There was no need to look round. She had slipped past him and was already there, waiting for him in the last of daylight.
Ridiki, eyes bright, ears cocked, tail high, delighted to see him. She was wearing her Sunday collar. He dropped to his knees and held out his arms. She pranced towards him, but stopped just out of reach. He shuffled forward and she drew away. Her ears twitched back a little and hackles stirred—not a threat but a warning. There were no footprints in the patch of dust where she’d been standing
“I mustn’t touch you . . .?” he whispered.
Her ears pricked, her hackles smoothed, and the look of anxiety left her eyes.
“Can you come home with me—part of the way at least? The man—Charon, I call him—says I’ve got to get out before the men come with the mules. I suppose they move the silver after dark.”
He’d always talked to her when they were alone together, telling her his thoughts, explaining what he was up to. He didn’t expect her to understand, but now for answer she turned and trotted off down the cleft. He followed. At the river she turned confidently to the left, but stayed on the track further than he’d have done. But she seemed to know what she was doing. This was a much easier climb than the route he’d taken down would have been, and towards the top they slanted to the left and so reached the crest of the ridge very close to where Steff had started down, but on the other side of the cleft.
The moon was rising, near to the full. He was interested to see that Ridiki cast a shadow, dark and definite enough, though somehow less so than the hard-edged black shadows of the rocks around. The shadow of a shadow, so to speak, for she herself was a shadow, a shadow somehow made solid. For him at least. He wondered whether anyone else would be able to see her.
As soon as they started down the moon was hidden by the mass of the ridge behind them, but Ridiki still seemed able to find the way. He could just pick out her yellow rump as she led him down twisting animal tracks till they came out on one of the many shepherds’ trails that crisscrossed the mountainside. From here on he knew the way, and without being told she dropped back to her usual place close behind him with her muzzle level with his left knee.
His heart lightened. So she hadn’t just been making sure he reached a point from which he could get safely home. She was coming with him.
Tired though his body was he strode home so happy that he barely noticed the journey. Even then it was well after midnight when he scratched on Papa Alexi’s shutter. The old man must have been sitting up waiting for him. He opened the door almost at once, a pale, stooped figure in his long nightshirt.
“Not bad,” he said. “I thought you’d be later. Get done what you wanted?”
“Yes. I was very lucky. It was all right. You didn’t tell anyone?”
“Waiting till morning. Good night, then.”
“Good night. And thank you very much.”
Over the next weeks he slowly became used to Ridiki’s strange existence, learning to think of her as his dog, there, real, as she always had been, though no one else on the farm could see her. Nor could any of the other dogs, though old Hera, stone deaf and almost blind, sniffed interestedly at her when she greeted her and thumped her scabby tail on the ground. She knew. Ridiki seemed to mind about the dogs not seeing her far more than she did about the people, and made a point of visiting her every day.
Invisibility had its advantages. She could now come indoors, and slept weightless at the foot of Steff’s bed. She trotted down to school with him and curled up under his bench or found safe corners to lie in so that she could still be nearby while he was doing stuff with his friends. At first he’d been worried about what might happen if someone happened to walk into her or trod on her, but she was careful not let it happen. As the days went by he came to realise that all the time she was with him she was performing an extremely difficult feat, a balancing act on a precarious rope bridge between the world of shadows and the world of flesh and blood. Any sudden jolt might toss her down into the nowhere between those worlds, any extra strain might unravel the fastening at one end or the other. A touch from his hand would do it.
So mostly she behaved as any other dog would have done. He had trained her not to eat anything except from his hand or from her bowl, but he had no shadow food to give her so she fended for herself, stalking shadow mice around the farm, or pouncing on small shadow creatures among the tussocks beside a path, or finding shadow scraps behind the kitchen door. Once, down on the shore, she dragged out something heavy from between two rocks and lay in a patch of shade holding one end of the invisible object between her forepaws and growling contentedly as she gnawed at the other end. She drank from a shadow stream that seemed to run down the far side of orchard. Steff asked Papa Alexi whether there’d ever been a stream there, and he said yes, but it had been diverted fifty years ago to water the fruit terraces. She peed and shat like a normal dog. Her faeces glistened a little while in the sun, but before they’d begun to dry and darken they faded into the ground.
She came with Steff when the man he thought of as Charon took him to meet his wife, Sophie, in a dark little bar in a backstreet, where none of the Deniakis or Mentathos people were likely to see them together. Charon fetched food and drink, but just had a glass of beer and left.
“Isn’t this wonderful!” said Sophie as soon as he’d gone. “Secret meetings again! And you look just like him, that age! My heart stopped when I saw you.”
They talked about Steff’s father—she told him a lot he didn’t know—and then about Steff himself, and his mother and his other family—she seemed to want to know everything—until it was time for her to catch the Mentathos truck home.
“Same again next week?” she said as she rose.
“Oh . . . Yes, please. If you like.”
It became a pattern for the next few weeks. She was like the cheerful and understanding aunt he’d never had. He didn’t know what she got out of it, but she obviously enjoyed their meetings. He told Papa Alexi and Aunt Nix about them, knowing they wouldn’t pass it on, but he didn’t expect anyone else at the farm to notice that he was getting back late on Wednesdays. He was wrong.
It wasn’t even a Wednesday. He got home at his usual time, just as the informal mid-day meal on the vine-shaded terrace was breaking up for everyone to go and have their afternoon rest. He was greeted by a shout from Mitsos.
“Hey, Steff. Where’d you get to yesterday? Not the first time, neither. Meeting some girl, I bet, down in the town. Tell us about her. Plump little piece, just coming ripe? You lucky little sod!”
Being Mitsos, he was aiming for maximum embarrassment, and a couple of months back he’d have got it. But thanks to Tartaros, and Ridiki’s return, and most of all to his meetings with Sophie, something had changed inside Steff. A joke Sophie had made to Charon a couple of weeks back even told him how to answer.
He picked up a chunk of bread, bit off a corner, chewed, and tucked it into his cheek.
“Dead wrong, Mitsos,” he said. “She’s a married woman.”
He chewed a bit more and added, “. . . and her husband isn’t jealous.”
Everyone laughed, partly at the joke, partly at Mitsos, but mainly with surprise at quiet, withdrawn, anxious Steff coming up with something like that. His uncle caught his eye and gave a nodded of approval—he thought boys should be able to stand up for themselves. Even so, it was a surprise when he returned after everyone else was gone, and Steff was finishing his meal, with Ridiki curled on the paving beside him. Steff rose. His uncle gestured to him to sit, did so himself, and picked up an olive.