Dancers of Epano
by
Wynn Parks
Copyright Wynn Parks 2007
Smashwords Edition
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Summer, burning Summer;
When in the shimmering,
Noon-day still,
The voice of Pan
Rings high to low,
And Dogs of War race for the kill …
The island’s protected inland valleys shimmer with heat. At mid-day, from the fruit groves of The Patriot’s village, his hora, a flight of pigeons rises. It circles, gaining height while the soldiers below, who have frightened the birds, re-group. Sweating in their battle gear, the men once more begin their wary climb. Above, the birds suddenly veer. A gentle shock palpitates the air, and an instant later, the strangely muffled cannon blast reaches the ears of the soldiers, who stop and stare up at the cloud of smoke.
The birds turn once more, toward their cot on the sea side of the village heights. In the silence, a drum beat comes faintly from beyond the houses. It softly punctuates the whirr of white wings. The birds’ course carries them over the old wall that partially encircles the foot of the hora. There, the gaps that have existed in it since the days of the ancient corsairs have been stuffed with new stones. At a gate to the valley path, a dry-rubble rampart is scattered around the remains of an exploded cannon. The terrace to one side of the gate is strewn with the limbs and bodies of men, while on the dirt track leading to the gate, a disemboweled horse stands panting in shock among the corpses of men, and stable-mates. Beside the gate near the burst cannon, lies a woman in a smoldering man’s suit; and in the air, the sulphurous reek of gunpowder.
Even in the hora, the sea-cliffs behind it, there is no wind, no cooling stroke from the North. The walls of the houses are freshly whitewashed and blinding in the surreal clarity of noon. Kitchen doors stand ajar to flies. The village plateia is still. There, a goat, trailing a rope, stands nearly upright, eating flowers from a pot in window ledge. It takes no notice of the drum beat, yet jerks away and stands on all fours, listening as the flight of pigeons passes overhead. The sound of their wings disappears as they continue toward the sea.
Behind the hora, in the field running down to the sea-cliffs, Reginald Jordon barely hears his own tattoo against the hide-stretched hoop. He stands apart from the choral line of women and children. They have dressed themselves as for a festival, with their slippers and scarves and gold embroidered jackets. Alexandra, wife of The Patriot, has woven blue Lupine into her button loops. Yet the dance line is for no Saint’s day. The twins, Anna and Nina, have bound their hands together with ribbons. The carry their babies slung before them in beaded shawls. The older children have been fed wine and opium. Jordan can see the shine of their eyes. The nine, linked women look through the world around them, like those in a trance. With a flash of detached admiration, Jordon notes they have put the strongest on the ends and in the middle to stop any from faltering. It seems ironic to the Englishman that the last survivors should be no more valiant, or cowardly, than the others of Epano who have already perished. The tough have fared no better than the soft, only with more dignity. So the survivors have joined hands as they have always done for dancing: Old Themie, The Patriot’s mother, on the left; Eleutheria, whose name means Freedom, in the middle; and on the far right, leading, is Alexandra…
After the explosion of the cannon had signaled them of the soldiers’ renewed assault, Alexandra called Jordon apart from the old threshing circle and showed him what tempo to play. He wanted to throw down the tambour and restrain her.
“And you expect me to play for this?” he had asked, instead.
“Yes.” She had said, but her eyes had conveyed something for him alone.
Summer, burning summer… Jordon knows he cannot stop the women. But he stands back from himself in wonder that he can bear knowing that Alexandra will soon die. He longs to suddenly wake in his room with Alexandra before him in the candle light. But the drumming anchors him too firmly in the moment. Before his eyes, the women have become a parade of apparitions. Yet, they are the apparitions of people with whom he has spent his years of exile. Because he will not share their fate, he knows he must witness it.
From the far side of the village, between drum beats, the sounds of guttural shouts come to Jordon.
“The soldiers,” he thinks, “they’re here.”
Alexandra removes the red scarf from her hair and floods Jordon’s mind with secret images of her. Now she swings it in her free hand as she dances. With tresses clinging to the sweat on her neck, she leads the women around the stones of the village threshing circle. Coming after her, the priest’s wife, Aspasia, tries to sing the song of the Suliot Women, but her voice breaks. Her knees buckle.
“O, Mother of God!” She moans, “Remove this cup …”
From the far end of the line, Jordon hears old Themie’s crotchety voice.
