Earth and Air

by Peter Dickinson

  Easier said than done. Some of the rocks that composed the plunging slope were as large as a house, and he had to find ways either down or round them. And then, when he had almost reached the bottom, a secondary cliff forced him some way back along the valley before he could at last scramble down to the river.

  He started warily up the rail track. The sleepers were mostly rotten and the rails were thick with rust, but in one place a swarm of flies buzzed around a pile of recent mule droppings—yesterday’s, or the day’s before, he thought. Alarming, but only half his mind was on the obvious dangers of what he was doing. The other half was trying to decide if what he was now seeing was at all like any of the shifting landscapes of his dream. Had one of them had a rail track running beside a river? Surely he would have remembered that, but no.

  He came to the cleft and turned into it, left. It had been right in the dream, hadn’t it? And of course no rail track. He’d been following Ridiki along a goat track. And those last dreadful moments, when he’d been toiling after her up the slope as she danced ahead . . . Here only a mild gradient led to the dark entrance of Tartaros.

  He reached it and his heart sank. What he was looking at was no deeper than the cave on the way to Crow’s Castle. Its back wall was formed by a solid-looking timber barrier. The rail track ran on through it beneath double doors with a heavy padlock hanging across the join.

  Well, it would have to do. He would find somewhere to hide or bury the collar and pipes, and then call his second farewell through a crack in the door. Gloomily he entered the cave. It wasn’t very promising. A natural cave might have had projections and fissures, but this had been shaped with stonecutters’ tools to an even surface. A small cairn then, piled into one of the far corners . . .

  Without any hope at all he checked the lock, and everything changed. It was locked sure enough, but only into one of the pair of shackles, one in each door, through which it was meant to run. Somebody must have deliberately left it like that, closing the door either from inside or outside in such a way that it looked from any distance as if it were properly fastened. For instance, they might have lost the key inside the mine. Or they might be inside now. Someone had been here not long ago. Those mule droppings . . .

  And the lock looked fairly new. Nothing like as old as the rails.

  It didn’t make any difference. He was still going to do what he’d come for. With a thumping heart he eased the door open, first just a crack, and then far enough for him to slip through.

  Darkness. Silence, apart from the drumming of his own blood. No. From somewhere ahead the rustle of moving water. He waited, listening, before closing the door and taking his hand torch out of his satchel. Shading the light with his left hand, he switched it on. Cautiously he allowed a crack of light to seep between his fingers.

  The rails stretched away into the dimness along a tunnel whose walls were partly natural, partly shaped with tools. Only a few paces along, low in the right-hand wall, he made out what he was looking for, a vertical crack in the rock, as wide as his clenched fist at the bottom and tapering to a point at about knee height. Having checked, and found it was deep enough, he laid the collar and pipes ready, collected some fragments of rock to seal them in with, knelt beside the crack, and picked up the collar, and straightened.

  No need to shout. If Ridiki could hear him, it would not be with earthly ears, and suppose whoever had left the door unlocked was somewhere ahead down there, he would be nearer the source of the water-noises, which should be enough to mask a quiet call from the distance.

  “Good-bye, Eurydice. Good-bye, Ridiki. Be happy where you are.”

  He was answered twice, first by the echo and then, drowning that out, by the bark of a dog, a sharp, triple yelp, a pause, and then the same again. And again. The alert call that every Deniakis dog was trained to give to attract its master’s attention to something he might need to be aware of. It could have been Ridiki. (No, for course it couldn’t. She was dead.) Out on the open hillside he would have known her voice from that of any other dog in Greece, but the echoing distances of the place muffled and changed it.

