I rose up like a tidal wave, taking bodies with me. With a roar I threw the women off, and yanked them away from Phoebe. Most came right back at me, and I fought them hand-to-hand.
This only seemed to increase their fury. They smashed me with their sticks and torches, and bit and clawed like animals. One came at me with the mossy rock, smashing it into my shoulder. Phoebe rose up and joined in the battle. We fought them back with total abandon, a rage to match their own. Finally, we crashed through the mob of women and fled toward the darkness of the woods.
Phoebe, with amazing alertness, grabbed her bag on the run.
THE STEEP ravine was thick with trees. Beams of moonlight slanted through, but the forest floor was dark. Shrieks shook the still air. The Maenads raced behind us. Glancing back, I caught their ghostly forms amid the pines.
Fueled by panic, Phoebe flitted down the slope; I ran just behind her. Her chiton, in tatters, clung to a single clasp. Blood streaked her skin. She’d lost one of her sandals. I could hear her breathless panting as she raced down through the trees.
We came out onto a grassy slope, a clearing in the woods. A circular pen made of pine boughs held half a dozen goats. The goats stirred and their bells clanged as the two of us darted past.
Immediately, we entered another wood, sparser than the last. Moonlight filtered through the trees; we could see and hear more clearly. Behind us, the goat bells jangled. Amid the shrieks of the women, we heard the shout of a man.
We slowed and looked back. In the pale light of the clearing, the Maenads came to a halt. For a moment the women seemed uncertain, peering into the trees. Several started running in another direction.
We raced on ahead.
Leaving the woods, we came into a swale of tall, yellow grass, what looked to me like wheat. Halfway across it, I grabbed Phoebe’s arm.
“This way!” I whispered. We cut across the slope of the field, then ducked down into the grass. Lying on our bellies, we were totally concealed.
We waited.
Both of us were out of breath, our blood pounding so hard it was pulsing in our ears. We peered out over the golden grass, back toward the edge of the woods. It remained dark and silent.
“Was it Vassilos?” Phoebe whispered.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “He’s much too slow to have made it this far. Maybe the guy from the cave.”
The moonlight gave the golden field a soft, velvet sheen. Phoebe pulled out a stalk of the grain. She examined the spike and tasted the seed. “Barley,” she whispered.
I don’t know how she knew it was barley. Maybe the Dutch girl had grown up on a farm. “For the kykeon, you think?”
“Barley was grown on the plains of Eleusis.”
“I bet this land is owned by the monastery,” I whispered. “They grow the grapes and the orchids. Why not grow the grain?”
We waited and watched. No one came out of the woods.
“Maybe they went after that guy,” I said.
Phoebe was scanning the surrounding landscape. “Look!” she whispered.
In the distance, beside a stand of trees, was the dimly lit window of a farmhouse.
“Let’s make a run for it,” I said.
Phoebe clutched my arm to stop me. Once again we scanned the edge of the woods. Nothing could be seen in its darkness.
She looked at me and nodded. We got up and ran toward the house.
21
THE FARMHOUSE was two stories high and looked to be as old as the island. It was built of dark stone with whitewashed mortar; in the moonlight it looked like a spider’s web. A single upstairs window glowed; the rest of the estate lay in darkness.
We crept through a copse of fig trees, past the stone wall of a melon patch, then alongside a dirt pen holding several pigs. A flock of sheep stood behind a fence in a field, and nearby was a pine bough corral with a mule. The animals stirred as we moved toward the house. Suddenly, a dog started barking.
Phoebe and I glanced behind us, expecting the Maenads to come streaming from the woods. But still no one appeared. We approached the front door of the house, and the wolfish dog edged toward us, growling.
A light appeared in a downstairs window, and a moment later the door swung open. A lanky man with a gray mustache peered into the yard and spotted us. He was wearing a robe, and a gas lantern dangled from his upraised hand. He looked curious and confused. Phoebe was standing in her torn and bloody chiton with her arms crossed to her shoulders, attempting to hide her nakedness. My shirt, too, had been ripped open and stained with blood. On an island that had seen its share of war, we must have looked like a couple of refugees stumbling out of the past.
