‘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.’