The Wine-Dark Sea

by Robert Aickman

  Floating in the emerald sea beneath the emerald sky was a body; though it was unlikely to be afloat much longer, as the women knew how to throw, and every stone hit true and hard. Grigg could see the body quite well: it had belonged to a fat, elderly, clean-shaven man with a big, bald head, and was dressed in a dark, conventional suit, of which the open jacket spread out in the water, like a pair of fins. All round the body the sea was red, like the death of a whale. Grigg shuddered as he thought of the whale.

  The skilled throwing went on for another minute or two, a marvel of ancient beauty, and then, suddenly, the body collapsed and sank. Grigg could hear the water pouring in, as into a pierced gourd. The women, apparently still unaware of him, stood in lovely silent attitudes and watched it go. When they saw nothing left but the fading patch of carmine, they turned, saw Grigg, and advanced laughing and gesticulating, their hair dishevelled and their faces flushed with excitement.

  ‘Who was he?’ asked Grigg.

  ‘A tourist. They fall out of boats.’

  ‘They fall off pier-heads.’

  ‘They fall from Heaven.’

  Grigg felt as once he had done when he found himself encompassed by English and American enthusiasts for the bull-fight. But now, at least, the central object had been dead to start with. Or so he could but suppose.

  *

  But this was not the only time when Grigg saw blood in the sea.

  *

  After he had been, as he thought, about three weeks on the island, or perhaps as much as a month, there was a great storm. There had been little forewarning, or little that Grigg had been able to sense; and the women had said nothing. The first lightning leapt at him in his room, taking him completely by surprise as he lay there musing in the warm darkness, some time after midnight. It was curious pink lightning, condensing, as it seemed, the entire firmament into a single second; and the thunder which followed might well have torn apart the total citadel … except that, to Grigg’s astonishment, there was no thunder, nothing of the kind beyond a faint rumble, more as if the Olympians had been overheard conversing than as if there had been an electrical discharge. On the instant, there followed another flash and brief rumble of distant talk; and then another. Grigg now listened for rain, of which there had been none that he was aware of since his arrival; but though, according to the laws of nature, it must have been raining somewhere, all there seemed to be here was a rising wind. Lightning was flickering from cherry-blossom almost to scarlet; but Grigg hardly noticed it as the wind rose and rose, like a cataract of water charging through the widening burst in a dam and sweeping down a valley, presenting to Grigg a similar picture of instant danger and catastrophe. He caught up the garment the women had woven for him and hastened round the big dark room shutting windows, like a suburban housewife. Those in one of the walls were too high for him to reach, but at least there was as yet no question of water pouring in.

  ‘There have always been storms like this.’

  It was Lek’s voice. Grigg could just perceive her shape standing by the door. ‘There is nothing to be afraid of. The citadel is built to remain standing.’ A flash of rosy lightning filled the room, so that, for a second, Grigg saw her with unnatural clarity, as if she had been an angel. ‘Come and look.’

  Lek clasped his hand and led him out. They ascended the pitch-black, stone stair. ‘Do not falter,’ said Lek. ‘Trust me.’ Grigg, feeling no doubt at all, went up the hard, dark steps without even stubbing a toe. They came out on the roof.

  The sky was washed all over with the curious pink of the lightning. Grigg had never seen anything like it before, and had never known so strange a wind, roaring, but warm, and even scented. Faintly massed against the rosy dimness at the other end of the flat roof was the recumbent shape of the male god. Lek stood looking at the god, herself a lovely, living statue. Grigg was filled with awe and revelation.

  ‘Tal is earth,’ he said, somehow speaking above the roar of the wind.

  As far as he could see, Lek moved not an eyelid.

  ‘Vin is fire.’

  He thought she faintly smiled.

  ‘And you are air.’

  A smile it was. There could be no doubt about it. And her eyes were far-distant vastnesses. The wind hummed and sang. Grigg kissed Lek, lightly as a leaf.

  ‘Come nearer to the god,’ said Lek, drawing him onward through the hurricane. ‘It is for him. Everything is for him.’

