Archipelago of Souls

by Gregory Day

  *

  In those first few days near Tzermiado no one knew of our presence in the area. Or so we thought. But it will forever remain a wonder to me how the people of the Cretan mountains manage to communicate with such effectiveness and speed, as if calling with loudhailers down the throats of gorges and from peak to peak, yet all the time with no traceable sound. When we’d returned from Karfi to the Trapeza cave on our fourth night, a night in which we had already decided to begin forays into the village in search of contacts, we sat huddled near the cave entrance when we heard voices approaching from below. I prayed my mate the donkey would remain silent where it was tethered under bushes beside the clearing. As it turned out I needn’t have worried, the voices continued on up the ridge beyond us, perhaps a pair of local trappers out on the hunt. But within an hour of that first scare we were visited again, and this time with no forewarning. From where we sat in silent retreat in the cave’s second chamber, we heard footsteps and then sharp whispers in the entrance corridor. A match was struck, a lantern flared, its glow spread over the moss and slimy coagulated rock, and two bodies then appeared behind it.

  This, as it turned out, was the Kalantzakis brothers, Antonis and Costas, from Kaminaki, a village on the far side of the plateau from Tzermiado. They greeted us, explaining that they had been expecting us for over a week, even before Spenser had met up with myself and Perry in the cave south of Iraklio. The brothers had been checking the Trapeza cave every night to see if we’d showed but on the previous few nights they’d thought better of crossing the plateau due to the presence of a visiting German deputation that had temporarily stationed itself at Agios Georgios to confer with the Italians. The Germans had now left the area and the Kalantzakis brothers were overjoyed to see us two misery-guts shivering in the cave.

  From that night on we had constant visitations from the market gardeners of the plateau. The Kalantzakis brothers assured us that the orchestration of the supply drops would indeed be possible, given that their Eyetie overlords seemed only interested in chickens and girls. They took great pleasure from this assessment, but set great store by it too, and thus our plans for the first drop of supplies started in earnest.

  Throughout this period I remained haunted not by one but by two images: firstly Vern’s face, its features bloated and slack as I imagined them in the drowned hold of the Imperial; and secondly, that moment in the first madness of the brolly drop, when he had slashed the paratrooper’s throat with the fannie. How, I asked myself, had I let him go off in that mad mood rather than catching him up, when I knew in my bones that only trouble would come of it? The answer wasn’t forthcoming. Sadly, it escapes me even now.

  *

  It was on a full moon evening three nights after the Kalantzakis brothers had found us, as we boiled potatoes in our helmets on the fire in the mouth of the cave and supplemented this dinner with Lasithi bread, that I took the chance to recount for Spenser the events of the night of the evacuation. If my diplomatic tone of the last few days altered as I spoke he seemed not to notice. Without a flinch he listened to my account, to what Perry Coghlan had told me, and to my fears for the fate of my brother and my anger at how he’d been left to go down with the ship by his own navy. I had decided I needed Spenser on-side but lost control a bit in the recounting of events, suggesting that perhaps, if the Great War was any guide, dominion troops were at times considered more expendable than others. This brought nil reaction from him and I didn’t harp on it. Instead I tried to convey the depth of my grief for my little brother and my subsequently urgent need to know more of what might have happened on that fateful night.

  Spenser’s face, lit as it was by the fire and the moonlight, betrayed very little, certainly no annoyance, if anything only a sincere and quite touching sympathy. He made it perfectly clear, however, when I’d said my piece, that my idea to make inquiries through wireless to Cairo would be of no use.

  ‘Simply because the RN’s based in Alexandria, Cress. The chaps receiving our messages in the bungalow in Cairo wouldn’t know a jot about it. You see?’

  This was a stymie that stupidly I hadn’t considered. ‘Yes, but who’s to say it was the navy’s decision,’ I said desperately. ‘To sink the ship, I mean.’

  Spenser shook his head. ‘Haven’t you heard of Cunningham, Cress? The admiral wouldn’t have a bar of it. The bloody RN’s 110 percent in control, 120 percent of the time. Anything that happens concerning Cunningham’s fleet is the responsibility of his admirals alone.’

