The Leithen Stories

by John Buchan

  ‘But you would not consent to such barbarity?’ Maris asked.

  ‘My consent is not asked,’ he replied. ‘Beyond doubt the woman is evil and comes of an evil stock. But the Scriptures teach mercy, and, though doubtless death is deserved, I would not counsel it. For if she is evil she is also witless. Why else did she return here, when she knew that the whole island desired her death? Did I not go to her secretly, as Nicodemus went to our Lord, and besought her never to return? And she has given immense sums of money to her enemies. Me she gave gold for the Church and that I have secure, but she has given it to others who have bought guns. The men from the hills, who are most bitter against her, carry rifles bought with her money.’

  Now I knew why the foolish child had realised her investments.

  The priest was gaining confidence.

  ‘The death of a witch may be a righteous deed,’ he said, ‘but the hearts of this people are not righteous. They are dabbling in a blacker magic than hers, for they are following the Outland Things. And that is heresy and blasphemy, which in the eyes of Holy Church are sins not less mortal than witchcraft.’

  Real anger, the jealous anger of a priest for his own prerogatives, blazed in his old eyes. He used for ‘outland things’ the word exotika, the very word which had puzzled Vernon in the manuscript I gave him, till he found help from Basil of Caesarea. The word caught my ear and I made Maris translate for me. He had clearly no compassion for poor Koré, but he was up in arms for his Church. Maris tried to probe the trouble, but he got the vaguest answers. The man seemed eager to unburden his soul and yet terrified to speak, and his eyes were always turning to the window and the closed street door.

  Last Eastertide there had been a lamentable neglect of sacred rites. This year the carelessness was complete. Holy Week had begun, but the minds of the people were not on its solemnities. ‘They fast indeed,’ he said, ‘but they do not pray.’ They had gone a-whoring after other gods, and what those other gods were it did not become a Christian man to consider. They meditated a sacrifice, but they had forgotten the sacrifice on which their salvation hung. ‘There is a madness which surges up at times in these islands. It happened so in my grandfather’s day in Santorini, and there is no quelling it till some black deed has been done and the people come to their right minds in a bitter repentance.’ He, their priest, had become less regarded than a cur dog. Men stopped talking in the streets when he drew near, and would not meet his eyes. If he spoke, they moved off. They were conscious of a guilty purpose, and yet resolved on it, and he was powerless to check them. ‘They will come back, doubtless, and bemoan their folly, but in the meantime they are breaking the hearts of the saints and loading their miserable souls with sin.’

  Then he broke off and his face took an expression of shrewdness.

  ‘You have brought men with you. How many?’

  Maris told him ten stout fellows all armed.

  ‘What foolishness!’ he cried. ‘The Government should have sent a regiment – a regiment with cannons. The madmen in Plakos are fifty times your number, and they have the hill folk at their back, and that is a thousand more.’

  ‘Nevertheless,’ said Maris, ‘we may be sufficient to garrison the House, and protect the lady. I have heard that it is a strong place.’

  He looked at us queerly. ‘No garrison is sufficient against fire. They will burn the House and all that is in it … Listen to me, sirs. I do not think as you think. I have no care for the woman nor for any of her accursed race, but I have much care for the souls of this wayward people, and would save them from mortal sin. There are no two ways about it – the woman must burn or she must depart. Can you carry her off?’

  Maris translated to me rapidly. ‘Things look ugly,’ he said, ‘and I rather think this old one talks sense. But to carry off the lady we must have a ship, and God knows where we shall find one. At Vano perhaps? Maybe we did wrong to separate our forces. It strikes me that the sooner we get into touch with friend Janni the better. It is indicated that one of us must presently make his way into the House, and that one had better be you. Let us interrogate the old one about the topography of this damned village.’

  ‘You must enter the House,’ said the priest, in reply to Maris’s question, ‘but it will be a task, I promise you, for Digenes the Cyprian. The place is guarded at all hours, and no one enters or leaves it without the knowledge of the warders. But it might be achieved by bold men under cover of dark. The moon is nearing its full, and when it has set in the small hours there might be a chance.’

