The Wine-Dark Sea (3 page)

The citadel had wooden gates, but they were open. Grigg hesitated. There was nothing to be heard but the soft sea and the bees. He listened, and entered the citadel.

The structure ranged round three sides of a stone-paved courtyard. The fourth side, which faced away from the bigger island, had either fallen or been bombarded into ruin, and then perhaps been demolished, so that now there was nothing left but high, rough edges of yellow masonry framing the view of the open sea, vast, featureless, and the colour of the sky. Again there were flowers everywhere, with a big
flowering
tree near the centre of the court. The glazed windows stood open, and so did several doors. Grigg did not care to enter: the place was clearly lived in, and he had no justification for being there.

Still he did not feel as yet like returning.

On the far side of the courtyard was another open
gateway
. Grigg passed cautiously through it. There seemed nothing to worry about. As usual, no one was to be seen. There were not even the farm animals he had half expected. There was nothing but a tangle of collapsed defence structures from past centuries, starting with an irregular wall which ringed this entire end of the island at little above sea-level. Between the many ruined buildings was dense, sharp grass, reaching above Grigg’s knees, and unpleasantly suggestive also of snakes. None the less, he ploughed on, convinced by now that this was his only chance, as he would never be able to find a reason for coming back.

A considerable garrison must have been installed at one time, or at least contemplated. The place was still like a maze, and also gave the impression, even now, of having been abandoned quite suddenly, doubtless when the Turks departed. There were still long guns, mounted and pointed out to sea, though drawn back. There were straggling,
dangerous
stacks of stone, and other obviously ancient heaps that might once have been heaps of anything. Grigg was far too hot and increasingly lacerated, but he determined to scramble on, as there was a circular tower at the end of the island, which, if climbable, might offer a more revealing panorama. Anyway, who that had imagination, could reach the island in the way Grigg had reached it, and not at least try to climb that tower?

When at long last attained, the tower seemed to be in almost perfect order. Grigg dragged open the parched door, and wound his way up and up through the spiders and other crepusculæ. The circular stone stair emerged through a now uncovered hole in the stone roof, so that the top steps were shapeless and treacherous beneath deep, lumpy silt which had drifted in from the atmosphere.

And then there was a revelation indeed. As Grigg emerged and looked out over the low battlements, he saw on the instant that another boat had entered the small harbour, almost a ship; in fact, without doubt,
the
ship. She was painted green, and her single blue sail had already been struck. Grigg perceived that now he could hardly depart from the island without explanations.

He descended the tower, not having studied the other features of the prospect as carefully as he otherwise would have done. As he stumbled back through the débris and thick, dry vegetation, he grazed and sliced himself even more than on the outward scramble. He felt very undignified as he
re-entered
the citadel, especially as he was hotter than ever.

Standing in the courtyard were three women. They all appeared to be aged between thirty and forty, and they all wore identical greeny-brown dresses, plainly intended for service.

‘Good afternoon,’ said one of the women. ‘Do you wish to stay with us?’ She had a foreign accent, but it struck Grigg at once as not being Greek.

‘Can one stay?’ It was a foolish rejoinder, but instinctual.

‘We do not run an hotel, but we sometimes have guests. It is as you wish.’

‘I am staying in the town. I couldn’t find out anything about the island, so I borrowed a boat to see for myself.’

‘How did you do that?’ asked one of the other women, in what seemed to Grigg to be the same foreign accent. She had dark hair, where the other two were fair, and a darker voice than the first speaker.

‘Do what?’

‘Borrow a boat. They would never lend you a boat to come here.’

‘No,’ said Grigg, certain that he was blushing under the singularly direct gaze of his interrogator’s black eyes. ‘It was difficult.’ After pausing for a second, he took a small plunge. ‘Why should that be?’

‘The Greeks are stupid,’ said the first woman. ‘Violent and vengeful, of course, too; quite incapable of government; but, above all, stupid. They can’t even grow a tree. They can only cut them down.’ She placed her hand on the bole of the beautiful flowering tree which grew in the courtyard. It was a rather fine movement, Grigg thought, much more like the Greeks of myth than any of the Greeks he could remember actually to have seen.

