The Wine-Dark Sea

by Robert Aickman

  ‘You don’t mind if I grow a beard?’ he said. ‘I’ve brought nothing with me.’

  They were very nice about his having brought nothing with him.

  ‘Enchanted islands are hard to understand,’ he said. ‘I’ve always thought that. It worried me even as a child. The trouble is that you can never be sure where the enchantment begins and where it ends.’

  ‘You learn by experience,’ said Tal.

  ‘Do you – do we – really live entirely on fruit?’

  ‘No,’ said Lek. ‘There is wine.’

  Vin rose and walked out through the gateway that led down to the harbour. She moved like a nymph, and her silhouette against the night sky through the arch was that of a girl-athlete on a vase.

  Wine was not the sustenance that Grigg, fond though he was of it, felt he most needed at the moment, but he said nothing. They were all silent while waiting for Vin to return. The tideless waves flapped against the surrounding rock. The stars flickered.

  Vin returned with a little porcelain bowl, not spilling a drop of the contents as she stepped bare-footed over the uneven stones. The bowl was set among them, small cups appeared, and they all drank. There was little wine left when all the cups had been filled. The wine was red. Grigg thought it was also extremely sweet and heavy, almost treacly in texture; he was glad that he did not have to drink more of it. They followed the wine by drinking water from a pitcher.

  ‘Where do you find water?’ asked Grigg.

  ‘From springs in the rock,’ answered Lek.

  ‘More than one spring?’

  ‘There is a spring of health, a spring of wisdom, a spring of beauty, a spring of logic, and a spring of longevity.’

  ‘And the water we are drinking?’

  ‘It is from the spring of salutation. Alas, we do not drink from it as often as we should like.’

  Here Tal departed and came back with the green cask which Grigg had earlier seen her carrying. It contained a different wine, and, to Grigg, a more accustomed.

  Tal had also brought a lantern. They settled to ancient games with coloured stones, and lines drawn with charcoal on the rocky floor. These games again were new to Grigg: not only their rules and skills, but, more, the spirit in which they were played. The object appeared to be not so much individual triumph as an intensification of fellow-feeling; of love, to use Lek’s word of welcome to him. Most surprising of all to Grigg was the discovery that he no longer felt underfed, although he had eaten neither meat nor grain. He felt agog (it was the only word) with life, air, warmth, and starlight. Time itself had become barbless and placid.

  ‘Sleep where you will,’ said Lek. ‘There are many rooms.’ Vin picked up her dress and they all entered the citadel.

  ‘Good night,’ they said.

  ‘He tried to catch Tal’s eye, but failed.

  They were gone.

  Grigg did not feel like sleep. He decided to walk down to the harbour.

  The lizards were still sprawling and squirming on the steps, which Grigg thought odd for such creatures, and unpleasingly reminiscent of his dream. The scent of the massed flowers was heavier than ever. He went slowly down through the stars and the blossoms, and climbed aboard his boat, now lying alongside the much bigger sailing-ship; looked at the engine, which appeared to be untouched (though he could think of no real reason why it should be otherwise); and sat on the stern seat thinking.

  He decided that though the way of life on the island seemed to him in almost every way perfect, he was far from sure that he himself was so innately the designated participant in it as to justify his apparently privileged journey and landfall. He was far from pleased by this realisation. On the contrary, he felt that he had been corrupted by the very different life to which he had been so long accustomed, and much though he normally disliked it. He doubted whether by now he was capable of redemption from that commonplace existence, even by enchantment. The three women had virtually agreed that enchantment has its limitations. Grigg felt very much like starting the outboard forthwith, and making off to face the difficult music.

  ‘Be brave.’

  Grigg looked up. It was Vin who had spoken. She had resumed her dress and was leaning over the gunwale of the ship above him.

  ‘But what does courage consist in? Which is the brave thing to do?’

  ‘Come up here,’ said Vin, ‘and we’ll try to find out.’

