Chương 130: 120. Íera Odós

"The Sacred Way from Athens to Eleusis runs fourteen miles through the Rarian plain, and every autumn for a thousand years the initiates walked it in procession to be received into the Mysteries. They were sworn to silence on pain of death, and in a millennium of continuous observance not one of them is known to have broken the oath. We have the road. We have the foundations of the Telesterion, the hall where it happened. We have no idea what was done to them inside it.

Thousands of literate, argumentative Greeks walked into that building every year and came out and never said a word." — The Ether Atlas: Field Notes of Steven Parr, Piraeus Donna came down the stairs in her boots, which she had not worn inside the house since the first night. Petros was going out tonight, to a hill, and none of them were quite sure how to manage the risk around it.

"Did you figure something out? You look ready to go out," Arthur said.

"No." The response was tight and frustrated.

"There is a treeline. I can see the yard and four hundred metres of the road out of it, and after that the road bends. A nd then all I can do is count. I watch the cart go out and I watch it come back, and if he is on it when it comes back, we know that much. If he is not on it, I know that much, and nothing else."

"There is no signal and no relay," Arthur said.

"If it goes wrong in that yard it will be over before we know about it." Sarah had been sitting with her head in her hands all evening.

"You cannot be on that road," she said, without raising her head.

"If you are seen on that road and they understand who you are, then Petros is a heretic sitting in a room full of men who murder for their god." She brought her head up, rubbing her eyes with her palms.

"He knows the risk. He chose it. We have had enough talks with him and he will not change his mind. We will have to trust that he knows what he is doing." The pressure your brother described is not available at an unallocated human baseline, Archie said, into the four of them. A man of that build does not settle a collarbone under a hand laid down gently. He has allocated, and he has allocated generously. Steve unfolded the square of paper. He had written on it in a hand tight enough to require a magnifying glass.

"Before he goes," Steve said, "I have worked out a signal. Three phrases. The first means all clear, the second means compromised, the third means abort. He memorises them tonight, and if he can get a message back to the fuel dock through Vangelis, we have a channel."

"The SOE gave trained agents in occupied France a memorised poem-code for their radio checks. The Germans broke every one of them inside a year. Leo Marks wrote a book about it. You want to hand an untrained civilian three phrases that he needs to memorise, and then turn a cult asset to deliver them back to the dock?" Donna asked. Steve looked at the three phrases a while longer, and then folded the paper back up. Petros came down with his jacket over his arm.

He crossed the kitchen without saying anything to anybody, because there was nothing left in that room which had not been said a dozen times. • • The yard behind the house off the Iera Odos was smaller than the room inside it, and darker. A wall of stacked crates screened the lane. Three oil lamps hung from nails in the stucco. Petros counted nine, his eyes low, hands loose. Donna had taught him that much. A woman with a splint on her wrist sat on the edge of the cart.

She was perhaps fifty, holding a bundle on her lap with both arms, packed for distance. Beside her, a man with a burnt face helped an older man up the cart. Petros got his hands under the man's arm, lifted him up and in. The man weighed almost nothing. He sat where Petros put him and pulled his coat over his legs. Two more came through the side door. A young woman with her hair cut short and no expression on her face, and a man in his thirties who had been large before whatever had happened to him.

He was now like a coat on a hanger, the frame keeping the rest of him upright. Neither spoke. Lefteris was in the doorway, watching. He had a list, and he ticked names off it without saying them aloud.

"Today you see the sanctuary. The place of upliftment," he said, pleased, "and then we will have the conversation properly." The carter was Manolis, a wide fifty-something man with the hands of a man who had spent his life on ropes and mules.

"Lefteris says you learn the road," Manolis said.

"Kala. Then learn the paper first, because the road is nothing, re. Any fool has a road. It is the paper." He held the paper flat against the side of the cart where the lamp fell on it. A Council requisition. Nine labourers, levied for the fortification works on the acropolis, released to the bearer. The stamp was real. He held his eyes on it longer than he needed to. A forgery he could have lived with. A forgery meant a clever man with an evening and a potato.