  ‘Yes, all right but there were hundreds of infantrymen on board. Whose decision was it to let some of them die? In fact, whose decision was it to kill them?’

  I had raised my voice and Spenser’s lips now pursed in distaste. ‘Steady on, old boy. You’re getting ahead of yourself a bit there I’d say.’

  ‘No, I’m not!’ I yelled. ‘Coghlan woke up on the Imperial as it was hit by the Hotspur. He dived off without waking my brother and whoever else was down there snoring. Why else do you think he got so badly burnt in the cave back there? He didn’t roll into the fire of his own fuckin’ accord you know!’

  After so many days alone with Spenser, I was finally boiling over. Mentioning Perry Coghlan’s burns like that, as we sat by ourselves in the Trapeza cave, sounded like nothing other than a deadly threat.

  In our hot helmets the water was hissing. It was time to eat. But Spenser was now looking at me very warily indeed.

  *

  Contrary to what might be expected, given the gravity of the situation on the island, Spenser’s negotiations with Cairo over the wireless regarding times and protocol for the supply drop on the nearby Limnakaro plain were neither efficient nor brief. After he refused my request outright, I had to climb that ridge and listen three nights running to conversations about a piece that the bloke in Cairo – his codename was ‘Tigermilk’ – was chasing. In between the details of how he’d met her at some patisserie but snuggled up on a boat at Lake Andreotis, Theseus and Tigermilk would sometimes deign to discuss the details of the supply drop. And all in the codes tapped out by my very own fingers! This is how a beautiful and proud plateau becomes scarred by tragedy, and many times as we waited for the night of the drop I looked out from the bushes in front of the cave with my guts twisting. How dare Spenser say there was no communication possible between Cairo and Alexandria and then carry on like that with his crony! It was like something straight out of Lord Haw-Haw. I knew I couldn’t put up with it.

  My laughter in the end, however, was deep and rich. The supply drop was a disaster. Night after night, with a posse of Lasithi villagers – most with memories of the grand dance the archaeologists had thrown for them all at Karfi on their last night there before the war – we’d piled up the wood for the two bonfires that would mark the spot for the planes on the Katharo plain, high to the south of Lasithi. That alone was exhausting work because of the stealth required in crossing the plateau and the climb to Katharo, not to mention the inconsistency of muleteers. More than once bundles of dried oak went spiralling down steep and prickly screes.

  It had been arranged for a phoney target to be built on flat ground to the west at Limnakaro. The Limnakaro bullseye would have three blazing bushfires and ours only two. That way, it was presumed by the SOE brass, any German planes flying over would strafe the Limnakaro target and leave us to get on with it. Well, it didn’t quite work out like that. After waiting for three successive nights for the plane to arrive, on the fourth night we tended our fires long after the arranged drop-off at 0200 before deciding that once again they had not showed. By 0500 we had returned none the wiser to a sooty low-beamed kitchen in Agio Georgios, on Lasithi’s southeastern flank, where we began to hear the drone of planes in the distance.

  We received confirmation of the mix-up from a gasping boy who wouldn’t have been any more than fourteen years old, and who had quite obviously sprinted his leg of the grapevine to get to us. In torrents of dia
lect he informed us that the drop had mistakenly taken place at the phoney site on Limnakaro. Added to this, the three bonfire bullseyes had worked beautifully as a decoy and the empty plain at Limnakaro had indeed been strafed mercilessly all night so that no one had been able to get out there to haul in the contents of the drop. It was feared that come daybreak German planes would see the booty on the plain and descend on it. And, even worse, the nearby villages would be punished.

