“They’re just hollows, man!”
“Ah.” I stood looking at them in amazement. “Aye, like the tinkers scare children with at fairs.”
“That’s it. God, they had me scared enough.”
“No wonder Jeanna said the place was haunted.”
“She said that, did she now?” Druin pondered. “I’ll have another chat with yon lassie sometime. Anyway. Let’s go on. Keep the voice down a bit though.”
Neither of us had spoken loudly at all, but the slightest sound seemed magnified by the tunnel’s acoustics. We turned again and walked on, the pool of light from Drum’s torch enabling us to avoid the stones on the floor, and almost to ignore the apparitions they cast. Almost—for the still faces of the men and women depicted in this intangible statuary were caught in a moment of anguish and alarm, which, as they repeatedly loomed out of the dark and passed us—or passed through us—was enough to inspire, in me at least, a creeping sensation of disquiet. They looked uncannily like the lost souls, the damned of the Christian and Mohammadan superstitions, and it would have taken a stouter faith in Reason than mine to have walked that dark path unshaken. Irrational as it may be, I drew some comfort from the fact—known to any child old enough not to be frightened by the “ghost tent” at a fair—that hollows have no existence outside the light, and that, therefore, there was not an unseen crowd of them in the darkness behind us.
Presently we passed beyond their eerie company, and closer to the source of light at the end of the tunnel (an expression whose full force I for the first time appreciated). The air smelt damper, and at the same time fresher. We had reached the foot of the slope; the rocky floor of the tunnel here was flat. Druin switched off his torch and we proceeded very slowly and silently for the remaining few metres. The reason for the light’s vagueness turned out to be a sharp bend in the tunnel; we crept around it, keeping close to the outer side of the crook, rifles gripped (though not, I recalled at that very moment, loaded).
I nudged Druin and, taking a shell from my pocket, made to put it in the rifle. He shook his head, firmly, and I desisted, reassuring myself with the reflection that the pistols on our belts were ready for immediate use. We rounded the bend and found ourselves looking out at a brightly lit space of great size—at least twenty metres across, I guessed, and ten high. The lighting came from overhead panels, and seemed like sunlight. The walls curved over to the ceiling, all stone; a cavern then, and not a natural one. Its full length was not obvious from where we stood, at one corner of it.
It contained row upon row of stone troughs, connected with stepped open pipes through which rivulets of water trickled; some arranged to feed the troughs, others to carry away waste—or so I guessed, from the fact that no channel that came out of a trough went into another. I could make out half a dozen people working there, moving from trough to trough, making undetectable adjustments to the flow or sifting some powdery material in. They looked like hydroponic gardeners, and I thought at first glance that they were following this familiar trade, possibly for some recondite component of the tinkers’ food-supply. Then I noticed the contents of the troughs farther to my right, and—as I quickly realised—of more mature growth. They were growing seer-stones—I could distinctly see the larger ones lined up, five to a trough.
“Well, well,” said Druin, as though thinking, as I was: so that’s how it’s done! He slung his rifle on his shoulder, glanced at me and shrugged.
“No point in creeping about now,” he said.
With that he marched boldly out into the light.
10
Forget Babylon
They made their way back from the ossuary, ducking under arches and through hammered holes in the walls, into the church. Beneath pocked, defaced Orthodox murals a Turkish woman sold silver and jade and crochet. They ignored her gestured pitch, stepped outside, stalked past more stalls. Across the hollow from the hilltop where the church stood, a hillside of streets of empty, roofless stone houses fought the slow green entropy of birch and bramble. The light was blinding, the heat choking, the silence intense. The cicadas broke it, the birds, the skitter of a lizard.
Jason wandered around to the front of the church, traced a date in coloured pebbles on the paving.
4912,” he said. That’s when they finished it. How proud of it they must have been. Ten years later, they left. Voluntary population exchange, hah.”
Myra squatted in the sunlight, swigged Evian, sucked Marlboro. “Worse things have happened since.” The dry, ancient ribs and femurs in the ossuary hadn’t disturbed her as much as the fresh bodies she’d seen the evening she arrived.
“No doubt.” Jason shrugged. “But you know, this place, it makes me feel like I’m a Greek, for the first time in my life. Even a goddamn Christian.” He glanced at the hawkers a few tens of metres away, hunkered down beside her and spoke in a low, earnest voice. “As in, you know, Western. It’s a different culture. They don’t like us.”
Myra stared at him, shocked. Karmilassos, or Kaya, or Kayakoi, or whatever it was called (the Turks shamelessly called it “the Greek ghost village”) oppressed her too, but the CIA agent seemed to be drawing entirely the wrong moral from it.
This is what nationalism does,” she said. “And what that kind of thinking does. No, thank you. I don’t buy it.”
Jason looked somewhat hurt. He tilted his hat back and started skinning up a joint. His age—he claimed, and she believed, though who could now be sure?—was twenty-four. The last time she’d been seriously hassled by the CIA had been just over sixty years earlier. There was something awesome about a man following up a file so much older than he was.
(Last time: the man from the Agency had talked to her over lattes in a Starbuck’s off Harvard Square, in July 1998 when she was touting for medical aid to Kazakhstan’s fall-out victims; the campaign’s poster child had a cleft palate. A surgeon she’d met had set up the contact; someone who’d worked at the consulate in Almaty, he’d said, but she wasn’t fooled. She brought a tape-recorder, discreet in the pocket of her blouse. She expected someone who looked like a Mormon, a Man In Black. He was young, dark, bright; blueberry T-shirt, baggy camos. Called himself Mike.
They chatted about Britain. Mike was interested in Ulster. The Orangemen were marching at Drum-cree. Myra told him nothing he didn’t know; he knew more about her than she did, casually name-dropping demos she’d been on in the seventies as he idly turned the foreign news pages of the Boston Globe. They took their coffees outside, sat on a low wall while Myra had a smoke.
Mike nodded at the clenched black fist of a faded black power mural high on a wall on the other side of the street, above the map shop on the corner. “All that’s over,” he said. “No more arguments about the politics, Myra. All of the line-ups are new, now. We aren’t asking you to betray anyone, or anything. Just share information. We have mutual interests. You’re going to a dangerous place, after all.” (Ah, there it was, the threat.) “You never know when the right contacts might be crucial.”
“Indeed,” she said. She was staring abstractedly at a teenage girl with pink hair, sure she’d seen her before. She shook her head. “I’ll bear it in mind,” she said. “Here’s my mobile number.”