The man called his dog. Immediately, it stopped growling and bounded back into the house. The man’s young wife appeared at his side, also in a robe, her eyes flared with apprehension.
Again I scanned the woods for the Bacchae.
The man called out a question in Greek. Phoebe started to answer, trying to find the words in his language to explain the bizarre situation we were in. But before she could get a full sentence out, the resounding peel of a distant bell drifted out over the mountain.
A church bell.
At this late hour, in the stillness of the night, there could be little doubt of its meaning. It was not the perfunctory tolling of an hourly chime, but the strong, persistent sounding of an alarm. I realized at once it had to be coming from the monastery. The older nuns we’d seen in the rearview mirror must have gone back to send out a warning.
The man’s wife immediately receded into the house, calling for her husband to join her. The man hesitated. Phoebe pleaded. Finally, he backed away and pushed the door shut.
We searched the darkness around us.
The front door opened again. With a sigh of relief we started toward it, but the farmer’s wife was only releasing the dog. It came tearing across the yard at us. We turned and bolted for the woods.
We could hear the dog approaching behind us, its breathing raspy and eager. Our feet could not carry us fast enough. As we reached the trees, the giant hound leapt onto Phoebe. She screamed and tumbled to the ground. The hound overran her, then scrambled back to attack.
I raced to stop it as it went for Phoebe’s throat. She threw up her arms to block it. Its teeth locked on her wrist.
Digging into the fur at its neck, I hauled back and pulled it off her.
Phoebe rolled away. The animal charged at me.
Before I could react, it was on me. The giant hound knocked me down. Teeth flashed before my face as I struggled to push it away.
Suddenly the animal yelped, a high-pitched squeal of pain. It released me and hobbled off, whimpering back toward the house.
Above me stood a man holding a long-bladed dagger. A rifle was slung from his shoulder. He offered me his hand.
In the distance, the bell continued tolling.
I took the man’s hand, and he pulled me up. He was old and gray, but remarkably fit. He wore a seafarer’s cap, and had a hunter’s game bag strapped to his back. I recognized his face.
The man looked closely at my neck and saw it wasn’t bleeding. “Luck is with you,” he said. He spoke with a thick accent. His handsome face was deeply wrinkled, his black eyes glinting slits.
“I saw you yesterday,” I said. “You came in on the ferry.”
The man was warily scanning the field, on the watch for Bacchantes. I eyed the ornate dagger in his hand, its long blade dripping with blood.
Phoebe stepped beside me, holding her bleeding wrist. “Who are you?” she asked.
With the sharp blade of the knife, he cut a strip of cloth from the bottom of his shirt. “My name is Gurpinar,” he said, slipping the blade back into his scabbard. “I am from Cypress.” He gestured toward Phoebe’s wrist.
Phoebe threw me a glance, then held her arm out to him. Two rows of canine teethmarks penetrated her skin.
The man quickly wrapped the wound. Still watching for the Bacchae. “You have lost someone,
” he said.
Again Phoebe glanced at me. “A friend was killed,” she said.
“Those women murdered him,” I said. “My brother is in jail.”
The bell continued its unnerving toll. I searched the trees for the Maenads.
Gurpinar finished tying off the bandage. “Leave now, quickly. I lead the women away. You must get off the island, tell what you have seen.”
“Why are you helping us?” Phoebe asked.
“I lose someone, too,” he said.
“Here on Ogygia?” Phoebe asked.
“On Mykonos,” he said.
Suddenly, I remembered seeing him before. Handing him my bottle of ouzo. “You were there!” I said. “In that bar on Mykonos!”
The man was peering across the field. “The bell calls,” he whispered. “More and more are coming.”
We turned to look toward the farm. Emerging from the house was the ghostly figure of the farmer’s wife, draped in a white chiton. Other ghosts materialized in the dark woods around her. The young wife hurried to join them as they flew out over the fields.
The Bacchae were streaming toward us.
“Go,” the man said. “Run!”