This was Council ink on Council paper with a Council die pressed into it.

"Good paper," Petros said.

"The best paper," Manolis agreed, and put it away, then clicked his tongue at the mules. They went out of the yard and down onto the Iera Odos with the light going out of the sky. The route went south through streets Petros could have walked blind. Past the junction where the old gasworks had stood. Down through the warehouse district where the loading cranes stood in silhouette against the last light.

Past the corner where his father had bought cigarettes every morning for thirty years from a kiosk that was now a heap of corrugated iron with a dog sleeping on it. The first checkpoint sat on the edge of the old gasworks, sandbags and a bus turned across the road. A boy in a militia jacket too big for him took the paper and held it to a lantern and moved his lips while he read, then waved them through without once looking at the cart.

"He reads," Manolis said, when they were past it.

"He is new. In a month he stops reading." Lefteris sat talking in hushed whispers with the nine. Squeezing a hand here and a shoulder there. The second checkpoint was on the harbour road, four men standing around a fire in a drum. A sergeant walked out with his hand up in greeting. He did not ask for the paper and simply motioned them through. The escort was waiting where the coast road left the city behind and the scrub began. There were fourteen of them.

They came out of the dusk on both sides of the road, unhurriedly and armed as a matter of habit. Most carried blades. A few had spears. One man rested a sledgehammer on his shoulder with the ease of a workman heading home. They had the shoulders of dockers and fishermen but a bearing that was far more dangerous. Two of them were eating goat off skewers as they walked and went on eating. The lead man raised a hand to Manolis, Manolis raised one back, and the cart did not slow down.

They walked for perhaps thirty minutes along the coast road. In that time, nothing came out of the scrub. Nothing came down from the hill. Fourteen armed men walked nine unarmed civilians beside a hill full of werewolves, and not one of them flinched at a noise. The cart stopped where the road curved round to the water below the seaward face of Kastella.

"On foot from here," Lefteris said. So they walked, toward a cut in the seaward rock face that Petros had been looking at since the cart stopped. A shelf of quarried stone, squared and weathered, framing a passage into the hill about a metre and a half wide. The old shelter gallery. The one the civil defence had cut into the rock during the war, or during the one before it. Every child in Piraeus knew there were tunnels in the hills.

Most of them had been inside at least one, until their mothers found out and screamed, and then they went back in anyway. Petros had dared Sarah into this one when he was eleven and she was nine. They had gone in with a torch that died halfway and came out the far end with scraped knees and a secret they kept from Eleni for three years. There was an iron gate on it now. It had not been there before. A man with a key stood at the gate, flanked by two others carrying blades.

He opened it without being asked, and stood aside. The hinges made no sound. You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story. The passage was lit with lamps hung from spikes driven into the walls. The light ran in front of them in a chain of small pools. The passage sloped upwards and they climbed with it to reach another gate at the top. Another gate kept by another man with another key. This one opened onto air and firelight and the smell of cooking meat.

• • The church compound sat on the crown of the hill behind a wall that was not the wall Petros remembered. The churchyard wall had always been there. A low structure of dressed stone enclosing the church and the graveyard. It had been low enough for him to sit on when he was twelve. It was not low enough to sit on now. Someone had raised it and filled every gap with rubble and dressed stone stripped from the ruin of the theatre on the seaward side.

The capping was uneven, laid by hands that knew the work but not the art, but it was solid. The compound itself was blocked off by another gate. This was also new and also iron, but it stood open with two men standing next to it. Inside the wall, the compound was clean and lit by fires kept low and shielded. A dozen people moved between the church porch and a row of lean-to shelters built against the inside face. Food was being cooked. A man was repairing the wall by lamplight.

Sentries stood on the wall at intervals, facing outward, and each person carrying a weapon inside the compound also wore a tabard. The tabard was white with red borders, and four jagged slashes were painted at the centre of it. There was an altar table standing in the open yard. Petros looked at it and dismissed it until he realised what he was looking at. This was a real altar table, stone-topped and heavy, and it had been carried out of the church and set down on the flags in front of the door under an open sky.

