Carver's Quest

by Rennison, Nick

  ‘But you cannot think that he is conspiring against us?’

  ‘I do not know what to think, Adam. I do know that those rogues appeared to have been informed that we were travelling from the bay of Volos towards Meteora. How else could they have come across us so conveniently in hundreds of square miles of terrain?’

  ‘But what possible advantage could Rallis gain from the theft of our horses? Like us, he is now stranded miles from the nearest shelter. It makes no sense.’

  ‘Little does make sense in this benighted country,’ the professor said bitterly. ‘Nothing has made sense in it for the best part of two millennia.’

  ‘It is true that some of the most notable men of Athens have links with some of the greatest villains in the country. The Dilessi affair earlier this year proved that, if nothing else.’

  ‘It’s just as you say,’ said Fields with sudden excitement. ‘It’s extraordinary. Politicians in the city are shamelessly and almost openly in league with brigands who roam the country looking for foreigners to kidnap and murder. It’s as if Mr Gladstone were to be in charge of a gang of garrotters and send them out onto the streets of London to steal purses to add to the exchequer.’

  ‘However,’ Adam continued, striving to soothe the professor, ‘there is not the slightest evidence that Rallis has any connection with brigandage. He is a lawyer and an amateur archaeologist – not a politician.’

  Thirty yards ahead, the man of whom they spoke had stopped and turned towards them. He waved his arm at the surrounding countryside.

  ‘The beauties of Thessaly, gentlemen,’ he shouted.

  Adam returned his wave.

  ‘You will notice,’ the professor said, ‘that our friend seems remarkably cheerful in the circumstances. Our loss does not appear to have hit him as hard as it has the rest of us.’

  With this parting shot, Fields increased his walking speed again and caught up with Quint and the mules.

  Left alone in the rear, Adam wondered if there could be any basis for the professor’s sudden suspicions of the Greek lawyer. It was true that there had been times in the journey when Rallis had seemed uncertain of the path to take. There had been times when they seemed to be turning their faces in the direction of whichever point of the compass seemed momentarily appealing. There had been times, Adam was obliged to admit to himself, when he had thought that Rallis either did not know where he was leading them or, at the least, did not choose to tell them. And yet what purpose in travelling with them could the lawyer have other than the ones he had acknowledged? His love of his country’s past. His desire to unearth more examples of its former glory. These provided him with his motivation, did they not? There was no evidence to support Fields’s sudden distrust of Rallis.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  For the next two days, they continued to make slow progress. Thessaly, Adam knew, was populous and prosperous. The plain was fertile agricultural land but the travellers came across little evidence of this. Rallis insisted that they keep off frequented roads and travel across rough country instead. They saw few people. On the first afternoon, they happened upon a wagon, with spokeless wheels of solid wood, which had been abandoned by the roadside. As they stood by it, they noticed a distant caravan of horses making its way along the road, laden with sacks and bags. Three tiny figures accompanied it, occasionally chivvying the beasts with sticks. Adam looked enquiringly at Rallis.

  ‘Small traders carrying goods to the coast, perhaps,’ the Greek said. ‘We travel in a different direction. We will let them pass.’

  That night they came near enough to a village to hear the furious barking of dogs in the distance and yet no one troubled them. They slept out under the stars once again.

  On the second day, they came across the carcass of a horse with two black vultures circling above it.

  ‘Those villains have left one of our beasts to die,’ Fields exclaimed upon seeing it.

  Rallis approached the dark shape on the ground, a kerchief in front of his face. Flies rose from the decomposing animal.

  ‘It was dead long before we met Lascarides, Professor. It has been here a week at least.’ The Greek lawyer looked up at the birds wheeling menacingly above their heads. ‘Those are not the first to feast on the poor creature.’

  ‘Why should it be lying out here?’ Adam asked. ‘We are surely many miles from the village where we heard the dogs last night. Who rode it and left it here to die?’

  Rallis shrugged. ‘Perhaps, like us, it had wandered far from home.’

