Carver's Quest Page 35

  The professor was unimpressed. ‘They are pious fools,’ he said, ‘wasting their lives in such isolation.’

  ‘There are few of them left in Meteora,’ Rallis said. ‘Once there were hundreds of monks here. Now, I am told, most of the monasteries are deserted. And those that do still have inhabitants have but a handful. Even the Grand Meteoron, the holiest of them all, has only a score and most of them are old men.’ He raised his hand to shield his eyes from the sun. ‘But now we have seen our destination from afar, we must hasten to reach it.’

  * * * * *

  Hours passed before the travellers came near to the stone pillars, which from a distance had seemed to rise perpendicularly out of a sea of foliage. The sun was now high in the sky and beating down upon them. Closer up, it was clear that a labyrinth of smaller rocks and outcrops of stone had to be negotiated before the party could reach the foot of any of the main pinnacles. They began to clamber amongst the ruined architecture of the rocks, moving in and out of the shade the stone columns offered. Here and there, groves of mulberries and cypresses covered the ground between the pillars. Some small trees had even found a means of twisting their roots into crevices in the near-vertical rock and were growing green against the darker colours of the stone. Often the roots were invisible from the ground and it seemed as if the trees were suspended in the air, floating high above the travellers’ heads.

  After a short time, Adam stopped. Shading his eyes with one hand, he pointed with the other towards half a dozen black smudges up on the rock. ‘There are caverns further up there,’ he said. ‘There is a ladder of some kind as well.’

  Below one of the dark holes that peppered the cliff, a rickety wooden structure that could only be a ladder stretched down from the cave entrance to a ledge some sixty feet beneath it. It looked like the backbone of some strange creature that had died and rotted on the rock face.

  ‘It is for a holy man,’ Rallis said. ‘He has turned his back on the world. He lives in the cave with only the eagles above him.’

  ‘Good Lord, man.’ Adam was shocked. ‘Are you telling us that someone spends his life up there?’

  ‘He prays there night and day. He beseeches the Lord to grant his soul eternal rest. Many have done so before him.’

  ‘Much good it must have done them. Living like benighted troglodytes in holes in the rock.’ Fields snorted with disgust, as if to suggest that this was only what he expected from those who adhered to the Greek version of Christianity. ‘These monks are but a few steps away from pagan nature worship. Who knows by what process of reasoning they have persuaded not only themselves but others that they are leading holy lives?’

  The travellers moved on, Adam looking back at the cavern entrance and wondering what could possibly drive a man to make his lonely home within it. They fought their way through tangled bushes and past fallen boulders. Eventually they emerged from the maze of rock and vegetation and stepped onto a square stone platform at the foot of what seemed a sheer cliff face.

  ‘Up there. That is Agios Andreas,’ said Rallis.

  The others craned their necks upwards and could just catch a glimpse of a building perched on the top of the cliff.

  ‘How the devil are we to reach it?’ Fields asked.

  The lawyer made no reply but nodded briefly to Andros. The giant Greek took several steps to the side, hauled out the ancient musket he kept strapped to his waist and fired a single shot into the air. The sudden sound of it, reverberating and echoing against the rock, made Adam start with surprise. For a moment, as the echo died away, there was no response. Then, from far above, like the cry of a bird circling in the air, came a voice. As they all strained their necks in peering up at the monastery, they could see what looked like a wooden shed projecting sideways from the rock. Adam could just glimpse a grey-bearded face staring down at them from some kind of door or window in it.

  ‘He is asking who we are and what we require,’ Rallis said, before shouting back at the monk in Greek. Adam could make out only the words for ‘travellers’ and ‘friends’.

  The monk disappeared briefly from view, but within a minute, he had returned and this time he was accompanied by two others, both similarly swathed in grey hair. All three were now calling down to the travellers and, as they did so, the door in the shed opened and a rope was flung out. Adam could see that the rope ran through a pulley, which was itself attached to the roof of the shed. Slowly the rope descended the cliff face until one end reached Adam and his companions below. Attached to it by an iron hook was a net. Rallis moved forward and unclasped the hook.

