Forests of the Night

by Tanith Lee

  Pitos glanced at me warily. I had had the plan as I lazed in the velvet water. Pitos was already starting to guess it.

  ‘Currents are very dangerous. Not to be trusted, except by harbour.’

  ‘How about between Daphaeu and the other island? It can’t be more than a quarter mile. The sea looks smooth enough, once you break away from the shoreline here.’

  ‘No,’ said Pitos. I waited for him to say there were no fish, or a lot of fish, or that his brother had gotten a broken thumb, or something of the sort. But Pitos did not resort to this. Troubled and angry, he stabbed my cigarette, half smoked, into the turf. ‘Why do you want to go to the island so much?’

  ‘Why does nobody else want me to go there?’

  He looked up then, and into my eyes. His own were very black, sensuous, carnal earthbound eyes, full of orthodox sins, and extremely young in a sense that had nothing to do with physical age, but with race, I suppose, the youngness of ancient things, like Pan himself, quite possibly.

  ‘Well,’ I said at last, ‘are you going to tell me or not? Because believe me, I intend to swim over there today or tomorrow.’

  ‘No,’ he said again. And then: ‘You should not go. On the island there is a…’ and he said a word in some tongue neither Greek nor Turkish, nor even the corrupt Spanish that sometimes peregrinates from Malta.

  ‘A what?’

  Pitos shrugged helplessly. He gazed out to sea, a safe sea without islands. He seemed to be putting something together in his mind and I let him do it, very curious now, pleasantly unnerved by this waft of the occult I had already suspected to be the root cause of the ban.

  Eventually he turned back to me, treated me once more to the primordial innocence of his stare, and announced:

  ‘The cunning one.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. Both irked and amused, I found myself smiling. At this, Pitos’s face grew savage with pure rage, an expression I had never witnessed before — the façade kept for foreigners had well and truly come down.

  ‘Pitos,’ I said. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Meda,’ he said then, the Greek word, old Greek.

  ‘Wait,’ I said. I caught at the name, which was wrong, trying to fit it to a memory. Then the list came back to me, actually from Graves, the names which meant ‘the cunning’: Meda, Medea, Medusa.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. I hardly wanted to offend him further by bursting into loud mirth. At the same time, even while I was trying not to laugh, I was aware of the hair standing up on my scalp and neck. ‘You’re telling me there is a gorgon on the island.’

  Pitos grumbled unintelligibly, stabbing the dead cigarette over and over into the ground.

  ‘I’m sorry, Pitos, but it can’t be Medusa. Someone cut her head off quite a few years ago. A guy called Perseus.’

  His face erupted into that awful expression again, mouth in a rictus, tongue starting to protrude, eyes flaring at me — quite abruptly I realised he wasn’t raging, but imitating the visual panic-contortions of a man turning inexorably to stone. Since that is what the gorgon is credited with, literally petrifying men by the sheer horror of her countenance, it now seemed almost pragmatic of Pitos to be demonstrating. It was, too, a creditable facsimile of the sculpted gorgon’s face sometimes used to seal ovens and jars. I wondered where he had seen one to copy it so well.

  ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Okay, Pitos, fine.’ I fished in my shirt, which was lying on the ground, and took out some money to give him, but he recoiled. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I don’t think it merits the ring. Unless you’d care to row me over there after all.’

  The boy rose. He looked at me with utter contempt, and without another word, before striding off up the shore. The mashed cigarette protruded from the grass and I lay and watched it, the tiny strands of tobacco slowly crisping in the heat of the sun, as I plotted my route from Daphaeu.

  Dawn seemed an amiable hour. No one in particular about on that side of the island, the water chill but flushing quickly with warmth as the sun reached over it. And the tide in the right place to navigate the rocks…

  Yes, dawn would be an excellent time to swim out to the gorgon’s island.

  The gods were on my side, I concluded as I eased myself into the open sea the following morning. Getting clear of the rocks was no problem, their channels only half filled by the returning tide. While just beyond Daphaeu’s coast I picked up one of those contrary currents that lace the island’s edges and which, tide or no, would funnel me away from shore.

