Marianne and the Rebels

by Жюльетта Бенцони

  She sought some relief by taking off her scanty clothing and hanging over the side to scoop sea-water over her body. It revived her a little and she moistened her lips and even tried to drink a few drops of cool water, but this only made things worse. The salt smarted on her lips and merely accentuated her thirst.

  Hunger came later, and was not so bad. Marianne would gladly have gone without food for two days for the sake of one glass of fresh water, yet a time came when she could no longer ignore the gnawing in her stomach. Her condition, the fact that there was a new life dependent on her own, only made her body more demanding. It was not long before she was suffering badly from fatigue. The sun was merciless. With a last effort she managed to ship the oars and lay them in the bottom of the boat, then she lay down, shielding herself from the killing rays as best she could. Still there was no land in sight, not even another boat, and if help were not forthcoming soon, she knew that she would face death – the slow, appalling death that she no longer doubted had been meant for her by Leighton. Yet, the man was a doctor and must, at some stage in his life, have sworn a solemn oath to succour anyone threatened by sickness and death.

  The fact that she had not so far encountered any other human being, nor even caught a glimpse of a sail, suggested that the Sea Witch had already deviated from her course before setting her adrift. They must have put her overboard somewhere in the midst of the broad stretch of open water that lay between the Cyclades and the island of Crete. Leighton's purpose had not simply been to get her off the ship: he had condemned her, quite coldbloodedly, to death.

  She very nearly cried as the cruel reality of her situation came home to her, but she forced back the tears with all the feeble strength left to her, knowing that she could not afford to waste a drop of the precious water that remained in her exhausted body.

  Evening brought some relief from the heat but the dehydration that seemed to be draining her body, like a vampire, only grew worse. Soon even her bones seemed to be crying out their torturing need for water.

  As she had done earlier, she scooped sea water over herself and knew a momentary relief. With it came the temptation to let herself slide into the blue water and seek a final end to all her sufferings. But the instinct of self-preservation was stronger, that and the odd little flicker, like the night-light burning in a sick-room which keeps the shadow of death at bay, which still flared up in her and bade her live, if only for the sake of revenge.

  The temperature dropped unexpectedly after dark and, after suffering from the heat all day, Marianne shivered all night long in her thin lawn, without a wink of sleep. Not until the sun had risen once more over the empty sea, did she manage to drop off and forget her parched and aching body. But the awakening was all the more painful. She was stiff and sore and desperately weak.

  Even so, at the cost of an almost superhuman effort, she succeeded in sitting up, only to fall back motionless into the bottom of the boat, at the mercy of the sun which now increased her torment.

  After that, the mirages began to occur. She seemed to see land on the burning horizon, and fantastic shapes of ships, and great sails racing towards her, bending over her, but when she stretched out her arms to seize them in her delirium, she touched only the empty air and the wooden sides of the boat, and was left weaker than before. The day passed with infinite slowness. In spite of the little she had managed to contrive in the way of shelter, the sun beat down on her with hammer strokes, and her tongue, which seemed to have swollen to three times its normal size, had grown too big for her mouth and was threatening to choke her.

  The boat drifted gently: in what direction Marianne had no means of telling. For all she knew, or cared, it might have been moving in circles. She was lost, and she knew it. She could hope for no help, now, but death. Opening her burned eyes painfully, she dragged herself to the side, determined now to drop into the water, if she could find the strength, and make an end of this inhuman torture. But her body had become like a baulk of dead wood and she could not raise it.

  Something red passed through her misted field of vision. Her hands touched water. She thrust harder. The rough wood scraped her chest but she did not feel it, insensible now to any pain but the vast fire that was consuming her whole being. Another little effort and her hair was trailing in the sea. The boat tipped gently and Marianne slipped over into the blue water which closed, mercifully cool, over her head.

  Too weak and too indifferent to swim, asking nothing but to get it over as quickly as possible, she let herself sink. Her mind shook free of the real world and consciousness receded.

  Yet the terrible need for water which had tormented her seemed to pursue her into death. She was haunted by water, it invaded her, she was dissolving in it. Sweet, life-giving water was flowing over her, as spring water wells up and covers dry stones. It was no longer the bitter, salt sea-water but a fresh draught, light as rainfall on the grass in a parched garden. Solaced, Marianne began to dream that the Almighty, in His mercy, had decreed that she should spend eternity drinking sweet water, and that she had gone to the paradise of those who have died of thirst.

  If so, it was a singularly hard and uncomfortable paradise. Her disembodied spirit was actually hurting quite savagely. Her swollen eyelids parted painfully and she saw a heavily bearded face bending over her, out of which looked a pair of questioning black eyes. Something red flapped in the background which she was soon able to identify as a sail rippling in the wind.