He had knelt in front of a table like that for thirty-eight years. There were people with their backs leaning on it and eating. Behind it the church door stood open and he could see the screen. The iconostasis was still up. The saints were still on it, in their rows, with their hands raised. Somebody had taken a blade to every face on it. Four cuts, in a fan, on every saint on that screen, the same four cuts the men on the wall wore in red on their tabards. The screen had been marked, and left standing.

The candle stand in front of it was full to the lip with grey ash instead of sand, and thin brown candles burned in them. Then the right wall caught his attention. It had names cut into it, in letters an inch high, hundreds of them. They were not the names of the dead, there were no dates, no crosses, no koimithi, only the name and under it a single word he could not read from where he stood. Two men wearing the white tabards came in through the gate with something wrapped, and carried it up the yard.

The wrapping had wet spots. Meat for the fires. Then a man came out of the church and stood on the step, and every voice in the yard fell silent. He was sixty or near enough and heavy through the chest. His beard was long and grey. He wore black and the robes did nothing to conceal the muscles beneath.

"Come up," he said.

"Come up where I can see you." The burned man got up and shuffled forward. Papa-Damianos took his hand in both of his and held on to it, and turned him by it to face the yard.

"This one has walked around Piraeus for two months with his face like that," he said, "in a city that had nothing to say to him about it. Not the Council. Not the Church. They stepped around him in the street." He was smiling.

"Tonight he will not be stepped around." Somewhere behind Petros a woman had begun to cry.

"This is an old tale, older than the Church, older than the city down there. This is a tale from our heritage. In Arcadia, up in the mountains, long before there was an Athens down there, there was a king. Lykaon. And one night a beggar came to his door and the beggar was Zeus." He came down a step.

"The king wanted to know," Papa-Damianos said.

"Whether the thing sitting at his table was a god or a man with a good story. So he set a test. He put a man's flesh on the table among the other meat, and then he sat down across from his guest and watched his face. Because a god would know what was on his plate." Papa-Damianos walked out among them, and they made room for him without being asked.

"And the god knew," he said, and waited.

"He knew before he sat down. He knew whose flesh it was and how it had come to be there, and now hear the next part of it, because in forty years nobody preached it to me and I never preached it to any of you." His voice did not rise. The yard came forward to him instead, in a shuffle of feet and knees.

"He came to the table anyway." Somebody let out a breath behind Petros.

"He did not turn round at that door. A man put the flesh of another in front of the god and asked a question with it, and the god sat down in that hall and answered him." He turned as he walked, taking the people in.

"Lykaon went out of that hall on four legs, his jaw long and claws strong. He did not die and he was never hungry again. He was never afraid again. Not of the winter, not of the wolves, not of men with spears. Nothing on that mountain could touch him for the rest of his life, and here we are standing in the dark two thousand years afterwards, still saying his name." He stopped in the middle of the yard, under the sky, with the fires low around him.

"They tell this story as a story of a curse. Fools!" Papa-Damianos spread his arms wide.

"Show me. Show me the punishment in that." Nobody in the yard answered him, and nobody in it was eating any more.

"Show it to me. I read that story and called it a curse, because that is what I was handed and I did not have the wit to look at it." He turned, his arms still spread.

"Point at the curse. Where is the wound? Lykaon asked, and he was answered by the father of gods himself. He was shown the way and he was made into a thing that the world has not stopped fearing ever since.

"They tell you Lykaon lost a crown and a hall and the good opinion of soft men. Bah! Which of you would not take that trade tonight? Which of you lost less than that in the first week, and got nothing back for it at all? What is a crown when the whole world trembles at your power?" The old man beside Petros said something under his breath, and it was not a prayer.

"They knew the truth and they hid it from us. To keep us weak. To keep you weak." Papa-Damianos pointed a finger at the sky.

"On a mountain in Arcadia called Lykaion, there was a sanctuary to the father of the gods, and once a year they brought to it an offering. Flesh of a man mixed with the flesh of the sacrifice.

"And the man who ate the sacred flesh was changed. He gave up his body and was given a new one, and for nine years he walked the mountain in the shape the god had chosen, and the mountain knew him, and the mountain kept him.