  Grigg climbed the narrow harbour steps, walked round the end of the little basin, and stepped over the side of the curved ship. Vin had now turned and stood with her back against the opposite side, watching him. Grigg was quite astonished by how beautiful she looked, though he could hardly see her face through the darkness. It mattered little: Vin, standing there alone, was superb. She seemed to him the living epitome of the elegant ship.

  ‘We don’t really exist, you know,’ said Vin. ‘So, in the first place, you need not be scared of us. We’re only ghosts. Nothing to be frightened of.’

  He sat on a coil of rope in front of her, but a little to the side, the harbour-mouth side.

  ‘Do you chuck about ropes like this?’

  ‘Of course. We’re strong.’

  ‘Do you eat absolutely nothing but fruit?’

  ‘And drink the wine I brought you to drink.’

  ‘I thought it was no ordinary wine.’

  ‘It makes you no ordinary person.’

  ‘I don’t feel very different.’

  ‘People don’t feel very different even after they have died. The Greek Church says that forty days pass before people feel any different.’

  ‘Is that true?’

  ‘Quite true. Not even the Greeks are wrong all the time. And the dead still feel the same even after forty days unless the proper masses are said. You can’t go to Heaven without the masses, you know.’

  ‘Or, presumably, to Hell?’

  ‘As you say, Grigg.’

  Grigg was struck by a thought.

  ‘Is that in some way why you’re here now?’

  Vin laughed, gurgling like her own thick, sweet, red wine. ‘No, Grigg. We’re not dead. Feel.’

  She held out her left hand. Grigg took it. It was curiously firm and soft at the same time, strong but delicate. Grigg found himself most reluctant to relinquish it.

  ‘You’re alive,’ said Grigg.

  Vin said nothing.

  ‘Tell me,’ said Grigg, ‘what there is in the wine?’

  ‘Rock,’ said Vin softly.

  Grigg was absurdly reminded of those claims in wine-merchants’ catalogues that in this or that brand can be tasted the very soil in which it was grown.

  ‘Don’t laugh,’ said Vin, quite sharply. ‘The rock doesn’t like it.’

  Grigg had no idea what she meant, but he stopped laughing at once. The mystery made her words all the more impressive, as sometimes when an adult admonishes a child.

  ‘Where did you all come from?’ asked Grigg. ‘To judge by what you say, you can’t be Greek. And you don’t sound Greek. You speak English beautifully, which means you can’t be English. What are you?’

  ‘Lek comes from one place. Tal from another. I from a third. Where I come from the people wear no shoes.’

  ‘Lek spoke of you as sisters.’

  ‘We are sisters. We work and fight side by side, which makes us sisters.’

  ‘Are there no more of you?’

  ‘Men have broken through from time to time, like you. The rock is surrounded, you know. But none of the men have stayed. They have killed themselves or sailed away.’

  ‘Have none of them sailed back? After all, it’s not far.’

  ‘Not one. They have always had something to make it impossible. Like your stolen boat.’

  ‘I suppose that’s inevitable. One couldn’t think of finding a place like this and still being able to go back.’ He thought about it, then added, ‘or forward either, I daresay.’

  ‘Grigg,’ said Vin, ‘burn your boat. I will make fire for you.’

  The sh
ock of her words made him rise to his feet, charged with the instinct of flight.

  On the instant her arms were round him, holding him very tightly. ‘Burn it, burn it,’ she was crying passionately. ‘Will you never understand? You might have done it hours ago.’

  Without thinking of what he was doing, he found that his arms were round her too, and they were kissing.

  ‘Watch me make fire,’ she shouted. In the instant they had become lovers, true lovers, sentiment as well as passion, tender as well as proud.

  She darted across the ship, leapt the gunwale, and ran round the little quay, all the while dragging Grigg by the hand. She seemed to part the thin painter with a single pull and drew the boat out of the basin. Despite the absence of tide or wind, the boat drifted straight out into the darkness of the open sea.

  ‘Day and night, the sea runs away from the rock,’ cried Vin.

  They stood together, their arms tightly round one another’s waists, watching the boat disappear.

