Carver's Quest Read online

  ‘I did so,’ the Greek replied. ‘But there was no need. The hegumenos assumed that the only reason we travelled so far was that we wished to pay our respects to the relics. He could imagine no other. He has agreed to show them to us later this morning.’

  ‘And their library?’

  ‘I believe that will also be included in the tour.’

  * * * * *

  Once breakfast was finished, the hegumen led his guests from the refectory. He beckoned them into a squat building that stood next to the chapel where Adam and Quint had admired the wall paintings the previous night. The two servants were left outside. The hegumen ushered Adam, Fields and Rallis into a rectangular stone cell where the treasures of the monastery had been laid out on a wooden desk for their inspection. From a cupboard in the corner, he took an embroidered stole and placed it round his neck. He waved his arm at the desk. The three visitors moved closer to examine what was on it.

  ‘There are beautiful objects here,’ Adam remarked, pointing to a jewel-encrusted box.

  The hegumen made encouraging noises as he did so, like a schoolmaster trying to embolden a bright but bashful pupil.

  ‘That is a very holy relic,’ Rallis said. ‘The monks believe it to be part of the body of Agios Andreas. Saint Andrew.’ He reached his right hand behind his neck and tapped on his own back. ‘I do not know the name of it in English but it is here.’

  ‘The shoulder blade,’ Adam said.

  ‘Ah, the shoulder blade. Like the blade of the sword.’ Rallis smiled at the curiosities of the English language. ‘The monks believe they possess the shoulder blade of Agios Andreas in the jewelled box. It is their greatest treasure.’

  Fields grunted with distaste. ‘These Eastern Christians are worse than papists,’ he said. ‘All these saints’ bones. What else do they claim to hold here? The right hand of St Thomas? Mary Magdalen’s left foot?’

  ‘They are not sophisticated, perhaps, Professor,’ Rallis said soothingly, ‘but their religious feelings are sincere.’

  ‘They are mired in unreason. In thrall to absurd superstitions. Do they seriously expect us to believe that bits and pieces of the body of Saint Andrew, a man who died eighteen hundred years ago, are scattered about the monasteries of Greece and the Levant?’

  ‘The relic is certainly many centuries old.’ Rallis continued to speak to Fields in a placatory tone of voice. ‘The monks say it belonged once to the emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus. It was brought from Byzantium by the first abbot of the monastery.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Fields barked. ‘It is as likely to be my grandmother’s shinbone as it is to be the shoulder blade of an apostle.’

  If the hegumen realised, from the professor’s voice, that the relic was not proving a success with one of his visitors at least, he gave no sign. Instead, he pointed to the wall behind the desk where an image of the Madonna, wide-eyed and solemn, looked down on them.

  ‘Holy Mother,’ he said in English, gesturing towards the icon. They all peered at it, the professor still tutting with irritation.

  ‘The painting has been damaged, I see,’ Adam remarked, indicating an area on the Virgin’s gown which had clearly been repaired.

  Seeing Adam’s gesture, the hegumen launched himself on an excited speech in Greek which only Rallis could follow.

  ‘It was a very bad man who did that, he is saying. A soldier, many years ago. He struck the icon with his sword. The Holy Mother began to bleed.’

  Fields snorted in derision.

  ‘She bled for many days. Only when the bad man repented and confessed his crimes did she stop. He became a very good man. He threw away his sword and became a monk himself. He died a saint.’

  ‘Is there no limit to the fatuities these people will believe?’ the professor asked of no one in particular.

  ‘She does not bleed any more.’

  ‘I should think not!’

  ‘But she does weep.’

  ‘Oh, I will hear no more of this!’

  Fields was, by this time, in a paroxysm of exasperation. He turned his back on the icon and moved as far away from it as he could in the confined space of the room. The old monk, apparently baffled by the professor’s behaviour, looked reproachfully at him.

  ‘She wept in the wars forty years and more ago when the Greeks were defeated,’ Rallis went on. ‘And when the monasteries were obliged to remain within the lands of the Turks. The hegumenos is too young to remember this but the oldest monk, Brother Donatus, saw the lady weep. He can tell you about it.’