  Spenser was suitably chastened by this news. I know because I didn’t take my eyes off him. By turns he looked the blushing buffoon and then suddenly, blithely, in casual control. Truth was, it had been a good plan administered with indiscipline. There is nothing worse for morale in desperate times than a promising plan gone terribly wrong through incompetence. As the villagers wandered off through the fields towards their homes there was an uncharacteristic mope to their walk. Their shoulders were slumped, they were anxious and downcast. Like all the andartes I’d met so far, their appetite for doing what had to be done was insatiable, and, due in part to their relations with the archaeologists before the fighting started, they had put great faith in the British. But now, though perhaps even before now, they got a strong whiff of something less admirable. Spenser was hardly the brilliant leader they had considered Pendlebury to be, and with this ill-managed fiasco there was now a heavy air above the plateau of suspicions confirmed. Exhausted, bedraggled, with the smoke of the bonfires all over them, their spirits tired from the futility of the exercise, they departed like sad spectres from the firelight inside the pokey kitchen in Agios Georgios.

  I hated the fact that I was now lumped in with diminished respect. As we crossed back towards the cave with a silent Costas Kalantzakis, I sensed that Theseus and Takis were viewed as a pair. I’d not had the chance, nor the lingo, to put that right.

  *

  After Costas had fulfilled his duty by seeing us back to the ridge, Spenser and I were on our own again. We entered the chill of the cave and he sat by his gear, picked the snail grit from his teeth with his jack-knife. We were a sorry pair and those tough spud farmers of the Lasithi plateau would have been better off without us. I sat there stewing, feeling terrible about everything until eventually, as Spenser readied himself for sleep, I made my decision.

  I would go. My mind was not on the job of defending Crete and, as much as I admired the andartes, I wasn’t in step with them. When Spenser had me tap out the nonsense to his mates over the wireless, I should have foreseen the supply drop would end in disaster. Instead, all I had been worried about was his refusal to let me ask questions about the Imperial. That is hard to admit. How one man’s sorrows can lead to a hundred more.

  The dejected mood of the villagers, the silence of Costas Kalantzakis in particular, had shown me my shame. Even my image of Vern had changed with the dawning of this new fiasco. I saw him alive now on the submerged ship, trying to breaststroke a way out through any porthole or passageway. His air was running out. I couldn’t escape from the effect of his desperation any more than he could escape from the boat, our fates were entwined. I remained glued in my thoughts to this harrowing sight of a marine Hades.

  There was nothing to be done. I had to get out of that cave, out of that fortress of mountains, to keep moving south towards the coast. The Cretans knew, courtesy of the Republican war and the years resisting the Turks and the Venetian occupation before that, they knew what it was like to lose loved ones to brutality and injustice. They understood the inevitability of human betrayal. But I didn’t. Though I was quickly learning.

  Spenser was soon snoring – even now I think it’s somehow poignant how the plummy vowels disappear in the democracy of sleep, as does the strine – and I found myself standing over him with his polished Smith and Wesson in my hand. I watched those blubbery lips shuddering with every departing breath, the upturned tips of his Cretan-style moustache twitching like a cat’s whiskers as he dreamed. And once again, as I had with Perry Coghlan, I trained a gun on an ally in the bowels of the earth.

  I couldn’t bear the unassailability any longer. The Imperial license to stuff up. In a fit of self-importance I convinced myself that before I walked out of that cave above Tzermiado I would do something, just a little something, on behalf of the good people there. So they wouldn’t have to execute an old friend of Pendlebury themselves. I would avert the danger for them, the mishaps to come, and relieve my own shame a little by doing so. At the very least, I would declare that I was never Takis and that the Pommy Theseus and I had never been, and would never be, a pair.

  It was as I thought these mock-honourable thoughts, pretending to myself for a few brief moments that I truly cared about those villagers of the plateau, that I saw the joke that appealed to me more. Below me, Spenser’s moustache continued to twitch. How dare he wear that flamboyant moustache in the name of Kriti, I thought. When in truth he was more concerned with a woman on Lake Andreotis than with getting the supply drop right. Like the bastards who’d left my brother to drown, Spenser didn’t only deserve to die, he deserved to be humiliated first.

  I thrust the revolver into my belt and walked over to the red carpet bag Spenser had carried all the way from the first cave. Taking out his shaving gear, his fannie, a map, his Korfu Rot and his scissors, I walked over to my own pile and stuffed them all inside. Except for the scissors. Gathering up my bag in readiness for departure, and also my rifle and the pig’s bladder we had used for carrying water on our way up to the plateau, I walked over and placed it all in the corridor at the mouth of the cave.