FOR NEARLY half an hour, Phoebe and I raced down the slopes of Mount Nysa. The tolling of the monastery bell finally ceased, but another, more distant bell could now be heard in its place. The sound was deep and resonant. When we came to the edge of a bluff and saw the town on the shore below, we realized it was coming from the tower of the church.
“Look at that,” I said. Lights in the town were blinking off, the village gradually darkening. “The whole town is being warned about us. Everyone on the island must be locking up their doors.”
“They’re leaving us to be killed,” Phoebe said. “We’re the only outsiders left.”
Except for the hunter, Gurpinar. They’d have to kill him, too, I thought, to keep their cult a secret. I wondered whose murder had brought him from Mykonos, and why he had followed us here. Whatever the reason, I was glad for his help. He seemed to have led the Bacchae astray and given us the chance to escape.
We descended through several pine tree woods, each one sparser than the one before. The slopes grew less steep and more open to view, with a maze of low, stacked-rock walls bordering cultivated fields. The moon was high overhead now, no longer blocked by the cliffs. Its gray light cast shadows across the landscape and bathed the rocks in a ruinlike gloom.
Climbing over the wall of a vineyard, we spotted what looked like a towering Maenad—a giant windmill set amid the rows. Mounted on a massive, whitewashed tower, the huge wheel stood perfectly still, its sails white and windless.
We were out of breath and near to exhaustion, but most of all we were thirsty. Hurrying to the tower in hopes of finding water, we arrived and walked around the base, looking for the entry.
The door was bolted shut.
Turning away in discouragement, my eyes fell on the round stone rim of a well, a few yards away from the tower. A metal bucket lay beside it, with a rope that tied to a beam across the top.
I immediately dropped the bucket into the well and heard it splash into water. When I hauled it up, it was nearly full. I dipped my hand in and took a taste. There was nothing peculiar about it, so the two of us cupped our hands in and greedily drank our fill.
Afterwards, I slid down to rest against the well. We had seen no Maenads from the time we’d fled the farm. Whatever had happened to them, it seemed for the moment we were safe.
Phoebe finished drinking and stared out over the vines, water dripping from her chin. Her eyes looked dark and fierce, still in the grip of the kykeon. Blood had caked on her neck and shoulder, her chiton hung in shreds, and cuts and bites covered her body. I noticed her raw bare foot was bleeding.
“Give me the med kit in your pack,” I said.
She was still gazing at the moonlit vineyard.
“Phoebe?”
She looked at me, then she let the backpack slip from her shoulder and drop on the ground in front of me.
I searched through it and found the small plastic medical supply box. There wasn’t much in it—cotton swabs, Band-Aids, an elastic bandage, a snakebite kit, poison ivy cream. I pulled out the Band-Aids and the bandage.
Phoebe wandered off between rows of the vines. She appeared to be checking out the grapes.
A sudden flapping of wings startled me. A shadowy bird fluttered to the tower.
I turned and dropped the bucket into the well and filled it again with water.
“Come here,” I said to Phoebe as I hauled up the pail.
Phoebe walked back over to the well. She held a dark clump of grapes in her hand, and she was chewing a mouthful of them.
I smiled as I set the pail of water on the ground. “Cabernet? Or Pinot noir?”
She held out the grapes for me to try. I tore a couple off and popped them in my mouth. “They’re juicy but they’re not quite ripe,” I said. I spit them out on the ground. “In fact, they’re fucking bitter.”
Phoebe seemed to think they were fine. She raised the clump above her face and gnawed off a dangling mouthful.
Grapes of Dionysus, I thought. I wondered if the kykeon had affected her sense of taste. Pain didn’t seem to register; why should bitter grapes?
Now juice from the grapes was running down her chin. Her behavior was beginning to disturb me. “Phoebe,” I said calmly, “if you’re going to make it down this mountain, it’s important we wrap that foot of yours.” I reached out and gently took her hand. “Step over here,” I said, guiding her toward the bucket. “We need to wash it first.”
I kneeled down in front of her and took ahold of her ankle. She stared at me, still chewing, holding the clump of grapes in her hand. The moon, high behind her, left her face in shadow, but the luminous wings of the windmill fanned out above her head.
