The Collected Short Fiction Part 17

'I suppose that's inevitable. One couldn't think of finding a place like this and still being able to go back.' He thought about it, then added, 'or forward either, I daresay.'

'Grigg,' said Vin, 'burn your boat. I will make fire for you.'

The shock of her words made him rise to his feet, charged with the instinct of flight.

On the instant her arms were round him, holding him very tightly. 'Burn it, burn it,' she was crying pa.s.sionately. 'Will you never understand? You might have done it hours ago.'

Without thinking of what he was doing, he found that his arms were round her too, and they were kissing.

'Watch me make fire,' she shouted. In the instant they had become lovers, true lovers, sentiment as well as pa.s.sion, tender as well as proud.

She darted across the ship, leapt the gunwale, and ran round the little quay, all the while dragging Grigg by the hand. She seemed to part the thin painter with a single pull and drew the boat out of the basin. Despite the absence of tide or wind, the boat drifted straight out into the darkness of the open sea.

'Day and night, the sea runs away from the rock,' cried Vin.

They stood together, their arms tightly round one another's waists, watching the boat disappear.

Grigg could not sense that she did anything more, but suddenly, far out, there was a beautiful rosy glow, like the sunset, it was contained and oval, and in the middle of it could be seen the transfigured outline of the boat, gleaming whitely, like the Holy Grail, too bright to stare at for more than a moment. Outside the fiery oval, the whole air was turning a faint, deep pink.

'My G.o.d,' cried Grigg, 'the petrol in the outboard. It will explode.'

'On to the ship,' said Vin, and hauled him back round the basin and aboard.

They hid, clinging together, in a small hold made simply by thick planks stretched at gunwale-level across the bow. The flush in the night sky was intensifying all the time. Then there was a loud concussion; the sky turned almost scarlet; and, not more than a few minutes later, he possessed Vin as if she had been hardly more than a little girl.

Hand in hand, they ascended the wide steps to the citadel. At the gateway, they looked back. The burning boat had still not sunk, because it could just be seen, a faint horizontal cinder, drifting into the blackness. The pink in the air was once more faint, and apparently turning to silver.

'The moon,' said Vin. 'The moon is drawing near and shining through the water.'

'The flowers go to meet the moon even more eagerly than the sun. You can hear them. Listen, Vin.'

They stood in silence.

'Sleep with me, Vin.'

'We sleep apart.'

It was as Tal had said 'We eat fruit'. And it proved to be equally true.

He stole through the empty rooms, seeing no one. Now very tired, he lowered himself on to a pile of cushions, but not the pile on which he had lain with Tal, and not in the same room.

None the less, he could not easily sleep. It came to him with a nervous shock, as happens after long absorption, to recall that, only that same morning, the island, the rock, as the women always named it, had been no more than an obsessive premonition, he no other than an ordinary mortal, eternally going through the motions. He felt now that in the very moment he had first sighted the rock, he had begun to change. And there was almost certainly no going back; not just in symbol or allegory, but in hard, practical terms, as the world deems them.

Grigg lay listening to the lapping, trickling waves; smelling the night flowers. Was it never cooler or colder than this? Never?

Grigg would not have believed it possible, as he reflected on his third morning, that he could live so happily without occupation. There were a few jobs to be done, but so far the women had done all of them, and Grigg had felt no real compunction, as the jobs had seemed to be as complete a part of their lives as breathing and as automatic and secondary. There had been almost nothing else: no reading, no struggling with the environment, no planning. Grigg had always truly believed that he, like others, would be lost without tasks; that pleasures pall; and that ease exhausts. Now he was amazed not only by the change in his philosophy, but by the speed with which it had come about. Obviously, one had to say, it was far, far too soon to be sure; but Grigg felt that obviousness of that kind was, as far as he was concerned, already a thing of the past. Indeed, nothing, probably nothing at all, was obvious any more. Perhaps it was that Tal and Vin had purged him of the obvious within little more than his first twelve hours on the island.

Not that anything of that kind had so far happened again. Vin had withdrawn into an att.i.tude of loving casualness, as Tal had done: the att.i.tude which characterised all three of the women, and which Grigg found especially charming, so that he had not even made any serious attempt to intensify things with either of them.

Later that day, the-three women had been singing. Now there was a pause, while they all lay listening to the waves and flowers singing for them.

'I am content,' said Grigg. 'But what do I do all day?'

Vin replied. 'The Greek Church says that work was the fruit of sin. Here the fruit is more wholesome.'

And, indeed, for a moment Grigg almost felt that he knew what the Garden of Eden had really been like: not the boring, moral attenuation of it; but the physical splendour, with flowers perfumed like these, with tiny, aquamarine birds, singing like honey, with indifference as to whether one was clothed or naked, with beauty to make it indifferent.

