Yanni stopped, knelt, and probed with a finger into the back of his boot, as if easing out a pebble that had slipped in there. The change of angle brought into view a patch of starlit hillside beyond the trees. Silhouetted against it was the shape of a man. He couldn’t tell who it was, but Thanassi had left the tavern early.
He rose and climbed on. The man didn’t try to follow him, and Scops rejoined him further up the slope.
“See you Tuesday,” he said as he left after the third evening.
“Make it Thursday,” said Kosta. “Tuesday’s a new-moon night. Tavern’s closed.”
“Oh, yes, of course,” he said.
Nobody left home on new-moon night, if it could be helped, certainly not just to go to the tavern. So they might as well close.
He wasn’t followed home. And still he had learnt nothing new, worth knowing.
He started to sleep badly, falling off almost before he lay down but then waking only two or three hours later and lying through the small hours, tense with the inner certainty that events were moving towards some climax while he had no way of knowing what it would be or when it would happen. New-moon night came, and he woke as usual. No, even earlier than usual. Something had woken him. It came again, a scratching at his shutter and a gentle prrp, prrp. This had never happened before, not at his bedroom window or this hour. He rose and opened the shutter and Scops was there. She didn’t greet him as usual, but simply turned herself round and sat peering out at the night. Nor did she respond to his touch, but instead half spread her wings and leaned forward as if to launch herself out, then stopped the movement and turned her head to look at him.
“You want me to come out?” he whispered. “On a new-moon night? And it’s almost midnight.”
“Prrp,” she said.
Well, why not? He wasn’t going to sleep, and as for it being new-moon night, if Scops was there . . .
He rose, found his clothes by touch, dressed, picked up his boots, and went to the back door. There he hesitated whether to tell Euphanie what he was doing, but no sound came from her room and he decided against it. Perhaps he’d only be ten minutes or so . . .
Still on stockinged feet he climbed the path. Scops was waiting for him on the gatepost. Carefully he undid the chain, and knelt to put on his boots. Scops slipped onto his shoulder as he rose.
“Where to now?” he asked.
She told him simply by gazing down the track, which had the effect of casting a beam of owl light along it, so he headed as if for the harbour. But halfway there she turned her gaze aside and directed him into a goat track that led him up an outlying spur of the central mountain of the island. Twice she left him to stand in the dark while she prospected for paths through the scrub along which he would be able to walk. They crossed the ridge and headed down beside a remnant of the old forest that had once covered the island, but had been felled to build the galleys of the Romans. They followed a stream downhill, turned aside yet again for short climb, crossed a lesser ridge and halted.
Ahead, black as the pupil of an eye, lay the sea. Nearer, with a few lights showing round the harbour, the crinkled shoreline of the island. Nearer still, immediately down the plunging slope, the House of the Wise One, invisible in its own natural bowl from anywhere but the hillside where he stood.
The glow of a small fire lit the space between the pillars, and grotesque shapes, small with distance, were moving around it. But for the owl light he couldn’t have known they were there except when they passed directly between him and the fire. He stared. A sudden chill had wrapped him round, though the night was warm for October. Demons, woken by the New Moon to dance in the House of the Wise One? They were animal-headed, as demons might be, though the heads seemed large for the bodies, and they stood on their hind legs and the bodies were human or part-human. Not animals, then. Humans . . .? A shape, a known shape, strutted past the flames. Stavros, with the head of a horse covering the upper part of his face and a horse-tail swinging behind. And the one with the limp must be Thanassi, and the skinny one old Dmitri. Yanni numbered the others off. They were all there, and at least four more, two of whom looked as if they might be women.
A white goat was tethered to a pillar at the end of the temple opposite the Bloodstone. It paid no attention to the dancers, but stood with its head bowed, as if it had fallen asleep.
At first the dancers simply circled the fire with slow, prancing steps, but soon they began to dance more vigorously, leaping and stamping their feet, and throwing their masked heads violently back and forth. He could hear faint whoops and cries.
The dance went on for a long while. The pace quickened and quickened. They should have been utterly exhausted by now, but they didn’t seem to tire. And then, suddenly, they halted and turned towards the far end of the temple, where the goat was tethered. A gap opened on that side of the circle.
Out of the darkness beyond the pillars paced a new figure, naked apart from a short leather skirt. The mask was that of a bull and, unlike those of the dancers, covered the whole head. The body was a man’s body, but half again as tall as any of the dancers. Flesh and hide were the colour of polished brass, and glinted like brass in the light of the fire. In his right hand the newcomer carried a flat dish with a few small objects on it. The dancers greeted him with a wild yodelling call, so loud that it carried clearly up to where Yanni and Scops watched. They crowded round him with upraised arms, and then fell back. There was a long pause. Nobody moved. When at last the Bull-man stepped forward, the others restarted their dance, slowly circling him and moving with him as he paced up to the fire.
Here he halted again, took something from the dish, and with a sower’s gesture sprinkled it onto the fire, which instantly flared up into a white blaze, that died almost as quickly away. When it was gone the whole space between the pillars was filled with a dull red glow that didn’t fade like the flames, but persisted, unchanged. Compared with the owl light of the dark beyond, Yanni could now see everything within the temple as clearly as he might have done in an early dusk. He watched the Bull-man pace round the fire and on up the temple towards the Bloodstone, the dancers moving with him, circling faster and faster, dancing themselves into a renewed frenzy, their repeated calls echoing up the hillside. The Bull-man reached and rounded the Bloodstone. He laid the dish down on it, turned to face the fire and stood still.
Two of the dancers, the ones Yanni thought were Dmitri and Thanassi, broke from the wheeling circle, pranced back down the temple, unleashed the goat, tipped it, unresisting, onto its side, lifted it by its legs, ran back up the temple and swung it up onto the Bloodstone, where they stretched it out and held it down. It made no effort at all to struggle or free itself.
The Bull-man picked up a flask from the dish and with a steady, ritual movement poured something into a bowl. He put the flask back on the dish and picked up what looked like a knife or dagger, paused again, and raised his head and arms towards the stars. The blade of his dagger glinted orange in the red light.
He opened his great bull mouth. The dancers reeled back. A moment later Yanni heard the thunder of his bellow, shaking the hillside. He seemed to have grown even larger, now twice the size of any of the dancers. Yanni stared at him openmouthed. He had seen the huge muscles of the neck flex. He had seen the mouth open. And that roar could not have come from any human lungs. The creature’s head was no mask. It was his own.