  I got out the map of the island, and tried to get him to give me my bearings. But he was hopeless with a map, and instead on the white hearth-stone he drew a plan of his own. The main road to the House from Kynaetho ran west from the village square, up a lane lined with crofts and past a big olive grove, till it reached the wood of chestnuts which was the beginning of the demesne. All the ground on this side rose steeply, and there were dwellings almost to the gates, so that it would be hard to escape detection. To the left the slopes curved in a shallow vale, bounded on the east by the main road to the hills and to Vano, and to south and west by a rim of upland beyond which lay the rugged coastline and the sea. This vale was broad and flat, and tilted up gently towards the west, and it bore the curious name of the Dancing Floor. In the old days, said the priest, the panegyria were held in it, the island festivals before poverty and madness came to Plakos. The Dancing Floor bordered on the demesne, and he thought that a way of entry might be found there.

  I made Maris ask about the shore road, but the priest was emphatic against it. There was no way into the House on that side except by the staircases from the jetty, which Vernon and I had seen in 1914, and there it was certain the watchers would be most vigilant. Besides the staircases were disused, and he believed that the postern doors had been walled up. The cliffs could not be climbed, and if the coast was followed towards the south the difficulties increased. From my recollection of the place, I thought he exaggerated, but I was not prepared to bank on a dim memory.

  ‘There is no time to lose,’ he said, with an earnestness which convinced me that, though our motives might be different, our purposes were alike. ‘In two days it will be Good Friday, and the night after comes the solemn hour when our Lord breaks the bonds of death. I grievously fear that that is the hour which my foolish folk have fixed for this sacrilege. If great sin is to be averted, the woman must be gone by then and the House given to the flames. The flames, I say, for whatever happens, there will be no peace in Plakos till it is in ashes. But let it be burned honestly and religiously, and not made an altar to the outland devils whom Holy Church has long ago cast into the darkness.’

  The problem seemed to me to be clarifying itself. I was inclined to think that the priest was too badly scared to take a balanced view of things, and also too wrapped up in his religious anxieties. I agreed that we must somehow induce Koré to come away, and that for this purpose we must get all our ten men together and beg, borrow or steal some kind of boat. It was also plain that the sooner I got inside the House the better, for Koré would need some persuading. I was not able to view the black magic of the villagers quite seriously. It was obviously a real peril, but it was so wholly outside the range of my mental conception that I took it as a straightforward risk, like that from a wild animal or a thunderstorm.

  Maris and I had a short talk in French and settled our plans. He would go back to the inn and see our fellows fixed up for the night. Then he would make his way on foot towards Vano and get into touch with Janni. We fixed a point on his map, on the edge of the cliffs about two miles south of the House, where he was to bring Janni and his posse, and where next morning I was to take out the others to join him. There seemed no risk in leaving the five men in the inn for the night. The villagers would scarcely interfere with strangers who purported to be a Government survey party and had no desire to move. Nor was it likely that any obstacle would be set in the way of Maris’s own journey. After all he was moving tow
ards Vano and away from the prohibited area.

  My own case was more intricate. If I went back to the inn, it would be harder to make my way from it to the Dancing Floor, for I should have the village street to go through. We put this to the priest, and he proved unexpectedly helpful. Why should I not stay on in his house till the evening? The church was adjacent, and behind the church lay the graveyard, by which a road could be found to the Dancing Floor. He would give me food, if I cared to share his humble meal. The old fellow might be a bigot, but he was honest and friendly and patently on our side. I beamed on him and thanked him in dumb show, while Maris made ready to start.

  ‘Get into the House somehow and fix up a plan with the lady,’ he said. ‘That is the first job. You are quite clear about the rendezvous on the cliffs? You had better get back to the inn somehow, and tomorrow morning bring the men to join me there. The village will think we’ve started on our surveying – and a long way off the danger-point. You will have to open the boxes and make each man carry his own supplies. You have your gun?’