  Grigg could not sense that she did anything more, but suddenly, far out, there was a beautiful rosy glow, like the sunset, it was contained and oval, and in the middle of it could be seen the transfigured outline of the boat, gleaming whitely, like the Holy Grail, too bright to stare at for more than a moment. Outside the fiery oval, the whole air was turning a faint, deep pink.

  ‘My God,’ cried Grigg, ‘the petrol in the outboard. It will explode.’

  ‘On to the ship,’ said Vin, and hauled him back round the basin and aboard.

  They hid, clinging together, in a small hold made simply by thick planks stretched at gunwale-level across the bow. The flush in the night sky was intensifying all the time. Then there was a loud concussion; the sky turned almost scarlet; and, not more than a few minutes later, he possessed Vin as if she had been hardly more than a little girl.

  *

  Hand in hand, they ascended the wide steps to the citadel. At the gateway, they looked back. The burning boat had still not sunk, because it could just be seen, a faint horizontal cinder, drifting into the blackness. The pink in the air was once more faint, and apparently turning to silver.

  ‘The moon,’ said Vin. ‘The moon is drawing near and shining through the water.’

  ‘The flowers go to meet the moon even more eagerly than the sun. You can hear them. Listen, Vin.’

  They stood in silence.

  ‘Sleep with me, Vin.’

  ‘We sleep apart.’

  It was as Tal had said ‘We eat fruit’. And it proved to be equally true.

  *

  He stole through the empty rooms, seeing no one. Now very tired, he lowered himself on to a pile of cushions, but not the pile on which he had lain with Tal, and not in the same room.

  None the less, he could not easily sleep. It came to him with a nervous shock, as happens after long absorption, to recall that, only that same morning, the island, the rock, as the women always named it, had been no more than an obsessive premonition, he no other than an ordinary mortal, eternally going through the motions. He felt now that in the very moment he had first sighted the rock, he had begun to change. And there was almost certainly no going back; not just in symbol or allegory, but in hard, practical terms, as the world deems them.

  Grigg lay listening to the lapping, trickling waves; smelling the night flowers. Was it never cooler or colder than this? Never?

  *

  Grigg would not have believed it possible, as he reflected on his third morning, that he could live so happily without occupation. There were a few jobs to be done, but so far the women had done all of them, and Grigg had felt no real compunction, as the jobs had seemed to be as complete a part of their lives as breathing – and as automatic and secondary. There had been almost nothing else: no reading, no struggling with the environment, no planning. Grigg had always truly believed that he, like others, would be lost without tasks; that pleasures pall; and that ease exhausts. Now he was amazed not only by the change in his philosophy, but by the speed with which it had come about. Obviously, one had to say, it was far, far too soon to be sure; but Grigg felt that obviousness of that kind was, as far as he was concerned, already a thing of the past. Indeed, nothing, probably nothing at all, was obvious any more. Perhaps it was that Tal and Vin had purged him of the obvious within little more than his first twelve hours on the island.

  Not that anything of that kind had so far happened again. Vin had withdrawn into an attitude of loving casualness, as Tal had done: the attitude which characterised all three of the women, and which Grigg found especially charming, so that he had not even made any serious attempt to intensify things with either of them.

  Later that day, the-three women had been singing. Now there was a pause, while they all lay listening to the waves and flowers singing for them.

  ‘I am content,’ said Grigg. ‘But what do I do all day?’

  Vin replied. ‘The Greek Church says that work was the fruit of sin. Here the fruit is more wholesome.’

  And, indeed, for a moment Grigg almost felt that he knew what the Garden of Eden had really been like: not the boring, moral attenuation of it; but the physical splendour, with flowers perfumed like these, with tiny, aquamarine birds, singing like honey, with indifference as to whether one was clothed or naked, with beauty to make it indifferent.

  ‘The Greek Church,’ said Lek, ‘had once a prophet. “Take no thought for the morrow,” he said; and spoke of lilies.’

  ‘But not of lilies only,’ said Grigg. ‘Far from it, alas.’