  Seeing that she had regained consciousness, the man slipped an arm beneath her head and supported her while he held something rough and cool to her cracked lips. It was the rim of an earthen jar. He let a little more of the blessed water trickle down her throat. As he did so, he said something incomprehensible, evidently speaking to someone Marianne could not see. Weak as she was, she struggled round and saw a black figure standing outlined against the red sail. He made a sinister impression standing there in the fiery glow of the setting sun: there was a Greek priest on board. Although himself heavily bearded and by no means clean, he was looking at her with evident disapproval. He said something clearly unflattering in reply and pointed an accusing finger. Instantly the man holding Marianne drew a piece of sailcloth over her, while the priest tucked his hands in his sleeves and turned away to stare at the horizon. Marianne remembered suddenly that her flimsy nightclothes must be in ribbons.

  She tried to smile her thanks to her rescuer but her parched lips would only form an agonized grimace and she winced at the pain of it.

  The man, apparently a fisherman, then reached behind him and produced a small phial of olive oil, which he smeared generously over her face. After this, he drew a basket towards him and took out a bunch of grapes, some of which he fed cautiously to his patient. Marianne took them eagerly: they were white and sweet and it seemed to her that she had never tasted anything so delicious.

  Then he finished wrapping Marianne in her cocoon of sailcloth, slipped a rolled-up fishing net under her head, and signed to her to go to sleep.

  At the other end of the boat, against the red sail whose colour faded with the fading light, the priest stood in an impassive and hieratic pose, eating black bread and onions, washed down by frequent draughts from a pot-bellied jar that he had beside him. When he had finished, he embarked on a lengthy prayer involving various ritual prostrations which, on the moving boat, called for considerable acrobatic skill. By the time this was over, it was quite dark and, curling himself into a ball with his strange-looking mitre tipped over his eyes, he settled himself into his corner and began to snore, without another glance at the creature whom his companion had fished out of the water.

  Tired as she was, Marianne felt no desire to sleep. She was exhausted but the thirst, the terrible thirst, had gone; the oil on her face had soothed away some of the pain and she felt almost better. The heavy canvas protected her from the chill of night-time, and above her the stars were coming out, one by one. They were the same stars she had seen the night before, as she lay in the
bottom of her boat, but then they had seemed cold and hostile. Tonight there was something friendly about them and from the bottom of her heart Marianne offered up a prayer of thanks to the God who had sent a saving hand to her just at the very moment when she had abandoned hope and decided to put an end to her existence. She could hear the man humming now, through closed lips, as he steered his little craft. She could not understand the language, she did not know to what land he was taking her, nor even where she was, but she was alive, and the sea that bore them up was the same sea that carried the American brig and the pirate who had taken possession of it. Wherever she was taken now, Marianne knew that it was only the first step towards her revenge. She knew, too, that she would know no rest until she had tracked down John Leighton and made him pay the price of his crimes in blood. Every sailor, friend or foe, who sailed the Mediterranean, must be pressed into service to pursue the slaver, so that Leighton might be hanged from the yard-arm of the ship he had stolen!

  Towards midnight, the moon rose, a thin crescent giving scarcely more light than the stars. A light breeze sang in the sail, and the sea slid past the vessel's hull with a noise like silk. The fisherman's voice sank to a low, faintly melancholy chant, so slow and soothing that Marianne dropped off to sleep at last. She was sleeping too deeply to see the island, with its tall black cliffs, or hear the whispered colloquy between the priest and the fisherman, nor did she feel the hands that carried her ashore, wrapped in the sail.

  When she woke, there was nothing but the absence of tormenting thirst to prove that she had not dreamed her rescue. She was lying in the shadow of a rock and a few stunted bushes on a shore of black sand strewn with silver weed. In front of her a sea the colour of indigo lapped at a fringe of black and white pebbles. The piece of sailcloth that had been wrapped round her had gone, like the boat, priest and fisherman, but her thin cotton rags were dry, and when she looked round she saw two bunches of golden grapes laid out neatly on a big flat stone. Automatically her hand crept out towards them. She felt incredibly weak and tired.

  Raising herself on her elbow, she nibbled a few of the sweet, juicy grapes. They tasted real enough to assure her that this was not all part of some fantastic dream. She was dizzy and ill, but there was no time to ponder why her fisherman rescuer had apparently changed his mind and abandoned her again on a deserted shore, for at that moment the shore ceased to be deserted.

  At the far end of the beach, where a path led down through the rocks, a white procession was emerging, so unexpectedly anachronistic in appearance that Marianne could only rub her eyes to ensure they were not deceiving her.

  Led by a tall dark woman, as beautiful and queenly as Athena herself, and a pair of flute-players, came a file of young girls dressed in the many-folded antique chiton, their black hair bound with criss-crossing white fillets. Some carried branches, others bore an amphora on one shoulder, and they walked two by two, slowly and gracefully, like the priestesses of some ancient rite, singing a kind of chant to the piping notes of the flutes.

  This curious procession was coming towards her. Marianne dragged herself over the sand until she felt that she was safely hidden by the rock, and with its help managed to stand upright. Her head was swimming and she was still very weak, far too weak to run away from this apparition from the past, which made her feel that she had taken a leap back over about two thousand four hundred years.

  However, the women had not seen her, and so took no notice of her. The procession swung away towards a fig tree, in whose shade Marianne could make out a figure, a statue of Aphrodite, mutilated but undoubtedly ancient. The left arm was missing but the torso was undamaged and the right arm bent in a graceful attitude of welcome. The head, whose profile was turned to the girl by the rock, was perfect in its beauty and purity.