I lowered her foot into the bucket. The water filled with mud and blood. Gently, I massaged her toes and her heel, and the tender sole with its blisters and cuts, and the top of her foot where the skin had been torn, and all the way up her ankle. On her slender calf I noticed a garish gash where human teeth had broken the skin. I rinsed the wound with handfuls of water, lifting them up, one after another, running my palm up her leg. Her knee, poking out from a rent in her chiton, was scratched and abraded, and dirt had mixed into the blood in the skin. I cupped my hands together and lifted out prayerful offerings of water which I laid upon the knee like a blessing. Gradually the blood and dirt washed away, and the tender knee glistened wetly in the moonlight.
It looked like the knee of a goddess. I don’t know why, but…
I kissed it.
Phoebe moaned. The hand clutching the clump of grapes lazily dropped to her hip. The juice of the grapes bled into her chiton, and I reached up to take them from her. But her fist tightened around the cluster; she did not want to release it. Dark skins and liquid squeezed through her fingers, and the black juice flowed down her leg.
I looked up at her face. She was staring down intently at the hand that held the grapes, now wet and running with their juice. Her mouth was open, and she seemed to have lost control of her breathing. Her eyes followed her dripping fist as it slipped the clutch of grapes through the rent in her chiton. She pressed the clump up between her legs, and mashed the grapes up against her. Her eyes rolled skyward and her lids fell shut. Rivulets of black juice ran down her thighs. She let out a deep-welling sigh.
The squished clump of grapeskins dropped to the ground. She lowered her eyes and stared at me. She took a firm grip of the slit in her chiton, and ripped it open up to her navel.
She held it there, open, allowing me to see.
I remained on my knees and stared. My eyes could not seem to sate themselves. Something inside me trembled. All I could hear was the sound of her breathing, and the throbbing pulse of my blood.
Phoebe dropped down on her knees before me. Her eyes seemed to burn with that Dionysian fire. The moon lit her hair like an aura.
Her ragged chiton hung from only one shoulder, leaving the white marble of a breast unveiled. Her chest heaved with feverish breathing, and her wet lips, plump and open, revealed bright incisors tinged by the grapes.
She tore off the clasp holding the chiton, and the tattered gown dropped to her waist. Her glowing white body, so delicate and creamy, was blotted with blood from scratches and bites, and swollen and discolored with contusions. Her arms were bruised where the bitches had grabbed her, and her throat looked as if she’d been strangled. Still she seemed completely unaware of any pain; the sudden surge of lust had overwhelmed her.
She pressed her mouth to mine, and her tongue slipped through my lips. My eyes were inches from her blood-caked ear. I heard her breathing frantically, rasping through her nostrils. Her eyes were strangely flared and ravenous, filled with a Maenad-like greed. She ripped off my ragged shirt and tore my belt apart. Then she climbed right out of her gown and launched herself on top of me.
Her body felt warm and keenly alive. Her wet thighs slapped and slid over mine, and her small breasts quivered as she trembled. Again she lowered her mouth to my lips and slipped her tongue inside.
I’d been hard from the moment she’d touched me. Now, on my back, wedged between her slippery thighs, I stroked against her cunt.
The hell with Dan, I thought. It’s me she really wants. As her body squirmed and shifted, I readied to throw her onto her back and bury myself inside her.
The windmill flared above me, eerily lit by the moon. In its stillness it looked like a clock that had stopped, freezing the moment in time. I suddenly became aware of myself, caught in the rapture of enthousiasmos, but remaining apart from it, too.
A haunting pair of yellow eyes peered down from the tower. An owl staring at us. It didn’t make a sound.
I knew I could not go through with it. This was not love we were making. This was Aphrodite or an aphrodisiac, a chemical or a goddess or a Bacchus that possessed us. Phoebe was no longer herself. I was no longer Dan’s brother. I knew I couldn’t let this be our night to surrender. To give up what she’d held so close for so long. Or for me to give up what I knew I should not.
Night of the Furies Page 22