No-one, Athena remembered, had talked of anything else and she suspected that one of the reasons that her Aunt had been so insistent on leaving Athens for the Prince's Palace at Mikis was to prevent her hearing more about the scandal that had left everyone gasping at its audacious impropriety.
But at Delphi, amongst the untidy houses which were little more than huts or hovels, she could not imagine she would find a brigand looking like the Albanian General.
As if he read her thoughts Orion said:
"There are brigands and brigands, some are extremely picturesque, but others can be dangerous and that is why I am warning you against them, Athena."
"I am not inviting their company," Athena laughed. He stopped still and looked at her and because he had ceased walking she was forced to do the same. "Look at me," he said. Wondering she turned her eyes up to his.
He was so much taller than her that his head seemed to be silhouetted against the sky.
"You must take care of yourself," he said very quietly but insistently. "You are so beautiful—so unbelievably beautiful—and I realise so innocent, that you have no idea of the dangers that might be waiting for you. Promise me, promise me by everything you hold sacred that you will be careful."
The solemnity in his voice gave her a very strange feeling.
No-one had ever spoken to her like that before, no-one's voice had ever suggested so much concern—and another emotion to which she could not put a name.
"I will ... be careful."
"You promise?"
"I promise!"
It was an easy promise to make, she thought, for after tomorrow she was quite certain there would never be another chance to escape.
They would be watching for her, and if she was brave enough, as she intended, to tell the Prince she could not marry him, she would go back to the safety of England where there were no brigands, but also no gods or sacred shrines.
They walked on and now as if Orion was thinking deeply he did not speak.
When they left a larger part of the village behind, the narrow road began to slope upwards.
Finally they climbed steeply to where on the outskirts of the other houses there stood what was obviously a Taverna with a breath-taking view over the valley beneath them.
It was a very simple building of two storeys and like all the houses in the village had a flat roof. It had a front porch made simply of dried branches of trees supported by wooden struts.
Beneath it were a number of deal tables at which were sitting several elderly men looking, Athena thought, as if they were customers of long standing.
They said good-evening in a friendly manner to Orion when they both appeared, and he answered them, calling them by their names as if they were his close friends.
Carrying Athena's bag and putting a hand under her elbow as if to support her he drew her through the doorway and into the house itself.
There was a large kitchen, a table in the centre of it and a stove at one side.
A middle-aged woman and a young girl dressed in peasant costume were preparing a meal while a thickset man whose hair was turning grey was sitting in an arm-chair, smoking a pipe.
They looked up as Orion and Athena entered and there was no doubt of the curiosity in their expressions.
"Madame Argeros, I have brought you a lady who requires a bed for the night," Orion said. "I told her that you will welcome her and she will be safe in your comfortable house, safe from the brigands and the 'sharks' in the village who batten upon tourists."
Madame Argeros laughed.
"Any friend of yours, Orion, is welcome," she said. "The lady can have Nonika's room. She can move in with us." They spoke in Greek but Athena understood. "I would not wish to be any trouble," she said in their language. Orion stared at her in astonishment.
"You speak Greek!" he exclaimed. "We have been together all the afternoon and you did not tell me."
"You did not ask me, and you spoke English so well that I might have been put to shame."
"But you speak with perfection!" he said. "Like everything else about you."
The last words were spoken in English so that only she could understand them. Athena felt shy and did not look at him.
"Let me introduce you," Orion said. "Madame Argeros, the best cook in the whole province, Diniitrios Argeros, her husband, the owner of this comfortable Taverna and Nonika, the prettiest girl for miles around."
Nonika blushed and dropped her eyes, Dimitrios Argeros gave Athena a respectful nod, but he did not rise from the chair on which he was sitting.
"Come and sit down," Madame Argeros suggested. "Nonika will get your room ready."
"We are both thirsty and hungry, Madame," Orion said. "I have not eaten since breakfast and I have not asked my friend when she last enjoyed a meal."
"As it happens it was last night," Athena replied, "with the exception of an orange which one of the boatmen gave me on my way here."
She spoke in Greek and Madame Argeros gave a little cry of horror.
"You must be starving!" she said. "Sit down, child, and I will find you something to eat, but dinner is not yet ready."
Obediently Athena sat down at the large deal table and Madame put down in front of her a loaf of bread and a cheese made from sheep's milk which Athena had tasted before and found delicious.
There were black olives ripe from the sun and red tomatoes sliced into their own juice, besides a cucumber hastily cut and added to the plate of tomatoes.
The bread was crisp and delicious and without waiting Athena cut herself a slice and spread on it the white sheep's-milk cheese.
As she did so Orion brought a bottle of wine to the table, opened it and poured her out a glass.
She sipped it.
"A feast for the gods," she smiled. "I do not believe that even ambrosia and nectar could taste better when I am so hungry."
He laughed, and helped himself to the olives and also cut a large piece of the bread.