  Leaving the rotting beast behind, they moved on. The vultures, which had flown off as they examined the horse, returned. Another night in the open awaited the travellers, but as shadows lengthened and they began to think of stopping, Andros hailed his master. He pointed through the gloom to what seemed to Adam no more than a pile of stones in the distance. As they came nearer, the pile slowly transformed itself into a rude shed, its walls battered by the elements but its roof still intact. There was even a wooden door, hanging at a skewed angle on iron hinges. Rallis pushed it open and all but Andros made their way inside. Adam lit a candle and they watched as the flames flickered on the four walls.

  ‘What is this place?’ he asked.

  ‘The hut of a shepherd, perhaps.’ Rallis sounded uncertain. ‘Or an outhouse from an old khan. A lodge for travellers.’

  ‘There are no signs of any other buildings. The khan must have long gone.’

  ‘Not only the khan,’ Fields remarked. ‘There is no indication that there is any road beside which it might have stood.’

  ‘It may have been abandoned a hundred years ago,’ the Greek said. ‘Or more. A road may once have passed this way.’

  ‘It is of no consequence to us now whether this was part of an old hostelry or the retreat of some lonely herdsman.’ Adam held the candle high so it illuminated as much of the building as it could. Some of its stones had fallen to the ground but the walls were largely undamaged. ‘The place is just about large enough to shelter us all.’

  There was a silence, interrupted only by the sound of the mules moving restlessly outside. The men in the hut looked at one another in the dancing light of the candle.

  ‘Quintus is unpleased by the idea, I see,’ the professor said,

  after a moment. ‘He is scowling like Stilicho when he looked upon the Goths.’

  ‘I ain’t a man to ask for much,’ Quint said, sounding aggrieved. ‘A comfy billet, a pint of pale ale and a twist of bird’s eye baccy and I’m ’appy enough. But look at this bleedin’ place.’ He stretched out his arms as if to knock down the weathered walls of the hut. His shadow leapt against the stones. ‘This ain’t a bunk for a bleeding goat never mind a man.’

  ‘You are too choosy, Quint,’ Adam remarked. ‘It is not as if you have much difficulty usually in entering the land of Nod. On previous nights, you have no sooner retired than you have been snoring loud enough to wake the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus.’

  ‘I ain’t going to get much chance of doing that if we bed down ’ere.’

  ‘We have no choice, Mr Quint,’ Rallis said, ‘unless you would prefer to spend another night sleeping beneath the stars.’

  Quint stared malevolently at the lawyer for a moment, as if the Greek was wholly responsible for dragging him from his urban comforts and out into this rural wilderness. Then he turned on his heel and marched out of the ruined building to join Andros and the mules outside. In the few short days they had been travelling, some kind of odd friendship had developed between the Londoner and the giant Attican. Andros spoke not a word of English. Indeed, he appeared to speak few words in his native tongue. Quint’s Greek was limited to a small and ill-pronounced vocabulary connected to the supply of food, drink and sex. And yet the two men had discovered some common ground. Now they joined forces in unloading the mules and gathering together the materials for a campfire.

  Later that evening, after they had eaten their frugal meal, all five men in the small expedition sat around the fire
. The night was surprisingly full of the noises of animals. Snorts and screams and distant baying could be heard in the darkness on all sides.

  ‘How are they off for wolves in this neighbourhood, do you suppose, Quint?’ Adam asked teasingly. ‘Will they venture into our poor shepherd’s hut? Should we worry about being eaten as we sleep?’

  ‘There ain’t no wolves in this neck of the woods. Jackals, maybe.’ Quint, reconciled by now to their accommodation, was not to be drawn. He tamped tobacco stolidly into his clay pipe. ‘Anyways, it sounds more like wild hog than anything else. That ain’t going to eat you. More like t’other way about.’