  And for the prostrate Grigg, as the warm wind blew and blew, the heavens opened.

  This time, just as much as he had finally forgotten to ask questions, so, at the end, he made no foolish demands.

  *

  On another night, conceivably a week later, Grigg was awakened by what must have been an unusual sound. He sat up and listened. There was nothing at all loud to be heard, but there was an unmistakable clinking and clanking in the island night, systematic, purposive, human. It occurred to Grigg immediately that there was an intruder – one intruder at least.

  He put on his garment and descended, without disturbing the women, presumably on the floor below.

  He stood in the courtyard avoiding the gaze of the stars in order the better to judge where the noise was coming from.

  He padded across the courtyard stones to the gateway leading to the tower he had climbed when first he came.

  On the top of the tower, visible above the roofs of the intervening ruins, he could just make out a figure; blacker than the night, and palpably at some manner of work.

  Grigg hesitated for a considerable number of moments. Should he try to investigate on his own, or should he first rouse the women? He probably decided on the former because he still felt short of experience and knowledge that were not mediated by what the women themselves called sorcery. He half-welcomed a moment to investigate on his own.

  He started to scramble, as quietly as was possible, through the rough foundations and tough thickets. Possibly he could not be quiet enough under such adverse conditions, because when at length he reached the tower, the black figure was gone, and a small black motor-boat was chugging across the black sea. The top of the tower had been screened from his view by the old fortress walls for much of the time he had been scrambling through the miniature Turkish jungle. The boat was the first he had seen so near the island. He watched it until, lightless, void of all detail, it merged into the black night.

  He had little doubt that it meant trouble, and he made a considerable search, even climbing the spidery tower, only when half-way up reflecting that someone might still be there, someone who had remained when the boat had left. His heart missed a beat, compelling him to pause in the tight, dusty darkness, but he continued upwards. There was no one, nothing but the stars drawn nearer, and there was no sign of intrusion, change, or recent damage; either about the tower or about the entire extremity of the island: nothing, at least, that Grigg could find or see as he plunged about, slashing and abrading himself, in the darkness beneath the uninvolved stars. He could not even make out how the interloper could possibly have managed to moor a boat and mount the sharp rock.

  Grigg sought and thought so conscientiously that the first light of dawn was upon him as he clambered back to the citadel. Ineffable, he thought, was the only word for such beauty: faint grey, faint blue, faint pink, faint green; and the entire atmosphere translucent right through to the centre of the empyrean, and on to the next centre, as if, while it lasted, distance was abrogated, and the solitary individual could casually touch the impersonal core of the universe.

  Back in the courtyard, he stood with his hands on the familiar wall, gazing across the tranquilly colourless, early-morning sea.

  Re-ascending the citadel staircase, he tiptoed into the big hall where the women slept. The three of them lay there, touching; in dark red robes (Grigg could think of no other noun); their faces pale and their lips full, with sleep; their relaxed bodies as undefined as the good, the true, and the beautiful. Grigg stood away from the wall, motionlessly gazing, filled with t
he apprehension of tragedy. He stood for a long time, then dragged at his numb limbs, and went on up. There was a scorpion-like creature on his coloured cushions, which, as it refused to be driven out, he had to kill before settling down to his resumed slumbers.

  *

  And the next morning, there, once more, was the redness in the sea; and this time, the sea was blood-red, not in a large, repulsive, but all too explicable patch, but red as far as Grigg, gazing appalled from his high window, could see; as if all the way across to the larger, mainland island. It was fearful, nightmarish, infernal. Macbeth’s dream had materialised: the green was one red.

  Moreover, there was a second sound that was new to the island.

  Grigg went down, his feet heavy.

  On the floor below, the women were lamenting. In their greeny-brown dresses, they clung together, shadowy and large-eyed, wailing and babbling in some tongue of which Grigg knew nothing, doubtless their own. Even in their mortification and misery, they were as beautiful as in their previous joy.

  ‘What has happened?’