  ‘You must not expect a Greek prophet to be always wise. The Greeks used to decorate their houses with flowers, and sing songs. Now they buy tinsel from shops and listen to radios. The Greek radios are the noisiest in the world. It is not surprising that Greek prophets often make mistakes.’

  ‘You can’t prophesy,’ said Tal, ‘when there’s such a noise that no one can hear you.’

  ‘But the radio is new,’ objected Grigg.

  Lek would have none of it. ‘The radio has been with us since the dawn of time,’ she said.

  ‘I believe that men thought of it when they took over the world,’ said Tal.

  ‘I prefer listening to you,’ said Grigg. ‘Sing me the song the sirens sang.’

  So they did.

  *

  On one occasion, two rather unpleasant things happened on the same day.

  The first was that Grigg, roaming about the citadel, as he was so often told he was perfectly free to do, came upon a shut door. It was in the basement, or cellar, where he had previously hesitated to go: a sequence of low rooms, as it proved, sunk into the rock, which, quite unmodified, formed the irregular floor. The rooms were ill-lighted by small windows high in the walls. Grigg had tried the door, which was deep in the furthest rocky wall, and opened it, before he realised that it was the first door he had had to open at all; the others, as far as he could remember, having stood wide before him, at least when originally met with. He thought of Alfred de Musset’s proverb: A door is either open or shut.

  Inside, it was totally black; as thick, Grigg found himself thinking, as that wine. He hesitated to take even one step inside, but craned in, listening, and drawing the door close behind him. A long way below, as it seemed, was a noise: Grigg wondered if it could come from the bottom of a deep pit. At first he thought it sounded like the ebb and flow of the waves, and supposed there might be a rift in the rock; but then, in a curious way, it sounded more like a gigantic process of ingestion, as if, perhaps, a press were reducing a miscellany of organic matter to, as people say, pulp. The sound rose and fell, though something less than rhythmically, but never quite ceased; and every now and then a smell rose from the pit, if pit there was, a smell akin to the noise, in that it might have been of long-rotted tideless seaweed or, alternatively, of vaguer and terrestrial decomposition. The smell, though unpleasant, came only in strong whiffs, and Grigg wondered why it was apparently uncontinuous. Could something below be opening and shutting, appearing and withdrawing? Nois
e, smell, and darkness were plainly related to the formations of the rock, but Grigg found the place disturbing, as a child often finds a room he has entered without clear authority.

  None the less, it was fascinating, and Grigg could not quite go, either: still like the transfixed child. He felt less than ever inclined to proceed further, but remained half-in, half-out, trying to peer through the blackness, but dreading at the same time. And, in the end, something terrible happened, or something which Grigg found terrible: it was as if the pit spoke. There was a sudden growling roar; a noise entirely different from what had gone before; and Grigg was sure that there were clear words. He could not understand them, and they did not sound like Greek, but words he knew they were, and addressed to him. The personal note was unmistakable, it was as if the pit and the darkness, the noise and the smell, had been watching him, and were now warning him off, and leaving no possibility of mistake.

  Grigg reeled back and slammed the door. Stumbling over the rocky floor, he hastened into the sunlight. Even before he had reached the courtyard, he had begun to realise that he had merely been the victim of an aural hallucination – an hallucination of a quite common type, indeed; almost the sort of thing staged for tourists visiting Mediterranean grottoes. When he found himself alone in the courtyard, he realised that he had nearly made a serious fool of himself. Even though the first terror had by then ebbed, there was no knowing what idiotic thing he might have said if there had been anyone to listen.

  He climbed over the courtyard wall and stretched out on the rock finally to recover his wits.

  That same evening, he heard the women shouting and laughing, out beyond the gateway to the harbour. He went to look. The sky was almost emerald green and they moved in magnificent silhouette against it. The three of them stood above the water’s edge and below the harbour causeway, on the side of the island away from the basin. Grigg found the beauty of their movement incomparable. He stood watching them for some time, as if they presented a merely formal spectacle, of maenads on a vase, or ballet dancers, before he clearly realised that they were not merely throwing stones, but very much aiming at a target. He walked down the causeway, and stood behind them, looking over their heads.