  ‘They are fishers of men, these monks,’ he said, spreading the net on the ground.

  ‘Are we to be their fish?’ Adam asked.

  ‘It is our only way to the monastery. Each of us must sit in turn in the net. The net closes around. The hook is attached. The monks pull us up. It has been so for many hundreds of years.’

  ‘Have they lost many fish in those hundreds of years?’

  Rallis shrugged. ‘Some, but not many.’ He spoke briefly to Andros. The Greek shrugged off the white capote he wore around his huge shoulders and placed it in the net.

  ‘Who will be the first to ascend the rock?’ Rallis asked.

  ‘Here is your chance to demonstrate your daring, Quint.’ Adam gestured at the net. ‘The monks await us.’

  ‘I ain’t going up in that contraption.’

  ‘You have heard what Rallis has said. It is the only way we can get to the monastery.’

  ‘I ain’t being ’auled up in the air in a bleedin’ net. It ain’t natural.’

  ‘Nor is descending into the bowels of the earth on the new underground railway from Paddington. But back in London I have known you to do it. Not once but several times.’

  ‘Down in the ground ain’t the same as up in the air.’

  ‘Come, Quintus,’ Fields said, ‘one of us must be the pioneer in this venture. Why should the honour not be yours?’

  Quint scowled at the professor, as if to suggest that the honour was one he would gladly relinquish, but at the same time he seemed to decide that further argument was fruitless. He moved to sit cross-legged on the capote, looking miserable but resigned to whatever fate might throw at him. Rallis took one of the corners and hung it over the large iron hook on the end of the rope. He did the same with each of the other corners until Quint was trussed like a turkey in the netting which dangled from the hook. He clung to the rope with his hands while both feet protruded through the holes. Rallis waved and shouted to the monks above and the net began its ascent. Almost immediately it began to spin and twist but slowly it moved further and further up the grey flank of the rock.

  ‘Give our greetings to the abbot, Quint,’ Adam called. ‘Tell him we shall all join him for dinner.’

  The distance from the ground to the monastery was more than 200 feet and, after only a short while, brief gusts of wind began to send man and net spinning around. There were shouts of alarm from below but Quint maintained a stoical silence. Looking up so far, Adam could not be certain but he thought that, at one point, he saw small plumes of smoke issuing from the tangled bundle. By some acrobatic feat, he decided, his servant had managed to light his pipe. After less than ten minutes, Quint’s ascent was complete and he disappeared from sight.

  The monks’ net returned to the ground and Adam was the next to be hooked into it.

  ‘You may wish to close your eyes,’ Rallis said. ‘It prevents the giddiness.’

  ‘I think I shall keep them open. I have a fondness for seeing where I am going, even when I am curled up like a hedgehog.’

  The monks above began to turn their windlass and Adam was tugged upwards. As he left the ground and was swiftly hauled a hundred feet into the air, he began to reflect on the ridiculousness of the position in which he found himself. There was little time, however, for such thoughts. He reached a point where, through the net, he could just catch a glimpse of his comrades below. At that moment the rope seemed to sl
ip through monastic hands. Abruptly, he fell several feet before control was regained and he came to a halt with a stomach-turning jerk. He was still recovering from this shock when he heard the sound of a gun. His first assumption was that Andros had, for some reason, fired his musket again. It was only when a bullet ricocheted off the rock face that he realised someone was shooting at him. Twisting and spiralling in the monks’ net, he was a more tempting target than a fish in a barrel. He heard the sound of another shot and flinched. The rock above his head shattered and splinters of stone cascaded into his hair and onto the shoulders of his jacket. Spinning in the trap the net had become, he strove to look first up at the monastery and then down to the ground below him. Shouts came from both directions. In his frantic efforts to see what was happening, Adam set the net spinning back and forth.

  ‘Quickly, Quint,’ he bellowed. ‘Get them to pull me up more quickly.’