  The call died away into uncertainty, as if the dog wasn’t sure it was doing the right thing. Steff found he had sprung to his feet, tense with mixed terror and excitement. The pipes were still on the floor where he had left them. He stuffed the collar in his pocket and picked them up, but continued to stand there, strangely dazed. Whatever the risk, it was impossible to turn away. To do so would haunt him for the rest of his days. He had to be sure. Shielding the torch so that it lit only the patch of floor immediately in front of his feet, he stole on. The daze continued. He felt as if he carried some kind of shadow of himself inside himself, its hand inside the hands that held the pipes and torch, its heart beating to the beat of his heart, its feet walking with shadow feet inside his feet of flesh and bone but making a separate soft footfall.

  And everything around him shared the same doubleness. In the world of flesh and bone this was simply an empty, worked-out silver mine that before that had been a deep cave. But, mine or cave, in the shadow world it was and always had been an entrance to the underworld. Along it, and all around him, invisible, imperceptible, flooded the souls of the freshly dead. And ahead of him there was a dog of flesh and bone who was also, somehow, the dog Cerberus, the dreadful three-headed guardian of that realm. And a nameless stream the shadow of whose waters was the River Styx. And, waiting for him on its further shore, Eurydice. Ridiki.

  The daze faded abruptly. He was aware of some other change, but couldn’t locate it. He stopped and stood listening. No, not a sound, a light, a faint orange glow from around a so-far unperceived bend in the tunnel. He moved on, step by cautious step. Even more slowly he edged round the bend. The water sounds became noticeably louder, telling him that they were made by something more than a trickle, more than a small stream. The source of light appeared, an ordinary oil lantern standing on a ledge carved into the opposite wall. Just beyond it, the dog.

  A dog of the Deniakis breed, all right, though larger than most, almost twice the size of Ridiki, but very much her colouring. Its collar was fastened by a light chain to a shackle in the wall, and it was lying across the near side of the tunnel, with its head turned away from him, ears half pricked, motionless. He knew that pose only too well. It was waiting for the return of its master.

  What now? In the world of flesh and bone the only sane thing would be to turn back. It was the pipes that made up his mind. Unconsciously while he hesitated he had been weighing them in his hand, but now he found himself gazing dreamily down at them. His shadow self returned, allowing him to look at them through shadow eyes, to see them for what they were in that dim light. In the world of fresh and blood he had brought them here as a tangible offering to make as part of his farewell to Ridiki, a way of telling himself that now, truly, finally, he was letting her go. But, like one of the echoes in this place of echoes, that purpose now reverberated back to him from the shadow world all changed, telling him that if he used them the pipes were a passport, a charm with which he might persuade the powers of the underworld to let him through.

  Suppose it was all nonsense. Suppose the dog’s only response was to set up a clamour of barking and bring its master running. The man must be a little way off, beyond the dog’s awareness, to judge by its anxious, waiting pose. He’d have a good start. Once through the door he could run the collar through the lock-shackles and fasten it tight. It would take the man some while to force his way past that, and by then Steff would be out of the cleft and well up the hillside . . .

  Before that half of his mind had finished these flesh-and-blood calculations his shadow self had moved him quietly out to the centre of the tunnel and put the pipes to his lips. He drew a calm breath and blew two sharp notes, well apart on the scale, three times repeated. All Deniakis dogs had been trained to the same signals, and since, once trained, they were going to be sold on, Nikos never allowed them to bond to a single man, but got them accustome
d to obeying the commands of strangers. This was the Attention call, a musical version of the dog’s Alert. Instantly the dog heaved itself onto its haunches. Its head swung round, ears pricked. Herd dogs have excellent sight, but Steff was some way from the lantern’s dim light and the dog, he now saw, was old. Its movements had been stiff and there was something awkward about its posture, very like Ridiki’s when she was at attention.

  Nevertheless it recognised a stranger, and was about to spring up and rush yelling to the reach of its chain when Steff blew a long, fluttering call—Down. Wait. Be Ready.

