You did not finish – or you did, but we were interrupted,' I said. It seemed a very long time ago.
'I told you they locked me up?' I nodded. 'They kept me locked away for two years,' she went on. 'Two endless years, in a plain white room with no glass in the window.'
You didn't… it must have seemed a lifetime,' I said, taking her hand. 'And I was only a child, really, at least at the beginning.'
'How did you – you know, how did you manage?' I asked carefully.
'There was a kind priest. Father Jago,' she said. 'He was a good man, for a Frank – no, by any measure. He did not try to cram his doctrines down my gullet. Instead he bought me flowers for my window-ledge, and found my belongings where they had been thrown in the cellars, so I could hang my tapestries. And he bought me my books. He was amazed, quite amazed, that a woman could read, and we spent hours together. He gave me hope.' 'So you were not very lonely?' I asked.
'I have never been so alone,' she said. 'Jago would read with me – Virgil, Aristotle, even Augustine – and I would see my home. Bees would come to sup at my flowers, and I would mourn, for they would never taste the rosemary or the lavender of our palace gardens. The mind plays cruel games.' 'Terrible games,' I agreed.
'Petroc, can I tell you something?' I nodded absently, looking up at the peaceful river of the Milky Way.
'Do you remember when we… back in Bordeaux? The first time?' I nodded again, and kissed her hand.
'It was not the first time. Not for me,' she said. I dropped her hand. 'Really?' I said, my voice reedy with surprise.
'No. You are shocked,' she insisted. I paused, considering. Then I picked up her hand again.
'I have no right to be shocked by anything,' I said. 'The greatest shock I ever had was discovering that you desired me. I have never judged you, Anna.'
'That is not true,' she protested. 'The day after Bordeaux, you acted as if I were Eve and Salome rolled into one.'
'No, no!' I shook my head furiously. 'No, it was the blood! I was sickened to my very soul by what I had done. And you had blood on your hands – I mean just that: your hands were all bloody, and I did not want more blood on me. That was all, Anna! I swear it!'
'I thought that you were revolted by me, by who – what – I was, what we had done. No, listen! In Trondheim, I was so lonely that I took one of my guards for a lover. He was a boy – big, blond, a peasant – and I was a girl. We did it exactly twice, then he boasted to his mates, there was a fight, and he lost the use of his arm. The whole castle found out. They put me in the cells, Patch! They would have tortured me were it not for my imperial blood.' She spat the words out distainfully. 'Then they decreed I should go to the stake. To burn. They would have done it, but Jago, my old priest, saved me. That was how I ended up in Greenland.' What about the guard?'
'Oh, I'm sure they killed him,' she replied. There was mockery in her voice, but it did not conceal the pain.
'Anna, you are neither Eve nor Salome. You did not kill that boy. Yes, there are many who would say otherwise – your husband, for one, and those pious murderers who administer the noose and the pyre as if those were Christ's sacrament. It is they who are damned, Anna. I judge them, not you.'
'Oh, what nonsense, Petroc!' she cried. I hushed her with my finger.
'Listen to me,' I said. 'That morning, after the fight, I was recoiling from what I had done to that man, not from what we had… There has never been anything finer than that in my mean little life. What you did in Trondheim, whose affair is it but yours? My God, Anna, how long were you in Gardar – two years? Well then, you have even done your penance as it is written down by the Church itself. But do not ask absolution of me. In my sight you are spotless. You are as pure as the whitest lily, my love.' 'Do you really mean all that?' she asked, quietly. With all my heart.'
'Then you are a fool,' she said. Her words were harsh, but her lips on mine were not.
The saint who watches over lovers and fools – and over foolish lovers most of all – was guarding us that night, for no one saw us, or if they did, chose not to make it their business. We were not so reckless again, but that night had battered down every last vestige of the reserve that had come between us for so long. If we were not so bold, then at least we spent our idle hours, be they night or day, together. And if my terrible rage was not quenched, it was tempered, and I saw, at last, that although I had come to know death, I had also found out life's store of sweetness, and how to share it with another.
Thus we had passed the great Bay of Naples and the great smouldering peak of Vesuvius, of which I had read in Pliny, and then down past the flames of Stromboli and the smoke of Etna – I remember these sights more than any other, as they were the strangest and filled me with wondering dread. We passed Stromboli at night, and Anna's lips found mine for a moment as we stood at the rail and watched the flames from the mountaintop cast ghastly pink and orange shadows on the black cloud that lowered overhead.
Then, as we passed the Straits of Messina and left Italy at Cape Spartivento, setting off into the Ionian Sea – I loved to hear these names, and pestered Nizam all I could to learn them – I felt a change in Anna. She was quivering like a courser about to be slipped free, and grew silent, although she seemed to seek my presence more. But most days she spent in her station at the bows, wedged in the angle between the rail and the bowsprit, watching the dolphins and flying fish that kept us company and gazing endlessly at the blue distance which hid Greece. She had taken her place there early on the morning we reached the island, as soon as land showed itself as the merest sliver on the horizon. Now her hair was stiff with salt spray, and her eyes were distant and slightly fevered.
'Do you hear it?' she asked. 'The land is singing to us. That is the song of my home.'
We were making for a gap in the lower cliffs that seemed to ring the island. Smaller breaks in the rock gave onto little beaches, each with a grove of trees clinging to whatever level ground there was. But Nizam had pointed the Cormaran at a stone gateway, where the cliffs dipped down into tapering spits and finally broke, letting the sea flow in towards the base of the greater mountain. At the end of each arm of rock stood two small stone turrets from the top of which spun four triangles of pure white cloth. They were windmills, childlike compared to the creaking giants of home but strangely festive amid all this water and arid rock.
We passed close enough to the starboard spit to hear the swish of the mills and to see the rock drop sheer into the deeps, white stone gleaming through the air-clear water. Thick red weed grew there, with fat sea anemones and clusters of black, spiky orbs.
'Echinoos,' said Pavlos, licking his lips. "You would say "urchins".'
I told him we had no such barbaric creatures in Devon, and that I wasn't going to have them anywhere near my mouth. 'No, no: you are the barbarian here, Patch,' Anna reminded me. You will eat echinoos, I insist. They are sublime. They taste like… you'll see.' I huffed. But in truth I was strangely drawn to this place already. We had made only one other landfall in the Mediterranean Sea, at Pisa, a place of man's artistry and artifice, and the filth that always accompanies man had turned the water a sickly, opaque grey. We had skirted the arid coasts at a distance, close enough to smell the herb-laced breeze but too distant to make out details. Now it was close enough to touch, and I felt a sudden shiver of excitement. Then we were past the point, and the Bay of Limonohori opened before us.