Earth and Air

by Peter Dickinson

  “He helped me train Ridiki.”

  “Another thing we’ve got between us, then. Now, the fellows with the mules will be up here . . . let’s see . . . bit over half an hour. Just time to get you clear.”

  “But . . . but I’ve got to see Dis about Ridiki.”

  “Listen, kid . . . what’s your name?”

  “Steff.”

  “All right, Steff. Looking at it your way, if Hector’s Cerberus and I’m Charon, then Dis is the boss down here. You absolutely do not want to see Dis. River in the underworld—isn’t that right?—fall into it and you forget everything. Same here. Fall into our river and next time anyone sees you you’ve forgotten everything all right, because you’ve been washed up in Siren’s Bay with a hole in your head might have been got by you banging it on a rock. Or maybe being banged with a rock. No, I wouldn’t put it past him. Why d’you think I beat you up the way I did? Sorry about that, but I couldn’t let you go, not after what you’d seen, and I was scared rigid what he’d do when he got his hands on you. You won’t get any sympathy out of him—you’d just as well ask old Hector . . . Wait! That’s it, Steff lad. What call d’you think Dis has to be interested in dogs? Cerberus is the one you’ve got to ask. You can do that as you’re going.”

  “But . . .”

  “You’ve got two choices, Steff. Either you do what I tell you, ask Hector for what you want, and then make yourself scarce, or I carry you kicking and screaming out onto the hillside and tie you up and come back for you later. Either way I’m taking a hell of a risk, trusting you not letting on to anyone. OK, your uncle would flay you if he found out, same as my wife would flay me if she found out I’d handed you over to the boss. But your uncle’s not the only one. You’re telling nobody. Got it? Nobody. Now, make up your mind.”

  Steff shook his head. He couldn’t think. The man was too much for him, not just too big and too strong, but too full of adult energy and command.

  “All right,” he muttered.

  The man grunted and picked up his lantern.

  They walked up the tunnel, side by side. Hector came in sight, lying as Steff had first seen him, but with his ears fully pricked at the sound of his master’s returning footfall. The man checked his watch again.

  “Still got time for it. Just like to see Hector doing his tricks after all these years. I’ll have to tell Maria about you, any case, and I’ll lay she’ll be wanting to meet you. Ready? Pipe away, then.”

  They halted. Half heartedly Steff put the pipes to his lips. They were Ridiki’s. He’d never expected to use them again. The sharp notes of the alert sounded along the tunnel. Hector rose, puzzled for a moment, but then eagerly, as if glad to perform for his master.

  “Well, I’ll be busted!” said the man, laughing aloud as Hector responded to the next two calls. “Ten years and more it’s got to be since he last did that. I’ve never had call to learn the signals. Well done, old boy. Now sit. Steff’s got something to ask you.”

  Obediently Hector rose again to his haunches. Steff knelt to bring their two heads level. He took Ridiki’s collar from his pocket and held it forward. Hector gave it an investigating sniff and then smelt it carefully over. To a dog, another dog’s smell is its name. He would know Ridiki if he met her. Only he wouldn’t—she was dead.

  When he’d sniffed enough, Steff leaned back to ease his posture. The movement caused the shadows on the wall to shift, as the two shadows of Steff’s head, one thrown by the lantern in the man’s hand and the other by the lantern on the opposite wall, detached themselves from Hector’s shadow, so that it now seemed as if the shadows of three heads rose from the shapeless mass of overlapping shadows cast by the two bodies.

  The shadow world had returned in all its strange certainty, and Steff knew that he now spoke through Hector to his shadow self, the monstrous guardian of the underworld.

  “Oh, Cerberus, please . . .” he whispered. “Please can you let Ridiki come back home with me? . . . I don’t expect you can, but . . . anyway, please look after her. Thank you.”

  He rose, and his two shadows now hid the dog’s and the shape on the wall meant nothing. He wiped his eyes on his sleeve, and when he looked again he saw, towering over his own double shadow, the single shadow of the man, cast by the lamp on the opposite wall. The lamp the man was carrying shone directly on the wall, making his shadow almost too faint to see, but it was there, reaching up to the tunnel roof and arching over them because the man was standing closer to the light source.