  The face of the rock was suddenly upon him and he thrust his hands through the reticulations in the net in order to push himself from it. His knuckles grazed painfully against the cliff but he had no time to think anything of it. He spun out again into mid-air and braced himself for the awful possibility of another shot. He could almost feel the bullet hurtling into his soft flesh and the terrible pain it would inflict.

  ‘Get me moving, Quint,’ he yelled again and, to his intense relief, he felt the net jerk and begin to rise once more. He could hear more noise from the ground and thought he heard Rallis’s voice shouting in Greek. Slowly, so slowly that it seemed to Adam as if the minutes were stretching into hours, he was pulled towards the monastery.

  Trussed in the net and half-dazed from the buffeting he had received as he collided with the rockface, Adam was finally brought level with the entrance. Hands reached out to haul him in like a bale of goods at the West India docks and he was deposited on the wooden floor. He looked up. A man was peering down at him. The man was dressed in a long blue serge gown and had a straggling beard and moustache which merged in a wild hedgerow of white facial hair. Out of the hair stared two glinting eyes.

  ‘I am Brother Demetrios,’ said a voice from the hedgerow, in Greek. ‘Welcome to the monastery of Agios Andreas.’

  The monk released the net in which Adam was held and he tumbled out of it. As he got to his feet he saw Quint, dishevelled and anxious, standing amidst a semi-circle of Brother Demetrios’s fellow-monks, all bearded and clad in black. His manservant moved towards him and began to brush down his clothes.

  ‘Told you travelling in a bleedin’ net weren’t natural,’ he said. ‘And why the ’ell was that lunk of a Greek shooting off ’is musket?’

  ‘It wasn’t Andros. Somebody was shooting at me. Somebody further down the path we ascended earlier in the day.’

  Adam waved Quint away and turned to his hosts. They bowed politely to him, their hands laid upon their hearts. He returned their greeting, conscious that he was shaking with the shock of his journey up to their home.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  But who was taking potshots at me, Rallis?’

  Another half-hour had passed and two other members of the party had been hauled up the rock-face and manhandled into the monastery. Andros had been left at the bottom with instructions to find a temporary resting place for the mules and much of the baggage in the village of Kalambaka.

  ‘He will come up to Agios Andreas later,’ Rallis had announced when he had arrived at the top. ‘The monks will have time to recover from their exertions in bringing us to their home. They will need all their strength to fish Andros up from the foot of the rocks.’

  The lawyer, now faced by Adam’s question, shrugged as if the identity of any would-be murderer was of no great significance.

  ‘One of the rogues who ambushed us, perhaps. Andros saw him and ran after him but the man was too quick. He had a horse waiting for him further down the rocks.’

  ‘He might have killed me.’ Adam was indignant as much as distressed.

  ‘He fired his rifle from far away. Only the very best of shots could have hurt you.’

  ‘That may be true, but two bullets at least struck the rocks not too far away from me.’

  ‘Perhaps the man was from Kalambaka. He was trying to scare you. To scare us. They do not always like strangers in these villages of European Turkey.’ Rallis waved his hand, his demeanour suggesting that Adam was making altogether too great a fuss about the incident. ‘But he did not harm you. He did not shoot again. And now we are safely delivered to our destination. The monastery of Agios Andreas.’

  Adam thought momentarily of pursuing the subject but there seemed little point. He could not very well ask the monks to winch him back to the ground so that he could chase some rifle-wielding will o’ the wisp across the plains of Thessaly. The Greek lawyer, it seemed, did not take the shooting seriously. So why should he? Perhaps Rallis was correct. Perhaps it had been a villager with a dislike of foreigners. Perhaps the intention had only been to frighten him. Adam decided to put the incident from his mind. Instead, he looked around the place which had been the goal of their party since they had left Athens.

  Covering just over an acre, the monastery of Agios Andreas stood on the very summit of the pillar of rock. It consisted of a church, side chapels, monks’ cells and other buildings which surrounded a central, irregularly shaped courtyard. The whole monastery looked like a miniature village, its houses huddled around the church.

  ‘How do the monks live up here, Rallis? How do they get their food? Their water?’

