‘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 greeting.
‘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.