  The swim was ideal, the sea limpid and no longer any more than cool. Sunlight filled in the waves and touched Daphaeu’s retreating face with gold. Barely altered in thousands of years, either rock or sea or sun. And yet one knew that against all the claims of romantic fiction, this place did not look now as once it had. Some element in the air or in time itself changes things. A young man of the Bronze Age, falling asleep at sunset in his own era, waking at sunrise in mine, looking about him, would not have known where he was. I would swear to that.

  Such thoughts I had leisure for in my facile swim across to the wooded island moored off Daphaeu.

  As I had detected, the approach was smooth, virtually inviting. I cruised in as if sliding along butter. A rowboat would have had no more difficulty. The shallows were clear, empty of rocks, and, if anything, greener than the water off Daphaeu.

  I had not looked much at Medusa’s Island (I had begun jokingly to call it this) as I crossed, knowing I would have all the space on my arrival. So I found myself wading in on a seamless beach of rare glycerine sand and, looking up, saw the mass of trees spilling from the sky.

  The effect was incredibly lush — so much heavy green, and seemingly quite impenetrable, while the sun struck in glistening shafts, lodging like arrows in the foliage, which reminded me very intensely of huge clusters of grapes on a vine. Anything might lie behind such a barricade.

  It was already beginning to get hot. Dry, I put on the loose cotton shirt and ate breakfast packed in the same waterproof wrapper, standing on the beach impatient to get on.

  As I moved forward, a bird shrilled somewhere in its cage of boughs, sounding an alarm of invasion. But surely the birds, too, would be stone on Medusa’s Island, if the legends were correct. And when I stumbled across the remarkable stone carving of a man in the forest, I would pause in shocked amazement at its verisimilitude to life…

  Five minutes into the thickets of the wood, I did indeed stumble on a carving, but it was of a moss-grown little faun. My pleasure in the discovery was considerably lessened, however, when investigation told me it was scarcely classical in origin. Circa 1920 would be nearer the mark.

  A further minute and I had put the faun from my mind. The riot of waterfalling plants through which I had been picking my way broke open suddenly on an inner vista much wider than I had anticipated. While the focal point of the vista threw me completely, I cannot say what I had really been expecting. The grey-white stalks of pillars, some temple shrine, the spring with its votary of greenish rotted bronze, none of these would have surprised me. On the other hand, to find a house before me took me completely by surprise. I stood and looked at it in abject dismay, cursing its wretched normality until I gradually began to see the house was not normal in the accepted sense.

  It had been erected probably at the turn of the century, when such things were done. An eccentric two-storeyed building, intransigently European — that is, the Europe of the north — with its dark walls and arched roofing. Long windows, smothered by the proximity of the wood, received and refracted no light. The one unique and startling feature — startling because of its beauty — was the parade of columns that ran along the terrace, in form and choreography for all the world like the columns of Knossos, differing only in colour. For these stems of the gloomy house were of a luminous sea-green marble, and shone as the windows did not.

  Before the house was a stretch of rough-cut lawn, tamarisk, and one lost dying olive tree. As I was staring, an apparition seemed to mani
fest out of the centre of the tree. For a second we peered at each other before he came from the bushes with a clashing of gnarled brown forearms. He might have been an elderly satyr; I, patently, was only a swimmer, with my pale foreigner’s tan, my bathing trunks, the loose shirt, it occurred to me at last that I was conceivably trespassing. I wished my Greek were better.

  He planted himself before me and shouted intolerantly, and anyone’s Greek was good enough to get his drift. ‘Go! Go!’ He was ranting, and he began to wave a knife with which, presumably, he had been pruning or mutilating something. ‘Go. You go!’

  I said I had been unaware anybody lived on the island. He took no notice. He went on waving the knife, and his attitude provoked me. I told him sternly to put the knife down, that I would leave when I was ready, that I had seen no notice to the effect that the island was private property. Generally I would never take a chance like this with someone so obviously qualified to be a lunatic, but my position was so vulnerable, so ludicrous, so entirely indefensible, that I felt bound to act firmly. Besides which, having reached the magic grotto and found it was not as I had visualised, I was still very reluctant to abscond with only a memory of dark windows and sea-green columns to brood upon.