  That night, despite the discomforts of their resting place and the sounds from the dark, Adam soon fell into a deep sleep. He dreamed more vividly than he had done for years. Strange, hallucinatory dreams in which he was back in Macedonia, digging up tombs long buried in the desolate hillsides. With his nails, he scrabbled at the soil to reveal cold stone coffins. When he pushed aside the lids of these coffins, faces from his past stared up at him from their depths. His mother, dead when he was a small boy, whom he could scarcely remember. His father, still apparently infuriated by the turns his life had taken. Charles Carver, the railway baron, had not been a happy man, his son now realised. His great successes as an entrepreneur had brought him little in the way of joy; the fraud and peculation which had ruined his company had also driven him to the point where he had believed self-destruction to be his only option. Adam was aware of how little he had known his father. Now, in the dream, Charles Carver’s face was twisted with rage. He seemed to be shouting defiance at the fates which had propelled him first towards great success and wealth and had then plunged him into disgrace and despair.

  Adam awoke with a start. He lay for a while, thinking of his father, and then turned his face towards the open door. It was still an hour or more to sunrise, but in the faint light of moon and stars that was drifting into the hut, he could see the shapes of his sleeping companions. Idly, he counted three and was about to fall asleep again when he realised that there should be one more. His eyes squinted in the semi-darkness as he strove to see who was in the hut. One of the party was definitely missing. He rolled out from under the blanket which covered him and began to make his way towards the door of the stone shelter. As he crawled past the other sleepers in the hut he could make out the giant form of Andros stretched beneath one wall. Next to him were Quint, snoring gently, and the professor. There was no sign of Rallis. It was only when he ventured outside that Adam located the missing man. The Greek lawyer was standing alone thirty yards from the hut. He was staring out into the darkness. Adam moved towards him.

  ‘Rallis?’ he hissed.

  The Greek lawyer froze at the sound. Then he turned slowly in Adam’s direction.

  ‘It is a beautiful night, Mr Carver, is it not?’ he said.

  ‘What are you doing out here?’

  ‘I could not sleep.’ Both men were speaking in fierce whispers. ‘I came outside to look at the stars.’

  As Adam approached the Greek, he thought he saw, for the briefest moment, a light flicker far out in the night but no sooner did he look more intently in the direction from which it seemed to come than it disappeared.

  ‘I have been picking out the shapes in the sky,’ Rallis said. ‘I have forgotten what you call them in English.’

  ‘The constellations.’

  ‘Con-stell-a-tions.’ The Greek repeated the word, drawing out each syllable, as if this would help him now to remember it. ‘It is from the Latin, of course. “Stars together”, I think. But I have had enough of astronomy for the night and we will be disturbing our companions. Let us return to our beds. There is time yet to enjoy some more sleep.’

  * * * * *

  ‘Maybe he just went outside to water his nags,’ Quint suggested the following morning when Adam told him of his encounter. Breakfast had been the swiftest of meals and the travellers were on their way less than forty minutes after rising. They had now left their resting place many miles behind them. Quint was leading the largest and most temperamental of the mules. His master was walking beside him.

  ‘He claimed that he could not sleep,’ Adam said. ‘He was tempted outside by the beauty of the night.’

  ‘Well, he ain’t going to say, “Don’t mind me, Mr Carver, I’m just ’aving a piss,” now, is ’e? He ain’t that kind of a bloke.’

  ‘No, that is true. We do not all have the obsession with bodily functions that marks you out, Quint. But I did not get the impression that it was either the delights of nature or its demands that had driven him from our humble shelter. There was something else.’

  ‘What was ’e doing then?’

  ‘Looking out into the darkness.’

  ‘What the ’ell for?’

  ‘I do not know. A sign that someone else was out there?’ The professor’s suspicions about their travelling companion returned to Adam’s thoughts. ‘Do you suppose that our Greek friend has arranged for others to be following us?’

  There was no opportunity for Quint to reply. As he opened his mouth, Adam reached out his hand to indicate that his manservant should be silent.

  ‘Hush, Quint. What is that?’

  A rhythmic drumming noise could be heard, echoing across the plain. At first, Adam thought the sound had only the one source but, as he continued to listen, it seemed as if it was travelling towards them from all the points on the compass. He found himself unable to guess what the drumming was or to judge exactly the direction from which it was coming. He turned and looked back at the professor but Fields, equally baffled, shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘It is the semandron,’ Rallis said, noticing their puzzlement.

