Decision at Delphi

by Helen Macinnes

  The path through the woods veered to the left as it climbed steeply up the hill. And at last, the trees thinned out and Cecilia could see a great hillside of rough fields, with scattered boulders and a few small trees and bushes. It seemed endless, cold and bleak under the half-light of early morning. This is where I stop walking, she thought. There is no place to hide on that hillside: I must keep near the trees.

  “You wash here!” Xenia told her, and pointed to a shallow pool, where the small stream, tumbling down from the heights, rested, too, before it went cascading through the wood. Boulders sheltered the pool from the hillside. And the path, once it crossed the flat stepping-stones of the pool, divided into two narrow tracks, each finding its own way on to the hill. They looked equally uninviting: the lower one disappeared behind the boulders; the upper one branched steeply, more directly up the hillside. I’ll stay close to the wood, Cecilia decided. But where did the sun rise? Where are we now?

  They were guarding her carefully. While Xenia hacked the black bread into thick slices, the man watched Cecilia, his revolver held ready. He talked. He was angry. Perhaps, thought Cecilia, he is disappointed. Something is still wrong. But what is wrong for them is right for me. Listening to the voices she could not understand, she sat on a boulder, looked down over the treetops towards the valley, waited for the moment when the sun would rise high enough to be seen.

  Xenia took over the watch, choosing a seat opposite Cecilia to face the hillside, keeping a cautious distance of about ten feet between them. The man folded up the map he had been studying, made some last bitter comments, took another slice of bread, and crossed the shallow pool by its flat stepping-stones. Cecilia could hear his feet clattering and slipping on one of the paths up the hillside behind her. He had left them, she decided, not out of tact but of necessity. Perhaps he had to explore the two paths and decide which was the better one. Perhaps, she thought in a surge of wishful hoping, he felt almost as lost as she did.

  She washed, ate her slice of bread, and waited. Xenia moved when she moved, always keeping the same distance from her. Cecilia could neither draw farther away nor come nearer than those ten or twelve feet. When Cecilia came back to her boulder, Xenia took the same seat again to face the hillside. They waited in silence. It was a long, long wait.

  At last, Cecilia saw the sun coming out over the woods. So that is definitely the east, she thought. And now I know that the hillside stretches to the north and the west. And down there, south, is the meadow and the road we travelled last night. Southeast, to be accurate. That is where Athens lies. But where can we be now?

  She studied the woman, who was chewing at her second slice of bread, her revolver still carefully ready. How much hope lay there? Cecilia wondered, and found very little. Xenia was a thoroughly discouraging type.

  She was probably not much older than Cecilia, almost the same height, but broader, heavier. She could have been handsome, something pleasant to look at, for her features were not ugly, her eyes were large, her hair thick and intensely black. But her mouth never softened, her dark eyes concentrated on her job. No wit, no humour in those eyes, no sympathy, no gentleness. They only held a strange mixture of aggressive intensity and impersonal coldness. She was the educated, dehumanised female, the dedicated machine. How do I get any information out of her? Cecilia wondered. “What has happened to your friend?” she tried. The woman ignored her.

  Cecilia reached for her handbag, the woman’s eyes following her movements. “I have no gun,” Cecilia said.

  “We know that.” The voice was as cold and contemptuous as the eyes. She watched Cecilia comb her hair. “Now put on your powder and lipstick,” she said derisively. “Make yourself pretty for them.”

  Cecilia finished combing her hair. “Them?” she asked.

  The woman ate her slice of bread.

  Cecilia said, “Have you been doing much kidnapping recently?”

  Xenia stopped eating and looked at her.

  “Or did you have enough practice with the children?” Cecilia kept her voice gentle. “What a magnificent experience that must have been for you! How many thousands of them, actually? I heard that it was almost fifty thousand who were kidnapped and taken out of Greece. Did you take some of them by this route? Did they cry much? Did they weep? You must have had a busy time, wiping away their tears, telling them they should be glad they had been stolen from their reactionary parents. Who wants a father or mother, anyway?”

