Carver's Quest Page 33

  ‘A bad road, eh?’ Adam said to himself. ‘Well, we have little choice but to follow it.’

  In the distance, about a quarter of a mile away, he could see Rallis and Fields, the other two members of their little party. The professor, as so often, appeared to be delivering a lecture. Adam could hear the sound of his voice but could not distinguish what he was saying. The lawyer was listening, his head politely inclined towards that of his companion. Adam crouched down by the stream and cupped his hands in it. He poured the water over his head and allowed it to course through his hair and down on to his chest. Refreshed, he stood up and made his way back towards the camp. Quint was still struggling to instil obedience in the mule.

  ‘This bleedin’ beast is aimin’ to be the death of me,’ he said as Adam approached.

  ‘You must learn to have faith in the poor creature. It is behaving so wilfully because it is aware that you do not trust it.’

  The animal lashed out a back leg and both men leapt sideways to avoid it.

  ‘That mule has a sly look in its eye,’ Quint said flatly. ‘It ain’t a mule a man can trust. And what’s more, it’s a mule as pisses pretty much where the ’ell it wants.’

  ‘Mules are intended by nature to be intractable beasts,’ Adam said complacently. ‘The best one can do is cajole them in the direction you wish them to go. There is no point in trying to coerce them, Quint. And there is certainly no point in endeavouring to control their habits of urination.’

  ‘That’s what you say. But you ain’t the one who’s spent the last half-hour wading about in mule piss.’

  ‘You have my sympathies, Quint.’ Adam yawned and stretched his arms. He did not seem unduly concerned by his servant’s troubles. ‘However, I cannot think seriously of anything until I have partaken of breakfast. Where is the bread? And the smoked meat?’

  ‘On that mule’s back,’ the servant said, with noticeable satisfaction. ‘The rest of us ate ours an ’our gone. While you was still snoring like an ’og.’

  ‘Well, the victuals and viands must be unpacked. I shall have to breakfast alone.’

  ‘Ain’t no time. The professor wants to be on the move. That’s why I’m lockin’ ’orns with this bleedin’ mule.’

  Fields and Rallis had returned to the camp and were saddling their horses. The lawyer’s servant, who had ambled with giant strides beside the horses the previous day, was awaiting his master’s orders to set off once more. Adam looked to where he had left his tangled bedding in order to walk down to the stream. It was no longer there. While he was washing, Quint had folded the bag and blankets and strapped them to one of the mules. Both of these beasts, even the most troublesome of the pair, now appeared anxious to move.

  ‘Come, Adam,’ the professor shouted, already on horseback. ‘We have many miles to go before noon.’

  The young man sighed. There was no help for it. Breakfastless, he mounted his own horse and the expedition headed off towards the north-east.

  They had left Athens a week earlier. On the first day, they had travelled by the newly finished railway line from the Greek capital to its port of Piraeus. There they had taken a boat. Sailing southwards, they had rounded the tip of Attica and turned north. With the island of Euboea rising mountainously to starboard, they had continued to sail towards Chalcis, the port on the narrow strait of Euripus. Negotiating the waters around the port, they had emerged into a huge bay with a distant view of Mount Pelion. ‘Where Achilles was taught by Chiron,’ the professor had been eager to tell the others. ‘We are approaching the land of centaurs and lapiths.’

  At the port of Volos, nestling beneath the slopes of Pelion, they had disembarked in the clear light of early morning. Turkish officials had hurried to intercept them, apparently intent on causing the maximum amount of inconvenience, but vigorous waving of the papers the professor possessed in front of the officials’ noses, in conjunction with the judicious use of baksheesh, had limited the delay to a few hours. Just as he had promised back in Athens, Rallis had arranged for men to be waiting near Volos with mules and horses. Adam had briefly wondered how the lawyer’s influence could make itself felt across the border with European Turkey, but the proof that it could was in front of his eyes. He had pushed the question to the back of his mind. Within a few hours more, they had climbed clear of the town. They could look back to the bay where they had landed and see its blue waters dotted here and there with the white sails of fishing boats. With the horses and baggage-laden mules, they had travelled nearly twenty miles on the first day before they had decided to make camp.

