Peter Dickinson - Earth and Air

A noise on the path ahead of him, coming from round the next bend. It paused and came again, more prolonged. Footsteps crossing a patch of loose gravel. Several people climbing the path. He drew aside, tucked his lantern under his cloak and waited. He had been half expecting this.

“See you Tuesday, Yanni?” someone had called when he’d been leaving the tavern last week.

“They’ll be shut here, won’t they? It’s a new-moon night again,” he’d answered. (He’d been wondering how they were going to manage this.)

“Oh, we’ll meet at my place,” Kosta had said. “Usual time.”

“Long way to walk down on a new-moon night, lad,” Stavros had suggested.

“No, I’ll be all right,” he’d said confidently. “See you at Kosta’s, then.”

Despite that, they couldn’t have been sure he’d not have changed his mind, or been persuaded to by his sister, so now they were coming to unpersuade him, and if necessary to take him by force, and perhaps Euphanie as well.

They rounded the bend, dim shapes in the light of their lanterns, climbing in silence. He couldn’t tell them apart until they were almost level with him.

“Stavros?” he called softly.

They stopped dead. Stavros clutched at Dmitri’s arm as they turned to face him.

“It’s me, Yanni,” he said easily. “I didn’t mean to make you jump—I was just being careful. New-moon night, you know.”

They relaxed, but there was still a gruffness in Stavros’s voice as he answered.

“Good lad. That’s why we thought we’d come and see you down. Now you’ve saved us the climb. Back we go, lads.”

They were all as tense as he was, Yanni realised as they descended the hill, and no wonder. They must understand that they were already trapped in a hideous labyrinth, and tonight they were going to descend a whole level further into its darkness. In their hearts they must be yet more afraid than he was. They didn’t have even the ghost of a goddess to help them, only a real and terrible master they must obey.

By island standards Kosta was a wealthy man. He was a boat builder, with three paid hands to help him—Dmitri was one of them—and himself owned two fishing boats. He lived in a house larger than most, a little above the town up a different track from the one that led to Crow Castle. The rest of the men were already there in the kitchen, with Kosta’s two bustling sisters bringing them little plates of the usual island snacks to add relish to the wine. Apart from that, the meeting was outwardly no different from any other at the tavern, teasing talk, and small bets on the backgammon, and memories of times past. Inwardly, though, it was utterly different. The air stank with tension and dread, and excited expectation, until Thanassi said “Time you were getting home, Yanni, lad.”

The tension wound up another notch, twanging taut. Yanni rose swaying, as if in response to the wine they supposed him to have drunk. Any moment now, he thought.

“Nightcap to see you on your way?” said Kosta, also rising. “Settle the wine and give you sweet dreams? Brandy, everyone?”

It would have been a slap in the face to refuse.

“You won’t taste brandy like Kosta’s again,” said Dmitri, himself too drunk not to chuckle at the hideous joke.

Kosta fetched a dozen small glass goblets and a stone bottle from a shelf. Yanni watched him fill one goblet and push it a little to the side, then fill the rest and not move them. He handed Yanni the first glass and the men passed the rest around among themselves. Yanni concentrated his will, the way the goddess had shown him.

“Well, good luck,” he said.

They echoed the toast, and watched him over their goblets as they drank. They saw a flesh-and-blood arm raise a solid glass goblet to his lips, and relaxed as they watched him drain it in three gulps.

“Wow!” he gasped, and staggered against the table by the door, slipping the glamour-hidden goblet, still full of the drugged brandy, out of sight behind the fruit bowl that stood on it.

“Bit much for a young head,” said Thanassi. “Maybe we better see him home after all.”

They all rose together. Two of them took Yanni by the elbows and led him out through the door. Behind him he could hear a sudden bustle of activity. The masks and costumes, he thought, and timber they’d need for the fire, and so on. An owl called from a tree in the garden, prrp, prrp.

How long, he wondered, before the drug would have taken hold? Better give it a few more minutes. But he was already supposed to be drunk, so he stumbled, and swayed against Thanassi, who roughly shoved him upright while Dmitri on the other side yanked him into place. Some of the men had lanterns, but once they were beyond the occasional lit windows of the town the night became very dark. In silence they started up the track to Crow Castle. Yanni let his head droop and his feet begin to drag. The men holding him grunted in satisfaction and shifted their grip so that they were now carrying some of his weight. With mild surprise he discovered that he wasn’t merely acting drunk and drugged. Unconsciously he had been using the goddess’s glamour actually to be those things, while still inside the half-stupefied young man who was climbing the track there was the true, hidden Yanni controlling the illusion, watching its effect and waiting to act.

Twenty minutes above the town they stopped and closed up. Two of the lantern carriers went to the front and led the way into the half-overgrown track that Yanni, drunk, must have stumbled up that first dreadful night to find the baby Scops. Yes, he thought, all this must have been foreseen by the goddess. Though it wasn’t far, it was a stiff climb, and most of them were panting with the effort by the time they emerged from among the olives and saw, faint-lit by lantern light against the utter black beyond, the squat pillars of the House of the Wise One.

The men put down what they’d been carrying. Yanni’s two minders switched their grip to let Stavros strip off his cloak, and he was able to slip his hand into the pouch and grasp his bit of olive branch and hold it against his wrist while they pulled the sleeve free. None of the three perceived it.

By now he was giggling almost uncontrollably under the influence of the imaginary drug. They stripped off the rest of his clothes and led him naked into the House. Stavros folded the cloak into a pad, and Dmitri settled him onto it and ran a cord under his arms and lashed him to a pillar.

Dazedly he watched Iorgo and Constantine, already in their costumes, build and light the fire with a spill from one of the lanterns. The timber was bone dry and blazed up almost in an instant. The others came back, costumed and masked. There were several more than had been at Kosta’s. At least two of them were women.

The masks changed them all. They were no longer people, nor animals either, but something else. They seemed to move differently, to hold themselves differently, from anything that belonged in the workaday world. The one who had been Nicos sounded a rattle of taps on the little drum hanging from a loop round his neck. The creatures stiffened and waited. The taps began again, became louder, steadied to a thumping double beat, and the creatures began to dance. At first they moved in slow, even steps, circling the fire, but soon the beat quickened to a jerky pulse, somebody double-stamped a foot, someone else whooped, and now they were circling faster, stamping on the ancient flagstones, jerking their heads back and forth, clapping out cross-rhythms, whooping and calling to summon their dark god, while their fantastic flame-cast shadows flickered across the line of pillars beyond them.

Yanni felt his own body beginning to tremble, tense with the urge to rise and join the frenzy. No, he told it, not yet, wait.