Peter Dickinson - Earth and Air

Before they were home Scops slipped away into the night, and he walked the last stretch in the human dark. When he closed the gate he fixed the chain so that it would rattle at a touch, and as soon as he was in through the door put his finger to his lips. Euphanie stared at him. They waited tense. The chain rattled briefly, and stilled as if someone had clamped a hand over it.

“No, it was all right,” he said, in slightly too loud a voice. “They were much nicer than last time, and I sat with them and watched them play backgammon. In fact I won a mug of wine on a bet, but I put it back in the jug as part of standing my round. I had a good time. What’s for supper? I’m hungry.”

“Well, you’re going to need to set the table before you can eat,” she said, with the same exaggerated audibility. “Anyway, it’ll be twenty minutes till it’s ready.”

“Then I may as well take the trash out.”

He left with the bucket by the back door and carried it along the top terrace. As he slung its contents down the slope a horrible thought came to him. Perhaps he’d understood the whole episode wrong. Perhaps it wasn’t him that Stavros was interested in, but Euphanie—a lone young woman living with her weakling brother far from any other dwelling—a brother who now thought he could trust these friends . . .

He turned to hurry back to the house, but Scops whispered down onto his shoulder. Now, by owl light, he could see Stavros standing in the shadow of the lemon tree, with his ear pressed to the kitchen shutter.

Scops slipped away almost at once. Yanni walked back with the heavy iron bucket hanging loose in his hand ready to be swung as a weapon against an attacker, and passed within six feet of the intruder, who made no move. Once in he bolted both doors, something they never normally troubled with, and he and Euphanie then discussed tomorrow’s tasks in the intervals of eating, until they heard the scratch of Scops’s beak on the shutter by which Stavros had been standing, and the soft prrp, prrp of her call, and knew that the watcher had left. He let the owl in and she sat on his shoulder while in a low voice he told Euphanie everything that had happened.

“This is the priest’s doing,” she said. “Who can we turn to? Mother of God, who can we trust?”

“Nobody. Only ourselves. And Scops.”

“What can we do?”

“Watch, listen. Bolt the doors at night, and when I go to the tavern.”

“You’re going again?”

“It’s the only way we can find anything out. They’ll start asking me to do something soon, to join them in something, I don’t know what. We’ll know a bit more then.”

She nodded, frowning. It was strange that he should be the one taking the lead, and that he should accept it, but that was how it seemed to be at the moment, for both of them.

The moon grew to its full, and waned. Yanni went each Tuesday to the tavern. The men were as friendly as before, and one of them played a board of backgammon with him, giving him odds of two free tiles, and then only one, as he learnt the game. To his surprise he found himself understanding its mathematical subtleties far better than he would have a few months back, when that kind of thing merely had the effect of making his mind go blank. Indeed on the third evening he beat Dmitri fair and square, without needing to use his free tile.

“Pretty good, kid,” said Kosta. “That makes you one of us, now.”

The others laughed, but with a note in their laughter that suggested there was more than one meaning to the joke. Otherwise he learnt no more.

On the first of those evenings nobody followed him. Scops met him just outside the town as before, and sat on his shoulder the whole way home. On the second Tuesday there was no sign of Scops until she drifted out of the dark when he was already well started on the climb, and then nestled close against his head. Just before the track bent sharply back on itself to tackle a steeper stretch she bit his lobe in warning and at once slipped away. Yanni climbed on, suddenly tense. A tall cypress stood in the crook of the corner, with an olive close against its further side. Between the two trees was a pitch-black cavern.

Yanni stopped, knelt, and probed with a finger into the back of his boot, as if easing out a pebble that had slipped in there. The change of angle brought into view a patch of starlit hillside beyond the trees. Silhouetted against it was the shape of a man. He couldn’t tell who it was, but Thanassi had left the tavern early.

He rose and climbed on. The man didn’t try to follow him, and Scops rejoined him further up the slope.

“See you Tuesday,” he said as he left after the third evening.

“Make it Thursday,” said Kosta. “Tuesday’s a new-moon night. Tavern’s closed.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” he said.

Nobody left home on new-moon night, if it could be helped, certainly not just to go to the tavern. So they might as well close.

He wasn’t followed home. And still he had learnt nothing new, worth knowing.

He started to sleep badly, falling off almost before he lay down but then waking only two or three hours later and lying through the small hours, tense with the inner certainty that events were moving towards some climax while he had no way of knowing what it would be or when it would happen. New-moon night came, and he woke as usual. No, even earlier than usual. Something had woken him. It came again, a scratching at his shutter and a gentle prrp, prrp. This had never happened before, not at his bedroom window or this hour. He rose and opened the shutter and Scops was there. She didn’t greet him as usual, but simply turned herself round and sat peering out at the night. Nor did she respond to his touch, but instead half spread her wings and leaned forward as if to launch herself out, then stopped the movement and turned her head to look at him.

“You want me to come out?” he whispered. “On a new-moon night? And it’s almost midnight.”

“ Prrp, ” she said.

Well, why not? He wasn’t going to sleep, and as for it being new-moon night, if Scops was there . . .

He rose, found his clothes by touch, dressed, picked up his boots, and went to the back door. There he hesitated whether to tell Euphanie what he was doing, but no sound came from her room and he decided against it. Perhaps he’d only be ten minutes or so . . .

Still on stockinged feet he climbed the path. Scops was waiting for him on the gatepost. Carefully he undid the chain, and knelt to put on his boots. Scops slipped onto his shoulder as he rose.

“Where to now?” he asked.

She told him simply by gazing down the track, which had the effect of casting a beam of owl light along it, so he headed as if for the harbour. But halfway there she turned her gaze aside and directed him into a goat track that led him up an outlying spur of the central mountain of the island. Twice she left him to stand in the dark while she prospected for paths through the scrub along which he would be able to walk. They crossed the ridge and headed down beside a remnant of the old forest that had once covered the island, but had been felled to build the galleys of the Romans. They followed a stream downhill, turned aside yet again for short climb, crossed a lesser ridge and halted.

Ahead, black as the pupil of an eye, lay the sea. Nearer, with a few lights showing round the harbour, the crinkled shoreline of the island. Nearer still, immediately down the plunging slope, the House of the Wise One, invisible in its own natural bowl from anywhere but the hillside where he stood.

The glow of a small fire lit the space between the pillars, and grotesque shapes, small with distance, were moving around it. But for the owl light he couldn’t have known they were there except when they passed directly between him and the fire. He stared. A sudden chill had wrapped him round, though the night was warm for October. Demons, woken by the New Moon to dance in the House of the Wise One? They were animal-headed, as demons might be, though the heads seemed large for the bodies, and they stood on their hind legs and the bodies were human or part-human. Not animals, then. Humans . . .? A shape, a known shape, strutted past the flames. Stavros, with the head of a horse covering the upper part of his face and a horse-tail swinging behind. And the one with the limp must be Thanassi, and the skinny one old Dmitri. Yanni numbered the others off. They were all there, and at least four more, two of whom looked as if they might be women.