  ‘We are well beyond the frontiers of liberated Greece,’ Fields had said with great satisfaction.

  Now, on the following morning, as Adam’s empty stomach rumbled and Quint continued to mutter about mules beneath his breath, they made their way further into Thessaly.

  Both Adam and Rallis were wearing English shooting jackets and broad-brimmed wide-awake hats. Quint had a shapeless canvas cap thrust onto his head. The professor had purchased in Athens a large white umbrella to shield him from the sun but he was finding it difficult to combine holding his reins in one hand and the umbrella in the other. He often rode bareheaded for an hour or more. Adam worried about the effects the heat might have upon him, but Fields showed no signs that he was troubled by it. As time passed, the younger man found himself marvelling anew at the stamina and endurance of the Cambridge scholar. At least twenty years older than any of his companions, the professor showed few signs that age was slowing him.

  For more than an hour that morning they travelled through countryside where the roads were all but effaced. The fields had been left to return to an uncultivated state and the houses and villages were deserted. They saw no one.

  ‘What has happened here?’ Adam asked, but neither the professor nor the Greek lawyer could give him a conclusive answer.

  ‘Perhaps the Turkish landlord has driven his peasantry from the land,’ Rallis suggested.

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘The Turks are often cruel masters. That is why we Greeks wish to be free.’

  ‘I am not at all certain that that is the case, my dear Rallis,’ Fields said, prepared as ever for argument. ‘Not unnaturally, you believe that your fellow Greeks on this side of the border are all yearning to join your new nation, but I remain unconvinced. As long as they pay their taxes and commit no open crime, I suspect that the Greek subjects of the Porte are as happy with their government as those of their fellows who are ruled from Athens.’

  For a moment, it seemed to Adam as if Rallis might dispute the professor’s statement but he remained silent.

  The party stopped for lunch under the shade of a group of plane trees. Horses and mules drank from the stream which ran past it. With the exception of Fields, who settled himself at the foot of one of the planes and opened a book, the men began to unload the saddlebags from the drinking beasts. After half a minute, Andros paused as he reached across the largest of the horses to unfasten its saddle. The huge Greek spoke briefly to Rallis and pointed towards the horizon. Rallis, shading his eyes against the sun, looked in the direction his manservant was indicating.

  ‘We have visitors, gentlemen. There are men on horseback coming across the plain.’

  Adam and Quint both turned from the saddlebags they had lifted to the ground and looked up across the sun-scorched landscape. The professor, either because he was oblivious to any danger the visitors might present or because he had not heard the Greek’s words, continued to read his copy of Thucydides.

  ‘Who are they?’ Adam asked.

  Rallis shrugged. ‘Who can say? I think we are many miles from any village.’

  Adam stood and watched the small group of riders. The sharp eyes of Andros had been able to pick them out from the landscape before anyone else, but now they were clear to all the travellers. Even Fields had lifted his eyes from his book and was following the horsemen as they approached in clouds of dust.

  ‘Are they brigands?’<
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  ‘I know no more than you, Adam,’ Rallis said. ‘We must hope not.’

  ‘Should we make a run for it?’

  ‘It would be pointless. We have only three horses for five men. And the mules could not move at a pace sufficient to escape. These men, whoever they are, will be with us in ten minutes.’

  Rallis’s judgement of time was a good one. Almost exactly ten minutes had passed when the riders, shouting and yelling to one another, pulled up their horses twenty yards from the trees. There were ten in the party, all of them looking like a cross between a pantomime villain and a scarecrow. Each man carried a miniature arsenal of small arms at his waist, a yataghan and a pair of pistols at the least thrust into his belt. All had long black hair which hung down to their shoulders in bedraggled tresses.

  A man in a dirty white capote and breeches who appeared to be the leader spurred his horse forward and began to address Rallis in a loud and threatening voice. His followers crowded behind him, bellowing approval of his words and occasionally brandishing their guns in their air.