  The women stopped wailing when they saw him, and Lek spoke.

  ‘The rock is dead.’

  Not at all understanding, Grigg could not but blurt out, ‘There was a man here last night. One man at least. I saw him.’

  ‘You saw him,’ said Vin. ‘And you did not kill him?’

  ‘Or let us kill him,’ said Tal.

  There was a difficult pause. Grigg gazed into their tear-stained faces.

  ‘I saw him on top of the tower. I could not get to him in time across the ruins in the darkness. When I reached the tower, he was gone. I saw and heard his boat quite a long way off.’

  ‘Why did you not tell us?’ asked Lek. ‘Why did you not trust us?’

  To such a question conventional answers abound, but Grigg could not bring one of them to his lips. Guilt in him was reinforced by fear. He felt that he might be made to suffer, and he felt that he deserved the suffering.

  ‘What does it mean,’ he asked, ‘when you say the rock is dead?’

  A tremor passed through them and Vin began once more to weep.

  ‘The rock was a living rock,’ said Lek softly. ‘The rock gave us wine and water. The rock was the other god, the female god, so, while the rock was alive, you could not be told. Now they have killed the rock with a machine, so that it does not matter what is said.’ As Lek spoke, Tal burst into tears and moans.

  ‘Is there nothing I can do?’

  ‘There is nothing that anyone in the world can do.

  ‘This was the last living rock, and now the last living rock is dead. There is nothing but to mourn, to forgive, and to go.’

  ‘I do not expect to be forgiven,’ said Grigg. ‘I deserve to die.’ The words came out quite naturally; which was something he would never before have thought possible.

  Lek stepped forward, took his hands, and kissed them. Then Vin and Tal did the same, leaving their tears on his mouth.

  ‘Let me at least mourn with you.’

  Lek smiled sadly, and indeed he found that the power to mourn, the power to mourn anything, was not in him.

  They walked in line down the causeway, among the flowers, the birds, and the lizards; with Grigg bringing up the rear. The green and grey of the sea had absorbed nearly all the red, though there was still a faint, shimmering glow beneath the surface, melting away as Grigg watched. They took nothing.

  The women spread the big, blue sail, and expertly steered the ship out of the basin into the hot morning. Grigg stood at the stern, looking back along the spreading plume of her wake.

  Then Lek was standing beside him.

  ‘How long can you swim?’

  Grigg looked into her eyes.

  ‘Possibly for half an hour,’ he said. ‘At least, in smooth, warm water.’

  So when they neared a spit of land, he went overside in the summer clothes he had worn when he had originally cast off in his borrowed motor-boat. It was his initiation into the last of the four elements. He went without touching any of the women, and in the event, he was immersed for not much more than ten minutes before fetching up, dripping and bearded, on a pebbly strand. Even so, it was enough for the ship to have sailed almost to the horizon, so skilfully was she navigated.

  THE TRAINS

  On the moors, as early as this, the air no longer clung about her, impeding her movements, absorbing her energies. Now a warm breeze seemed to lift her up and bear her on: the absorption process was reversed; her bloodstream drew impulsion from the zephyrs. Her thoughts raced from her in all directions, unproductive but joyful. She remembered the railway posters. Was this ozone?

  Not that she had at all disliked the big industrial city they had just left; unlike Mimi, who had loathed it. Mimi had wanted their walking tour to be each day from one Youth Hostel to another; but that was the one proposal Margaret had successfully resisted. Their itinerary lay in the Pennines, and Margaret had urged the case for sleeping in farm-houses and, on occasion, in conventional hotels. Mimi had suggested that the former were undependable and the latter both dreary and expensive; but suddenly her advocacy of Youth Hostels had filled her with shame, and she had capitulated. ‘But hotels look down on hikers,’ she had added. Margaret had not until then regarded them as hikers.

