Aphrodite's Island (4 page)

Karaolis will hang! He was condemned to death for the murder of a policeman the day after I let Stephen make love to me. Iannis says he will be our first martyr. Since then, five British soldiers have been killed. I am terrified for Stephen. I know he goes wandering about the island alone and everyone thinks he is a spy. Perhaps he is. How do I know what he does when he is not with me? Am I a traitor to my own people?

Two nights ago I was woken by the sound of footsteps and low voices outside my window. Looking out, I saw five mules standing in the street below. Men were coming and going from the house, carrying packages wrapped in oilskin, Iannis and Demetrios among them. I recognized the packages. They were the rifles that had been hidden under the floorboards for months. Some of the mules were already loaded with unfamiliar crates and boxes. I wondered whether they were arms that had just been acquired somehow or whether they had been hidden all along in other houses in the village. Whichever it was, I could understand why the decision had been taken to move them. Every day we heard tales of other villages that had been surrounded at night by troops who travelled in convoys without lights through the mountains. At dawn the search would commence and there was no time to move the arms to safer hiding places.

The night air was cool and I wrapped myself in my shawl, but it was not the cold that made me tremble. I had no idea what EOKA’s plans were, except for the hints Iannis gave when he talked of ‘giving the Brits a taste of their own medicine’, but there had already been deaths on both sides and the situation was
getting more tense every day. It occurred to me that perhaps these guns and whatever else was in the crates were not being moved to a safer place but were being prepared for an attack or an ambush. In that case, should I warn Stephen? How could I, when my own brothers might be the ones caught or killed in the confrontation?

I knew most of the men down in the street but there was one I had never seen before, a short, powerfully built man who seemed to be in charge of the operation. When the mules were all loaded he beckoned the others to him and they gathered by the wall of the house, just below my bedroom window. Voices were lowered but in the still night air I could hear every word.

‘Which of you knows the way to this cave?’

‘I do.’ It was Iannis’s voice. ‘We played there as kids. I’m the one who suggested it.’

‘Right. You lead the way. Let’s get going.’

I sat rigid by the window until the clacking of the mules’ hooves had faded into the distance. My brain felt as paralyzed as my body. Eventually, I dragged myself back to the bed and lay down, pulling the blankets close around me to try to still the trembling that gripped me like a fever. Later that same day I was due to meet Stephen at the cave. How could I stop him from going there? He had warned me never to try to contact him at his base in Famagusta and I had no idea where he would be during the earlier part of the day. And even if I could contact him, what excuse could I make for changing our meeting place? I could stay away; tell him later that I had been taken ill. Then, if he found the cache of arms, at least I could not be accused of betraying their hiding place. But I had told him that Iannis knew about the cave – that we three were the only ones who did. He would immediately connect the arms with my family. How could I inflict that dilemma on him? Another thought struck me. Suppose they had left someone to guard the cache. Stephen would walk in on them, all unsuspecting, and would probably be shot. At all costs I must prevent him from doing that. I would have to wait for him on the track below the cave and find some excuse not to go there. But
what? The sky was light before I managed to sleep again.

Next day I cut my last lesson in order to be sure of getting to the cave before him. I took the bus, as I always did, to the next village to Ayios Epiktetos and walked from there. There had been rain during the morning and the air was clear and cool, making the climb into the hills much less arduous, but I suddenly noticed that I was leaving footprints in the softened ground. It didn’t matter here, the track was often used by people moving between the two villages, but if I took the path up to the cave they would give me away. My stomach clenched with alarm as a new thought came to me. Had Stephen and I left telltale prints and other traces in the cave? Would Iannis have seen them, in the dark? Could he possibly guess that I had been there? And what of last night’s mule train? They must have left tracks. Would Stephen notice them?

When I reached the place where the path to the cave branched off, I was relieved to see that the rain had turned it temporarily into a watercourse. All traces of any passing had been washed away, leaving the rocks swept clean and gleaming dully in the sunshine. I stood quite still, listening for any movement above me. It had occurred to me with the daylight that it was unlikely that anyone would have been left to guard the cave. All the men I had seen last night had jobs and families. They could not disappear into the hills for hours on end without raising suspicion. And the cave had been chosen specifically because no one was likely to stumble across it. Still, I had to be sure that I was not allowing Stephen to walk into an ambush.

After a few moments I began to creep cautiously up the path, pausing every few steps to listen. There was no sound except for the rustle of the wind through the branches. I reached the final bend in the zig-zag track and flattened myself behind a large rock. Beyond the cave mouth the path ended in a tumble of loose earth from an old landslide. There was no sign of movement and the branches of the fallen pine appeared to be undisturbed. I began to wonder if I had misheard the conversation below my window, or even dreamed it. Silently, I moved out of the shadow
of the rock and crept up to the fallen tree. Beyond the branches I could see nothing but darkness. For a while longer I crouched there, nerving myself to enter. Then I pushed aside a branch and scrambled through.

Once my eyes grew accustomed to the dimness I saw that the front of the cave was empty and, moreover, someone had swept the sandy floor with a pine branch so that it was smooth and trackless. To anyone else it would have seemed that the cave had not been entered for years but I knew that Stephen and I must have left our footprints in the dust and we had never bothered to wipe them out. Had anyone else seen them? Or perhaps with so many men coming and going they had been obscured by others before they were noticed.

