The Kings of Eternity

PART ONE

Summer in Kallithéa

Chapter One

Kallithéa, July, 1999

That night, Daniel Langham dreamed. He had a nightmare about an alien being that came to Earth through an oval of brilliant blue light to assassinate him and his friends. The beast was reptilian and stood upright on two legs, fast and darting and vicious. It carried a rifle that spat liquid fire and annihilated its victims in seconds. In the nightmare, Langham was running, and getting nowhere, and the alien was bearing down on him.

He came awake in the early hours and sat upright, crying out loud in panic. He was sweating, his heart pounding. He calmed himself and stared around at his familiar bedroom.

He wondered if the dream was a warning for him to be even more vigilant. He climbed quickly from bed and dressed. From beneath his pillow he took the oval, amber mereth and slipped it into the pocket of his trousers, which he had done habitually for the past twenty-five years.

Then he left his villa and hurried along the path through the pine trees.

The moon was out, silvering his way, and the night was absolutely silent. Through the trees he could see the sea, twinkling.

He strode out over the uneven ground until he came to the shape of the villa on the hillside to his left. It was beautiful stone-built building constructed on two levels, with a spectacular view over the sea.

Yesterday, according to Georgiou at the taverna, an English woman had moved into the villa. Langham wondered if it was this that had provoked the nightmare.

He walked up the sloping drive and around to the rear of the building. He came to where he knew the bedroom to be. Eight years ago, when old Helmut had moved into the property, Langham had performed the very same... vetting operation, he had called it then.

Now he paused outside the open bedroom window and slipped the mereth from his pocket. He held it out towards the window, his breathing uneven, ragged, lest the mereth tingle painfully on his palm.

It did not tingle: it thrummed healthily, as if a tiny engine were embedded within its polished amber shape.

The English woman was, then, what she claimed to be.

Feeling light-headed with relief, Langham hurried from the villa and retraced his footsteps home.

For the rest of the night, he slept well.

The following morning, in common with every other morning for the past ten years, Langham sat in the shade of the vine-covered patio and wrote his customary four pages.

It usually took him three hours to complete his quota, from nine until twelve, but today he finished an hour ahead of schedule. The characters had taken over and chatted amongst themselves for the entire scene. All Langham had had to do was listen and take down what they said.

Over the years his writing routine had made him a creature of habit. He would no sooner dream of taking a morning off than he would of jumping into the sea from the rocky headland outside his villa. It helped, of course, that he was a recluse, and never left the island.

The trouble with being a respected writer, and trying to keep a low profile, was that his insistence on shunning the limelight itself became an issue of intense debate in the middle-brow press and the review sections of the Sunday papers. The more privacy he wanted, the less he got.

Perhaps, he mused as he slipped his manuscript book and pen into the drawer of his rickety writing table, it was time to move on again.

He took his sun hat from the hook on the whitewashed wall of his villa and stepped from the patio. Last year his editor, on one of his rare visits, had expressed shock and concern with Langham’s habit of leaving his novel in progress in the drawer of the table, where any Tom, Dick or Harry - or even, Langham had corrected him playfully, Spiros, Kostas or Yannis - could get their thieving hands on it. Langham said that he’d left his manuscript books in the same place for ten years, and they had never come to any harm.

“But what would you do if some light-fingered Kostas
did
run off with a work in progress?”

He’d thought about that for a while, and then replied, “Start again, I suppose. After all, I have plenty of time.”

He left the villa and walked up the track that climbed the ridge of the headland and led, a mile further on, to the village of Sarakina. Cicadas strummed their incessant, two note thrum, sounding more like some faulty electric appliance than insects. They fell silent as he passed, only to start up again in his wake; like this, he felt himself to be walking in a globe of temporarily reduced sound. It reminded him of the few times he’d ventured into the island’s capital, Xanthos; he felt sure that islanders and tourists alike were commenting on his passing among them: “Look, that’s the hermit novelist, Daniel Langham. Shh, here he comes!” How paranoid, he thought!

The Ionian sea must be, he thought for perhaps the thousandth time, the most beautiful sight in the world. It was something to do with its unruffled cerulean calm, its dignity in agreeing to make hardly the slightest wave as it came ashore. Its grace was always enhanced by the presence of a boat upon its surface. A fishing boat, drawing a feathered wake, puttered from the harbour far below and headed for the fishing grounds on a lazy curve, and the sight of the vessel riding upon its back gave the sea a sudden dimension of vastness.

He continued walking, passing through pines fragrant with resin, and occasional fig trees, which had dropped their fruit like sticky bombs all along the track.

Ahead was the villa that belonged to the English woman, and outside it, seated upon a wooden packing case outside the gate to the villa, was the woman herself.

He slipped his hand into his trouser pocket and caressed the mereth, as if last night’s test had been a dream... The device thrummed, reassuring him.

The woman stood and waved when she saw him. She was perhaps thirty-five, small and broad-hipped, with bobbed black hair and pale face. When he came closer, he saw that her hair was flecked with grey, and that crow’s feet wrinkles at the corners of her eyes made her appear older than his first estimation. But she had an attractive face, especially when she smiled.