  The quiet voice had, at first, deceived the woman. But now she rose, staring at Cecilia. She mastered her anger. “You are politically uneducated,” she said contemptuously. “It is useless to talk with you. You would not understand liberation. You do not—”

  “Oh, I am being liberated, am I? Ever since you hit me on the head and shoved me into a taxi, I have been liberated? And how ungrateful of me, not to appreciate it.”

  Xenia’s eyes narrowed. “You make a joke. Tomorrow, you will make no jokes.”

  “No?” Would she really use that revolver? Cecilia wondered. The sound of a shot would carry on this hillside. She wouldn’t want that; I would. But then, she might hit me. She’d like that; I wouldn’t. If I did not want so desperately to live, now that Ken— She looked down at the valley, trying to stare the sudden tears away. Yes, I’d take the chance of being hit, she decided, if there was anyone near enough to hear the shot. But the little stretch of white ribbon, the curving road, was empty. The hills around it were still and silent under the early-morning sky. This country reminded her of the loneliness of Wyoming, of the rise and fall of the foothills leading up to the Big Horn, of nothing but mountains and forests and overwhelming sky. “Where shall I be tomorrow?” She managed to smile. “Dead?”

  “We are not criminals.”

  “That’s nice to know. Where shall I be tomorrow?”

  Xenia brushed a crumb from the sleeve of her coat. “I do not know,” she said, coldly, casually. And that, thought Cecilia, is the truth: this woman does not know and she could not care less, and she believes she is not a criminal. A chill, far sharper than the shrewd mountain air, struck through her. “So you are just delivering me over, like a package? To whom?”

  Xenia did not bother to answer. She glanced at her watch, then up at the hillside in front of her, then back at Cecilia. “Why do you look down at the road?” she asked with open amusement. “There is no car there. It is too early. And no one could see us here. No one.”

  “You gloat so nicely,” Cecilia said. “You have such endearing traits.”

  “Say good-bye to the road,” the woman said. “Say good-bye to everything!” But she could not see the first wisps of smoke, darkening, thickening, a thin black column rising above the treetops near the meadow.

  Cecilia looked away. A column of hope, she thought. Even if, at this hour, there was no one to see the blazing hut, someone would find its ashes later. And, suddenly, she remembered the unexpected side to the loneliness of Wyoming. How often as she had ridden through empty countryside had she come around some trees and found a man fishing in a creek; or in a high meadow, near a stream, there would be a little cabin; sometimes, in a draw, she would find a solitary cowhand searching for strays; on a hill-side, a Basque would be sitting at his wagon door, watching his sheep. Here, she thought quickly, there are shepherds, too. Even if the one I saw last night has moved on with his flock, this morning, there may be others. There may be a peasant going to work in his fields, a woman fetching water from a spring, a boy gathering wood. I may not hear or see them, but they exist all the same. A man with short sight would not see those two eagles, far to the west, circling slowly in the sky. Yes, she thought, this country is no more lonely, no more unexpected, than Wyoming. This woman had almost shocked her into hopelessness; the cold, disinterested eyes had almost mesmerised her with despair. But now, as she looked at the distant eagles soaring over some hidden valley, her heart rose, too.

  “Stand still!” Xenia said angrily, nervously. She sensed a change. She couldn’t unde
rstand it. But her caution doubled.

  Cecilia, bending down to take off her shoes, only rubbed one ankle as her reply. A pity, she thought, that there was such a stretch of open ground in this clearing; the nearest trees were thirty feet or more away. The course of the stream was no help, either. After this pool, it plunged down between boulders in an unpleasant drop through the wood. There was the hillside behind her, of course, with its outcrops of rock, large boulders, no doubt some gullies and its own sudden precipices. But the man was somewhere up there. And, besides, she did not want to run uphill. She wanted to get down, down to the road.

  “It is better,” the woman said, relaxing as she approved of such unexpected good sense. “The shoes are useless on the hills.” She looked at the high heels and found them comic. “Put them down! Here!” She pointed to a boulder near where she stood.