  “You know you mustn’t look round until you are out?” said the man, amused but sympathetic.

  An echo floated back, toneless, a shadow voice, whispering out of the rock of Tartaros.

  “. . . until you are out.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Steff. “Thank you. I’ll go now. I’ll turn left at the river and try and climb up that way. Then I won’t run into your friends with the mules.”

  “Easier that way, any case,” said the man. “There’s a bit of a track. And look. Wednesdays Mentathos runs a truck down to the town, so the women can do their shop. I’ll be waiting for you after school. Don’t let on you know me—neither of us wants anyone asking questions—just follow where I go and I’ll take you to meet Sophie. Better tell someone you’ll be late home. OK?”

  “OK. See you,” said Steff, and turned away into the unceasing stream of the invisible dead moving in the other direction. The lantern glow dwindled behind him. Reluctantly he switched on his hand torch. Its sharp, white, modern beam banished the shadow world. The tide of dead ceased to exist, a remembered delusion. None of that had been true. He’d taken a crazy risk for a silly, childish hope, and been extraordinarily lucky. Ridiki was dead, buried under the fig tree.

  And yet she was there, trotting silently behind him. He’d always been able to tell, just as he could tell exactly where his hand was if he closed his eyes and moved it around.

  Oh, nonsense! Kidding himself again, the way he’d been kidding himself all through the adventure because he so longed for it to be true. All he was doing was making it worse for himself every step he took until he reached the open air and turned round and she wasn’t there. Torturing himself with hope. Grow up, Steff. Get it over.

  No, he told himself. This was another test, the hardest of all.

  Somehow it was now far further up the dark and empty tunnel than it had been when he’d been stealing so cautiously in, and all that way he fought the compulsion, grimly forcing himself into the gale of the rational world as it blew every shred of its shadow counterpart away. All he had left of it was this one last tatter, that when he at last looked back and saw nothing but the rock-rubble floor of the cleft he would still at least know that he had kept faith with Ridiki.

  He reached the wooden barrier, opened the door, closed his eyes and held it for long enough for her to slip through before he shut it. Still with closed eyes he set his shoulders against the barrier to check his direction and purposefully walked the few paces more to bring himself clear of the cave before he opened them.

  There was no need to look round. She had slipped past him and was already there, waiting for him in the last of daylight.

  Ridiki, eyes bright, ears cocked, tail high, delighted to see him. She was wearing her Sunday collar. He dropped to his knees and held out his arms. She pranced towards him, but stopped just out of reach. He shuffled forward and she drew away. Her ears twitched back a little and hackles stirred—not a threat but a warning. There were no footprints in the patch of dust where she’d been standing

  “I mustn’t touch you . . .?” he whispered.

  Her ears pricked, her hackles smoothed, and the look of anxiety left her eyes.

  “Can you come home with me—part of the way at least? The man—Charon, I call him—says I’ve got to get out before the men come with the mules. I suppose they move the silver after dark.”

  He’d always talked to her when they were alone together, telling her his thoughts, explaining what he was up to. He didn’
t expect her to understand, but now for answer she turned and trotted off down the cleft. He followed. At the river she turned confidently to the left, but stayed on the track further than he’d have done. But she seemed to know what she was doing. This was a much easier climb than the route he’d taken down would have been, and towards the top they slanted to the left and so reached the crest of the ridge very close to where Steff had started down, but on the other side of the cleft.

  The moon was rising, near to the full. He was interested to see that Ridiki cast a shadow, dark and definite enough, though somehow less so than the hard-edged black shadows of the rocks around. The shadow of a shadow, so to speak, for she herself was a shadow, a shadow somehow made solid. For him at least. He wondered whether anyone else would be able to see her.