  ‘The water is in cisterns cut deep in the rock. They fill with rain during the winter.’ The lawyer motioned to a stone structure in the centre of the courtyard which Adam could now see was some kind of well. ‘As for their food, it is hauled up on the ropes as we were hauled up.’

  ‘And how in heaven’s name did the first monks make their way up here?’

  ‘The monks believe that Saint Athanasios – the holy man who built the first of the monasteries – did not climb the rock. He was carried to the top by an eagle.’

  ‘That would be a more convenient means of transport than any other,’ Adam admitted. He made his way across to the stone well and peered into its depths. He could see what might have been the faint glint of light on the water below.

  ‘They tell another story about Athanasios,’ Rallis went on. ‘That he travelled at first only halfway up the rock. He lived in a cave there. But soon he saw demons flying about the entrance to his cave. So he went to the very top of the mountain, where the demons could not follow him.’

  ‘They couldn’t fly that high, eh?’ Adam turned away from the well.

  ‘It would seem not.’

  ‘So whatever other perils we might face here, we need not worry about demons.’

  Rallis laughed.

  ‘It was another rock on which Athanasios built. Not this one of Agios Andreas. But the principle is probably the same.’

  Adam nodded his head politely at the monks, who were still gathered round the winding equipment which had hauled him up the rockface. Bearded and bashful, the inhabitants of Agios Andreas were looking at their visitors as if they had never seen such strange and unaccountable men before. Perhaps, Adam reflected, they had not.

  ‘We will meet the rest of the population at dinner, I suppose. Minus demons, of course.’

  ‘This is the population, Adam. Except, I think, for the hegumenos. There are fewer than ten caloyeri, ten holy men, at Agios Andreas,’ Rallis said.

  ‘So few!’ Although he remembered what Rallis had said about the depopulation of the monasteries, Adam was still surprised. ‘How can they survive?’

  ‘Perhaps they will not. I doubt there are more than fifty caloyeri in all of the monasteries together. Perhaps when they all die, there will be no more monks at Meteora.’

  ‘But there are young novices, are there not? When I was bundled from the net I saw one lad standing behind the monks. He looked no more than twelve.’

  ‘Some of the young boys fro
m the village come up to the monastery to learn to read and write. They are the servants of the caloyeri. He must have been one of those.’

  One of the monks had approached them and was trying shyly to attract their attention. He spoke to the lawyer, his words a jumble of half-familiar Greek words uttered so swiftly and in such a marked accent that Adam was unable to follow them. Rallis, it seemed, had no such problem.

  ‘His name is Theophanes,’ he interpreted for Adam. ‘He will show you and Mr Quint and the professor to rooms where you can rest.’

  Theophanes beckoned to Adam and his companions, who had both been engaged in peering over the monastery’s perimeter wall at the plain beneath. Leaving the lawyer, the three men followed the monk through an arched opening into one of the buildings off the courtyard. A short flight of stone steps led upwards, which through the centuries had been worn away by the feet of generation after generation of long-departed monks. As they began to climb it, Fields gave a short cry and fell to his knees. Quint, following close behind, nearly tumbled over him. The professor peered downwards in the gloomy light of the stairwell.

  ‘Most interesting, most interesting,’ he said, removing his glasses and crouching even lower to examine one of the steps.

  Brother Theophanes had stopped when Fields did and was looking down at him with polite puzzlement. Adam smiled at the monk as if to suggest that the professor’s action was odd but not entirely unexpected.

  Fields struggled to his feet. ‘Fascinating, Adam, simply fascinating. It is a burial stele. I can make out the words “Attyla, daughter of Eurypothus”.’

  ‘How did it come to be here?’

  ‘I have no idea. I can only presume that the monks in the Middle Ages, when they were building this place, brought it up from the plain. I must look at the other steps.’

  Adam glanced at the monk, who was wearing the bemused expression of a courteous man faced by the inexplicable behaviour of foreigners.

  ‘I think that task must be postponed a while, Professor. Our host is patient but we cannot keep him waiting for too long.’