Papa Alexi was Steff’s great-uncle, his grandfather’s brother. Being a younger son he’d had to leave the farm, and look for a life elsewhere. He wasn’t anyone’s father, but people called him Papa because he’d trained as a priest, but he’d stopped doing that to fight in the Resistance, and then in the terrible civil wars that had followed. That was when he’d stopped believing what the priests had been teaching him, so he’d spent all his working life as a schoolmaster in Thessaloniki. He’d never married, but his sister, Aunt Nix, had housekept for him after her own husband had died. When he’d retired they’d both come back to live on the farm, in the old cottage where generations of other returning wanderers had come to end their days in the place where they’d been born.
The farm could afford to house them. There were other farms in the valley, as well as twenty or thirty peasant holdings, but Deniakis was much the largest, with Nikos and three other farmhands, and several women, on the payroll, working a large section of the fertile land along the river, orchards and vineyards, and a great stretch of the rough pasture above them running all the way up to the ridge.
Steff found Papa Alexi as usual under the vine, reading and drowsing and waking to read again. Today Aunt Nix was sitting opposite him with her cat on her lap and her lace-making kit beside her.
“You poor boy,” she said. “I know how it feels. It’s no use anyone saying anything, is it?”
Steff shook his head. He didn’t know how to begin. Papa Alexi marked his page with a vine leaf and closed the book.
“But you wanted something from us all the same?” he said.
“Well . . . are there any caves up in the mountains near here? Big ones, I mean. Not like that one on the way to Crow’s Castle—you can see right to the back of that without going in.”
“Not that I know of,” said Papa Alexi.
“What about Tartaros?” said Aunt Nix. “That’s a really big, deep cave, Steff. It’s on the far side of Sunion.”
“Only it isn’t a cave, it’s an old mine,” said Papa Alexi. “Genuinely old. Alexander the Great paid his phalanxes with good Tartaros silver. There were seams of the pure metal to be mined in those days. You know perfectly well you persuaded me to go and look for silver there once.”
“Only you got cold feet when it came to crossing into Mentathos land. We were actually looking down at the entrance, Steff . . .”
“You wouldn’t have been the one Dad thrashed. Anyway, you knew it was a mine, back then.”
“Of course I did. But that doesn’t mean it can’t have been a perfectly good cave long before it was ever a mine. Nanna Tasoula told me it used to be one of the entrances to the underworld. There was this nymph Zeus had his eye on, only his brother Dis got to her first and made off with her, but before he could get back into the underworld through one of his regular entrances Zeus threw a thunderbolt at him. Only he missed and split the mountain apart and made an opening and Dis escaped down there. That’s why it’s called Tartaros. Nanna Tasoula was full of interesting stories like that, Steff.”
“And you believe in all of them,” said Papa Alexi. “You know quite well it was a mine.”
They wrangled on, deliberately trying to keep Steff amused, he guessed. He tried to pay attention in a dazed kind of way. All he knew was that he had to go and look at the cave, if only to get rid of the dream. It couldn’t be helped that it was on Mentathos land. There’d always been bad blood between Deniakis and Mentathos, and it had been worse since the troubles after the war, when some of the young men had fought on opposite sides, and terrible things had been done. Papa Alexi made the point himself.
“Don’t you go trying it, Steff,” he said. “It’s not only Mentathos being a hard man, which he is, and he’d be pretty rough with you if you were found. He’d make serious trouble with your uncle. His father sold the mineral rights to a mining company. They came, and cleaned out any silver there was to be had. On top of that they’ve still got the rights, fifty-odd years. No wonder he’s touchy about it. Last thing he needs is anyone finding silver again.”
“Steff just wants to look,” said Aunt Nix. “It’s to do with your dream, isn’t it, Steff? Tartaros. I bet you that’s where it came from, your dream. Eurydice, after all. You remember the story, Steff . . .”
He barely listened.
Of course he knew the story, because of the name, though he hadn’t thought about it till now. Ridiki had already been named when he’d got her, so in his mind that’s who she was, and nothing to do with the old Greek nymph she was named from. But that didn’t stop Aunt Nix telling him again what a great musician Orpheus had been in the days when Apollo and Athene and the other gods still walked the earth; and how he’d invented the lyre, and the wild beasts would come out of the woods to listen enchanted to his playing; and how when his wife Eurydice had died of a snakebite he’d made his way to the gates of the underworld and with his music charmed his way past their terrible guardian, the three-head dog Cerberus, and then coaxed Charon, the surly ferryman who takes dead souls across the river Styx into Tartaros, the underworld itself; and how at last he’d stood before the throne of the god Dis, the iron-hearted lord of the dead, the one living man in all that million-peopled realm, and drawn from his lyre sounds full of sunlight, and the sap of plants and trees, and the pulse of animal hearts, and the airs of summer.
“Then Dis’s heart had softened just the weeniest bit,” said Aunt Nix, “and he told Orpheus that he’d got to go back where he belonged, but Eurydice could follow him provided he didn’t look back to make sure she was there until he stood in the sunlight, or she’d have to go back down to the underworld and he’d never see her again. So back Orpheus went, across the Styx, past the three snarling heads of Cerberus, until he saw the daylight clear ahead of him. But then he couldn’t bear it any more, not knowing whether Eurydice was really there behind him, and he looked back over his shoulder to check, and there she was, plain as plain, but he wasn’t yet out in the sunlight, and so as he turned to embrace her she gave a despairing cry and faded away into the darkness and he never saw her again.”
“I really don’t think . . .” said Uncle Alexi.
“Nonsense,” said Aunt Nix. “Steff only wants to look. He can do that from above. Like we did, Lexi. You go up the track toward the monastery and turn right at the old sheepfold, and then . . .”
Steff listened with care to her directions.
“Really, this isn’t a good idea,” said Papa Alexi when she’d finished.
“Please,” said Steff. “It’s not just I want to. I . . . I’ve got to.”
Papa Alexi looked at him and sighed.
“All right,” he said. “Start early. It’s a long way, and it’ll be hot. Take enough water. There’s a stream a little after you turn off at the sheepfold—you can refill your bottle there. You probably won’t be back till after dark. Scratch on my shutter when you’re home.”
He spent the evening writing his Sunday letter to his mother. She lived in Athens, with her new family. He didn’t blame her, or even miss her most of the time. She had a little shop selling smart, expensive clothes to rich women. That was what she’d been doing when she’d met his father, who’d worked for the government in the Foreign Ministry. Athens was where she belonged.
Steff didn’t remember his father. When he was still a baby some terrorists had tried to set off a bomb under the Foreign Minister’s car, but they’d got the wrong car, the one Steff’s father had been in, so he didn’t remember him at all. He’d no idea what he had thought about things. But he’d been a Deniakis, so Steff was pretty sure he’d felt much the same as he himself did, that he belonged on the farm.