Ivoria, Tanith Lee [popular ebook readers .TXT] 📗

included no DVD’s or books. He found the thrillers and other stuff later. Afterwards he found he missed nothing he had left behind.

But the pin he found when he stripped the bed.

It had lain just below the undersheet, against the mattress. He had no idea how it had got there. Had he put it there? Nick thought not. Maybe it had only fallen from his hand, rolled, become caught. It was a wonder he had not damaged it, lying on it…

Oddly it appeared less green, the verdigris rubbed a little. But the carved small emotionless face with its fanciful hair was as he recalled.

He took it to the hotel with him.

When he decided he would go to Greece, also he took the pin with him. He wrapped it carefully, and somehow thought no one would detect it, or if they did think it worth investigating. Nor apparently had they. If it had been valuable, as he had at first suspected, then his own attitude was most unwise. Either he did not care, or he had never truly believed it was worth a sou. Another of Laurence’s tricks…

At the holiday flat in Athens, Nick kept the pin, still in its container, in his bag. He had no urge to look at it, had no notion why he retained it, if it meant anything at all, let alone to him. But then again, he did not quite know why he came to Greece. To someone else it might have been imperative - and he had expected all the while he stayed on in England that Serena would call him, to demand if he meant to follow up the ‘lead’ the old Franks woman had supplied, or what the address was in the ice-cream notepad, and if it existed. Serena though did not call. No one did by then.

Two days after the American girl had gone, the ferry began to run to the island. His passage was already booked.

As he vacated the apartment for the metro to Pireas, the thin cat, seated on a lump of stone across the way, watched him.

The girl had been concerned about the cat. The Greeks, she had said, were notorious for their blank indifference to animal welfare. But, although thin, the cat’s coat, a dark malt shade, shone as if burnished. The eyes were not blue, naturally. Later, however, he could only seem to remember them that colour.

On the front of the boat - or ship - a catamaran of some size, there were two blue eyes, drawn in thickly on the red and white paint of the hulls.

The eyes, their purpose, was treated as a sort of joke between the captain and most of the passengers, several of whose cars squatted on the car-deck. The crew seemingly insisted the eyes be present, to protect the vessel and the persons manning it. Also, of course, so the boat (or ship) could see the way it/she had to go.

The catamaran set out across an Aegean of cornflower colour, under a blaze of sun. The other travellers were of several, perhaps to be anticipated, sorts, fit middle-aged or over-fit under twenties, these last noisy and excitable.

As the mainland drew away, the world opened out brazenly and indomitably. On every side far off islands began to appear, beckoning green, or alabaster with buildings. Black-headed gulls were circling. Once a swarm of some sort of fish went glittering by below, cleaving the drown-blue water with their knives.

His lung had begun to ache. Nick sat under an awning and drank an intense orange drink. The light, sheering from the sea, made him think of beautiful smashed crockery, possibly gilded with silver. He should take a written note of how it all was. He did not.

The voyage took a little more than six hours. The catamaran called nowhere else, being the property of the island, which it greeted with its own proprietary bleat of a horn.

It had been early, before noon, when they left Pireas, but the sun swam lower, it and the light still clear as coppery glass.

Nick knows he is afraid to enter the harbour. To disembark. But it occurs to him he always secretly has been, of entering any port, any coast, and of any type - the other universe of a country, or a relationship - unless, obviously, it was strictly business. Maybe, he thinks, as he readies himself to leave the transporting intermediary of the ship, even to be born had unnerved him: no longer a pampered passenger in the sweet, luxurious privacy of Claudia’s womb, but a stranger put ashore on the unknown landmass of life.

Zeta

His current hotel lies just behind the port, where the coastal village runs along in white blocks, caged with painted wooden balconies. Some of the blocks are steep steps, some houses. But there are terraces above the beach, crowded with cafés and bars, psistariés and tavernas, several shaded by gigantic mulberry trees.

A little farther along the curved hip of the coast a second resort - pensions, bars and discos - has sprung up. After sunfall these erupt in sound and flexing lights. Yet from this distance they are less intrusive, their flashing colours, he thinks, only like partly tamed lightning.

The island itself is largely volcanic. Above the village paths carve into the hills. Pines and cypresses, fresh springs sparkling as the sun shoots at them.

At the centre of it all three mountains rise, not of colossal height, but seeming quite impressive from the coast, their heads still slightly chalked with snow.

The eyed catamaran goes, and returns every five days, birthing new arrivals.

There is the summer wind.

This wind, they say, is a living being. It forms in the north and then blows southward at and about the isles all summer, easing only after dark, to sleep.

A wind that sleeps.

A once volcanic island.

There might always be appalling earthquakes. They may happen at any hour, any moment. There are still those who recall the horrors of a quake over fifty years