‘They certainly seem to have a particular feeling about this island.’

No further explanation was forthcoming. There was merely another slight pause. Then the first woman spoke.

‘Do
you
have any particular feeling about this island?’

‘I think it is the most beautiful place I have ever visited,’ replied Grigg, hardly knowing whether or not he exaggerated.

‘Then stay with us.’

‘I have to take back the boat. As I said, I have only borrowed it.’

The third woman spoke for the first time. ‘I shouldn’t take back the boat.’ She spoke with the same accent as the others, and her tone was one of pleasant warning.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Grigg.

‘You’ll be torn to pieces if you do.’

‘Oh, surely not,’ said Grigg, laughing uneasily.

‘Didn’t you steal the boat?’ The woman was smiling quite amicably. ‘Or at least borrow it without asking?’

‘As a matter of fact, yes.’

‘And haven’t you borrowed it so as to come here?’

‘Yes.’

‘They’ll tear you to pieces.’ She spoke as if it were the most foregone of conclusions; but, seeing that Grigg still doubted, she added in friendly seriousness, ‘Believe it. It’s true. If you leave us, you can’t go back. You’ll have to go somewhere else. A long way off.’

Inevitably, Grigg was impressed. ‘But tell me,’ he said, ‘why shouldn’t I – or anyone else – come here?’

The woman with the black eyes looked hard at Grigg. ‘They believe we’re sorcerers – sorcer
esses
,’ she corrected
herself
, tripping over the language.

Grigg was familiar with such talk among southern
peasants
. ‘And are you?’ he asked lightly.

‘Yes,’ said the dark woman. ‘We are.’

‘Yes,’ confirmed the first woman. ‘We are all sorceresses.’ There was about about the statement neither facetiousness nor challenge.

‘I see,’ said Grigg gravely; and looked away from them out to the open ocean, empty as before.

‘People who come her usually know that already,’ said the first woman; again in some simple explanation.

Grigg turned back to them and stared for a moment. They really were, he realised, most striking to see, all three of them: with beautifully shaped, muscular, brown limbs; strong necks and markedly sculptural features; and a casual grandeur of posture, which was perhaps the most impressive thing of all. And their practical, almost primitive, garments suited them wonderfully. The two fair women wore yellow shoes, but the dark woman was bare-footed, with strong, open toes. Grigg was struck by a thought.

‘Yesterday I saw your ship,’ he said. ‘In a way, it was why I came. Do you sail her yourself?’

‘Yes,’ said the first woman. ‘We have sometimes to buy things, and they will sell us nothing here. We built the boat on a beach in Albania, where no one lives. We took wood from the forests behind, which belong to no one.’

‘I believe that now they belong to the People’s Republic,’ Grigg said, smiling.

‘That is the same thing,’ said the woman.

‘I suspect that you are right about my little boat,’ said Grigg. ‘They tell you to act more regularly on impulse, but I often act on impulse, and almost always find that it was a mistake, sometimes a surprisingly bad one.’

‘Coming here was not necessarily a mistake,’ said the first woman. ‘It depends.’

‘I wasn’t thinking about that part of it,’ said Grigg,
convicted
of rudeness. ‘I like it here. I was thinking of what will happen when I go back – whenever I go back.’

‘One of us will guide you to somewhere you’ll be safe. Now, if you wish.’

‘Thank you,’ said Grigg. ‘But I only borrowed the boat and must really return it.’

‘Take it back during the night,’ said the third woman, with unexpected practicality.

And thus it was that Grigg decided to stay; at least until it was dark.

*

There was work to be done: first, the unloading of the ship. Grigg naturally offered to help, but the women seemed very cool about it.

‘The tasks are disposed for the three of us,’ said the woman who had spoken first, ‘and you would find it very hot.’

Grigg could not deny this last statement, as he was
already
perspiring freely, though standing still. None the less, he could hardly leave it at that.

‘As you are permitting me to intrude upon you,’ he said, ‘please permit me to help.’

‘You are not an intruder,’ said the woman, ‘but you are a stranger, and the tasks are for me and my sisters.’

