Decision at Delphi (49 page)

He lay flat on his face, his head beginning to throb again. Someone tugged at his arm. It was Petros. “Here,” Petros whispered, getting him off the path, pulling him behind a clump of bushes. “And what little game were you playing, my friend?” But he laughed softly, as if he knew. “That back of yours—it tempted them. It asked them, it begged them to shoot.”

Elias suddenly appeared beside them. “A mistake,” he observed in a whisper. “Now we know where that fellow is.” He pointed to the field on the hillside above the house. He frowned. “But why there?” he asked himself.

“And why,” Strang asked, equally puzzled, keeping his voice to a whisper, too, “don’t they follow me?”

“You like trouble,” Petros said. Then, as he heard a rustle near them, he gestured with his arm. “John!” he whispered, and a man rose from the underbrush and came quietly to join them. “What do you see, out there?” Petros asked him. “Eyes like a cat,” Petros explained to Strang as John moved to get a clear view.

“Where’s Levadi?” Strang asked.

Petros shrugged his shoulders, as he stared at the distant field encircled by its stone wall. “Around, some place.”

“Why don’t they follow me?” Strang asked again, with exasperation. This was uncanny. Two shots, then silence. “Or do they think they hit me?”

“They nearly did,” Elias said grimly.

Or perhaps they want to make sure I’m alone, Strang thought, and unarmed. It
was
uncanny. The dogs were barking wildly now, but the village still lay in darkness, as if it had pulled the blankets over its head, determined to hear and see nothing.

John whispered hoarsely, “Four of them!” The man who had fired from the cover of the stone wall around the field had risen. Two others were coming down from the hillside above him. They seemed to think that cover was no longer necessary. “Three are going to the house,” John said.

Petros was on his feet.

“Keep down!” Elias whispered angrily.

Strang said, “Steve is in that house.”

Elias stared at him.

“Stefanos Kladas is in that house,” Strang insisted. “And these men know. They know. That’s why they didn’t come after me.”

John said, “I cannot see them now. The house hides them.”

Elias rose quickly, taking a whistle out of his pocket, giving a clear sharp blast. From the other end of the village street came an answering whistle. Petros and John were starting up the path. Elias yelled to Strang, “Stay there! Stay there!” Then he was racing after Petros and John, and catching up with them, too. From the olive trees on the other side of the stream, men ran out and splashed through the water to the village street. And along there a car was starting up, gathering speed to reach the house.

So I come out, get shot at, and stay here, Strang thought: the hell I do. He started after the others, halted, staring, helpless. He yelled, “The roof, the roof!” For a man was clambering up there, half crouching as he reached the ridge, half rising as he started a hobbling run toward the chimney, his right arm raised to throw. Petros and John both fired. The man’s step veered; he seemed to take three running steps right down the front of the roof before he fell and clattered the rest of the way to plunge over its broad eave. His body landed in front of the house, and, a split second later, exploded into a flash of grey light, a balloon of smoke.

Strang’s sense of complete helplessness vanished. He ran toward the low stone wall encircling the field, just about the point where the sharpshooter had hidden. Petros, Elias, and John had reached the house and were fanning around it, along
with the men who had crossed the stream. The car had arrived, too, screeching to a halt just as the grenade had gone off, and three men were jumping out of it to join the others. Enough men there to take care of any trouble, Strang thought. There was plenty, too; another explosion sent him ducking behind the wall. He heard the frenzied scream of a horse or a donkey, the bleating of goats; back in the village, the dogs had gone crazy. He swung his legs over the roughly laid loose stones, and landed in the field as there was a third explosion. To his left, near the house, there was a shot, then three more, a sudden surge of men, another burst of firing, then silence.

But what interested him was the field. Up there, somewhere up there, near the top of the steeply ploughed furrows, he had seen a lumbering shadow. That must be the fourth man whom the lynx-eyed John had spied. He started up the hill, and stumbled over a dog, lying wide-eyed, its throat slit. So that was why he had heard no dog barking its warning from the Kladas house. Quickly, he focused his eyes back on the lumbering shadow, now almost at the top of the field. Someone called after him; he waved, and ran on. If he took his eyes away from that shadow, he’d lose it.