  ‘He need not bother himself,’ the professor said, from his position in the corner of the room. ‘We have no interest in these preposterous superstitions.’

  The hegumen had finished his short lecture. He picked up the icon and kissed it reverently before returning it to the table.

  ‘Do they have no books or manuscripts to show us?’ Fields had returned from his sulk but he was still beside himself with impatience and irritation. ‘Do they think we have come all this way to look at ham-fisted daubs of the Virgin Mary and the scapulae of the long dead?’

  ‘These monks are not learned men, Professor,’ Rallis said. ‘Mostly they are peasants and artisans. They are ignorant and uneducated. The relics and the icons they love but the books in their library often mean little to them. Some of them can barely read.’

  ‘But they continue to look after them,’ Adam interrupted.

  ‘Not with any great efficacy, I would conjecture,’ the professor said. ‘Any volume that we get to see will doubtless be ruined by damp and neglect.’

  ‘They tend their gardens because they relish the food that comes from them,’ Rallis said. ‘They do not so much relish the food of the mind. They tend their books only because the monks here have always done so. They respect them for their antiquity.’

  ‘The books and manuscripts should be removed from the monasteries and from the hands of these ignorant men,’ the professor said. ‘Otherwise mice and mildew will destroy them.’

  The hegumen, who had been waiting in polite silence, now spoke swiftly to Rallis. He had clearly understood at least something of what had been said.

  ‘They do not keep their books here,’ the lawyer interpreted.

  ‘Their library is elsewhere. Perhaps, the hegumenos says, it will be possible to see it later. But now he must return the relics to their places of safe keeping.’

  * * * * *

  ‘The hegumenos was distressed by the lack of respect the professor showed to the relics and to the icon of the Holy Mother.’ Rallis and Adam were talking together in the latter’s room. Fields, still muttering to himself about the childish gullibility of the monks, had retired to read his Thucydides. The two servants, when Adam had last seen them, had been sitting on a stone wall above a precipitous drop, playing cards. Quint had been endeavouring, with little success, to teach Andros the rudiments of three-stake brag. ‘He cannot bring himself to show more treasures to such a disrespectful man.’

  ‘Aha, Fields has shot himself in the foot, has he?’ Adam could not help but feel a little amusement that the professor’s bad temper had rebounded upon him. ‘With his inability to stay quiet?’

  ‘So it would seem. But the hegumenos was impressed by the reverence you showed to the relics. He speaks a little English. He understood that you were asking about the books.’

  ‘He will let us see them?’

  ‘Only you and I are to see them. Not the professor. He will send Brother Demetrios to open the library for us.’

  ‘Demetrios? The monk who helped me to my feet after that wretched journey up the rockface? I shall be almost as pleased to see him again as I was to see him the first time.’

  At that very moment there was a tap upon Adam’s door.

  ‘Come,’ the young man cried. The door opened and the wild-haired Demetrios, looking like a distraught prophet from one of the more obscure books of the Old Testament, bustled into the room. He came to a stop when he saw the two men and bowed his head in gree
ting.

  ‘Here is the very man of whom we were speaking,’ Adam said, returning the monk’s salute. ‘And, like the earl in Tennyson’s poem, his beard is a foot before him and his hair a yard behind.’

  Demetrios spoke rapidly to the young Englishman, nodding his head up and down with great energy. Adam, able to follow only one word in three, smiled encouragingly.

  ‘As you have probably surmised,’ Rallis said, when the monk’s brisk torrent of Greek came to an end, ‘he is here to take us to the library.’

  Beckoning the two men to follow him, Demetrios left the room and walked into the passage outside. He led them through an arched gateway at its end which took them into the main courtyard. Adam waved his hand in greeting to Quint and Andros, still sitting on the wall a dozen yards away and staring at cards. Both were too engrossed by their game to respond. Looking back to ensure that his visitors were still following him, Demetrios crossed the courtyard and approached a building which Adam had noticed earlier and assumed to be a storehouse for food. The monk stopped in front of its low wooden door and, delving into the inner recesses of his clothing, extracted a rusting key. He waved it in front of Adam’s eyes for a moment or two, like a conductor using a baton to beat time with an orchestra. Then, with a final flourish, he thrust it into the keyhole. The key turned. Demetrios placed his shoulder against the door, shoved vigorously and disappeared into the interior of the building.