  As soon as they started down the moon was hidden by the mass of the ridge behind them, but Ridiki still seemed able to find the way. He could just pick out her yellow rump as she led him down twisting animal tracks till they came out on one of the many shepherds’ trails that crisscrossed the mountainside. From here on he knew the way, and without being told she dropped back to her usual place close behind him with her muzzle level with his left knee.

  His heart lightened. So she hadn’t just been making sure he reached a point from which he could get safely home. She was coming with him.

  Tired though his body was he strode home so happy that he barely noticed the journey. Even then it was well after midnight when he scratched on Papa Alexi’s shutter. The old man must have been sitting up waiting for him. He opened the door almost at once, a pale, stooped figure in his long nightshirt.

  “Not bad,” he said. “I thought you’d be later. Get done what you wanted?”

  “Yes. I was very lucky. It was all right. You didn’t tell anyone?”

  “Waiting till morning. Good night, then.”

  “Good night. And thank you very much.”

  Over the next weeks he slowly became used to Ridiki’s strange existence, learning to think of her as his dog, there, real, as she always had been, though no one else on the farm could see her. Nor could any of the other dogs, though old Hera, stone deaf and almost blind, sniffed interestedly at her when she greeted her and thumped her scabby tail on the ground. She knew. Ridiki seemed to mind about the dogs not seeing her far more than she did about the people, and made a point of visiting her every day.

  Invisibility had its advantages. She could now come indoors, and slept weightless at the foot of Steff’s bed. She trotted down to school with him and curled up under his bench or found safe corners to lie in so that she could still be nearby while he was doing stuff with his friends. At first he’d been worried about what might happen if someone happened to walk into her or trod on her, but she was careful not let it happen. As the days went by he came to realise that all the time she was with him she was performing an extremely difficult feat, a balancing act on a precarious rope bridge between the world of shadows and the world of flesh and blood. Any sudden jolt might toss her down into the nowhere between those worlds, any extra strain might unravel the fastening at one end or the other. A touch from his hand would do it.

  So mostly she behaved as any other dog would have done. He had trained her not to eat anything except from his hand or from her bowl, but he had no shadow food to give her so she fended for herself, stalking shadow mice around the farm, or pouncing on small shadow creatures among the tussocks beside a path, or finding shadow scraps behind the kitchen door. Once, down on the shore, she dragged out something heavy from between two rocks and lay in a patch of shade holding one end of the invisible object between her forepaws and growling contentedly as she gnawed at the other end. She drank from a shadow stream that seemed to run down the far side of orchard. Steff asked Papa Alexi whether there’d ever been a stream there, and he said yes, but it had been diverted fifty years ago to water the fruit terraces. She peed and shat like a normal dog. Her faeces glistened a little while in the sun, but before they’d begun to dry and darken they faded into the ground.

  She came with Steff when the man he thought of as Charon took him to meet his wife, Sophie, in a dark little bar in a backstreet, where none of the Deniakis or Mentathos people were likely to see them together. Charon fetched food and drink, but just had a glass of beer and left.

  “Isn’t this wonderful!” said Sophie as soon as he’d gone. “Secret meetings again! And you look just like him, that age! My heart stopped when I saw you.”

  They talked about Steff’s father—she told him a lot he didn’t know—and then about Steff himself, and his mother and his other family—she seemed to want to know everything—until it was time for her to catch the Mentathos truck home.

  “Same again next week?” she said as she rose.

  “Oh . . . Yes, please. If you like.”

  It became a pattern for the next few weeks. She was like the cheerful and understanding aunt he’d never had. He didn’t know what she got out of it, but she obviously enjoyed their meetings. He told Papa Alexi and Aunt Nix about them, knowing they wouldn’t pass it on, but he didn’t expect anyone else at the farm to notice that he was getting back late on Wednesdays. He was wrong.

  It wasn’t even a Wednesday. He got home at his usual time, just as the informal mid-day meal on the vine-shaded terrace was breaking up for everyone to go and have their afternoon rest. He was greeted by a shout from Mitsos.