"You are not to spoil your appetite, Orion," Madame admonished from the stove. "I have cooked all your favourite dishes as you are leaving us tomorrow."
"Shall I guess?" he asked. "Or shall I tell you I can already smell the fragrance of baby lamb ? "
"It is to be a surprise," Madame said severely. "There is Moussaka to start and I only hope your friend enjoys it as much as you do."
"She will," Orion answered.
He smiled at Athena as he spoke and as he did so it suddenly struck her that she had never been so happy in the whole of her life.
She was with people who welcomed her because she was herself.
She was with a man who was speaking to her as an intellectual equal.
This was what she had always wanted, what she had always missed. It could be summed up in one word—happiness.
Chapter Three
Nonika came shyly into the kitchen to tell Athena her room was ready.
"I expect you would like Nonika to show you the way upstairs," Orion suggested.
"Thank you, I would," Athena replied.
She picked up the hand-woven bag and her bonnet from where they were laid on a chair and followed Nonika.
They climbed a narrow, rather rickety staircase, and on the low-ceilinged small landing at the top Athena saw there were two doors, one on the right the other on the left.
Nonika opened the one on the left and Athena followed her into a room which contained a bed, a wool rug on the wooden floor and a chest-of-drawers on which there was a small mirror.
A table contained a washing basin and there was one chair, but nothing else against the white-washed walls. But it was spotlessly clean, and smelt of bees-wax and wild thyme.
"It is very kind of you to give me your room," Athena said.
"I only sleep here when there are no guests," Nonika replied. "Orion has the other room."
"You know him well and he stays here often?" Athena enquired.
She felt perhaps she had no right to ask the question. At the same tim
e she could not help feeling curious about Orion's position in the household.
He was so obviously a different class from the Argeros family, but they appeared to treat him as if he was a favoured son rather than a client of their Taverna.
While they were eating Madame had admonished him for missing the midday meal, and her husband had cracked jokes and repeated some incident that had happened in the village to people who were apparently known to them both.
In answer to Athena's question Nonika gave a little shrug of her shoulders.
"He comes—he goes," she said enigmatically. "Sometimes we do not see him for a long time, but always he returns and is welcome." She gave Athena a smile as she added: "As you are welcome as his friend."
She shut the door as she spoke and Athena felt herself warm at the sincerity of her words.
How charming and simple these people were, she thought, so different from the sharp-eyed, wise-cracking society notabilities whom she had met in Athens.
Even the Parnassus relations who had come to call on her had seemed very social-minded in their outlook and the women were extremely fashionable in their appearance.
She realised that the whole of Athenian society centred around the Court and the gossip that enthralled them left little room for any other interest or amusement.
It was not extraordinary that the Courtiers and notabilities who circled round King Otho and Queen Amelia should have a passion for scandal.
It ran through the Salons and cafes of the whole city and was in keeping with its many other Oriental traits.
Athens had surpised Athena in that it was not in the least what she had expected from the Greek Capital.
"It is part Turkish, part Slav and part Levantine," one of the King's aides-de-camp had explained to her, and she realised when she drove through the busy city that he was right.
There were the seething Turkish Bazaars, the cafes where at least half the population spent most of their time smoking their nargailyes and drinking innumerable cups of coffee.
But what had delighted Athena was the noisy crowded streets where she could see the exotic costumes which were characteristic of the islands and the provinces.
This was where she longed to wander by herself if she had been allowed, to watch the people and have the opportunity of entering the dark churches, decorated with Icons, from where, as she passed, she could hear the chanting of the monks.
The King's Palace, plain, square and uncompromisingly Bavarian, had set the standard for the taste of Greek Society, who were determined to be as European as possible.
But however conventional they might wish to be, Athens remained a conglomeration of booths and Palaces, noisy gargottes and Byzantine churches.
"You would hardly believe it," someone said to Athena: "the city has over twenty thousand inhabitants but only two thousand houses."
"Then where do they all sleep?" Athena asked.
"Many of them in the streets," was the answer.
In the short time she was there Athena realised that the tiny capital attracted like a magnet pleasure seekers from all over the Balkans.
Rich Moldavian nobles travelled for weeks over immense distances to indulge in riotous living; fezes, turbans, and the lambskin hats of the Caucasians intermingled with tasselled caps.
A mixture of yashmaked kohl-eyed women wrapped anonymously in black rubbed shoulders with colourful peasants, and ladies wearing silks and satins direct from Paris.
It was only in the Palace and in its splendid gardens that Athena had felt lonely among the chattering groups of nobles and her eyes went continually toward the Parthenon standing sentinel over the city as it bad done for more than two thousand years. She wanted to say with Byron:
"Ah! Greece! They love thee least who owe thee most;
Their birth, their blood and that sublime record
Of hero sires, who shame thy now degenerate horde!"
