by David Bell
The invaders’ other ship had burnt down to the waterline and what was left of her spun slowly, rocked, almost gently, by the waves. Clouds of acrid smoke were drifting slowly towards the shore, thinly veiling a dreadful flotsam of charred bodies and wreckage that soiled the surface of the sea. I felt the sun hot on my shoulders and heard seabirds screaming overhead. I looked up, longing to see something clean and alive. The sun had barely reached its midday height. Could that be true? Could men cause so much death and destruction in so short a time? But I had prayed for this. I had asked her to send a storm to sink that ship and kill those men. She had done it, but in her way: she had sent a storm of fire. Had she? It was Kanesh who had made the firepots. He had brought them and the powders and the oils on board days ago. Had she known what had to happen? Had she made Kanesh do this, given him the knowledge, long ago? And Potyr, had she sent the wind he asked for? She was real to him. But to Kanesh? Never. Yet, how can she be real for one and not for another? How can anyone know?
I shook my head to get rid of these thoughts. Out on the water the seabirds were scrabbling and shrieking as they tore at their ghastly meal. Charred meat was as good as raw to them. I turned away from the sight. I was hot, parched and dog-tired from all the violence and danger I had been through. Most of the men were lying exhausted on the jetty. Even the archers stood with shoulders sagging and heads beginning to droop. We were jerked out of our torpor by Kanesh.
He called us together and rapped out commands. Men were sent back into the town, some to bring our wounded to the jetty on litters carried by prisoners, and others to gather up weapons and bring the rest of the prisoners down under escort. I was ordered to take a party to forage for food and other useful supplies in warehouses and storerooms and bring back a list of what we found. Kanesh said when that was done I could join the rest of the men who were being sent to search the town for our own people, who had been held captive by the invaders. The Governor’s Residence had been ransacked and the Lord Koreta was nowhere to be seen. He must be found. He said he knew I wanted to look for Kallia but wounded, prisoners and food supplies had to come first.
My job did not take very long. Some of the warehouse roofs had collapsed in the earth shaking and buried the contents under piles of rubble that had turned to mud in the rain. Others had been ransacked by the enemy and all the valuable goods, the grain, wine, oil, honey, dried fruits, metal tools, jewellery, perfumes, resins and cloth that would have been there were gone: eaten by the invaders or stowed aboard their ships, one of which was now a burned hulk adrift in the harbour. Only a few grains of barley were left scattered across the floors and what they could not carry away or stuff down their throats they had smashed and spoiled. The doors of the last building we approached were locked from the outside with a wooden batten jammed between brackets. It might be a trap. Two men stood ready with drawn swords to stop any outward charge as I lifted the batten and pulled the doors open. Nothing happened. We edged inside cautiously and peered into the gloom. It smelled very bad, of body stink, vomit and shit. I stepped in further and fell over something soft, a sack, on the floor. A baby whimpered and began to cry weakly, and feeling for it in the darkness my hands found not a sack, but a body, the soft body of a woman who tried to squirm away from me, still holding her baby tightly in her arms. As my eyes got used to the gloom what I saw stopped my breath. Huddled together on the floor were some old women. No, some were young but looked old, and cowered away from us. Some clutched babies to them and small grimy-faced children with big eyes hid behind their backs. Their hair straggled down over their faces like dirty ropes and some had blackened eyes and gashed and swollen lips. Their clothes were nothing more than stained and stinking rags. Without thinking, I put my fist to my forehead and began whispering, Potinya, please, Mistress, Matertheya, Mother, please, oh let her be here, Kallia, even like this, let her be here.
I told my men to put their swords out of sight and sit down on the floor, then knelt down myself, and began to speak as softly as I could to the women. I said we had come to rescue them; we had come from Keftiu; I was Sharesh, son of Dareka, the warehouse chief; I used to live here; the evil men had gone; they were safe now; come out into the light; don’t be afraid; we would look after them. They were hearing their own language again and I could tell they had begun to listen but they made no move. I felt inside the little sack I carried tied to my belt and found some dried apricots. I shuffled slowly forwards on my knees and held out my hand with the fruit. One or two lifted their faces to look at the food but still kept back. Then a naked grubby urchin suddenly snatched at my hand and crammed the apricot in her mouth. That made another jump forward and the spell was broken. An old woman got painfully to her feet and stumbled into my arms and wept. I wept with her and so did my men. I could hear them behind me. We coaxed them outside. It took a long time. But Kallia was not among them. Matertheya, Mother; how could you let this happen?
The Captain of Archers took charge. He picked out a few of our older men, fathers, to take the women to a secluded place and leave them to wash themselves and their children and wrap themselves in some pieces of cloth found hidden away in one of the houses as makeshift clothes until the Davina came back and we could find them something more becoming. They left with their guards carrying food and water for them, and youngsters perched on their shoulders, already excited at the idea of playing again on the beach.