  “Hey, Steff. Where’d you get to yesterday? Not the first time, neither. Meeting some girl, I bet, down in the town. Tell us about her. Plump little piece, just coming ripe? You lucky little sod!”

  Being Mitsos, he was aiming for maximum embarrassment, and a couple of months back he’d have got it. But thanks to Tartaros, and Ridiki’s return, and most of all to his meetings with Sophie, something had changed inside Steff. A joke Sophie had made to Charon a couple of weeks back even told him how to answer.

  He picked up a chunk of bread, bit off a corner, chewed, and tucked it into his cheek.

  “Dead wrong, Mitsos,” he said. “She’s a married woman.”

  He chewed a bit more and added, “. . . and her husband isn’t jealous.”

  Everyone laughed, partly at the joke, partly at Mitsos, but mainly with surprise at quiet, withdrawn, anxious Steff coming up with something like that. His uncle caught his eye and gave a nodded of approval—he thought boys should be able to stand up for themselves. Even so, it was a surprise when he returned after everyone else was gone, and Steff was finishing his meal, with Ridiki curled on the paving beside him. Steff rose. His uncle gestured to him to sit, did so himself, and picked up an olive.

  “Got over losing that dog of yours?” he asked.

  Out of the corner of his eye Steff saw Ridiki look up, amused.

  “Just about,” he said. “I missed her a lot at first.”

  “Hurts a bit every time, and the first one’s worst. Ready for another one, d’you think? Atalanta’s litter’s ready to look at. Got a chap coming tomorrow to choose one, but you get first pick.”

  “Oh, but . . . I thought they’d all be spoken for.”

  “You’re family. I’d give you one myself, but your mother’s sent the money. She wants it from her.”

  Steff bent as if to scratch his ankle while he thought, letting him look directly at Ridiki for help. Her ears were pricked with interest and her eyes amused.

  He straightened.

  “Thank you very much,” he said. “I’ll go and look at them when Nikos’s finished his rest.”

  As he watched his uncle walk away it struck him that he hadn’t seen Ridiki looking that lively for quite some time. Over the last few weeks she’d been spending more and more of her time asleep, and when she was awake her interest in everything around her was somehow less intense than it used to be. He’d started to wonder whether she was tired because it was becoming more of an effort for to maintain the between-two-worlds balance she needed for these spells of wakefulness.

  Did she think another dog would be
company for her, liven her up? Or for him, and allow her to go back into the shadows where she belonged?

  Though she knew Steff well, Atalanta was a jealous mother, and Nikos had to hold her while Steff picked the pups out of the box one by one, turned them over to check their sex, and set them on the floor of the kennel-shed as if to see how they reacted while Ridiki looked and sniffed them over. Their eyes were open but still blurred, and the black markings they would have as adults only just visible as darker patches fawn birth-fur. The first three were bitches. They looked lost and miserable and headed straight back to the box with the rubber-legged waddle of small pups.

  The fourth was a dog. He stood his ground, peering around with an absurd expression of eager bewilderment. Steff held out a hand. The pup sniffed at it, gave it an experimental lick, and sucked hopefully at a fingertip. When the hand was withdrawn he continued sniffing, to Nikos’s eyes at empty air, and then attempted to lick something, reaching so far that he almost tumbled on his face as Ridiki withdrew her invisible nose.

  But not invisible to the puppy.

  “Seen a ghost,” said Nikos, laughing. “You get that with some dogs. Hera, now, and she’s his—let’s see—great-grandmother.”

  “Can I have him?” said Steff. “I don’t want another bitch, not so soon after Ridiki.”

  “Good choice. You’ve the makings of a sound dog there. Mind you, he’ll look a bit like something out of a circus, those markings. There’s some wouldn’t want that.”

  Steff hadn’t paid much attention to the markings, merely registering that the dog would be mainly the Deniakis golden-yellow, with a few black bits. Now he saw that these patches, still no more than a light golden-orange, were going to darken into five almost perfect circles, three on the left flank and two on the right, like a clown’s horse in a picture book. He was a comical little scrap.