  The maniac was by now quite literally foaming, due most likely to a shortage of teeth, but the effect was alarming, not to mention unaesthetic. As I was deciding which fresh course to take and if there might be one, a woman’s figure came out onto the terrace. I had the impression of a white frock, before an odd muffled voice called out a rapid — too rapid for my translation — stream of peculiarly accented Greek. The old man swung around, gazed at the figure, raised his arms, and bawled another foaming torrent to the effect that I was a bandit or some other kind of malcontent. While he did so, agitated as I was becoming, I nevertheless took in what I could of the woman standing between the columns. She was mostly in shadow, just the faded white dress with a white scarf at the neck marking her position. And then there was an abrupt flash of warmer pallor that was her hair. A blonde Greek, or maybe just a peroxided Greek. At any rate, no snakes.

  The drama went on, from his side, from hers. I finally got tired of it, went by him, and walked towards the terrace, pondering, rather too late, if I might not be awarded the knife in my back. But almost as soon as I started to move, she leaned forward a little and she called another phrase to him, which this time I made out, telling him to let me come on.

  When I reached the foot of the steps, I halted, really involuntarily, struck by something strange about her. Just as the strangeness of the house had begun to strike me, not its evident strangeness, the ill-marriage to location, the green pillars, but a strangeness of atmosphere, items the unconscious eye notices, where the physical eye is blind and will not explain. And so with her. What was it? Still in shadow, I had the impression she might be in her early thirties, from her figure, her movements, but she had turned away as I approached, adjusting some papers on a wicker table.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said. I stopped and spoke in English. For some reason I guessed she would be familiar with the language, perhaps only since it was current on Daphaeu. ‘Excuse me, I had no idea the island was private. No one gave me the slightest hint — ’

  ‘You are English,’ she broke in, in the vernacular, proving the guess to be correct.

  ‘Near enough. I find it easier to handle than Greek, I confess.’

  ‘Your Greek is very good,’ she said with the indifferent patronage of one who is multilingual. I stood there under the steps, already fascinated. Her voice was the weirdest I had ever heard, muffled, almost unattractive, and with the most incredible accent, not Greek at all. The nearest approximation I could come up with was Russian, but I could not be sure.

  ‘Well,’ I said. I glanced over my shoulder and registered that the frothy satyr had retired into his shrubbery; the knife glinted as it slashed tamarisk in lieu of me. ‘Well, I suppose I should retreat to Daphaeu. Or am I permitted to stay?’

  ‘Go, stay,’ she said. ‘I do not care at all.’

  She turned then, abruptly, and my heart slammed into the base of my throat. A childish silly reaction, yet I was quite unnerved, for now I saw what it was that seemed vaguely peculiar from a distance. The lady on Medusa’s Island was masked.

  She remained totally still and let me have my reaction, neither helping nor hindering me.

  It was an unusual mask, or usual — I am unfamiliar with the norm of such things. It was made of some matte-light substance that toned well with the skin of her arms and hands, possibly not so well with that of her neck, where the scarf provided camouflage. Besides which, the chin of the mask — this certainly an extra to any mask I had ever seen — continued under her own. The mask’s physiognomy was bland, nondescriptly pretty in a way that was somehow grossly insulting to her. Before confronting the mask, if I had tried to judge the sort of face she would have, I would have suspected a coarse, rather heavy beauty, probably redeemed by one chiselled feature — a small slender nose, perhaps. The mask, however, was vacuous. It did not suit her, was not true to her. Even after three minutes I could tell as much, or thought I could, which amounts to the same thing.

  The blonde hair, seeming natural as the mask was not, cascaded down, lush as the foliage of the island. A blonde Greek, then, like the golden Greeks of Homer’s time, when gods walked the earth in disguise.

  In the end, without any help or hindrance from her, as I have said, I pulled myself together. As she had mentioned no aspect of her state, neither did I. I simply repeated what I had said before: ‘Am I permitted to stay?’

  The mask went on looking at me. The astonishing voice said: ‘You wish to stay so much. What do you mean to do here?’

  Talk to you, oblique lady, and wonder what lies behind the painted veil.