  Cecilia moved slowly over, staring beyond the woman’s shoulder. “There’s smoke rising, down there.”

  Xenia had been expecting some trick. “Some smoke rising!” she mimicked.

  From the hillside, behind Cecilia, the man called out. Cecilia glanced around. Anastas was not near the two paths which had diverged at the boulders on the rough field near her. He had come back by a higher, easier route and he was now standing on the hillside itself just above the wood. From there, he had seen the smoke rising. He was pointing, as he began to scramble down toward the trees.

  Xenia had looked toward the valley as he called. For a moment, she stared down at the rising column of black smoke. And in that moment, Cecilia moved. She smashed the heel of the shoe into the back of the woman’s neck, and sent her sprawling. She tried to pick up the revolver; but from the trees came the man’s shout, a shot. She turned and ran. There was only one way to run, after all. Towards the paths at the boulders.

  A second shot rang out, but she was already dodging behind the first boulder. Which path now? Which path? Instinctively, she chose the one on her left, the lower one, the one nearer the valley. She kept on running. Her luck was holding. The path was good, a narrow trail of worn grass, easy on her feet.

  And then she knew it wasn’t so good. It was only a goat track narrowing as the ground on her left began to fall away more steeply. One slip—she looked down at the fall of hillside, now developing into a precipice, and stopped running. The man wasn’t even bothering to chase after her on this path. He knew what lay ahead.

  She drew against the steep bank on her right, regaining her breath and her sadly splintered confidence. She would have to go on. There was no going back. The man, she thought, makes mistakes, too: he is now regretting the two shots he fired. She remembered his heavy build, his plodding walk, his sallow face: he wasn’t accustomed to scrambling around a hillside. His wits might not be so nimble here as they were when he was arguing over a coffee table back in Athens.

  She started along the narrow trail, less than two feet wide, which now curved around a rock face. She took that carefully, not looking down. Halfway, she realised for the first time that she was still holding a shoe in each hand. She waited until she was past that jutting face of rock before she paused to slip the shoes into her pockets. And, unexpectedly, the trail relented. It swerved away from the edge of the precipice and climbed uphill. She increased her pace.

  But she was also out in the open, away from the rocks and the boulders which had sheltered her. She looked back along the hillside, toward the wood. The man was following the upper path, still some distance away, but in clear sight. As he saw her, he began a slow run, stumbling, as if his morning’s exploration had already exhausted him.

  She ran, too, abandoning the trail which was now climbing straight uphill towards the higher path which the man was following. She cut across the hillside, westward, soft grass under her feet, blue wild flowers to cover her ankles. She struggled up the last slope of the hill’s shoulder. Her thoughts came in gasps like her breath. Over there, just over that shoulder, perhaps there were trees, a wood, some place to hide.

  But when she reached the hill’s shoulder, there was no wood, only a vast country of high meadows and far hills. Immediately in front of her, cutting down the hillside in a jagged furrow, was a deepening gully. There was no way across except by the path, higher up on the hill. She looked down at the gully, almost a ravine at this point; and then she glanced back over her shoulder. The man had gained slightly on her as she stood here, fumbling for breath, for a clear thought. He was still keeping to the path; he knew she would have to climb back to it to cross the gully.

  Could I manage to reach the path up there ahead of him? she wondered, and knew it was impossible. She looked at the deep gully once more, cutting her off from the meadows. Over there, might be safety. In the distance, she could see a movement: black sheep, white sheep, a flock of them grazing. There was only one way for her to reach them. Quickly, she started down into the gully.

  She ran where she could, scrambled where she couldn’t, and let herself slide when there were bushes to break her descent. As it became more difficult, she slowed her pace, held on to the branches to lower herself to each new level. The ground was dropping away steeply now, but it wasn’t a precipice. Not on this side. Across the deep bed of the narrow stream, it was a different matter. There, a giant bite had been taken out of the high bank, clean and neat, leaving only sharply ridged rock. The farther she climbed down, the worse the other side looked. Its scattering of bushes, growing into its clefts, had made it seem not impossible from the top edge of the ravine; but from below, looking up at that wall of rock.