  In chivalrous pose then, on bended knee rather like some ironic knight, I brandished the British army scissors in the torchlight beside Spenser’s plump and snoring head. With one easy snip I cut off the upturned right-hand side flourish of his moustache. I gathered my things, untethered the donkey, and set off laughing down the ridge.

  *

  The truth is, I felt it then, and, despite my terrible doubts at the time of writing to Leonie, I feel it now: despite my rage in the cave with Perry, it was a great thing I’d done to the Pom up at Lasithi. It was something, at last, to be proud of. The fact that it was never gonna earn me a VC is hardly any fault of mine.

  The Kalantzakis brothers of the Lasithi plateau would make their way back up to the cave later that day, in readiness to assess the wrong of the day before, and my message would be clear. A man with only half his moustache is surely not to be trusted. He is either mad, or he is running with the hare and hunting with the hounds. With that one snip I had delivered my verdict, disentangled myself, and avoided the additional shame of having killed a man in his sleep. And so my laughter that morning was not only in the nature of a practical joke but, as the English themselves might say, for the rare excellence and economy of my deed. Any way I look at it now, it was the noble thing to do.

  I had a clear aim in my mind now that I was finally on my own. Technically, I had a responsibility to make it back to my unit, but for the moment I just had to survive and make my way south to the coast, where I presumed I would comb the fishing villages in search of a boat. I was still prepared to believe that, with a bit of luck, I could front up in Alex, even in Cairo if necessary, and start asking questions. I would request permission, knock on doors, explore official and unofficial channels, demand an explanation. Sitting here now, on this more realistic island, I can only scoff at the layers of illusion I was under, the imaginative warp that came as part of grief’s cohort. Some days I wander the beaches here and literally moan like a seabird at the way the horrors filleted my thought processes. But one thing I knew for sure was: I could not fight on in the way we had been, not under those flags and not for the principles they espoused, until I had either confirmed or scotched my suspicions of what happened to our Baby.

  A full week afterwards however I was still in the arena of Lasithi, stymied in my desire to go south by local hospitality that ensued from an appreciation of my joke. Word had travelled quickly down f
rom the cave that morning and the missing half of Theseus’ moustache had aligned with local suspicions. I was making my way gingerly with the donkey, stepping down through the blood-red poppies cackling my head off, then feeling the effects when my laughter had dwindled, of keeping those bullseye-bonfires going all night, the sheer lack of sleep. And with the tiredness my healing hand began to play up, the blisters opening, and so my niggliness returned, my distress and my umbrage. I mouthed it all to my mate the mule, who by this time I had nicknamed Simmo, after the legendary donkey of Gallipoli in the first war, who had, according to my dad and his brothers, worked with a bloke called Simpson to help carry the wounded from the disastrous frontline of that other British-led fiasco. Now I reassured Simmo that we would find somewhere dry and well grassed. I would take out the archaeological mud map I’d stolen from Spenser, and plot our likely escape. I told him I would always be grateful for his solidarity but also that the bonus of my getting to Egypt to find out the truth would be that I would also be off his bloody island. The island where a clear-sighted animal like him would always feel at home but where I had lost my innocence, in more ways than one.

  *

  It was as we passed above a narrow lane of a small village, still hanging off the mountainside but east of Tzermiado, dressed in my Cretan bog-catchers, black shirt, goat-hair vest, AIF boots and with Spenser’s Smith and Wesson hidden under my shepherd’s cummerbund, that I was hailed by a short stout villager and called enthusiastically down through scrubby thyme and on through a narrow doorway. Determined as I was to press on for official explanations, my heart finished with the laughter by now, I did my best to refuse but the cheery soul would have none of it. He was a middle-aged man, his hair grey, the pallor of his wide jaw a living parchment of tobacco smoking and healthy mountain air. But his delight in chancing upon me was excessive, his exaggerated happiness at the sight of me almost preposterous, and despite internal cursing I allowed myself, after tethering Simmo to a surprising gum tree beside his house wall, to be ushered inside.