But because she was so anxious to love everything in the land in which she was to live and because she wanted to immerse herself in everything that was Greek, she would not admit that Athens had disappointed her or that the Greek people whom she met had not in any way measured up to her expectations.
But today she had found in Orion the type of man she had hoped to meet.
This was how she had imagined all Greek men would look and that they would be proud of their past, trying within themselves to revive the spirit which had made Greece the foundation on which European civilisation was built.
As she washed, then tidied her hair, Athena could not help wishing that she could change her dress and put on one of the exquisite gowns she had brought with her from London in her trousseau.
But she laughed at the idea of going downstairs to the kitchen bedecked in silk and tulle or wearing one of the off-the-shoulder gowns edged with a lace bertha which was the fashion.
At the same time something very feminine within her wanted Orion to see her at her best.
How could he judge what she was like in the very plain dress she had chosen in which to travel to Delphi?
Then she told herself she was being ridiculous.
"Tomorrow he is leaving and I shall never see him again," she told her reflection and wondered why the thought gave her a pain that was almost physical within her breast.
Laughing at her vanity, and yet at the same time driven by it, she arranged her hair more fashionably.
She brushed the ringlets on either side of her face until they shone as if they had caught the sunlight, and made certain that the parting down the centre of her small head was absolutely straight.
The face she saw in the mirror had changed, she felt, in some way from its look before she had come to Delphi.
Her large grey eyes which dominated the oval of her face had a light in them that had not been there before, there was a touch of colour in her cheeks and her lips were soft and parted with excitement.
Only her small straight nose which her grandmother had always said was exactly like that of the goddess after whom she was named, remained the same.
Yet the whole effect was different, though Athena could not explain exactly how.
She remembered when Homer wished to describe the goddess Athena he called her "the bright-eyed one", and that he had spoken of Helen of Troy as "wearing a shining veil".
"That is what is happening to me now," Athena said to herself. "I am shining with a reflection from the Shining Cliffs and from the light that I felt in the Temple."
Because she was in a hurry to go downstairs to see Orion again and talk to him, she did not linger long in her bed-room.
Just for a moment she glanced out through the window at the stupendous view that lay beneath.
Now as the sun was sinking the valley was in deep shadow, the olive trees no longer silver-grey but like a dark carpet of purple.
But the little Port of Itea still glowed in the setting sun and the tops of the mountains were burnished with gold.
Athena drew in her breath. Then spurred by an urgency that she was afraid to explain to herself she hurried below.
There was a cloth on the table in the kitchen and when Orion rose at her entrance she saw that he had put on a black velvet coat over his shirt.
He wore nothing so formal as a tie, but a silk scarf inside the collar of his shirt which made him not only appear tidier, but also in some way gave him a new dignity.
It made Athena find it hard to look at him as she approached the table, but his eyes were on her face and it would have been impossible for her to go anywhere except to his side.
"Dinner is ready," he said speaking in Greek and she answered him in the same language.
"I am very hungry, I hope Madame Argeros will not think I am greedy."
"There is plenty for everyone," Madame said.
She set a dish clown on the table and Athena saw that it was the famous Moussaka which she had eaten before and which she had learnt varied from place to place and from kitchen to kitchen.
It
might be a Greek speciality, but she thought it resembled very closely the Shepherd's Pie that she had eaten so often at home and which in the School-Room always appeared on Monday made from the left-overs of the Sunday joint.
However with Greek olives, herbs, aubergines and various other vegetables added she found Moussaka very delectable and because she was hungry ate without speaking.
Orion filled her glass with the golden wine and by the time they had consumed large portions of baby lamb roasted on the spit the edge of Athena's hunger and, she thought, Orion's too had gone.
They started to talk to the Argeros family who had joined (hem at the table, but either Nonika or her father kept rising to attend (he customers sitting outside the Tavcrna.
They continually and loudly demanded bottles of wine or cups of coffee, but with the exception of olives and an occasional plate of cheese, they did not ask for food.
Athena commented on this.
"The Greeks eat very late," Orion explained. "Madame Argeros panders to my preference for an early dinner, but if I was not here I doubt if she would begin cooking until it was nearly ten o'clock."
"But they get up very early," Athena answered, remembering that the streets of Greece had been crowded when she had looked out at six or even five o'clock in the morning.
"Every Greek enjoys a long siesta during the hottest time of the day," Orion said, "just as you took yours this afternoon."
"But I did it inadvertently," Athena replied almost defensively.
"Consciously or unconsciously you conformed with the customs of my country," he smiled.
His eyes were on hers as he spoke and she remembered how she had awoken to find him sitting beside her when she had been dreaming that she was flying with the eagles.
She felt herself blush at what she thought he must be thinking and was glad when Madame Argeros broke the tension by saying:
"We have bad news today."
"Bad news?" Orion questioned.
"There was trouble at Arachova last night."
Athena knew that Arachova was a small town about four hours from Delphi on the road over the mountains leading to Athens.
Kiss the Moonlight Page 5