For the first time I had brought a torch with me. I made my way to the back of the cave and found the narrow slit in the rocks that led back into the interior. There was still no sound. If anyone was in there, they were sitting in silence and complete darkness. I switched on the torch and edged into the cleft. It was so narrow that my shoulders touched the rock on either side and a man would have had to turn sideways to pass through. A few yards in there was a turn to the right and once I had passed it the last trace of sunlight was obscured. My heart was pounding and I had to force myself to go on. I had never believed Iannis’s stories, but they had left their mark none the less.

The passage was shorter than I expected and quite suddenly I found myself at the entrance to the inner chamber. It was smaller than I had imagined from Iannis’s description but with a
high-vaulted
ceiling where the beam of my torch failed to penetrate the darkness. There was no treasure, and no fire-breathing dragon, but on the far side, stacked in a pile, were the crates and bundles I had seen loaded onto the mules.

As soon as I was sure of what I was seeing I was seized by a new wave of panic. I was convinced that someone would come into the cave behind me and to prevent me from revealing the secret would somehow block the narrow passageway leading to
the open air. A terror of being closed up in the dark gripped me and I blundered back towards the mouth of the cave, choking and almost sobbing with fear. Once I was in the light again, I sat down on the floor and tried to regain control of myself. The arms were here, but well hidden. Stephen had never shown any inclination to explore the back of the cave and I had never mentioned the existence of the passage. Rather than arouse his suspicions by making some excuse to change our meeting place, would it not be better to try to behave as if nothing had happened?

I scrambled to my feet and seized the dead pine branch that had clearly been used as a broom to wipe out tracks last night. In a frenzy of haste, I began to brush away my own footprints. It was only when I reached the passageway in the rock that I realized I must obliterate them all the way through to the far chamber, so that when the others returned to collect their cache they would not know someone else had been there. I swallowed and tasted bile. It was harder this time to force myself into that dark hole than it had been before but somehow I half stumbled, half crawled to the entrance of the second chamber. Then, working backwards, I wiped out all traces of my presence until I was once more crouching by the cave mouth with the dappled sunlight on my back.

I had only just finished when I heard a step on the path outside. I scrambled to the edge of the cave, pressing my back against the wall. A man’s shadow fell across the sandy floor. Then the branches were pushed aside and Stephen stepped through. Without thinking, I cried out in relief and he stopped short, his hand going to his revolver. Then he recognized me and held out his arms.

‘It’s all right, silly! It’s only me. Who did you think it was?’

I clung to him, trying to hide my shaking voice in laughter. ‘I don’t know. I wasn’t expecting you so soon. You took me by surprise.’

‘I’m early, I know. I didn’t think you’d be here. Were you as impatient as I was?’

‘Yes. Yes, I suppose I am. I couldn’t wait to see you.’

‘Me, too. Oh, darling, I hate every moment I’m not with you! I think of you all day and dream of you all night.’

He kissed me and drew me down onto the ground. He had brought drinks, beer for himself, Coke for me, and I drank greedily. My throat was parched from nerves as much as from my exertions. Afterwards he began to make love to me but this time I was unable to give myself up to him as unreservedly as before.

He felt my tension and said softly, ‘What is it, my love? You’re all wound up. Is it the usual monthly thing?’

I blushed at the mention of such a thing but nodded and muttered, ‘Probably.’

He stroked my hair. ‘We don’t have to do anything, if you’d rather not. I can be patient. We can just cuddle and chat, if you’d rather.’

I felt on the edge of tears. ‘Yes, please. I’d like that.’

So for the first time we talked in the intimate way of lovers. He told me about his unhappy boyhood, sent away to boarding school by his adoptive parents who, he said, must have decided after a year or two that the adoption had been a mistake and wanted him out of the way. He told me how he had been bullied, until he had learned to fight back, and how later he had discovered that he was cleverer than most of the other boys and had achieved some self-respect. He spoke of the relief and delight of his time at Cambridge University and the misery of being cast back into the brutal atmosphere of army life.

‘Thank God I got a deferment until I had my degree! At least that meant I could apply for a commission. I don’t think I’d have survived two years as a squaddie!’

I asked him what he would do when he left the army.

‘I thought of becoming a teacher but I realize now it was for all the wrong reasons. I’ve always loved to travel and to write, and I thought the long holidays would give me a chance to do both.’

‘So have you changed your mind?’

‘I think so. While I’ve been here I’ve seen so many things that – well, things that ought to be brought to people’s attention, so
they can understand what’s really going on. And I’ve seen the correspondents from the various national papers hanging round the bars and hotels, trying to make sense of the situation. I can’t write about how things are here, of course, not while I’m in the army, but once I get out … How do you fancy being the wife of a journalist – a foreign correspondent?’

My breath caught in my throat. ‘Here? You know my father would never permit it.’

‘How could he stop us, once you’re over twenty-one?’

‘You don’t understand. Age makes no difference here. We could never live here as husband and wife.’

‘Then would you come away with me? To England or wherever else in the world I happened to be sent? I know it’s asking a lot, for you to leave your family and the place where you grew up. But it seems as though it’s the only chance for us. Would you do that, Ariadne?’

I should have hesitated. I should have been afraid but I only felt complete certainty. ‘Yes. If you will come back for me, when you leave the army, I will come with you to the end of the earth.’

He kissed me then, and very soon I forgot my fear, forgot even the guns hidden at the back of the cave, and we made love.