  ‘What is the man saying?’ Fields asked impatiently. He had hauled himself to his feet as their visitors clattered into the camp and thrust his volume of Thucydides unwillingly into his jacket pocket. ‘He speaks such a barbarous dialect I can barely catch a word in three.’

  The leader, urged on by his comrades, continued to roar his threats at the travellers.

  ‘Oh, that the language of Homer and Pindar should descend to this!’ the professor remarked to no one in particular. ‘If I am not mistaken, he seems to be talking a great deal about blood and death and the valour of his ancestors.’

  ‘He is certainly modelling his behaviour on that of a brigand chieftain in a Drury Lane melodrama,’ Adam remarked. ‘He could not have seen one in this desolate spot, could he? Surely no company has come this far on tour?’

  The brigand chief was now pointing at the professor and was directing his words at him. Fields looked at the Greek as if he was an exceptionally dim student he was obliged to tutor.

  ‘No, it is useless. I simply cannot understand enough of this ruffian’s Greek to make sense of it,’ Fields said. He seemed to imply that the ruffian was entirely to blame for this.

  ‘He has been saying that his family have lived on this land for generations,’ Rallis translated. ‘He has also been saying that foreign dogs should not trespass on his lands. These things are probably not true. It is not his land, I think.’

  ‘He certainly does not look like a farmer,’ Adam remarked. ‘What else does he say?’

  ‘Now he says, “You foreign dogs are in our hands. Your money is ours. Your blood is ours.” ’

  There was another impassioned burst of Greek from the man in the white capote.

  ‘ “I am the pasha here. I am a king to rule over English milords.” ’

  ‘He knows we are English, then,’ Adam remarked.

  ‘If he knows we are Englishmen, he knows we are not men with whom to trifle.’ Fields sounded exasperated that something as trivial as the arrival of ten heavily armed men should be holding them up. ‘Tell him to be on his way. And to take his ragamuffin band with him.’

  The leader of the band now made a gesture, first towards the mules and the horses and then towards the saddlebags.

  ‘He wishes to inspect the baggage,’ Rallis said.

  ‘The impudence of the man!’ Fields exclaimed. ‘You will tell this rogue that—’

  ‘Silence!’ Rallis’s sudden cry was the more surprising because of the studied politeness with which he usually spoke. ‘I will tell him nothing. This is not a game that these men play. It is for us to listen, not to tell. And to obey.’

  ‘He is right, Professor,’ Adam said, placing a restraining hand on Fields’s arm as the older man made to move towards the bandit chief. For a moment, it seemed as if Fields might continue to protest but he subsided into glowering silence.

  The bandit chief shouted abrupt instructions and two of his men dismounted. They walked over to where the bags were lying on the ground and opened them. Within moments, all Quint’s work that morning in packing the bags was undone. Meanwhile, another three men had also stepped down from their mounts and moved to where the horses and mules were tethered. They began to examine the beasts, prodding at legs and slapping flanks.

  Rallis called out to the leader of the group. The man jumped down from his horse and strolled over to where the lawyer stood. He laughed and slapped him so heartily on the back that Adam could see Rallis stagger beneath the blow. The Athenian said something else and the man laughed again. Together the two of them walked away towards the shade of one of the plane trees. There they remained while the ransacking of the bags and the assessment of the horses continued. After five minutes, Rallis walked back to his companions, followed a few paces behind by the brigand.

  ‘Put smiles upon your faces, gentlemen,’ the Athenian said as he approached. ‘I have told our friend here that we bear him nothing but goodwill.’

  The travellers now stood, wreathed in smiles, as the brigand and two of his most ruffianly companions came closer. Even the professor twisted his face into a ghastly simulacrum of cheerfulness. The chief of the supposed bandits leered amiably as he approached.

  ‘His name is Lascarides,’ Rallis went on. ‘He is at pains to assure me that he is an honest man. His colleagues are all honest men.’

  ‘Damn grinning scoundrels, the lot of them,’ Fields said, although, Adam noticed, he was careful to keep his mask of genial greeting in place.