  ‘Look at the island, if you’ll let me. I found the statue of a faun near the beach.’ Elaboration implied I should lie: ‘Someone told me there was an old shrine here.’

  ‘Ah!’ She barked. It was apparently a laugh. ‘No one,’ she said, ‘told you anything about this place.’

  I was at a loss. Did she know what was said? ‘Frankly, then, I romantically hoped there might be.’

  ‘Unromantically, there is not. No shrine. No temple. My father bought the faun in a shop in Athens. A tourist shop. He had vulgar tastes but he knew it, and that has a certain charm, does it not?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it does. Your father — ’

  She cut me short again.

  ‘The woods cover all the island. Except for an area behind the house. We grow things there, and we keep goats and chickens. We are very domesticated. Very sufficient for ourselves. There is a spring of fresh water, but no votary. No genius loci. I am so sorry to dash your dreams to pieces.’

  It suggested itself to me, from her tone of amusement, from little inflections that were coming and going in her shoulders now, that she might be enjoying this, enjoying, if you like, putting me down as an idiot. Presumably visitors were rare. Perhaps it was even fun for her to talk to a man, youngish and unknown, though admittedly never likely to qualify for anyone’s centrefold.

  ‘But you have no objections to my being here,’ I pursued. ‘And your father?’

  ‘My parents are dead,’ she informed me. ‘When I employed the plural, I referred to him,’ she gestured with a broad sweep of her hand to the monster on the lawn, ‘and a woman who attends to the house. My servants, my unpaid servants. I have no money any more. Do you see this dress? It is my mother’s dress. How lucky I am the same fitting as my mother, do you not think?’

  ‘Yes…’

  I was put in mind, suddenly of myself as an ambassador at the court of some notorious female potentate, Cleopatra, say, or Catherine de Medici.

  ‘You are very polite,’ she said, as if telepathically privy to my fantasies.

  ‘I have every reason to be.’

  ‘What reason?’

  ‘I’m trespassing. You treat me like a guest.’

 
‘And how,’ she said, vainglorious all at once, ‘do you rate my English?’

  ‘It’s wonderful.’

  ‘I speak eleven languages fluently,’ she said with offhanded boastfulness. ‘Three more I can read very well.’

  I liked her. This display, touching and magnificent at once, her angular theatrical gesturings, which now came more and more often, her hair, her flat-waisted figure in its 1940s dress, her large well-made hands, and her challenging me with the mask, saying nothing to explain it, all this hypnotised me.

  I said something to express admiration and she barked again, throwing back her blonde head and irresistibly, though only for a moment, conjuring Garbo’s Queen Christina.

  Then she walked down the steps straight to me, demonstrating something else I had deduced, that she was only about an inch shorter than I.

  ‘I,’ she said, ‘will show you the island. Come.’

  She showed me the island. Unsurprisingly, it was small. To go directly around it would maybe have taken less than thirty minutes. But we lingered, over a particular tree, a view, and once we sat down on the ground near the gushing milk-white spring. The basin under the spring, she informed me, had been added in 1910. A little bronze nymph presided over the spot, dating from the same year, which you could tell in any case from the way her classical costume and her filleted hair had been adapted to the fashions of hobble skirt and Edwardian coiffeur. Each age imposes its own overlay on the past.

  Behind the house was a scatter of the meagre white dwellings that make up such places as the village on Daphaeu, now plainly unoccupied and put to other uses. Sheltered from the sun by a colossal cypress, six goats played about in the grass. Chickens and an assortment of other fowl strutted up and down, while a pig — or pigs — grunted somewhere out of sight. Things grew in strips and patches, and fruit trees and vines ended the miniature plantation before the woods resumed. Self-sufficiency of a tolerable kind, I supposed. But there seemed, from what she said, no contact maintained with any other area, as if the world did not exist. Postulate that a blight or harsh weather intervened, what then? And the old satyr, how long would he last to tend the plots? He looked two hundred now, which on the islands probably meant sixty. I did not ask her what contingency plans she had for these emergencies and inevitabilities. What good, after all, are most plans? We could be invaded from Andromeda tomorrow, and what help for us all then? Either it is in your nature to survive — somehow, anyhow — or it is not.