  The dog paused, uncertain. He blew the call again. The dog subsided, though still with obvious doubt, and lay with its muzzle on its outstretched forelegs. Its hackles continued to stir as he walked confidently forward, the pipes ready at his lips, but its training held. As he neared he saw why it had so reminded him of Ridiki. The left forepaw—what would have been the hand on a human arm—was missing as far as the wrist. Once well past the dog, he turned and played the first few notes of a local lullaby. Relax. It obeyed, obviously relieved, looking in fact rather pleased with itself at having performed a known task well. It was a nice old dog, he thought, not at all dreadful. And only one head.

  And the same with everything else. The tunnel he was in was now an old mine shaft and nothing more. The dead no longer flooded invisibly along it—it was empty apart from himself. And what he was doing was once again pure, reasonless, dangerous folly. Only the memory of his earlier resolution carried him on.

  Another lantern glowed in the distance. Very likely that was where the dog’s master was doing whatever he was here for, but again the danger had to be faced. Twice now he had come to such a moment with nothing more to rely on than shadow certainties that he no longer felt, and twice they had compelled him to face the test. Why stop trusting them now? Still, spasms of fear shuddered through him as he stole nearer to the light, and he had to stop and wait for them to pass before he could force himself on.

  Now he could see the end of the tunnel, a rock surface with a thick rope running across it through a series of old iron rings. The rail track curved round to the left, into the lantern light. The floor of the tunnel ended halfway across to the opposite wall—the gap must be the channel in which the water ran.

  He edged along close to the left-hand wall, checking to the right on what he could see of that side of the chamber ahead, as more and more of it came into view. In fact it ended in a blank stone wall only a couple of paces round the corner. The water flowed out of it under a low arch.

  At the tunnel’s end, huddled close against the wall, he stood and listened, but the steady rustle of the water drowned any small sounds the man might be making, if he was there. Cautiously he peeped out, just far enough to see round the corner with one eye. The lantern stood on a flatbed rail trolley, a simple wooden platform on wheels, with a hinged handle either end for pushing or pulling. The rails ended a pace or two beyond it, and the chamber a little beyond that, with a blank wall through which the water flowed out of a tunnel high enough for man to stand in. The rope along the far wall continued through more rings and on into the tunnel.

  At first there seemed to be no one about, but then a man’s head and shoulders, facing away from Steff, rose from behind the trolley. For a moment he seemed to be standing in the river, but his body rocked as he lifted something heavy up onto the quayside, showing that he must be standing on some kind of boat or raft. The rope on the wall was for him to pull himself up and down the river.

  Still with his back towards Steff he climbed up onto the quay and lifted his load onto the trolley and slid it forward. It was a sturdy wooden box, not large but obviously heavy. He returned to the raft and disappeared, clearly to fetch another one.

  Steff had only a moment or two to think, but barely needed it. Everything he’d seen and been told seemed to click into place in his head. Somebody—probably one of the men who’d done the final survey on the mine and said it was worked out, had actually found a vein of fine silver, like what Alexander had used to pay his soldiers. He’d kept quiet about it until he could use it for himself. He’d then done a deal with Mentathos, to share the profits if he’d help. They had to keep dead quiet about it, because the silver really belonged to the mining company, and besides, if nobody knew, then they wouldn’t have to pay taxes. (The papers were always full of this sort of shady dealings, and the men talked about them over their dinners.)

  So what Steff was doing was no longer a silly escapade for which he’d be seriously punished if anyone found out. Suddenly it had become extremely dangerous. He’d better get out, and quick, while the man was busy and he still had time to pipe his way past the dog.

  But the man was Charon the ferryman, and the river was the Styx, the first of the seven rivers of the underworld, and all around, at this very moment, unseen, unfelt, the dead were crowding the quay, begging for passage, paying him with the two coins that had been put in their mouths before they were buried.

  There was some small change left from this week’s pocket money. But how . . .?

  Still hesitating, Steff edged an eye round the corner to check what he was doing. As it happened the man was looking straight towards the mouth of the tunnel.

  He stared for an instant, and bellowed. Automatically Steff jerked back, caught his foot, and fell. Before he could rise the man was on him. He was grabbed by the shoulders, hauled to his feet, and shaken violently back and forth, while the man continued to bellow.