  ‘However, they require our horses. They apologise for the inconvenience but they insist that we hand over our mounts.’

  ‘We appear to have little choice in the matter,’ Adam remarked.

  ‘None whatsoever,’ Rallis said.

  Lascarides, now beaming from ear to ear as if he had just chanced upon a long lost brother, approached Adam and chucked him under the chin. Adam instantly made as if to strike the man a blow but, recalling their situation, he restrained himself and merely widened his mirthless smile. The Greek laughed.

  Beneath his fixed grin, Fields was almost beside himself with fury.

  ‘Are we to allow this to happen?’ he said, forcing out his words like a novice ventriloquist making his first appearance on stage. ‘Are we going to stand by and do nothing while this ridiculous, tatterdemalion villain and his crew of scarecrows walk off with our horses?’

  There was a burst of rapid chattering from Lascarides.

  ‘The wretch really does speak a version of Greek no gentleman could possibly understand,’ Fields dropped his pretence of grinning and spoke out loud. ‘What does he say, Rallis? Something about trees and guns?’

  ‘He says that he will tie the old man to the tree and get his men to use him for shooting practice unless he shuts up,’ Rallis translated impassively. ‘He is weary of hearing the old man’s voice.’

  ‘The impertinence!’ Fields exclaimed and then fell silent.

  Lascarides and his men now wasted no time in further threats or intimidation. Three of them hitched the horses they had commandeered to their own mounts and they all prepared to depart. Lascarides tipped his hat ironically at the professor. One of his followers yelled and shot his pistol in the air. The bandits wheeled their horses about and cantered away.

  The travellers watched as they disappeared into the distance. Shouts and outbursts of raucous laughter drifted back to them as they turned their attention to the ruins of their campsite. No more than half an hour had passed since Andros had first drawn his master’s attention to the riders approaching.

  ‘At least they did not kill us or kidnap us,’ Adam remarked.

  ‘They thought we were madmen,’ Rallis said. ‘I told them we came from Athens to look for ancient writings. They decided we were insane. And who would kill lunatics?’

  ‘Or pay a ransom for them?’

  ‘Exactly.’ Rallis smiled. ‘They were particularly certain that the professor was one who had lost his mind.�
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  ‘Why did they not steal the mules as well as the horses?’

  Rallis shrugged. ‘Too much trouble to take them. Too little profit to sell them. Who knows?’

  Andros and Quint repacked the saddlebags and loaded them on the mules. With the horses gone, the beasts that were left were doubly laden. There was no chance now for any of the party to ride. All five men would have to walk. Rallis looked up at the position of the sun and then stretched out his arm.

  ‘That is the way we must go,’ he said.

  As they set off, they disturbed a covey of partridges which flew suddenly upwards with a noisy flapping of wings. Above them an eagle soared in the air currents, looking no doubt for the very prey the men had just put to flight.

  Rallis strode out in front. Behind him Andros and Quint guided the mules. Adam followed them and the professor brought up the rear. Soon the group was stretched, Indian file, across the plain. For nearly thirty minutes they travelled in a silence broken only by an occasional bray from one of the mules. Then Fields increased his pace and caught up with Adam.

  ‘What do you make of our Greek friend?’ he asked, in a conspiratorial whisper.

  ‘Of Rallis?’

  ‘Who else? Should we trust him, do you think?’

  Adam was taken aback by the question. Was it not the professor who had first argued that he was the ideal person to assist them in organising the expedition to Thessaly and beyond?

  ‘I can see no reason why we should not.’

  ‘You do not find the arrival of those thieving wretches today somewhat surprising?’

  ‘We knew that we risked encountering bandits wherever we went in the countryside. Some of the regions in which we are travelling have an unpleasant celebrity for klephti and thieves and rogues of all kinds. But we made plans to evade them before we left Athens. Rallis made plans for us to evade them. Even so, we ran a risk. You are surely not suggesting that he deliberately arranged for those men to cross our path?’

  ‘I merely suggest that our Greek friend should be watched. And what he says must be taken cum grano salis.’