It was heavy, slow travel, uphill through the field’s soft earth, and ruination for a careful spring planting. Behind him, Petros called again, but he went on. He was near the top of the field now; there was the low stone wall in front of him. And beyond it, a bleak beginning to a mountainside, boulders and rocks scattered over rough grass, a distant cliff face, a ridge of high peaks lined sharply against the eastern sky. Dawn was coming from the other side, a hint of green-grey behind the ragged rim of mountain, the stars fading, a cold wind rising.

Strang climbed over the wall, and then halted, his eyes searching the mountainside, while he got his breathing once more under control. He swallowed in hot, heavy gulps, feeling the saliva burn its way down his throat. He pulled his jacket collar up, the lapels over, and thrust his hands deep into his pockets; up here, the wind had an edge like a hatchet. He took a few last deep breaths, and he had steadied himself again. And then he saw the man in the bulky sheepskin tunic. It was Levadi, all right. He had stopped, near a large boulder almost as tall as he was, and he had turned to face Strang. Friendly or not? Strang wondered, noting the long, heavy stick on which Levadi, grasping it at shoulder height, rested his weight.

Strang, his hands still in his pockets, walked slowly up toward a goat path, a foot-broad, winding ribbon of worn earth. No sudden movements, he thought, as he reached it, no loud noises: just this steady plodding, up the goat path, one slow foot in front of another, eyes on that strange bulky shape that looked in this half-light like a shaggy animal standing on two human legs.

Strang halted about twelve feet away from Levadi, within smelling distance, he thought wryly, but just outside the swing of that long stave. He looked at the man, seeing his face for the first time. “Good morning,” he said, speaking in Greek, slowly.

The man said nothing, his eyes staring intently from under heavy brows at the stranger, still suspicious, still waiting for the first sign of attack.

“A fine view,” Strang said, and looked briefly down over the valley. And it was a view to startle anyone. Strang had to force his eyes quickly back to the man and that stave. But Levadi
had looked down over the dark valley, too, and then beyond, to the far-off giants of western mountains, their white peaks tinged with gold and mauve and pink, gleaming through the veils of soft trailing clouds. And he stood there, silent, his wild eyes watching as they, perhaps, watched each morning. For a long minute, he stood there as if he had forgotten the stranger. His hair was light in colour, Strang noted, an unkempt mass of thick locks falling over the prominent brow; his features were good but coarsened, the skin ruddy with health under the layer of grime, the mouth was large, the lips heavy and slack. Now Levadi seemed to remember the stranger again, and his head swung around quickly, the eyes wary and suspicious.

Levadi spoke. It was a rough, shy voice, strangely thin, high-pitched. “You are here.”

I certainly am, thought Strang. Or was that remark Levadi’s idea of a question? “I want to talk to you.”

Levadi’s frown deepened. “You stop me, I kill you,” he said. He stared at Strang’s hands, still buried in his pockets.

“I came to talk.” Strang took his hands out of his pockets. “I have no weapon,” he assured the man. But that was a miscalculation. Levadi turned and walked uphill, with a long striding step. There was no gun to fear, after all. “Wait!” Strang started after him.

Levadi whirled around, the long stick grasped in both hands, ready to hit, if necessary.

Strang halted. “Where are you going?”

The man stared at him. “Home,” he said slowly.

And where was home—a hut on this mountainside, or the ruins, far on the crest of a hill, of the Frankish castle? Then Strang made a bold guess. “This is not the way to Parnassos.”

The man looked at him. “I know the way”

“But you cannot go back.”

“Now—yes.” Levadi smiled, the lips drawn slowly back into a wide, loose grimace.

“And Myrrha—”

The grimace on the wide mouth turned from delight to pain.

It was, thought Strang, very much like talking to a large powerful dog who might understand a few key words but mistrusted everything else. Strang said very clearly. “They tried to kill Myrrha.”

There was denial in the wild eyes, staring at the American.

I’ve seen that face, Strang thought; somewhere, I’ve seen that face. He repeated slowly, “They tried to kill Myrrha.”

“No. Not Myrrha. Stefanos, yes. He is a deserter. He betrayed—”

“That’s a lie. He did not desert to any Germans. Sideros told you a lie. Odysseus told you a lie.”

Levadi’s reply to that was to raise his stick and take a step toward Strang.

“Come back to the house,” Strang said. “See what they have done. The dog had its throat slit. Myrrha may be dead. You heard the—” And what was the Greek word for grenades?