  “Mother of Christ, who the hell are you? And what in God’s name do you think you’re doing here, you nosy little bastard? I’ll show you!”

  The man flung him back against the rock wall, grabbed him before he could fall, and began to batter him to and fro again.

  “Charon?”

  Winded, half-stunned, terrified, Steff wasn’t aware of deciding to say the name. It was a barely audible croak, forced out of him by the violence of his shaking. But the man paused, staring. He wasn’t much taller than Steff, but broad-shouldered, with a weather-beaten, flat, snub-nosed face and dark eyebrows that joined above his nose.

  “Mother of Christ!” he said. “The boss sent you? That case, what cause you got to go sneaking around like that?”

  “No . . . No . . . He didn’t . . . No one did. I’m looking for Ridiki . . . My dog.”

  “So what the hell makes you think your bloody dog might be down here? Hector’s the only dog down here. Come to that, how’d you get past him without him yelling his head off? And how come you know what the boss calls me?”

  “She isn’t down here—not like that. She’s dead. A snake bit her. But Ridiki’s short for Eurydice. That’s her real name. The story, you see . . . And this is Tartaros. It’s an entrance to the underworld . . .”

  “And so I’m Charon. Look, kid, that was just a lucky guess. Like I said, it’s what the boss calls me, one of his jokes, because of what the mine’s called. Next thing you’ll be telling me Hector’s got three heads, and you charmed your way past him by playing him beautiful music.”

  “Well, sort of. I’d brought my pipes, you see, to leave for Ridiki, but when I saw he was one of our dogs, I played him . . .”

  “Hold it there. One of your dogs? You’re Deniakis? Don’t tell me you’re one of the old man’s kids? No, they’re older . . .”

  “He’s my uncle.”

  “Your dad was the one those bastards in Athens got?”

  “That’s right.”

  The man paused, thinking.

  “Right,” he said. “You’re in a mess, kid, a bloody, stupid, dangerous mess you got yourself into. And by sheer fool’s luck you’ve run into the only Mentathos who’s going to get you out of it. Your dad was my wife’s childhood sweetheart. All of ten years old they must have been. Fell for each other, click!, just like that. He smuggled a puppy down to show her, let her cuddle it. And they weren’t supposed even to talk to each other; their dads would’ve flayed them if they’d heard, and they’d both got elder brothers a
t the school to keep them toeing the line. Year and a half they kept it up, stolen moments, couple of friends they could trust. Then her brother twigged, got up a Mentathos gang to take it out on your dad and his brother, but Deniakis—he’s your uncle now—was waiting for us with his own gang, and between us we pretty well wrecked the school. Upshot was her dad took my wife away but they smuggled letters back and forth for years.

  “She told me all this before we married—I didn’t like it, of course—but she got me to understand she wasn’t in love with him, not like that. He was going to come to our wedding in disguise, bringing his wife, but his ministry sent him to America, so when our first kid was on the way she wrote to him and asked him to be a sort of secret godfather. I’d tried to talk her out of it and I tried again when he wrote back and said he’d give us one of the Deniakis dogs. I could see the sort of trouble that would cause, but she was set on the idea so I cleared it with Mentathos. Not that he liked it either, but he owed me one. He’s a hard man—hard as they come, but he pays his debts. Said OK, we could have the dog and told his men to let it alone.

  “Someone didn’t listen. You saw Hector’s missing a foot. Fox trap, left deliberate. I caught the fellow that put it there. You’ll know him if you meet him. Two fingers missing on his left hand, and he can count himself lucky I left him the hand . . .”

  “Rania dropped a skillet on Ridiki’s left leg—she didn’t mean to, she’s just clumsy, but it could’ve killed her.”

  “Right. Anyway, that’s Hector. Best dog I ever owned, three legs or four. Took a bit of time for us to get him—Deniakis keeps count of his dogs. Your dad was dead by the time he came but a fellow called Nikos fixed it . . .”