It was a gigantic cove, a giant's stone basin tipped towards the sea, the lip just submerged, the walls rising on all sides until they fused with the mountain that towered high over everything. Straight ahead, a white village on a strip of white beach shimmered through the heat. Suddenly we were out of the wind and the air was still and hot and filled with the shrieks and rasps of unnumbered legions of insects. I smelled pine resin and thyme, and herbs that I could not name; stone dust, and a faint, pungent stink that was not unpleasant. The place was soaked in scent and noise and dry heat, as if the bay were an alchemist's alembic and we had intruded on some miraculous operation.
As we moved on, I could see houses on either side of us, small whitewashed cubes with roofs of red pan tile standing out from the dark grey-green trees. On the beaches, men sat mending nets while their brightly painted boats skipped at anchor in the clear, silver-blue shallows. I waved – something not done aboard the Cormaran, but I could not help myself – and a few waved back. At my side the Greeks were visibly shaking with joy. They whispered back and forth, their hands drawing urgent signs in the air between them. 'Have you been here before?' I asked them.
'I have,' said Pavlos. His face fell for a moment. 'They were not so pleased to see me then. It was when I sailed with… when I was with the pirates. I think we raided every village on these islands, but we didn't see the people. They would hide in the mountains, and besides, they had nothing to steal. But Venice is strong now, and the pirates are all dead or fat and old. Or respectable-' and he dug Panayoti in the ribs. 'They don't seem to be afraid of us at all.'
'Because we bring trade, not ruin. In any case, this time our brand of piracy will be more – what shall I say? – delicate.'
'He means that we aren't going to land, collar the first old man we see and tell him we've come to pinch their Saint Tula.' It was Gilles. 'The Captain is very, very good at his work.'
The truth, of course, was that we were here to steal these people's most precious possession. Tula's body was the beating heart of Limonohori and of Koskino itself. Although I did not believe that – nor did any of us -1 had not forgotten that I had once been one of the faithful, the credulous. I missed it, that feeling of certainty. When you lose faith you never quite fill the emptiness left behind. And so I was not yet so estranged from my past to wave away the import of what we had come here to do.
But then I thought, as the cypresses and those strangely gnarled, grey-leaved trees slipped by, if no one knows that Tula has gone, has she really left? It is faith that has the true power, not the object, and provided we left their faith intact, maybe we would have done no great wrong. I spat over the side. Well, I had solved that problem, I thought, bitterly.
I am a little ashamed to report that these dark thoughts slipped away as soon as I heard the rattle and hiss of the anchor cable and felt the Cormaran stall beneath my feet. We were perhaps four rods' length from shore, but the cable paid out twenty fathoms before the anchor struck. It was deep below us, and the sun's rays, very low now, made darts of speckled gold that dived and vanished. The village was there before us, a scatter of houses and a strange little church, with a merry chaos of painted boats at anchor in the shallows and drawn up onto the glaring white pebbles. A crowd was gathering at the edge of the water. They certainly were not afraid of the Cormaran, I thought, as I watched men wade out to their boats and begin to row out to us. They rowed standing up and facing forward, pushing their whole bodies into the task, sunburned men with curly black hair and beards, wearing simple tunics as white as the stones of the beach.
Pavlos, with Elia and Panayoti at his heels, was clambering into the gig. Anna made to follow, but Gilles held her back gently. 'Not yet, Vassileia,' he murmured. We will do this properly, with a little style.' Meanwhile the three Greeks were rowing madly towards the villagers. They met in open water, and the villager in the lead boat grabbed the gunwales of the gig and pulled it alongside him. I saw Pavlos put out his hand and felt a certain relief when it was taken warmly. There was much hand waving in the Greek style, and then the flotilla pulled towards us again.
'So they trust us for now,' said the Captain behind us. 'That is good.' The village headman had ordered a feast in our honour, and despite the short notice, pigs and goats were already sizzling on their spits by the time Anna and I waded ashore. Trestles had been set up in the square beneath two great trees whose bark was smooth and peeling, showing the creamy skin of the trunk beneath.
'Platanos,' Anna told me. 'I don't know what you call them in your country. Here every village has one in the square for shade. Often they are older than the village itself. And those other trees you are gawping at are lemons. Limoni – how this place got its name.'
She sat beside me at the head of the table – that is to say, she sat at the head of the table, the Captain on one side, myself on the other. It seemed unfair to me that Gilles or another, more senior crewman should be placed below me, but Gilles himself insisted, waving away my protests. Anna, he explained, had been presented to the village as Eleni, the daughter of a Macedonian duke. She was being married off to a Flemish lord living in Venice – myself, as it turned out – who had come to fetch his bride and carry her back to the Serenissima. The Lady Eleni had heard of the shrine of Saint Tula from her old nursemaid, and had come to make an offering and pray for many sons. That had overjoyed the folk of Limonohori. They loved their saint, they told us, and everyone who came to visit her was sent by God to bring joy to the island. But of course, few had come while the pirates (may their intestines be chewed by wild pigs) had held sway. Now pilgrims were coming again, thanks be to the Frankish lords, but never often enough.
The food was wonderful. Chargers of red earthenware piled high with the hacked-apart meat passed from hand to hand. There were bitter greens, little grilled fish, strange and rich stews of vegetables, some of which I recognised, some not. 'Melitzana,' Anna would explain. 'Bamyes; fasolyes.' I finally tasted a lemon, squeezing a half into my mouth and almost choking on the knife-like sourness while the villagers roared. A boorish Frank, but at least he's trying, they seemed to think, and that was fine. Anna and I were at the very centre of a constant swirl of bustle and noise: we, the noble lovers, were the guests of honour. Every new dish came to us for a first taste, every speech – and there were many, each one more eloquent and wine-loosened than the last – began with a toast to us. I took a guilty joy in the thought that these poor people, so profligate with their hospitality, had no idea just how lowly one of us was, and how truly imperial the other. We did not have to play-act very much, there being small likelihood of anyone in Limonohori knowing much about the social life of Antwerp – not that I knew much more than them. I kept my chin up and my manner as lordly as I could under the determined siege of the strange pine-soaked wine. Anna, meanwhile, seemed to be in paradise. They brought her babies to bless, and I blanched at first when she spat on the little swaddled things until she explained that it warded off evil. She pinched children's cheeks and had her own pinched beet-red by an endless line of old women who would have loved to get their claws on my own jowls had they dared. Rank evidently had its advantages.