  Adam and Rallis followed the monk through the door and found him struggling to light a candle. As the flame took hold, its light revealed the contents of the room. An ancient wooden cupboard stood against one wall. In one corner was a heap of rotting monastic robes. Opposite these were fragments of twisted metal that might once have been an iconostasis. The only other piece of furniture was largely hidden by curtaining. Demetrios twitched the fabric aside to display seven shelves of old and decaying books. The musty smell of neglect hung in the air above them. Leather bindings peeled away from cracked spines. Several volumes seemed to have disintegrated altogether and all that was left of them were handfuls of torn and stained pages thrust between their fellows.

  ‘Bibliotheka,’ the monk said, with a hint of pride in his voice. Silence followed as the two visitors stared in dismay at the shelves Demetrios had revealed. One of the books, disturbed by the monk thrusting aside the curtain, fell sideways on its shelf. Small clouds of dust rose upwards.

  ‘This is the library we have come so far to see?’ Adam asked eventually. He spoke to Rallis with a hint of reproach as if the Greek was solely responsible for the reputation the monastery had gained. The lawyer looked abashed.

  ‘Many scholars I know in Athens tell me that Agios Andreas has very interesting books in its possession.’

  ‘Your Athenian friends must have been misinformed.’

  ‘Perhaps the books are more valuable than they seem.’

  Adam reached out and took a volume at random from the middle shelf.

  ‘The Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom.’

  He put the book back in its place and extracted another.

  ‘St Basil on the workings of the Holy Spirit. These are the sort of works we could find in many eastern monasteries, Rallis,’ he said, deeply downcast. ‘I doubt very much there is anything here for us.’

  Demetrios had been standing by the library, beaming with pleasure and taking deep breaths, as if intending to inhale an aroma of scholarship that clung to the books. Now he sensed the disappointment of his visitors. He put a hand on Adam’s arm and began to speak to him with great earnestness.

  ‘Rallis, I cannot understand the Greek our friend here speaks. I would be most grateful if you would translate for me.’

  ‘He is telling you that you are not the only Englishman to see the library. Another of your countrymen came here last year.’

  ‘He must have been as disappointed as we have been, then.’

  ‘No, the other Englishman liked very much what he saw in the library.’

  ‘Did he, indeed? He is certain the visitor was English?’ Adam asked, his interest now aroused. ‘Perhaps he knew only that he came from the West.’

  Rallis conferred with the monk once again.

  ‘The man was most definitely English. He spoke English. And he behaved all the time as if the monastery belonged to him.’

  The Greek’s face was impassive as he translated.

  ‘Brother Demetrios is also telling me that he was once English himself.’

  ‘Was he, by Jove?’ Adam said. He looked at the bearded and bedraggled monk who grinned at him, revealing a mouthful of blackened teeth. ‘But he is no longer?’

  The monk spoke rapidly to Rallis. Adam could make out only a handful of Greek words and could not connect them into any meaningful sentence.

  ‘He was born in Cephalonia, he says. The English ruled there when he was born but they gave the island back to the Greeks. He likes to be Greek now but sometimes he wishes he still was English.’

  The monk nodded as if in vigorous approval of the precision of Rallis’s translation and then began to speak again.

  ‘There is another library which the monks keep hidden,’ Rallis said after Demetrios had finished. ‘But for English travellers he opens it. Because he remembers being English himself. He opened it for the Englishman last year. He is asking if you also would like to see this hidden library.’

  Adam could scarcely contain his delight at this information. ‘I rather think I would,’ he said. He bowed his head several times in Brother Demetrios’s direction and was rewarded with another black-toothed grin. The monk moved to the large wooden cupboard in the corner of the room and opened its door. Inside, was a second door which he threw back to reveal a small chamber cut into the thick stone walls. Shelves had been fitted round the chamber and sitting on them were dozens of musty volumes.