“Don’t tell me,” he said, gesturing at the case, “Christos and that useless mule of his dropped it there and you need to get it inside?”

“You obviously know him well,” she laughed. “When I came out this morning, here it was. He didn’t even tell me.”

“He’s not being rude. That’s how things work on the island. No-one would run away with it.”

She gave it a kick with a plimsolled foot. “They wouldn’t be able to pick it up!”

“Perhaps between us...?”

“Would you mind? That would be lovely.”

It was more awkward than heavy, and one person would have struggled with it. Between them they managed to manoeuvre it through the gate and into a stone building next to the villa. “Just here. That’s fantastic.”

He straightened up and looked around. “A studio. You paint?”

Gorgeous oils of abundant flower gardens, bright still lifes, and Greek seascapes adorned the walls; other paintings, in various stages of production, sat upon easels. Two big Velux windows in the south-facing sloping roof provided ample light.

“Would you like one?”

He was taken aback. “I couldn’t. You must sell them for small fortunes.”

“Please. I insist.”

“No, really.” He indicated the crate. “It was nothing. I wouldn’t want you to feel beholden.”

She smiled. “Anyway, it’s nice to meet you.” She held out a hand. “Caroline. Caroline Platt.”

“Daniel Langham. We’re neighbours. I have the place on the headland.” He noticed her hands, then. They were perhaps the most beautiful hands he had ever seen; there was something about the grace and articulation of the fingers, the oval perfection of the nails, that took his breath away. His reaction disturbed him.

She was nodding. “I’ve seen it. You have a wonderful view.”

He was gratified that, if she did know he was Daniel Langham, the novelist, she did not say so.

“At least let me get you a drink, then.”

“Actually, I’m late as it is. I hope you don’t think me rude.”

She was smiling. “Not at all. Drop round any time. Any excuse not to work...”

As he raised his hand in a wave and retreated from the studio, he hoped that her invitation had been nothing more than a courtesy which he could ignore.

He made his way down the winding path towards the village and found himself recalling the beauty of her hands, and something else. Despite her smile and her affable nature, she possessed an air of sadness that he found hard to define. He was troubled that the novelist in him, usually so observant, could not pin down exactly what it was about her that suggested a faint air of melancholy. He wondered, briefly, if she had been recently bereaved, and he was subconsciously picking up on the fact.

He came into the village and sat at his usual table beneath the red and white striped awning of the taverna, and let thoughts of Caroline Platt slip from his mind.

He would spend an hour eating his meal, and later sip Greek coffee and stare out across the harbour. He would concentrate on his latest novel, the chapter he was working on, allowing scenes and characters to drift across the stage of his mind. Most people would call it day-dreaming; Langham insisted that it was work.

He ordered Greek salad and freshly-caught catfish, with a glass of rough local retsina, and ate slowly.

As he ate, another customer seated himself beneath the awning and ordered a meal. Instantly upon seeing the man, Langham felt for the mereth. It thrummed, signalling that he was safe. He was, he realised, a slave of the device... but how could he be otherwise, after the events of ‘75?

The man was fat and wore a tight, fawn-coloured polyester suit. The man’s weight, his entire bearing, was clearly not suited to such temperatures: he had the look of someone enduring a penance. He was reading an English newspaper - the
Daily Mail
- which
was
a penance that Langham did not envy.

The man lowered his paper once and gave him a quick glance, and Langham wondered if he was being stalked by a journalist yet again. But the fat man drank his bottle of Amstel and did not approach and ask for an interview, and Langham relaxed.

He scanned the headlines on the front page of the tourist’s paper, and their blaring banality reassured him in his resolution never to read newspapers. That was another aspect of Langham’s life that his editor found strange, his repudiation of the modern world: no papers, no TV, not even a radio, still less a computer. “How on Earth do you keep up with things, Daniel?”

His answer was simple. “I don’t.”

At two he climbed to his feet, entered the taverna to pay Georgiou, and walked back to his villa. The fat man did not follow him, and Georgiou had been primed to say nothing to strangers who asked where the English Writer lived.

At three he began work again, cutting and correcting what he had written that morning. He finished at six. It was, he thought, another day spent satisfactorily.

At nine o’clock that evening he was enjoying a beer on the patio, and watching the sun extinguish itself in the sea, when he heard a noise on the path outside the villa.

He expected the man to come waddling around the corner, perhaps bearing a bottle as a gift. He was about to slip quickly inside and lock the door when he saw that his visitor was not the fat Englishman.

“I hope you don’t mind,” she said, “but after what you did for me today...”

He was standing before the door, his hand actually stalled in the process of pushing it open. Some instinct told him to continue the movement, step inside and ignore the woman. He was famed on the island for his churlishness; it would be entirely in character.

She had stopped at the foot of the short flight of steps to the patio. She smiled again, and held something out in her left hand. “I know it’s rather late, but I saw the patio light and I thought...”

It was the sight of her left hand that did it, its grace and elegance.

“That’s perfectly alright. In fact I was just going inside for another beer. If you’d care to join me...” He gestured across the patio to where the ancient, overstuffed sofa was positioned before the view of the sunset.