“Wow!” he gasped, and staggered against the table by the door, slipping the glamour-hidden goblet, still full of the drugged brandy, out of sight behind the fruit bowl that stood on it.
“Bit much for a young head,” said Thanassi. “Maybe we better see him home after all.”
They all rose together. Two of them took Yanni by the elbows and led him out through the door. Behind him he could hear a sudden bustle of activity. The masks and costumes, he thought, and timber they’d need for the fire, and so on. An owl called from a tree in the garden, prrp, prrp.
How long, he wondered, before the drug would have taken hold? Better give it a few more minutes. But he was already supposed to be drunk, so he stumbled, and swayed against Thanassi, who roughly shoved him upright while Dmitri on the other side yanked him into place. Some of the men had lanterns, but once they were beyond the occasional lit windows of the town the night became very dark. In silence they started up the track to Crow Castle. Yanni let his head droop and his feet begin to drag. The men holding him grunted in satisfaction and shifted their grip so that they were now carrying some of his weight. With mild surprise he discovered that he wasn’t merely acting drunk and drugged. Unconsciously he had been using the goddess’s glamour actually to be those things, while still inside the half-stupefied young man who was climbing the track there was the true, hidden Yanni controlling the illusion, watching its effect and waiting to act.
Twenty minutes above the town they stopped and closed up. Two of the lantern carriers went to the front and led the way into the half-overgrown track that Yanni, drunk, must have stumbled up that first dreadful night to find the baby Scops. Yes, he thought, all this must have been foreseen by the goddess. Though it wasn’t far, it was a stiff climb, and most of them were panting with the effort by the time they emerged from among the olives and saw, faint-lit by lantern light against the utter black beyond, the squat pillars of the House of the Wise One.
The men put down what they’d been carrying. Yanni’s two minders switched their grip to let Stavros strip off his cloak, and he was able to slip his hand into the pouch and grasp his bit of olive branch and hold it against his wrist while they pulled the sleeve free. None of the three perceived it.
By now he was giggling almost uncontrollably under the influence of the imaginary drug. They stripped off the rest of his clothes and led him naked into the House. Stavros folded the cloak into a pad, and Dmitri settled him onto it and ran a cord under his arms and lashed him to a pillar.
Dazedly he watched Iorgo and Constantine, already in their costumes, build and light the fire with a spill from one of the lanterns. The timber was bone dry and blazed up almost in an instant. The others came back, costumed and masked. There were several more than had been at Kosta’s. At least two of them were women.
The masks changed them all. They were no longer people, nor animals either, but something else. They seemed to move differently, to hold themselves differently, from anything that belonged in the workaday world. The one who had been Nicos sounded a rattle of taps on the little drum hanging from a loop round his neck. The creatures stiffened and waited. The taps began again, became louder, steadied to a thumping double beat, and the creatures began to dance. At first they moved in slow, even steps, circling the fire, but soon the beat quickened to a jerky pulse, somebody double-stamped a foot, someone else whooped, and now they were circling faster, stamping on the ancient flagstones, jerking their heads back and forth, clapping out cross-rhythms, whooping and calling to summon their dark god, while their fantastic flame-cast shadows flickered across the line of pillars beyond them.
Yanni felt his own body beginning to tremble, tense with the urge to rise and join the frenzy. No, he told it, not yet, wait.
The dance went on and on, fiercer, wilder, madder. Rapt in their ecstasy the dancers could not tire. And yet, in an instant, in response to no sign or call, they halted, motionless apart from their heaving lungs.
In that silence the Bull-man stalked into the temple.
He stopped barely a yard from where Yanni was lashed. He was no masked man. He was huge. His shoulders were above the upstretched arms of any of the dancers who came whooping and crowding round him, and then fell back into a ring, silent apart from faint eager whimperings, a pack of dogs waiting to be fed. The firelight rippled across the brass of his body. The shadows in its folds and clefts were black as the new-moon night. He stank of animal essences. The pillars of the temple seemed to pulse and waver with his presence, as if Yanni had been seeing them through rising air.
Everything had changed with his coming. The glamour that had protected Yanni so easily this far with its solid-seeming illusions, giving him an almost contemptuous confidence in his ability to outwit the men, seemed to weaken and thin to a gauzy veil. If the god had glanced down at him it would have melted away. But he would not.
“The power flows into him in the instant of the victim’s death,” the goddess had said. “To look at the victim before that would be to anticipate that moment, and so dilute its power.”
The god paid no more heed to the dancers than he did to Yanni, but stood gazing out above their heads while they waited imploring. At last he took a heavy pace forward, and another, and another. The drum rattled. The dancers reformed their ring and began slowly to circle their god, the circle moving with him as he paced up the temple and stood outlined against the fire. Now they ringed both fire and god.
With a sweep of his arm the god strewed a handful of dark grains onto the flames, and a white blaze flared, too brilliant to look at, and died as quickly away, leaving the space enclosed by the pillars filled with a smoky red glow that seemed to come not from the fire but from the stones of the temple themselves. The air within that space reeked with a heady odour, sickly sweet, dazing the senses.
Yanni concentrated his will and forced it away, at the same time freeing both body and mind from his own illusion of drugged torpor, and became fully alert, himself. He felt the glamour the goddess had given him return, though weakened. Perhaps it would still do, he thought. Provided the brass god did not look at him until the moment came.
As before, the drumbeat quickened, the dancers spun faster and faster, stamping, prancing more and more wildly, whooping and calling, flinging heads and arms, thrashing themselves into a mindless, ferocious ecstasy, an agony of lust for the blood of the coming sacrifice.
The god reached the Bloodstone, stalked round it, turned, laid his dish in front of him and waited, massive, impassive, his great beast eyes glinting orange in the red glare as he stared out over the line of pillars at the darkness beyond. Thanassi and Dmitri broke from the spinning circle and raced back down the temple. Dmitri knelt, gripped Yanni by the ankles and pinned them to the floor. Thanassi untied the rope and reached for his wrists.
Yanni was ready for him, gripping in his right hand the stub of side-branch of the olive he’d cut, so that the short length of the main branch lay directly above his wrist. Though weakened, the illusion held, just, and made it seem to Thanassi that he took hold of the wrist itself, real not simply to his eyesight but to his touch as well, real skin, real flesh and bone against his palm and fingers. Yanni clung to the side-branch as they lifted him and raced back past the fire. The ring of dancers opened to let them pass, and they swung him up onto the Bloodstone and spread-eagled him in front of their god.
The god had not moved. This was the moment of extreme danger. Though the god might not look at Yanni directly, the illusory wrist that Thanassi held must lie near the edge of his vision, and surely, if he should glance this way . . .