  She stopped where she was, and let herself fall beside a clump of bushes, her breath tearing her body, her heart pounding up into her ears, her legs suddenly trembling and helpless. She stared up at the wall of rock. I’ll never manage it, she realised. Never. She lay back, staring up at the blue sky, and she wept.

  28

  Still keeping to the path, the man, Anastas, reached the rough bridge over the gully. He was as much out of breath as out of temper. He stared down the length of this wild, abandoned place, the stream bed deepening as it ate into the ground, its banks rising higher until the gully had been transformed into a ravine. There were bushes down there, straggling dwarf trees, falls of sharp-edged rock, boulders worn smooth by winter torrents.

  Where did he begin to search? It would take four men to scour that ravine, block its exits. He decided to stand and watch. There must be a movement, sometime. Let her think he had gone away, and she would move. Move, he told her under his breath, move!

  He waited for thirty minutes, thirty silent minutes, long long minutes. But there was no movement. He could see not one sign of her, hear not one stone dislodged. Cursing her, he started down into the stream bed. He was sweating inside his heavy coat. The sun was warm down here. He was thirsty and tired and depressed. If everything had only gone according to plan, the girl would have been off their hands before dawn came. Xenia and he could have left the hut on the meadow as soon as he arrived on his motorcycle. By this time, they would have been as far north as Thessaly. He could really travel on that machine.

  He searched for twenty minutes and he still had not covered more than a quarter of the ravine. It was obvious that if the girl was still here—he was beginning to doubt that—she could even shift her position and take cover where he had already searched. One man was useless on this job.

  Then he saw Xenia, standing up on the path at the plank bridge over the gully, watching him. That’s right, he thought as he wiped his brow with his sodden handkerchief, loosened his collar still more; she will stay up there and give me advice. He left the ravine and scrambled back to the bridge.

  “She isn’t there?” Xenia asked, her eyes searching the ravine.

  The question annoyed him.

  “You saw her go in?” Xenia insisted.

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “If I knew that exactly, I’d know where to find her. There is a rise on this hill slope, perhaps you’ll notice. It hid the ravine, did
n’t it? So it hid her as she went in.”

  “Perhaps she went right down the ravine, and out by the other end.”

  “Yes,” he said, “right over a precipice.”

  “Then perhaps she’s stuck on that precipice.”

  “You climb down and look,” he suggested.

  Xenia ignored that. The pain at the back of her neck was almost gone, but she had one of her blinding headaches now. It would last for hours; they always did. That bright sun, the glare from the rocks, were no help, either. “We shall have to search,” she said doggedly, closing her eyes wearily.

  Her air of martyrdom annoyed him. “Impossible!” He looked at his watch. “One man is useless on this job.”

  Her eyes opened, and she turned to look up at the crest of the hill. “Where are the men? Did you find them?”

  “They are there. In the cave, just around the other side of the hill. They are resting. They had a long walk last night.”

  “And did not finish it,” she said angrily. “If they had come down to the hut as they were told—”

  “How could they? There was that shepherd and his dog searching—”

  “Frightened of a shepherd and his dog? You men!”

  “Not frightened. Cautious. They cannot afford to be seen. There isn’t a peasant for miles around who wouldn’t go running to the police.” He stiffened as he looked at a ledge on the high cliff wall of the western side of the ravine.

  “There’s something!” he said, and pointed.

  Xenia shielded her eyes. She laughed. “It’s a sheep,” she said, “it’s a dead sheep.” She turned away, her eyes blinking the strain out of them, the headache tightening its iron band around her brow. “Go back to the cave and make them come down here.”

  “Make them?”

  “They have got to help us search.”

  “They won’t come down here in daylight. It’s too open. They might be seen.” His patience was shortening rapidly again. “Look, Xenia, I tried to get them to come as far as the wood. What do you think I was doing all that time I left you and the girl alone at the pool?.”