“Not Myrrha.”

“They lied.”

Levadi leaped forward in anger, in a quick bounding run, the stick upraised and ready to strike. Strang jumped aside. And from behind him, the sharp crack of a rifle sounded, echoing, echoing along the mountainside. Levadi dropped the stick as he spun around with a cry, and fell clutching his shoulder. He tried to rise and run.

“Stop, or I’ll kill you this time,” Petros yelled, clambering over the stone wall. John was following him.

Levadi stopped. Strang looked at him in amazement: he had stopped, had taken two paces back. To be killed—was that what he feared most? What made a man like that even want to live? Strang watched Levadi and wondered. The man had stopped again; he was looking across the black stretch of valley to its western wall of mountains. The snow-wrapped peaks were ablaze with colours, no longer hinted but as vivid as the fires of an opal: purple, pink, mauve, magenta, rose. The mists had drawn into soft white masses of cloud edged with a golden light. The colours shifted, deepened, mixed, paled. And then, in a moment, they were gone:

“Look at him!” Petros said bitterly, as Levadi turned to them, biting his lip, struggling with his emotion. “Tears for a sunrise! And he would have beaten out your brains on these rocks just as easily as he welcomed a dog and slit its throat. He would let a man be murdered in his bed and a woman be blown to pieces.” Petros’s lip curled with contempt. He raised his rifle.

“No!” Strang said sharply. “Get him down to the house!” He looked away from Levadi. The man’s emotion was too painful to watch.

Levadi stumbled past him, his left hand resting on top of his head in surrender, his right arm half raised in pain. And at that moment, Strang remembered the photograph: the surrender on the slope of Parnassos; the man whose blind instinct to live separated him from those he left to die, the shepherd who wept tears of shame and followed Odysseus into the enemy camp.

Elias, his hair ruffled in the wind, his thin face tired and
anxious, was waiting for them at the low stone wall. “Who’s this?” he asked.

“The fourth man,” John told him, his sharp eyes watching Levadi’s every movement, his rifle ready.

“The shepherd,” Strang said, and Elias looked at him sharply, then back at the man slipping and stumbling toward him. Now Elias was studying the face coming toward him. “Yes,” he said coldly, “the shepherd from Mount Parnassos.”

Levadi climbed over the wall and stopped as he saw a group of men waiting down at the bottom of the field near the house.

Elias told Petros and John, “See that nothing happens to him!”

“What? We protect him?”

“We need him alive.” In English, Elias said to Strang, “If he will talk, that is to say.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Can he talk?”

“He isn’t an idiot. Ask him why he once rebelled against Odysseus.”

Elias’s eyebrows were raised. But he fell into step beside Levadi and began talking to the man. Halfway down the field, Elias waited for Strang to catch up. “It was a personal matter. Something about Elektra.”

“Tell him Odysseus has killed Elektra.”

Elias stared in horror. “Certainly not! Don’t even say that to anyone. Not yet! I forbid you!”

“All right, all right,” Strang said, and fell back to join Petros.

“It is enough to show him what Odysseus ordered to be done here,” Elias said gruffly, and hurried Levadi on toward the house.

“Who are the men?” Strang asked Petros, watching the tight group that waited at the bottom of the field. Their weapons, he saw, were axes.

“From the village. You saw them rush across the stream when the captain blew his little whistle.” Petros was delighted with the look of surprise on Strang’s face. “What did you think I was doing when I left you and Myrrha? I went to waken my friends. We needed them, didn’t we?”

“And Elias brought back no reinforcements?”

“Sure. They are on their way.” Petros’s smile broadened. “Arriving any moment.”

Strang looked at the row of quiet little houses, and apologised to them. “When I climbed this field, I wondered why they lay so still.”

“When you climbed this field, how were you so sure that I would follow you?”

“Because,” Strang said, “you weren’t going to let me escape—if that was what I had been doing.”

Petros rubbed the scar on his brow, looked sideways at the American, and laughed softly. “There could have been a fifth man,” he said, threw an arm across Strang’s back and matched his step. He was still smiling broadly as they reached the group of embattled villagers around Elias and his prisoner. Strang left Petros explaining that the captain must know what he was saying, and headed for the broken door of the shed at the back of the Kladas house.