I went back to find Kanesh. There was little to tell. All we had found were a few jars of rancid oil and some small sacks of damp and sprouting barley. He thought for a moment and then said that there must be a store of food somewhere else. The two enemy ships could only have taken their supplies from the warehouses and billets round the harbour because they would hardly have had time to bring anything down from the town. Merida’s house had been the main base in the upper part of the town and he always had plenty put by, although the invaders would have been working their way through that. He told me to get up there with four reliable men and secure the place before anyone else got in and started gorging themselves and getting drunk. Then I could search for Kallia in the other houses, he added. I set off at a run. For some reason I didn’t feel tired any more.
We stood to one side by the Dyer’s House as a ragged column of prisoners was being marched down to the harbour. The commander was at the head, striding along stiff-backed and looking straight before him. Further up the street, where we had ambushed the reinforcements, some of our men were dragging bodies to one side, ready to get them carried down to the beach before they started to stink. One of the archers was pulling arrows from the corpses, sometimes using his knife; bronze arrowheads were too valuable to be thrown away. To get into the Square we had to step over a pile of bodies heaped in the narrow entrance between Anchor House and Little Labyrinth.
Anchor House made up almost one whole side of the Square opposite. I remembered its plastered walls painted a faded red colour and the large window on the upper floor. Apart from a few cracks over the doorway below this window it did not seem to have suffered much damage in the earth-shaking. My work for Merida used to keep me mostly down at the harbour and in the warehouses there, but he regularly called me up to the house to go over the cargo lists and accounts which I marked on clay tablets at the end of each day, so I got to know the place fairly well, at least in part. It had once contained a shrine with a statue of the Mistress that was taken out once a year in the spring and paraded solemnly by priestesses into the fields to to be present during the celebration of the rites. Later, the shrine and statue were moved to the Temple on the Hill and Merida bought the house, once the sacred cleansing had taken place. He knew that it had been rebuilt out of the ruins of an older house that had been destroyed in an earth-shaking long ago and, careful man that he was, he had been examining the foundations before he bought it when he came across signs of even more ancient inhabitants, the Old People, some bones and amulets and a copper foundation peg. He used to tell people that he heard ghosts of the Old Peop
le whispering at night about fire falling from the skies. Some said he did that to scare off thieves, but others were not so sure and I have seen more than one man making the sign of propitiation before going in. I had been in the workshops and storerooms on the ground floor and once into the suite of rooms on the floor above where Merida and his wife, the Lady Tuwea, once lived when he came to inspect his holdings on Kallista. Other merchants liked to visit him at Anchor House to discuss business deals because he always had good wine, but more important guests were entertained at his great new mansion on the cliffs overlooking the Lagoon. On the same floor as the private apartment was the biggest room in the house where Merida had installed several new looms worked by skilled weavers who produced the fine woollen and linen cloth which found a good market on Keftiu and the Islands.
We had to step over two bodies still sprawled across the threshold where they had been cut down by Kanesh’s men as they tried to get out. Inside, it was clear that the place had been roughly used in a hunt for valuables but afterwards cleared up in the way that disciplined troops arrange their billet. Their bedding and clothes still lay on the floor, pushed aside when they struggled half awake to get up and face the enemy. I sent one of my men to search for supplies in the workshops, storerooms and especially the kitchen on the ground floor, and another up a small staircase I knew led to a room above at the back of the house. Followed by the other two men I climbed up the main staircase, cautiously, alert against any surprise attack. In the weaving room the looms had been pushed against the walls to make more space for sleeping. Some of Merida’s bales of prize cloth had been used for mattresses on the smooth stone slabs of the floor. I went across and looked out through the big window into the Square below. I remembered how it looked on warm summer evenings, full of people strolling through, arm in arm with their friends, and children dodging between them, swerving as they played tag. I saw Kallia for the first time, down there, carrying a basket of figs
I went across to the doorway into the living room of Merida’s private apartment. I started back for a second at the sight of a naked man holding something in both hands, and then I laughed; it was only the painting of Leptos with his catch and there, in the opposite corner was his twin, the other Leptos, also naked, and with his catch on strings dangling from each hand. He tried to keep the secret but everyone knew Merida liked the sight of young naked men and was very proud of his paintings. High up on the walls space was left for future exploits of the merchant who liked to be known as a man of the sea. Perhaps, when all this was over and Kallista got back to what she used to be, he might have the painter paint a picture of our battles in the streets and in the harbour. After all, Merida’s own ship had won that victory. In the bedroom beyond was a painting of his wife when young, wearing gold earrings and a yellow gown. She was offering a bowl of red cherries, a fruit that Merida loved more than any other. In an alcove another wall was a painting of a vase full of lilies. They made me think again of Kallia. These rooms were clean and well kept and judging from some pieces of equipment lying on a table next to a cot, must have been the enemy commander’s quarters.
I was not doing my job of finding food and drink for our hungry men and the town’s survivors. So I ignored the last room in the apartment which I assumed was a bathroom and went into a corridor at the back of the house where I found three of my men cheerfully counting a large number of storage jars containing oil, grain, lentils and honey, rations for our enemy and now for us. The man left downstairs had done even better and showed me baskets of olives and dried fruit, more barley and lentils and jars of wine, including the prized honeyed kind. We would now have enough to be going on with if we were careful, while some foraging was done around the island and supplies could come by ship from Keftiu. I was now sure that no enemy were left in this part of the town, so I sent the men off to search other houses in the street and said I would deal with the Lady’s house myself.