  I patted my pocket. ‘Yes, but there isn’t going to be any shooting. We haven’t a dog’s chance at that game, with Miss Arabin arming the natives with Mauser rifles.’

  NINE

  MANY TIMES THAT day I wished that my education had included modern Greek. Through the hot afternoon and evening I remained in the little room, bored and anxious and mystified, while the priest sat opposite me, a storehouse of vital knowledge which I could not unlock. I raked up my recollection of classical Greek and tried him with a sentence or two, but he only shook his head. Most of the time he read in a little book, a breviary no doubt, and his lips muttered. An old woman came in and made ready a meal. We lunched off onion soup and black bread and a very odd-tasting cheese, and I was given a glass of some wine which smacked of turpentine. I smoked one of the two cigarettes left in my case, and afterwards fell asleep. When I woke the old man was sitting just as I had left him, but he had laid down his book and seemed to be praying. There was no reserve now in the old face; I saw the age of it, and the innocence, and also the blind fear. He seemed to be pleading fiercely with his God, and his mouth worked like a child’s in a passion of disquiet.

  Of course I might have strolled out-of-doors, and gone back to the inn, where I could have seen our five men and retrieved my pipe and pouch. It struck me that we were behaving like fools; we had come to visit the House, and we ought to lose no time in getting there. My nap had put our previous talk out of my head, and I found myself on my feet in a sudden impulse. Then I remembered how Maris had enjoined the utmost caution, and I remembered, too, the look of those queer people in the street. The House was tabu, and if I was seen going towards it I should be stopped, and I might even precipitate some wild mischief without Maris to help me. There in the priest’s homely kitchen, with a belt of golden light on the floor and the hum of flies in the window, I had an acute sense of being among shadows which might suddenly turn into monstrous forms of life. The whole island seemed to me like a snake still numb from the winter cold but thawing fast into a malignant activity. And meantime Koré was all alone in that ill-omened House with the circle of hate closing around her, and I, who had come there to protect her, was still outside the cordon. I cursed the infernal fog which had brought us so fatally out of our course: and I resolved that no power on earth would hinder me, when the dark came, from piercing the barrier.

  The presbytery opened into a narrow lane with outbuildings in front of it, but from the window I could see a corner of the main street. The sun poured into the lane, and I watched the little green lizards on the wall beyond. There was scarcely a sign of life in the segment I saw of the main street; indeed there was a silence strange in a village, so that every tiny natural noise – the chirping of grasshoppers, the slow flight of a dove – came with a startling clearness. Once a woman with a shawl over her head hurried past the opening. There should have been children playing at the corner, but there were no children nor any sound of them. Never a cart rumbled by, nor mule nor horse crossed my line of vision. The village seemed to be keeping an eerie fast.

  One man indeed I saw – a big fellow with a white blouse and long boots of untanned leather. He stood staring down the alley, and I noticed that he carried a rifle. I beckoned to the priest and we watched him together out of a corner of the window. The old man shook his head violently and muttered something which ended in ‘bounos’. Then he added between his teeth a word which sounded like ‘Callicantzari’. I had heard that word from Maris as a term of abuse – he had said, I remember, that it meant men who become beasts, like the ancient Centaurs. I guessed that this fellow must be one of the mountain-men, who were now in league with their old enemies of the coast. If they were among the besiegers. Koré could no longer refuse our help. ‘I will hire a regiment to shoot them down,’ she had furiously told me. But what good was our help likely to be?

  The sight of that fellow put an edge to my discomfort, and before the shadows had begun to fall I was roaming about the little room like a cat in a cage. The priest left me, and presently I heard the ringing of a bell. In the quiet, now deepened by the hush of twilight, the homely sound seemed a mockery – like the striking of the bells of a naval battery I once heard on the Yser. Then, in the midst of mud and death, it had incongruously suggested tea on the cool deck of a liner; now this tintinnabulation with its call to a meek worship had the same grotesque note of parody. Clearly there were no worshippers. I went to the back of the cottage, and from the window of the bare little bedroom had a view of the church in that amethyst gloaming. It was a baroque edifice, probably five centuries old, but renovated during the last fifty years, and in part painted a violent red. Beside it was a tiny bell-tower, obviously far more ancient. I could see a faint light in the window, and beyond that a dark clump of ilex above which the evening star was rising.

