“Got over losing that dog of yours?” he asked.
Out of the corner of his eye Steff saw Ridiki look up, amused.
“Just about,” he said. “I missed her a lot at first.”
“Hurts a bit every time, and the first one’s worst. Ready for another one, d’you think? Atalanta’s litter’s ready to look at. Got a chap coming tomorrow to choose one, but you get first pick.”
“Oh, but . . . I thought they’d all be spoken for.”
“You’re family. I’d give you one myself, but your mother’s sent the money. She wants it from her.”
Steff bent as if to scratch his ankle while he thought, letting him look directly at Ridiki for help. Her ears were pricked with interest and her eyes amused.
He straightened.
“Thank you very much,” he said. “I’ll go and look at them when Nikos’s finished his rest.”
As he watched his uncle walk away it struck him that he hadn’t seen Ridiki looking that lively for quite some time. Over the last few weeks she’d been spending more and more of her time asleep, and when she was awake her interest in everything around her was somehow less intense than it used to be. He’d started to wonder whether she was tired because it was becoming more of an effort for to maintain the between-two-worlds balance she needed for these spells of wakefulness.
Did she think another dog would be company for her, liven her up? Or for him, and allow her to go back into the shadows where she belonged?
Though she knew Steff well, Atalanta was a jealous mother, and Nikos had to hold her while Steff picked the pups out of the box one by one, turned them over to check their sex, and set them on the floor of the kennel-shed as if to see how they reacted while Ridiki looked and sniffed them over. Their eyes were open but still blurred, and the black markings they would have as adults only just visible as darker patches fawn birth-fur. The first three were bitches. They looked lost and miserable and headed straight back to the box with the rubber-legged waddle of small pups.
The fourth was a dog. He stood his ground, peering around with an absurd expression of eager bewilderment. Steff held out a hand. The pup sniffed at it, gave it an experimental lick, and sucked hopefully at a fingertip. When the hand was withdrawn he continued sniffing, to Nikos’s eyes at empty air, and then attempted to lick something, reaching so far that he almost tumbled on his face as Ridiki withdrew her invisible nose.
But not invisible to the puppy.
“Seen a ghost,” said Nikos, laughing. “You get that with some dogs. Hera, now, and she’s his—let’s see—great-grandmother.”
“Can I have him?” said Steff. “I don’t want another bitch, not so soon after Ridiki.”
“Good choice. You’ve the makings of a sound dog there. Mind you, he’ll look a bit like something out of a circus, those markings. There’s some wouldn’t want that.”
Steff hadn’t paid much attention to the markings, merely registering that the dog would be mainly the Deniakis golden-yellow, with a few black bits. Now he saw that these patches, still no more than a light golden-orange, were going to darken into five almost perfect circles, three on the left flank and two on the right, like a clown’s horse in a picture book. He was a comical little scrap.
“What can I call him?” he asked. “Did the old Greeks have clowns?”
“Yes, you’ve got a problem there—not a lot of fun, that lot. Hold it. There was that fellow wrote a play about frogs. Aristo something. Aristotle?”
“I’ll ask Papa Alexi. I could call him Risto.”
Three months later came the start of the grape harvest. School was over for the next few weeks, so Steff helped all morning in the vineyard—a cheerful time, with a lot of laughter and chat between the regular farmhands and the casual pickers from the town. But it was clearly going to be a hot and tiring afternoon, and he’d not been looking forward to it when, just as everyone was rousing themselves from the midday break, Nikos said “They’ve more than enough hands here, Steff. They won’t miss two of us. Like to show me how that dog of yours is getting on?”
This was part of the deal. Not wanting to see a good dog spoiled, Nikos had been a bit reluctant to let Steff train Risto on his own, but he’d agreed to let him do the first stages, learning the simple pipe calls and so on, and see then to see how it had gone. Risto was still more puppy than dog, and still a bit of a clown, but he was a quick and eager learner, and had Ridiki to show him what was expected of him.
He was also a show-off—part of his clownishness—and in the dogs’ eyes Nikos was the leader of the human pack, and so he really laid it on for him, quivering with excitement as he sat waiting for the last note of each call and then darting into action. He finished with a theatrically stealthy stalk of a rock with a sheepskin draped across it, moving left and right, crouching and moving on, exactly on each call.
Nikos laughed aloud.
“Pretty good,” he said. “He’s got the instinct in him, and then some. Never seen a pup that far on. Like to try him on a few live ones?”
He whistled for his own dog, Ajax, and led the way up to the rough pastures above the vineyards. Risto watched, thrilled and eager, while Ajax cut out three staid old ewes who knew what was expected of them almost as well as he did. Then, at first with Ridiki to guide him but soon on his own, he raced off to team up with Ajax and move the patient sheep across the slope, between two large boulders, round and back before releasing them. He returned panting, delighted with his own achievement, lapping up all the praise Steff could give him.
“Don’t overdo that,” said Nikos. “He’s big-headed enough for three dogs already. Pretty good, mind you—good as I’ve seen. I’ll tell your uncle you’re doing fine. That’s enough for now. He’s only a pup still, and he’s all in. Not worth going back to the vineyard. Give yourselves a break.”
So Steff went back to the farm house and settled on a rock in the shade below the terrace to begin his weekly letter to his mother, with Ridiki and Risto curled up either side of him. The evenings were earlier now and the sky was just starting to redden as he gazed out over immense distances of the coastline beneath the sinking sun. Above him on the terrace some of the women were getting things ready for the party Deniakis held every year to celebrate the start of the grape picking. A happy and peaceful evening, but at the same time full of the feel of coming change, of the world readying itself for winter. The bustle on the terrace increased. The first of the workers began to arrive. Risto woke.
Puppy fashion, he’d forgotten his weariness, couldn’t imagine such a state was possible for him. He looked up at Steff. Not a hope. But there was Ridiki beyond him, still asleep. He pranced round, springy with pent energy, crouched an inch from her nose and snorted. She opened an eye, raised her head and yawned. He rose onto his hind legs and pawed the air. Ridiki looked at Steff—if she’d have been human she’d have shrugged resignedly, Kids!—and she was off, streaking away down the slope into the orchard, jinking in and out between the trees, with Risto after her, sometimes on her tail, sometimes careering on after one of her sudden full-speed turns, braking so frenziedly that at one point he went tumbling head over heels, and then racing to make up the lost ground.
At that speed they couldn’t keep it up for more than a few minutes and then came back side to side to Steff and sat panting, tongues lolling out, but still bright-eyed with the fun of what they’d been doing. Somebody coughed overhead and he looked up.
It was his uncle’s new wife, Maria, holding her baby perched on the terrace wall to watch Risto racing around the orchard. There were people who said her mother was a witch and had put a spell on Deniakis to make him fall for someone who wasn’t that young or that pretty, or rich enough to bring him that much of a dowry. But Aunt Nix had told Steff this was nonsense, and they’d been lovers for several years.