I went back into the Square and headed up the street towards the Lady’s House, passing some badly damaged buildings on the way. A high wall, blank except for a window on the very top floor, formed the side of the house facing the street. The entrance was through a passageway guarded at the street end by a gatekeeper’s box. Everyone in the town knew that no man was ever permitted to enter the Lady’s House although Namun once told me, after glancing around to make sure no one else was listening, and with a grin on his face, that occasionally a man was needed in there and he was sometimes that man. He could have been telling the truth because when he was not at sea he lodged with a shopkeeper a little further along the street on the opposite side. Apart from the gatekeeper the house was looked after by women who lived in and were seldom seen, except when they came to the entrance to collect deliveries of food and other necessities. Priestesses and novices from the Temple on the Hill came in procession to the house from time to time, and certain women who lived in the town, my mother among them, spent time there too, although they were usually back in their own houses by dawn. The sounds of chanting and the music of pipes could be faintly heard when the priestesses were in residence; at other times the house was silent, secluded and mysterious. Everyone accepted the seclusion and respected the mystery, after all, it was the House of the Lady, the Mistress; it had always been like that. It would be unthinkable, and dangerous, for anyone to attempt to intrude. Well, not quite; sometimes, late in the evening, after a good deal of wine or beer, some men, not the older ones, blustered that they had a right to know what went on when their women were in there. I had not told my men that the main reason I had kept this house to myself was the slight chance that Kallia had taken refuge there when the invasion happened, in the hope that the place would be respected as a sanctuary.
The gatekeeper’s box lay on its side in the street and the gate into the passageway was open: not good signs that the house had been left untouched. At the end of the passage I hesitated; this was the House of the Lady, forbidden to men. But my urge to find Kallia gave me the courage to go on and I stepped into a large paved courtyard. In the centre was a deep pool with stone steps leading down into the water. Large pots in which lilies grew, now faded and drooping from lack of water, were arranged around the walls. There were stone benches shaded by vines growing along trellises above. Steps led up to the main door which was closed. I expected to walk into a darkened room because the windows I had seen from outside had all been in the upper levels, but the hall was full of a soft light which came from above where there was an opening high in the roof. I had never seen anything like this in any other house in the town, but there was one great mansion on Keftiu that I knew very well and it had them and, of course, there were many in the Palace. Stone staircases mounted towards the upper floors and tall vases filled with dead flowers stood near open entrances to other rooms. The whole place was spacious and graceful and silent, a sanctuary from the squalor, destruction and violence I had found in the streets outside and I felt compelled to move about slowly and quietly as if I were in a temple or some other sacred place.
Strongly built, the house had withstood the worst of the shaking and my fears that it might have been ransacked and defiled were calmed as I realised that all was in order. The inhabitants had gone, leaving everything just as it was when they left, covered now with the finest powdering of dust. I found a kitchen full of pans, bowls and ladles and plates, bronze knives and the remains of a meal scattered on a table. The dead embers of a fire lay on the hearthstone. In a pantry off the kitchen were storage jars full of barley flour and others with oil; the salt and spices in little flat boxes were still dry. Other rooms had stools, and low tables on which stood vases for flowers; the walls had niches containing figurines of the Lady Mother, some showing her leading a bull, or a lion, or holding the sacred horns. One room had a closed door with paintings of ivy and crocuses on the stone doorframes. I opened the door slowly but inside it was too dark to see anything so I went back to the kitchen for a beeswax lamp which, after some effort, I managed to light using the
flint, firestone and oil-soaked tinder I found in a box. The light from the lamp cast shadows from the pillars that divided the room into two parts but as my eyes grew used to the dimness I saw that the walls were covered with paintings, very different from those in Anchor House. High up on the walls all round the room, ran coloured bands, blue, brown and yellow, and underneath them at the far end were tall sea lilies like those which grew in clumps along the shores all around Kallista. On the side walls were very different pictures, pictures of women as vivid as if they were alive. Their long black hair flowed down their backs over rich golden bodices as far as their flounced skirts which were held by dark girdles round their slim waists. Their cheeks and lips were rouged and they wore large gold earrings and bracelets. They faced each other and held out their hands, one offering flowers or perfume flasks, the other touching the face or the breast of the partner. A woman leaned towards another offering her red lips as if for a kiss, her full breast slipping from her bodice with its stiff reddened nipple just above the cupped hands of another who wore only flounced skirts. Above them the artist had painted the night sky filled with rows of stars, whose rays of light speared across the heavens. A faint sweet perfume hung in the air, like a distant memory of the sea lilies near the shore in White Bay. I felt a stab of shame at the stirrings roused in me by these images. I had no business here, in this private place and turned to leave. Outside, I stopped, guilt fighting with curiosity, then with a deep breath I ran up the stairs, shielding my lamp and telling myself Kallia could be up there, and if not, then things we needed would be.