  When the priest returned it was almost dark. He lit a lamp and carefully locked the door and shuttered the window. His barren service seemed to weigh heavily on him, for he moved wearily and did not raise his long-lidded eyes. It was borne in on me that at any price I must find some means of communicating with him, for my hour of action was approaching.

  I tried him in French, but he never lifted his head.

  Then it occurred to me that even a priest of the Greek church must know a little Latin. I used the English pronunciation, and though he did not understand me, he seemed to realise what tongue I was talking, for he replied in a slow broad Latin. I could not follow it, but at any rate we had found a common speech. I tore a page from my notebook and was about to write, when he snatched it and the pencil from my hand. There was something he badly wanted to say to me. He hesitated a good deal, and then in laborious capitals he wrote:

  ‘Si populus aliquid periculi tibi minatur, invenies refugium in ecclesia.’ Then he scored out ‘refugium’ and wrote in ‘sanctuarium’.

  ‘Quid periculi?’ I wrote.

  He looked at me helplessly, and spread out his hands. Danger, he seemed to suggest, lay in every quarter of the compass.

  We used up five pages in a conversation in the doggiest kind of style. My Latin was chiefly of the legal type, and I often used a word that puzzled him, while he also set me guessing with phrases which I suppose were ecclesiastical. But the result was that he repeated the instructions he had given me through Maris. If I was to enter the House, the only way was by the Dancing Floor – it took me some time to identify ‘locus saltatorum’ – and to climb the great wall which separated it from the demesne. But it would be guarded, probably by the ‘incolœ montium’, and I must go warily, and not attempt it till the moon was down. Also I must be back before the first light of dawn.

  I showed him my pistol, but he shook his head violently and went through a pantomime, the meaning of which was clear enough. I was not to shoot, because, though the guards were armed, there would be no shooting. But all the same I was in some deadly danger. He scribbled in abusive Latin that the people I had to fear we
re ‘pagani, nefasti, mysteriorum abom-inabilium cultores’. If I were seen and pursued my only hope was to reach the church. Not his house – that was no use – but the church. Twice he printed in emphatic capitals: ‘Pete sanctuarium ecclesiœ.’

  Then he took me into his little bedroom, and showed me the lie of the land. The moon was now up, the fog of the morning had gone out of the air, and the outline of the church and the bell-tower and the ilex grove beyond might have been cut in amber and jet. Through the trees there appeared a faint reddish glow as if fires were burning. I asked what this might be, and after a good deal of biting the stump of my pencil he wrote that there lay the graveyard, and the lights were burning ‘ut vrykolakes absint’. He seemed to doubt whether I could follow his meaning, but I did, for I knew about this from Koré – how the peasants kept lamps at the grave-heads to ward off vampires.

  He was clear that I must traverse the valley of the Dancing Floor while the moon was up, for otherwise I should miss my way. He looked at me appraisingly and wrote ‘You are a soldier’, implying, as I took it, that there was cover for a man accustomed to use cover. Then he drew a plan on which he marked my road. If I skirted the graveyard I should find myself on a hillside which sloped towards the Dancing Floor. I must keep to this ridge, which was the northern containing wall of the place, till I reached the boundaries of the House. On no account must I go down into the valley, and when I asked why, he said that it was ‘nefasta’. That could not mean merely that it was well-guarded, but that it was held in dread by the people of Kynaetho, a dread which their priest shared.

  I left the house just after eleven o’clock. Our long silent sederunt had made the two of us good friends, for he wept at parting and insisted on blessing me and kissing me on the forehead. I was on his side, on the side of his Church, a crusader going into peril in a strife with heathenish evil.