  The flutes continued playing while the offerings were laid before the statue. Then the other girls prostrated themselves, and the tall dark woman stepped forward and addressed the goddess in the noble tongue of Demosthenes and Aristophanes, to the amazement of Marianne who still stood clinging breathlessly to her rock. Forgetting her own wretched plight for a moment, Marianne listened, wonderingly, to the language she had learned as part of Ellis Selton's plan for her niece's education, letting the woman's warm, grave tones sink into her being:

  Deathless Aphrodite, on your shining throne,

  Beguiling daughter of Zeus, to you I pray.

  Do not with pain and anguish like a stone

  Crush my poor heart.

  But come to me, as you would come of old,

  Hearing my cries of passion from afar,

  Leaving your father's dwelling-house of gold,

  To bear my part.

  The bright-winged sparrows harnessed to your cap,

  Flew swift from heaven through the midway air,

  A myriad flutterings brought you from afar

  To this black earth.

  Soon, soon they came. And you, O Blessed One,

  Your glorious face illumined with a smile,

  Would ask what new grief, what insane desire

  Consumed my heart.

  What was it made me call to you again?

  Whom must Persuasion lead back to your love?

  Who is it, Sappho, who now gives you pain?

  Who wrongs your heart…?

  The music of the words, the inexpressible beauty of the Greek language, entered into Marianne and took possession of her already half disembodied spirit. She felt as if the burning prayer were pouring from her own heart. She too was in anguish; she too was suffering from wounded love, a love debased, disfigured and deformed. The passion by which she lived had turned against her and was rending her with its claws. The woman's complaint made her fully conscious of her own unhappiness which had been almost driven from her mind by her physical ordeal and by the violence of her hatred for John Leighton. Now she was brought face to face once more with the realities of her own situation: a very young woman, abandoned, grieving and bitterly hurt, and tortured by the childish need to be loved. She had been maltreated by life and by men, as though she were strong enough to stand up to their cruelty and selfishness. Everyone who had loved her had tried to make use of her, to dominate her, all of them, except perhaps the passionate, enigmatic lover of that night in Corfu. He had asked nothing but pleasure he had rendered back a hundredfold. He had been gentle… gentle, and tender. Her body remembered him with gladness, as in the torments of thirst it had remembered all the sweet water it had known. She had a sudden curious intuition that happiness, plain ordinary happiness, had come near to her and passed away again with the stranger.

  The tears were pouring down her hollow cheeks. She lifted her arm in its ragged sleeve to brush them away and, loosing her hold on the rock, fell to her knees. Then she saw that the girls had paused in their invocation and were looking at her.

  She tried to run away, to hide herself in terror in the shadow of the bushes, for to her bruised spirit any human creature seemed an enemy, but she was too weak to stand and could only sink back on to the sand. Already the girls were all around her, bending over her curiously and talking rapidly in a tongue which bore little resemblance to ancient Greek. The tall woman approached more slowly, and the chattering circle parted respectfully before her.

  Bending over the castaway, she put aside the tumbled mass of dark hair, sticky with sand and sea-water, and lifted the waxen face down which the tears still coursed. Marianne did not understand the question put to her but she murmured, without much hope:

  'I'm French… lost… be kind to me…'

  A gleam shot through the kneeling woman's dark eyes and, to Marianne's astonishment, she whispered quickly in the same language:

  'Good. Be quiet now. Do nothing. We will take you with us…'

  'You speak—'

  'Be quiet, I said. We may be watched.'

  Swiftly unfastening the golden fibula that clasped the classical peplos of white linen that she wore over her pleated tunic, she put it round the other w
oman. Then, still in the same low voice, she issued a number of orders to her companions and they lifted Marianne, silently now, and held her upright, supported by the shoulders of two of the strongest of their number.

  'Can you walk?' the woman asked, and answered her own question at once:

  'No, of course you can't. Your feet are bare. You would not get past the first bend in the path. We'll carry you.'

  All the girls set to with remarkable speed and efficiency and constructed a kind of litter made of interlaced branches tied together by the fillets from their hair. They laid Marianne upon it, and then six of her new friends raised her on their shoulders, while the rest plucked trails from a wild vine that grew nearby, and asphodels, and some of the strange silvery weed that straggled all over the beach, and arranged these over her just as if it were a funeral bier. When Marianne's eyes turned inquiringly to the strange priestess, she smiled briefly.

  'It is best that you should feign death. It will save us from the possibility of awkward questions. The Turks think us mad and fear us on that account… but moderation in all things!'

  As a further precaution, she laid a fold of the peplos over Marianne's face, without giving her time to protest. All the same, the latter's curiosity impelled her to whisper:

  'Are there Turks here?'

  'They are never far off when we come down to the shore. They wait for us to leave before they steal the jars of wine we put by the goddess. Now be quiet or I'll leave you here.'

  Marianne took the hint and made herself lie as still as possible as the procession of women returned by the way they had come, chanting another hymn, this time with all the solemnity of a funeral dirge.