  ‘Ah, the semandron,’ Fields said. ‘Of course. I have read of it but I have never before heard it.’

  ‘What is it?’ Adam asked. ‘I confess that I have never heard the word before.’

  ‘The Greek Christians at these monasteries use it in place of bells, which were long forbidden to them by the Mahometans.’ Fields dismounted from the mule he had been riding and stood by its side, listening to the echoing percussion of the semandron. ‘It is a long wooden bar which they strike with hammers. It has something of a barbaric note, I feel.’

  ‘It means that we are drawing close to the monasteries,’ Rallis said. ‘The sound of the semandron can travel many miles but I think, from its loudness, we must be near to them.’

  Andros, pulling the last mule up a slight slope, joined them. All five men stood in the shade cast by a small grove of wild apple trees at its top and listened.

  ‘Ain’t a cheery sound, if you ask me,’ Quint said. ‘It fair puts the wind up you.’

  ‘It is calling the faithful to prayer, Quintus.’ Fields was standing almost on tiptoe, straining to locate the source of the drumming.

  ‘Sounds more like it’s calling ’em to the grave.’

  As they spoke, the monk striking the semandron ceased to do so. The percussive noise came to an end and only the booming echoes of the final blow continued to reverberate in the air.

  The men began to descend the slight rise. Emerging from the trees, they were thrust once more into the glare of the sun. Eyes dazzled, they could barely see the plains stretching ahead of them. Rallis was the first to recover his sight and his bearings.

  ‘The monasteries of Meteora, gentlemen,’ he said, throwing out his arm to point to the north-east. ‘The monasteries that float in the air.’

  Across the plain, perhaps two miles away, they could see some twenty or thirty outcrops of rock which arose, like giant stalagmites, from the ground and pointed towards the sky. Pyramids, obelisks, columns and monoliths of all shapes and sizes reared up from the ground. At this distance they looked like trees in some gigantic petrified forest. A village rested beneath the rocks, the roofs of its houses just visible amidst the shadows they cast.

  ‘The monasteries are all in the village?’ Adam was surprised. He raised his hand to his brow to shade his
eyes, eager to make out more of their destination.

  The Greek laughed.

  ‘No, Adam. You must cast your eyes further up to heaven. That is just Kalambaka. The holy monasteries are much higher.’

  Rallis pointed a finger at the shadowy buildings of the village and then raised it slowly to the sky, as if tracing the passage of a bird from one of the roofs to the pinnacle of one of the giant stalagmites.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘There is one of the monasteries we seek. I think it is Agios Stefanos although I cannot be certain from here. The other monasteries may be hidden from our view here.’

  Adam stared in disbelief. At first, he could see nothing but the needle of rock itself. Only as his eyes grew accustomed to the distance and to the light could he make out what might have been a building perched precariously on its point. As he continued to look, he realised that there were others clinging to the sides or the summits of these strange stone obelisks.

  ‘ “Mountains that like giants stand/To sentinel enchanted land”,’ he quoted.

  ‘Scott had not such prodigies of nature as these in mind,’ said the professor. ‘He was, as usual, singing the praises of his native land, was he not? And the Scotch, for all their boasting, have nothing to match this.’

  ‘They’re like bloody great skittles in a giant’s bowling alley,’ Quint said.

  ‘More like the buttresses of some bizarre cathedral.’ Adam continued to gaze in astonishment at the sight before him. How, he wondered, had he never before heard of this phenomenon of nature? ‘Mr Ruskin himself would delight in their Gothic charms. But, surely, there is no mention of these extraordinary rocks in any ancient text.’

  ‘The Greeks of Plato’s day had little time for the wonders of the natural world, Adam,’ Fields said. ‘Who would know from their literature that in Athens the Lykabettos rises higher than the Acropolis?’

  ‘The monks must be like the stylites of bygone centuries.’ Adam was still lost in admiration of the rocks. ‘Perched upon their pillars far above the temptations of the world.’