  ‘Holy books,’ said Demetrios in English.

  Adam began to examine them. Clouds of dust arose as he picked each book from the shelf. On first inspection, most seemed as commonplace as the ones in the outer room. Gospels and liturgies by the score. Works by long-dead Orthodox theologians. Editions of Greek classics that would have been welcome enough additions to college libraries back in Cambridge but hardly worth the trouble of travelling most of the way across Europe to consult. Adam continued to feel that only disappointment awaited them but he moved on into the dark recesses of the hidden chamber. Demetrios, who had left them briefly, returned with a lantern which lit up the furthest shelves. Beyond the last of the printed books were what looked to be the few bound manuscripts the monastery possessed. As Adam moved his hand to reach for them, the old monk spoke.

  ‘Those are the ones the English always like,’ Rallis translated. ‘The other Englishman wanted to buy one of them.’

  ‘Did they sell it to him?’ Adam asked anxiously. The other Englishman, he felt certain, could only be Creech. The man with the crescent scar had been asking in Athens about travelling to the monasteries. He must have succeeded in doing so. He had found the manuscript he had been seeking. If he had been able to buy it, their own journey would be in vain.

  Rallis spoke quickly to the monk, who sounded indignant as he replied.

  ‘No, they did not sell to him. There is not enough gold in the whole of the country to buy any of the holy books.’

  ‘This one is not very holy,’ Adam said, examining one of the more ancient-looking manuscripts. ‘Unless I am very much mistaken, it is a collection of poems by Anacreon. It is probably just as well that the monks choose not to read this.’

  ‘Some of the caloyeri would not be able to read it, even should they wish to do so. They are very close to illiterate.’

  ‘Well, that would save their blushes. Anacreon on drinking, they might like. But Anacreon on women might be rather strong meat for them.’

  Adam continued to root through the volumes on the innermost shelves, picking up the occasional one and turning the pages swiftly. The smell of long-neglected literature hung in the air.
Demetrios’s hidden cubicle was not, he thought, so dissimilar to some of the darker corners of a college library back in Cambridge.

  ‘Which was the manuscript the other Englishman wanted to buy?’ he asked.

  Rallis spoke again to the monk.

  ‘It is the one by your left hand. The small one bound in black leather.’

  Adam took hold of the volume indicated and carefully opened it.

  ‘It is written on vellum,’ he said.

  ‘Are they not all written on vellum?’

  ‘The majority will probably be paper. Vellum manuscripts will, I assume, be the oldest.’

  ‘Is it the one which we seek?’ The lawyer’s voice was as hushed as if he was in the monastery’s church.

  Adam turned the leaves of the manuscript one by one. He blew gently on one of them and a small cloud of dust particles rose into the air.

  ‘Adam, is it the book we have come for?’ Rallis sounded as if he was struggling to maintain his usual calm.

  In reply, Adam held out the manuscript, open at the page on which he had blown. He pointed to the Greek lettering inscribed on it hundreds of years earlier. The ink was fading but the letters were still clear and legible. He indicated one of the words at the top of the page.

  ‘ “Euphorion”,’ he said in a hushed voice. ‘Unless my ability to decipher Greek has deserted me entirely, that word is Euphorion.’

  ‘It is,’ Rallis replied. ‘And there beneath it is the word “Periegesis”. There can be no doubt about it. This is the missing manuscript of Euphorion’s travels.’

  The two men looked at one another with poorly suppressed excitement. For a moment, neither man could think of anything further to say.

  ‘You have come a long way to find this book,’ Rallis said eventually. Adam was staring once again at the word ‘Euphorion’ on the leaf of vellum. He had indeed travelled far since he had first encountered the name written in the notebook belonging to poor Creech. And now here was the mysterious manuscript, the one in which, if Palavaccini, the editor of the first printed version was to be believed, the Greek writer spoke of “the golden treasure that lies hidden where the ancient kings buried it”.