Andada flourished, becoming immensely wealthy and acquiring several more wives and children. He did not trade along the route himself, but once a year, despite his increasing girth, he would have himself carried up into the desert, left there overnight in his litter, and fetched back next day. In his old age, knowing he would never make another such journey, he took his eldest grandson with him, having made the young man vow to repeat the trip each year but tell no one, ever, what he found there. The route remained active on these terms for several hundred years, until suppressed by a puritanical Sultan of Timbuktu who refused to countenance pacts with demons.
Centuries later, the great Victorian explorer, Sir Pauncefoot Smethers, mapping the pitilessly barren ranges near the eastern edge of the desert, found an anomalous fertile valley, uninhabited now but apparently once intensively cultivated, with every slope neatly terraced to catch the seasonal rains, and great cisterns for water storage against drought years. But there was no sign of any city such as would have excited the interests of the archaeologists of those days, so it was another hundred years before any came to enquire further. They were baffled by what they found.
Digging in middens they unearthed plenty of scraps and shards, mainly more or less crudely made from local materials but in a surprising number of styles, with parallels in the ware of places as far away as Armenia and Germany, but with a frequently recurring motif of a winged quadruped with the head of a bird. These could be dated on both stylistic and scientific grounds to any time from the start of the Christian era to around 1200 AD. In addition to these the trowels turned up a considerable number of small luxury items, all ultimately traceable as trade goods that might have passed through the ancient city of Dassun, long ago buried by the desert but even in its prime nine hundred untravellable miles away west.
As if that was not enough of a problem, one of the party, a birdwatcher, scanning the cliffs through binoculars at a time when the slant evening light picked out every detail of the surface, saw a strange carving on a stretch of sheer rock face. It was the outline of a man, five times life size—or rather of a god, for the iconography was clear, the brimmed helmet, the wand of healing, the winged boots. Mercury, or possibly Hermes, if the thing had been of Greek origin. Even the conventional half-smile of the god was discernible with good glasses. But the image had been carved with a technique unknown in the classical world, as far as anyone in the party could remember, every detail gouged into the rock with four parallel lines, as if carved with a four-pointed tool.
The inscription was on a surface at a different angle, not lit by the revealing light of sunset, and so was not noticed until later, by a young woman scanning the rock around the carving for some sign of how it might have got there. The two words, being in Latin, cleared up the question whether the work was Greek or Roman, but otherwise added further dimensions to the riddle. They were carved in yard-high letters using the same four-line technique as in the image of the god and read simply:
MEMENTO VARRONEM
Remember Varro.
Scops
TIME: a dozen or so centuries ago, when there was still a Christian Emperor in Byzantium.
PLACE: One of the several hundred little islands that were part of his Empire, though it is doubtful whether he had ever given this one a thought.
ACTION: A young man is throwing up.
Yanni was drunk, bewildered, miserable, lost in the pitch-black dark, shuddering and gasping. All he knew was that he was leaning forward, propping himself against the square edge of something stone, having just vomited everything out of his stomach in one reeking gush into the gap between his legs and the something.
A blinding glare. Immediately on top of it a deafening blast of sound. Lightning and thunder, he woozily recognised.
Two senses blasted away. Now there were only the taste and stink of his own vomit, and the touch of the stone something.
And a memory. In that instant of glare, the stone surface, flat as a table. On it a small, round, fluffy ball.
He straightened a little and gently swept a quivering hand across the top of the something. There. Even more gently, he eased his trembling fingers round the soft ball and picked it up. It squirmed slightly in his grasp but didn’t struggle. Through the diminishing fuzz of his deafness he heard a faint cheeping. Yes, he thought that was what he’d seen. A baby bird.
He straightened fully and cupped it carefully between both hands. It squirmed again. By feel he was able to tell what it wanted, so he loosened his grasp, allowing it to work its head between his thumbs. Once there it was still.
Carefully he established control over his balance and looked around. He had come to this place groping through the blind, pitch dark, but now to his surprise, though the cloud cover was dense and low and the thin moon must have long set, there seemed to be enough light for him to recognise where he was. The shapes were strangely fuzzy. He assumed that must be something to do with the wine—he’d never been drunk before—but there was no mistaking the tall pillars either side of him and the lintel above. This was the House of the Wise One. The thing he’d been leaning against while he vomited was the Bloodstone. And on a new-moon night, almost!
In a panic like that of nightmares he stumbled out between the pillars and down through the olive trees. Even under the unthinned olives—nobody tended or harvested the trees that had belonged once to the Wise One—there was enough light for him not to bump into their trunks. With a sigh of relief he turned up the path. As he did so it started to rain, a few huge drops, and then the longed-for downpour. The air filled with the smell of water on parched ground, more glorious even than the smell of fresh-baked bread. Carefully he shifted his grip until he could hold the bird one-handed and tuck it up under his smock, out of the wet. Hunching his body over it for further protection he hurried up the path. The night was now pitch dark again, but his legs knew the way. He wondered how, even drunk, they could have strayed from it.
The rain sluiced down. For himself he didn’t mind the drenching. His body was almost like part of the hillside, welcoming wetness. Besides, combined with the sudden bout of panic, the rain seemed to have cleared the fumes out of his head and now he could remember the horrible day, feeling from first light as if the island had a curse on it—heavy, dense air, sunless but oven-hot under the low clouds, tense with thunder that never did more than rumble overhead, while, as if to embody the curse, dark columns of desperately needed rain could be seen falling uselessly far out at sea, or sometimes coming nearer but then sidling past the steep fields and vineyards and tinder-dry scrubland, all dying from the unseasonal spring drought.
In that heat and oppression Yanni and his sister Euphanie had worked all morning in their terraced vineyard, Yanni checking over and repairing the trellises that supported the vines while Euphanie trained and tied in the fresh spring growth that would carry the grapes, and thinned out the unwanted shoots. They had rested unresting through the midday torpor, and returned to work. By the time Yanni had finished in the trellises and joined his sister, the thundery tension had given her one of her headaches, so sour that she could barely see for the pain of it. Despite that, she had kept getting further and further ahead along her own row, and then coming back to find what was holding him up.