"Pausanias wrote about it so that we remember. Then the servants of the new gods, the silent gods, called it heresy and a curse. Curse?" Papa-Damianos looked at the crowd with tears in his eyes.

"Curse?" he asked again.

"It is not heresy. It is love. The love the old gods gave us, the gods who came to our table." Petros could hear the sounds of weeping all around him.

"Today, you will experience that love. This church and the ground below are the Lykaian sanctuaries come again. You will go down the steps and you will ascend. You will find the power that you were denied and the love you are owed." He was now beaming at the hopeful faces.

"Every name on that wall walked through the door of my church and went down into the dark. And then they emerged on the hill. Walking about on it. On two legs, in the shape the legends handed us two thousand years ago and told us to be frightened of." He walked among them, touching a shoulder here, taking a hand there.

"You were brought here because you are ready. Not because you are desperate. Because you are the ones who stopped pretending. The strong take, and the strong become, and what they become is holy." His hand came to rest on a woman with a splint. She looked up at him.

"You have carried more than your share," he said.

"Tonight you set it down." The yard made a sound. It was more a murmur than a cheer, but it was more hopeful than such a place should allow.

"There was flesh on Lykaon's table," Papa-Damianos said, "and the god came to it." He looked out at them.

"There is flesh on this one." Nine of them stood up quietly, all over the yard. They came forward and made a line in front of the altar table, and it was the same line Petros had stood in every Sunday of his life. Two men came out of the church with the vessels. One of them carried a polished silver chalice and the other carried a red cloth in both hands. They took their places on either side of Papa-Damianos, and Papa-Damianos took up the spoon.

"They will tell you that this is bread," he said to the line, in an ordinary voice.

"It is not bread. I will not lie to you in front of the holy door." Nobody stepped out of the line. The burned man went first. He put his head back and opened his mouth and the red cloth was put under his chin. Papa-Damianos put the spoon in and said a word over him that Petros did not catch, and it was over in the time it takes to say a name. The burned man stepped aside and stood with his eyes shut and began sobbing.

The second went up, and Petros forced himself to watch, because a man who understood what he was looking at would have looked away. The spoon went into the chalice and came out again, nine times, and it never dripped once. This spoon was almost dry. There was no wine in that cup. They had not changed the cloth either, and it went from red to a darker red and then to almost black. The last was the woman with the splint.

She stepped back from the table and stood blinking with a trickle of red at the corner of her mouth. The server wiped it away with his thumb. Petros kept his hands loose and his eyes uninterested and dead. Lefteris came up beside him, put a hand on his shoulder and walked him back three paces to the wall.

"You stand here," he said in his ear, not unkindly.

"This part is not ours, re. We bring them to the door. We do not go through it." So Petros stood against the wall with the names cut into it, and from there he was close enough to read the word underneath them. It was the same word under every one, in smaller letters. Anevike. He went up. She went up. The nine were walked to an inner church door. Papa-Damianos stood beside it, and they went in past him one at a time.

He touched each of them as they went, on the shoulder, on the head, on the back of the neck, and then two men wearing the tabard followed the nine with a lamp. Papa-Damianos did not follow them. He took the handle in both hands and pulled the door shut from the outside. He stood with his back against it and his head down as if in prayer. An old man near Petros said, to nobody, "You should go. You have earned it before any of us."

"Somebody must stand at the door and open it," Papa-Damianos said, without lifting his head.

"When there is no one left to send, I will go." The yard began to sing. He had heard that tune at every funeral he had ever stood through. He had heard it at his father's, in a stone church with his mother's hand shut around his own. The tune was the same. The words were not. Then the singing thinned, and heads began to turn. Petros turned with them and looked up past the wall to the rise beyond it. Something was standing on the crest, above the last of the firelight, on two legs.

It stood up there with the sea behind it and looked at the fires, and then it turned and went over the crest without hurrying. All around him, in one movement, people went down on their knees. They were weeping, with their arms thrown wide, and they were saying names. Lefteris was on his knees beside him, tears running openly down his face. Petros got down on his knees.