  Apart from the controversy about the city, all had so far gone fairly well, particularly with the weather, as their progress entered its second week. The city Margaret had found new, interesting, unexpectedly beautiful and romantic: its well-proportioned stone mills and uncountable volcanic chimneys appeared perfectly to consort with the high free mountains always in the background. To Mimi the place was all that she went on holiday to avoid. If you had to have towns, she would choose the blurred amalgam of the Midlands and South, where town does not contrast with country but merges into it, neither town nor country being at any time so distinct as in the North. To Margaret this, to her, new way of life (of which she saw only the very topmost surface), seemed considerably less dreadful than she had expected. Mimi, to whom also it was new, saw it as the existence from which very probably her great-grandfather had fought and climbed, a degradation she was appalled to find still in existence and able to devour her. If there had to be industry, let the facts be swaddled in suburbs. The Free Trade Hotel (RAC and AA) had found single rooms for them; and Mimi had missed someone to talk to in bed.

  They had descended to the town quite suddenly from the wildest moors, as one does in the North. Now equally suddenly it was as if there were no towns, but only small, long-toothed Neanderthals crouched behind rocks waiting to tear the two of them to pieces. Air roared past in incalculable bulk under the lucent sky, deeply blue but traversed by well spaced masses of sharply edged white cloud, like the floats in a Mediterranean pageant. The misty, smoky, reeking air of the city had enchanted Margaret with its perpetually changing atmospheric effects, a meteorological drama unavailable in any other environment; but up here the air was certainly like itself. The path was hard to find across the heather, the only landmarks being contours and neither of them expert with a map; but they advanced in happy silence, all barriers between them blown down, even Margaret’s heavy rucksack far from her mind. (Mimi took her own even heavier rucksack for granted at all times.)

  ‘Surely that’s a train?’ said Margaret, when they had walked for two or three hours.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Mimi, the escapist.

  ‘The point is it’ll give us our bearing.’ The vague rumbling was now lost in the noisy wind. ‘Let’s look.’

  Mimi unstrapped the back pocket on Margaret’s rucksack and took out the map. They stood holding it between them. Their orientation being governed by the wind, and beyond their power to correct mentally, they then laid the map on the ground, the top more or less to the north, and a grey stone on each corner.

  ‘There’s the line,’ said Margaret, following it across the map with her finger. ‘We must be somewhere about here.’

  ‘How do you know we’re not above t
he tunnel?’ inquired Mimi. ‘It’s about four miles long.’

  ‘I don’t think we’re high enough. ‘The tunnel’s further on.’

  ‘Couldn’t we strike this road?’

  ‘Which way do you suggest?’

  ‘Over the brow of the next hill, if you were right about that being a train. The road goes quite near the railway and the sound came from over there.’ Mimi pointed, the web of her rucksack, as she lay twisted on the ground, dragging uncomfortably in the shoulder strap of her shirt.

  ‘I wish we had a canvas map. The wind’s tearing this one to pieces.’

  Mimi replied amiably. ‘It’s a bore, isn’t it?’ It was she who had been responsible for the map.

  ‘I’m almost sure you’re right,’ said Margaret, with all the confidence of the lost.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Mimi. With difficulty they folded up the map, and Mimi returned it to Margaret’s rucksack. The four grey stones continued to mark the corners of a now mysterious rectangle.

  As it chanced, Mimi was right. When they had descended to the valley before them, and toiled to the next ridge, a double line of railway and a stone-walled road climbed the valley beyond. While they watched, a train began slowly to chug upwards from far to the left.

  ‘The other one must have been going downhill,’ said Mimi.

  They began the descent to the road. It was some time since there had been even a sheep path. The distance to the road was negligible as the crow flies, but it took them thirty-five minutes by Mimi’s wrist-watch, and the crawling train passed before them almost as soon as they started.

  ‘I wish we were crows,’ Mimi exclaimed.

  Margaret said, ‘Yes,’ and smiled.

  They noticed no traffic on the road, which, when reached, proved to be surfaced with hard, irregular granite chips, somewhat in need of re-laying and the attentions of a steamroller.

  ‘Pretty grim,’ said Mimi after a quarter of an hour. ‘But I’m through with that heather.’ Both sides of the valley were packed with it.