Peter Dickinson - Earth and Air

A white goat was tethered to a pillar at the end of the temple opposite the Bloodstone. It paid no attention to the dancers, but stood with its head bowed, as if it had fallen asleep.

At first the dancers simply circled the fire with slow, prancing steps, but soon they began to dance more vigorously, leaping and stamping their feet, and throwing their masked heads violently back and forth. He could hear faint whoops and cries.

The dance went on for a long while. The pace quickened and quickened. They should have been utterly exhausted by now, but they didn’t seem to tire. And then, suddenly, they halted and turned towards the far end of the temple, where the goat was tethered. A gap opened on that side of the circle.

Out of the darkness beyond the pillars paced a new figure, naked apart from a short leather skirt. The mask was that of a bull and, unlike those of the dancers, covered the whole head. The body was a man’s body, but half again as tall as any of the dancers. Flesh and hide were the colour of polished brass, and glinted like brass in the light of the fire. In his right hand the newcomer carried a flat dish with a few small objects on it. The dancers greeted him with a wild yodelling call, so loud that it carried clearly up to where Yanni and Scops watched. They crowded round him with upraised arms, and then fell back. There was a long pause. Nobody moved. When at last the Bull-man stepped forward, the others restarted their dance, slowly circling him and moving with him as he paced up to the fire.

Here he halted again, took something from the dish, and with a sower’s gesture sprinkled it onto the fire, which instantly flared up into a white blaze, that died almost as quickly away. When it was gone the whole space between the pillars was filled with a dull red glow that didn’t fade like the flames, but persisted, unchanged. Compared with the owl light of the dark beyond, Yanni could now see everything within the temple as clearly as he might have done in an early dusk. He watched the Bull-man pace round the fire and on up the temple towards the Bloodstone, the dancers moving with him, circling faster and faster, dancing themselves into a renewed frenzy, their repeated calls echoing up the hillside. The Bull-man reached and rounded the Bloodstone. He laid the dish down on it, turned to face the fire and stood still.

Two of the dancers, the ones Yanni thought were Dmitri and Thanassi, broke from the wheeling circle, pranced back down the temple, unleashed the goat, tipped it, unresisting, onto its side, lifted it by its legs, ran back up the temple and swung it up onto the Bloodstone, where they stretched it out and held it down. It made no effort at all to struggle or free itself.

The Bull-man picked up a flask from the dish and with a steady, ritual movement poured something into a bowl. He put the flask back on the dish and picked up what looked like a knife or dagger, paused again, and raised his head and arms towards the stars. The blade of his dagger glinted orange in the red light.

He opened his great bull mouth. The dancers reeled back. A moment later Yanni heard the thunder of his bellow, shaking the hillside. He seemed to have grown even larger, now twice the size of any of the dancers. Yanni stared at him openmouthed. He had seen the huge muscles of the neck flex. He had seen the mouth open. And that roar could not have come from any human lungs. The creature’s head was no mask. It was his own.

The dagger flashed down. The dancers screamed again. The Bull-man laid the dagger aside, lifted the goat’s head by one horn and held it clear of the slab, and with his other hand took the cup and held it so that the blood streamed into the bowl. The bowl steamed. He dropped the goat’s head, gripped the bowl by its stem and raised it towards the sky. The screams grew louder, shriller. He lowered the bowl to his mouth and drank. Still screaming the dancers rushed forward. He flung what was left in the bowl over them, and they fought to lick it from each other’s bodies until he tossed the dead goat among them, and then climbed onto the Bloodstone and towered over them while they scrabbled to and fro, a mass of bloody limbs and bodies, fighting like a pack of starving dogs to tear the carcass to pieces with their bare hands and then gnawing at the tatters they had managed to wrench from it, skin, offal and all.

All the time the monstrous figure on the Bloodstone seemed to grow huger.

Yanni watched for a moment, disgust and terror swirling inside him, and turned away.

“Let’s go home,” he muttered.

He barely noticed how he got to the gate. His legs carried him. Scops showed him the way. He let himself in, woke Euphanie, and sitting in the dark at the end of her bed with Scops still on his shoulder, told her what he had seen. After a little while she climbed out of the sheets, wrapped a blanket round herself and sat beside him, cradling him and he her against the terrors of the dark while he finished his story. She carried her clothes into the kitchen, lit both lamps, and dressed while he sat staring at the tabletop. Every now and then he would remember some detail and mutter it to her. But again and again he returned to the behaviour of the goat, its torpor, the way it didn’t struggle or try to escape.

“Goats aren’t like that!” he said

“They’d drugged it?” Euphanie suggested.

“I suppose so.”

Neither wanted—neither dared—to go back to their rooms and lie in the dark, alone, so to get themselves through the small hours Yanni scrubbed the floor and cleaned the stove and Euphanie went through all her cupboards, sorting out her stores, reminding herself of what she had and what she still needed to lay in for the winter. Together they cleared the shelves and cleaned all they had, down to the smallest egg-cup. By dawn the kitchen was spotless.

This was just as well, because soon after sunrise they heard the rattle of the gate. Scops flew up onto a beam and tucked herself out of sight, and with a sick feeling and a thundering heart Yanni opened to door to see who had come.

Three men and a woman, none of them islanders, stood on the track. Two of the men were some sort of servants, carrying bundles of rolled parchment. The third, by his dress, was an official. He took a roll from one of the others, opened it and came down the path, running a finger down a list and stopping at a line.

“The Philippes holding?” he asked. “The previous census, twenty-two years ago, listed one man, one woman, and one infant daughter.”

“Oh . . .well . . . my father and mother are dead,” said Yanni, stammering with relief. “The baby must have been my sister. I was born after the census. I’m Yanni Philippes.”

“Excellent. I will record the household details later. But now, while the day is still cool, I will go round your holding and recheck the boundaries, and you can tell me of any changes in the nature of the holding since the previous census.”

“My sister had better do that,” said Yanni. “She knows much more about it than I do.”

The official frowned—Yanni was a man, and therefore legally the master of the household—but nodded and turned to the two servants to sort out the rolls he would need. The woman came drifting past them, unnoticed.

“May I come in?” she said in a soft voice. “I like to travel, so I come with my brother on these tours, but now I am tired from the climb and would like to rest.”

Yanni stood aside to let her pass. Euphanie had been listening just inside. The woman acknowledged her curtsey with a smiling nod. She was short and plump, grey-haired, and wore a soft grey travelling cloak clasped at the neck with an ivory brooch carved with the head of a woman who had a tangle of writhing serpents instead of hair.

“You must go with my brother,” she told Euphanie. “Check the clerks’ work, every line. Sometimes they have been known to cheat, and acquire land for themselves.”