“Shut up, Aspasia. You’ll frighten the children.”
A hundred meters away, on the near side of the village, one of the soldiers appears. He stops and dries the sweat band of his helmet as he counts the villagers, then runs back, calling out to someone.
Unable to wait any longer, Alexandra leads the women from the circle toward the cliff’s edge. A part of Jordon braces, allowing him refuge only in the now-empty silence, between beats. Where the surge of breeze from the surf below first lifts the stray strands of her hair, Alexandra lays down her scarf, a swath of blood on the stony ground.
“This is our mark.” She announces.
When the women have moved back; aligned themselves facing the drop, soldiers begin to pour out of the village. Brandishing their weapons, the soldiers run shouting toward them. Jordon sees Alexandra glance over her shoulder at the soldiers, then look down the line.
“Quickly!” she raises her free hand, never looking at Jordon. “Come, sisters. We fly with the birds.”
Their start is uneven. Alexandra is held back by her children, Eva and Leko, who cannot match their mother’s stride. Down the line, Old Themie’s end surges in front. The wiry old woman sees, and slows to allowing everyone to come abreast. After a few steps, the lagging end of the line passes in front again. Jordon wonders that their final steps can still be governed by their usual, worldly disorder. As the women and children draw down on the scarf, it seems to him that all the world around him has begun to slow. To his ears, the drum beats fall further apart, as if time might stop before the dancers have reached the edge.
Old Themie first breaks her bonds with earth. Only she, into her seventy-eighth year, has seemed to keep contact with the corporeal world, until the final step. To Jordon, it seems she leaps with the beat, and he wonders at her timing. She springs into the air as if she means to climb it, and then jerks sideways against Eleni, her God-Child’s weight. Old Themie seems to hover in mid-air, caught between upward and downward, on her God-Child’s hand …
It had all begun five days before. The weather was already hot and windless. On the first day, the advance guard had arrived and camped in the orchards below the village. There were only a few, and so the villagers stayed within the old wall, and not gone down to water their trees. All morning, the villagers walked softly through their streets, talked softly, and hushed their children’s play, hoping to go unnoticed. But the soldiers had not decamped. Watchers from the high points in the hora had seen two new arrivals to the soldiers’ camp. They came on horseback near mid-day. As the day wore on, the old men of Epano, unfit for the guerilla life with their sons, began to speak of parlaying with the soldiers. By night fall, a group of these elders formed a “Delegation of Amity and Honor”, proposing to go down to the soldiers. After dark, the villagers gathered in Epano’s small plateia. The air was heavy, and laced with the smell of sour sweat. In the lantern light, faces gleamed. The leader of the elders stood on a chair in the middle of the plateia.
“We must go now; bearing olive branches, or they’ll think we’re hostile. If we wait until more come, they’ll out number us. Then they’ll have no respect for us.”
Old Themie had climbed half-way up an outside flight of stairs, to see over the heads of the others.
“Are you crazy?” she had finally piped up. “Will you also carry your razors to them, so they can cut your white-stubbled throats? Dimitri Odyssiades, you’re supposed to be the clever one here. Do you think those foreign dogs down there will negotiate with a delegation of old men? If they’re here for no good, then let them come to us and say it. Don’t go looking for trouble.”
“For all we know, they’re here simply to collect taxes …” Odyssiades got out.
“Themie’s right.” The Town Crier’s wife, Eleutheria, cut him short. “They’re soldiers and foreigners, not tax collectors, Dimitri. You mustn’t trust yourselves to them. What will the rest of us do if they take you prisoner?”
“We mustn’t provoke them.” Themie continued. “We must cover ourselves with oil, so they have no hold on us. When they can’t see, then we arm ourselves and be ready to fight them, if we must. Meanwhile, we will send for my son, The Patriot, and his boys.”
Dimitri waved off Themie and Eleutheria.
“You can arm if you like with your pots and pans and kitchen knives. As for your son, ‘The Patriot’, it’s because of Petros we’re singled out. Who knows, maybe this is all a trap to catch him. And we’re the bait. No, we must talk with these fellows and try to find out their intentions. This is what we must do!”
Jordon was watching secretly from a darkened, upper window in The Patriot’s house. He'd been polishing the sword given by Petros a year before, and trying to follow the fast-flying arguments. It alarmed him to hear Alexandra call out to her fellow villagers from the balcony, two rooms away.