'The Greek Church,' said Lek, 'had once a prophet. "Take no thought for the morrow," he said; and spoke of lilies.'

'But not of lilies only,' said Grigg. 'Far from it, alas.'

'You must not expect a Greek prophet to be always wise. The Greeks used to decorate their houses with flowers, and sing songs. Now they buy tinsel from shops and listen to radios. The Greek radios are the noisiest in the world. It is not surprising that Greek prophets often make mistakes.'

'You can't prophesy,' said Tal, 'when there's such a noise that no one can hear you.'

'But the radio is new,' objected Grigg.

Lek would have none of it. 'The radio has been with us since the dawn of time,' she said.

'I believe that men thought of it when they took over the world,' said Tal.

'I prefer listening to you,' said Grigg. 'Sing me the song the sirens sang.'

So they did.

On one occasion, two rather unpleasant things happened on the same day.

The first was that Grigg, roaming about the citadel, as he was so often told he was perfectly free to do, came upon a shut door. It was in the bas.e.m.e.nt, or cellar, where he had previously hesitated to go: a sequence of low rooms, as it proved, sunk into the rock, which, quite unmodified, formed the irregular floor. The rooms were ill-lighted by small windows high in the walls. Grigg had tried the door, which was deep in the furthest rocky wall, and opened it, before he realised that it was the first door he had had to open at all; the others, as far as he could remember, having stood wide before him, at least when originally met with. He thought of Alfred de Musset's proverb: A door is either open or shut.

Inside, it was totally black; as thick, Grigg found himself thinking, as that wine. He hesitated to take even one step inside, but craned in, listening, and drawing the door close behind him. A long way below, as it seemed, was a noise: Grigg wondered if it could come from the bottom of a deep pit. At first he thought it sounded like the ebb and flow of the waves, and supposed there might be a rift in the rock; but then, in a curious way, it sounded more like a gigantic process of ingestion, as if, perhaps, a press were reducing a miscellany of organic matter to, as people say, pulp. The sound rose and fell, though something less than rhythmically, but never quite ceased; and every now and then a smell rose from the pit, if pit there was, a smell akin to the noise, in that it might have been of long-rotted tideless seaweed or, alternatively, of vaguer and terrestrial decomposition. The smell, though unpleasant, came only in strong whiffs, and Grigg wondered why it was apparently uncontinuous. Could something below be opening and shutting, appearing and withdrawing? Noise, smell, and darkness were plainly related to the formations of the rock, but Grigg found the place disturbing, as a child often finds a room he has entered without clear authority.

None the less, it was fascinating, and Grigg could not quite go, either: still like the transfixed child. He felt less than ever inclined to proceed further, but remained half-in, half-out, trying to peer through the blackness, but dreading at the same time. And, in the end, something terrible happened, or something which Grigg found terrible: it was as if the pit spoke. There was a sudden growling roar; a noise entirely different from what had gone before; and Grigg was sure that there were clear words. He could not understand them, and they did not sound like Greek, but words he knew they were, and addressed to him. The personal note was unmistakable, it was as if the pit and the darkness, the noise and the smell, had been watching him, and were now warning him off, and leaving no possibility of mistake.

Grigg reeled back and slammed the door. Stumbling over the rocky floor, he hastened into the sunlight. Even before he had reached the courtyard, he had begun to realise that he had merely been the victim of an aural hallucination an hallucination of a quite common type, indeed; almost the sort of thing staged for tourists visiting Mediterranean grottoes. When he found himself alone in the courtyard, he realised that he had nearly made a serious fool of himself. Even though the first terror had by then ebbed, there was no knowing what idiotic thing he might have said if there had been anyone to listen.

He climbed over the courtyard wall and stretched out on the rock finally to recover his wits.

That same evening, he heard the women shouting and laughing, out beyond the gateway to the harbour. He went to look. The sky was almost emerald green and they moved in magnificent silhouette against it. The three of them stood above the water's edge and below the harbour causeway, on the side of the island away from the basin. Grigg found the beauty of their movement incomparable. He stood watching them for some time, as if they presented a merely formal spectacle, of maenads on a vase, or ballet dancers, before he clearly realised that they were not merely throwing stones, but very much aiming at a target. He walked down the causeway, and stood behind them, looking over their heads.

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 att.i.tudes 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 encompa.s.sed 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 ma.s.sed against the rosy dimness at the other end of the flat roof was the rec.u.mbent shape of the male G.o.d. Lek stood looking at the G.o.d, 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 G.o.d,' 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 the 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.