“I would love one. I would like about six drinks,” said the Saint wistfully. “Tall ones, ice-cold. I would not be fussy about what they were. Orange juice, beer, cider, wine, tomato juice, even water. Do you have a refrigerator in a cave anywhere near by?”
“You can have some of my water if you like.”
The lad reached behind him and swung into sight a skin bottle that had been hanging down his back, suspended from a loop of gray string. He pulled the cork from the neck and extended the flask to the Saint, who took it in a state of numbed shock.
“And I thought you were kidding...” Simon raised the bottle to his lips and let a trickle of hot, sour, but life-giving wetness moisten his tongue and flow down his throat. At any other time it would have been almost nauseating, but in his condition it was like nectar. He sipped slowly, to extract the maximum humidity from it and to give himself the impression of a prolonged draught without actually draining the container. He returned the skin still more than half full, and sighed gratefully.
“Mille grazie. You may have saved my life.” On the other hand, the youth might equally prove to be a contributor to the Saint’s death. There was no way to make him forget the encounter, short of knocking him on the head and pitching his body into the nearest ravine, which would have been a somewhat churlish return for his good Samaritanism. But eventually the goatherd would hear about the foreigner who was being sought, and would tell about their meeting, and would be able to indicate which way the Saint had gone. With one quirk of fate, Simon had lost much of the advantage that he had toiled so painfully to gain — how much, depended on how soon the boy’s story reached one of the search parties. But that was only another hazard that had to be accepted.
3
There was nothing more to be gained by perching on that ledge like a becalmed buzzard and brooding about it. Simon climbed to his feet again, counting the compensation of the brief rest and refreshment, and pointed down the steep slope.
“There is a village down that way?”
“Sissignore. It is where I live. Would you like me to guide you?”
“No, if I keep going downhill I must come to it.”
“After you pass around that hill there with the two dead trees on the side you will see it. But I have to go back there before long in any case.”
“I am in a hurry, and I have already interfered with you too much,” said the Saint hastily. “Thank you again, and may your goats multiply like rabbits.”
He turned and plunged on down the slope with a dynamic purposefulness designed to leave the lad too far behind for further argument before any such argument could suggest itself.
He only slackened his pace when he felt sure, without turning to look back, that the goatherd had been left shrugging helplessly at the incontestable arbitrariness of Anglo-Saxons, and when the precipitousness of the path reminded him that a twisted ankle could eventually prove just as fatal as a broken neck. He had to work his way across a perilous field of broken scree on the direct course he had set for the two dead trees which had been pointed out as his next landmark, but soon after he passed them he scrambled over another barren hump to be greeted by a vista that justified all the toil and sweat of its attainment.
In the brown hollow of the hills far below clustered the white-washed buildings of another village, with a road leading away from them down the widening canyon that could ultimately meander nowhere but to the coast. His venture seemed to have paid off.
His descent from the heights seemed like a sleigh ride only by comparison with the preceding climb. A steep downhill trail, pedestrians whose walking is confined to city pavements might be surprised to learn, is almost as tiring as an uphilclass="underline" the body’s weight does not have to be lifted, but its gravitational pull has to be cushioned instead, and the shocks come on the unsprung heels which make the muscles of the thighs work harder to soften the jolts. It was true that he had had a cupful of water to drink, but to boil it off there was an afternoon heat more intense if possible than the morning. Having breakfasted on nothing but thin air, he was now sampling more of the same menu for lunch. If he had been inclined to self-pity, he could have summarized that he was parched with thirst, faint with hunger, stumbling with fatigue, and baked to the verge of heat prostration; but he never permitted himself such an indulgence. On the contrary, renewed hope winged his steps and helped him to forget exhaustion.
Nevertheless, a more coldly impersonal faculty warned him that he couldn’t continue drawing indefinitely on nothing but will-power and his stored-up reserves of strength. He would have to find liquid and solid sustenance in the village. If he by-passed it, he might be able to reach the coast on foot, but he would be in no shape to cope with any minions of the Mafia that he might meet there or run into on the road. The risk of attracting attention in town had to be balanced against the physical and mental improvement that its resources of food and drink could give him.
As he worked his way closer to it, suffering all the added disadvantages of pathfinding as the price of refusing the young goatherd’s offer of guidance, the echoing clangor of the inevitable church bell reached him, striking the half-hour which his wrist watch confirmed to be one-thirty. Ten minutes later he slithered by accident across a well-worn path which would probably have brought him as far with half the effort if he could have been shown it, but which at least eased the last quarter-hour’s slog to the most outlying cottages.
But the delay had not necessarily penalized him. In fact, it might have improved the conditions for his arrival. The reassembly of the inhabitants under their own roofs, and the serious business of the colazione, the midday and most important meal of the southern peasant, would have run their ritual courses, and a contentedly inflated populace should still be pampering the work of their digestive juices in the no less hallowed formality of the siesta. Even if any of them had already been alerted, which in itself seemed moderately unlikely, for a while there would be the fewest eyes open to notice him.
The pitifully stony terraces through which he made the last lap of his approach, the dessicated crops and scattering of stunted trees, prepared him in advance for the poverty-stricken aspect of the town. Indeed, it was hard to imagine how even such a modest community could wrest a subsistence from such starved surroundings — unless one had had previous immunization to such miracles of meridional ecology. But the Saint knew that within that abject microcosm could be found all the essentials that the fundaments of civilization would demand.
Like all the Sicilian villages of which it was prototypical, it had no streets more than a few feet wide. The problems of motorized traffic were still in its fortunate future. Its twisted alleys writhed between those houses which were not prohibitively Siamesed to their neighbors, only to converge unanimously on what had to be deferentially called the town square. Having accepted the inevitability of ploughing that obvious route, Simon strode boldly and as if he knew exactly where he was heading through a debris-cluttered alley which squeezed him between two high walls overhung with wilted flowers into the central piazza. The overlooking windows were tightly shuttered, lending an atmosphere of timeless somnolence to the scene.
The Saint’s pace slowed into a pace compatible with his surroundings, trying to tone down obtrusive brashness, for the benefit of any wakeful observer, without inversely suggesting nefarious stealth. But there was no sign of any interest in his deportment, or even that his entrance or his mere existence had been discerned at all. The pervading heat dwelt there like a living presence in the absence of any other life. Nothing whatever moved except the flies circling a mangy dog that lay in a dead sleep in one shaded doorway.