She made Grigg feel so completely unqualified that he could think of nothing to say. ‘The house is open to you,’ continued the woman. ‘Go wherever you like. The heat is not good unless you are accustomed to it.’ The three women then went out through the harbour gateway and down the long flight of marble steps to the ship. Grigg looked after them as they descended, but none of them looked back.

*

Grigg entered through one of the doors and began to prowl about. There were many rooms, some big, some small, but all well proportioned. All were painted in different colours, all perfectly clean, all open to the world, and all empty. The whole place was beautifully tended, but it was hard to see for what, at least by accepted standards.

Grigg ascended to the floor above. The marble staircase led to a landing from which was reached a larger and higher room than any of the others. It had doubtless been the main hall of the citadel. Three tall windows opened on to small decorative balconies overlooking the courtyard. On a part of the floor against the wall opposite these windows were rectangular cushions packed together like mah-jong pieces, to make an area of softness. There were smaller windows high in the wall above them. There was nothing else in the room but a big circular bowl of flowers. It stood on the floor towards one corner, and had been hewn from pink marble. Grigg thought that the combined effect of the cushions, the flowers, and the proportions of the room was one of extreme luxury. The idea came to him, not for the first time, that most of the things which people buy in the belief that they are luxuries are really poor substitutes for luxury.

The other rooms on that floor of the citadel were as the rooms below, spotless, sunny, but empty. On the second floor there were several rooms furnished as the hall; with in one place a mass of deep cushions, in another a mass of flowers, and nothing else. Sometimes the flowers were in big iron bowls mounted on tripods; sometimes in reservoirs forming a part (but the dominant part) of a statuary group. On the first and second floors, the rooms led into one another, and most of them had windows, overlooking the larger island from which Grigg had come, the other overlooking the open sea. It was true that there were doors, in coloured wood; but all, without exception, stood open. There was nothing so very unusual about the building, agreeable though it was, and nothing in the least mysterious in themselves about its
appurtenances
, but before Grigg had completed his tour and emerged on to the flat roof, he had begun to feel quite depressed by the recollection of how he and his neighbours dwelt, almost immersed beneath mass-produced superfluities, impotent even as distractions.

On the roof was a single stone figure of a recumbent man, more than life-size. It reposed at one end of the roof with its back to the harbour, and it was from the other end of the roof that Grigg first saw it, so that he had a longish walk across the bare expanse before he came up to it, like a visitor to Mussolini in the great days.

The figure was, inevitably, of the kind vaguely to be termed classical; but Grigg doubted whether, in any proper sense, it was classical at all. It was not so much that it was in perfect order, as if it had been carved that same year, and glossy of surface, both of which things are rare with ancient sculpture, but rather the sentiment with which the figure was imbued, and which it projected as an aura, the compulsive implication of the artist’s work, if indeed there had ever been an artist.

It was a male of advanced years, or alternatively, perhaps, ageless, who reclined with his head on his right hand which rose from the elbow on the ground, a position which Grigg had always found to be especially uncomfortable. The hair straggled unkempt over the low cranium. The big eyes
protruded
above the snub nose, and from the thick lips the tongue protruded slightly also. There was a lumpy chin, unconcealed by a beard. The rest of the body was hirsute, long-armed, and muscular; hands, feet, and phallus being enormous. The man appeared to be lying on the bare and wrinkled earth; or possibly, it struck Grigg, on rocks. The folds in the stone ground of the statue (it seemed to be some other stone than the usual marble) were very similar to the folds in the rock which he had noticed as he walked up from the harbour. There was something compressed and drawn together about the man’s entire attitude, almost like a foetus in the womb, or an immensely strong spring, compressed against the moment of use. Grigg thought that the man did not much stare at him, though staring he certainly was, as right through him and beyond him, probably far beyond. As Grigg gazed back, a small spurt of dirty water bubbled from the man’s open mouth. It dribbled from his tongue and
discoloured
the forearm supporting his head. There must have been a pump to supply the fountain, and Grigg was not surprised, considering the obvious mechanical problems, that it did not work very well.