Aphrodite's Tears Read online

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘Perhaps a little wine?’

  Oriel shook her head. After the brazen heat of the airfield, the cool cabin was welcome but her throat felt dry and her lips were parched. ‘Just a glass of water, please.’

  He reached into a large coolbox tucked behind the seats at the back of the plane and poured some water, placing the chilled glass in front of her on the table. ‘Better to have your wits about you when you meet the Kyrios. I warn you, he takes no prisoners. Never has a man’s name been more appropriate.’ He poured himself a glass of ouzo and sat down opposite her, fastening his own seatbelt.

  She frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’

  Yorgos gave a short laugh, seeming to relish her confusion, and his teeth gleamed against the dark olive of his skin. ‘Kyrios Damianos Lekkas.’ He regarded her with an assessing stare that she sensed was meant to intimidate her. ‘In ancient Greek, Damianos means master, tamer and conqueror. The name suits him well, you’ll find.’

  Oriel was well aware of the meaning of the word but she also knew it would be a waste of time pointing that out to him. Instead, unflinching, she said: ‘I didn’t realize Kyrios Lekkas’s name was Damianos. On the contract I signed, his forename was only an initial. So, you say his name suits him well?’ She hardly wanted to ask but curiosity got the better of her: forewarned was forearmed.

  ‘Put it this way, the islanders call him Drákon Damian, Dragon Damian. Feared by everyone, he is himself fearless. He seems to have six heads, each with a pair of eyes. Nothing on the island escapes him.’ Yorgos appeared to look straight through her for a moment in reflection before his gaze fixed on her again. ‘It would be a brave and clever man who outwitted the Kyrios.’

  Drákon Damian. The rather gothic epithet didn’t bode well, Oriel thought wryly. ‘You make him sound quite formidable.’

  ‘Of course the Kyrios is formidable. He is the island’s leader, a tough one, who demands respect.’ Yorgos’s obsidian eyes regarded her closely, making Oriel feel as if she were being pinned under a microscope and put in her place. There was something self-important about the estate manager; she had the sense that a weak and dull personality was being animated by guile and the affectation of substance.

  Oriel schooled her features into an inscrutable mask, one that she was used to adopting when asserting herself at work. ‘I see how Damian Lekkas is the master of the island but “tamer” and “conqueror” are surely not adjectives he warrants,’ she said mildly.

  Yorgos took a large gulp of ouzo and cleared his throat. ‘You think I exaggerate? He is both of those things. He hunts in the moonlight with the wolves and swims with the sea monsters in the deep and dark waters surrounding the island. The waters around Helios are known to be particularly dangerous.’ He leaned forward slightly. ‘Do you know that he once fought a shark and actually killed it?’

  Oriel raised an eyebrow. No deep-sea diving excavation project was without its dangers and the way Yorgos Christodoulou was speaking was overblown; still, it made her feel uneasy. As for Lekkas himself, she was becoming increasingly intrigued by the enigmatic figurehead of Helios, despite her growing sense of foreboding. ‘A courageous man,’ she said in a neutral tone.

  Yorgos regarded her suspiciously, clearly wondering if he were being mocked. ‘Yes, Despinis Anderson, a courageous man and a powerful one, too. He can be totally merciless with his enemies and when it comes to defending his property.’

  ‘Owning an island must bring a great deal of responsibility,’ she conceded. ‘Security being paramount, naturally. I suppose for that one needs to be hard.’

  Yorgos sat back in his deep leather chair. ‘Hard, yes. Some people would say there is also a coldness about him. Even so, that doesn’t stop him exerting a strange power over women.’ He gave Oriel another calculating look. ‘In that way, he’s the conqueror, Despinis Anderson, since you ask. He just has to set his cap at a woman for her to kneel at his feet in submission.’ He shrugged, looking down into his glass. ‘I’ve seen it many times. Each year it’s the same. Another girl here, another girl there, all of them drawn to him like a magnet. And the Kyrios responds as any man would.’ Yorgos’s glittering eyes snapped back to Oriel’s face. ‘Oh, he will bed them, but he doesn’t care one iota for them. There’s only ever been one woman for him.’ At this, he gave a half smile and shrugged. ‘But the Kyrios is easily bored. As soon as a girl starts demanding things of him, he casts her out. He’s a man of stone, with a dead heart.’

  Oriel tried to hide her distaste for the estate manager’s vulgarity, not to mention his disloyalty. Even if Kyrios Lekkas was all the things Yorgos Christodoulou was describing – although she put much of it down to Greek melodrama – she disapproved of the way he was criticizing the person on whom he depended for his livelihood.

  ‘That’s a harsh thing to say. Why do you work for him if you dislike him so much?’

  Yorgos gave a forced smile and held his hands up as if to correct her misapprehension. ‘You misunderstand, Despinis Anderson. I don’t dislike him, I grew up with the man and understand his ways better than any other. We Greeks have a saying: if you do not praise your own home, it will fall on you and squash you. We do not speak badly about our own kind. But it is the Greek way to talk plainly, you’ll find out soon enough. There’s a difference.’

  Is there? Oriel wondered. It sounded to her as if there were skant difference at all where Yorgos Christodoulou was concerned, but she bit her tongue.

  ‘I admire the Kyrios, of course,’ he continued, ‘but he’s a man to be feared. Everyone is wary of the Drákon. The locals all bow and raise their hats but behind their smiles, people whisper when he passes. Some say that, if crossed, he would be capable of anything. Even murder.’ A shiver rippled down Oriel’s back. She didn’t answer, glad that the plane’s engines were now rumbling to life, providing a distraction.

  ‘Ah, we’re about to take off.’ Yorgos finished off his ouzo and set his glass down. ‘The flight isn’t long.’

  Oriel turned and looked out of the window as the aircraft began to taxi down the runway, avoiding further eye contact with the estate manager and concentrating instead on the golden landscape beginning to move faster outside. Then suddenly they were in the air. She gazed down on the shining surface of the emerald and cobalt waters of the sea with its rippling surf, drowsy lagoons and islands, so brilliantly green, floating in the vast ocean under the Mediterranean sun. The people became midgets; the palms looked like aspidistras; everything on earth a child’s toy set in the endless blue lake of the sea.

  They had been flying for forty minutes in silence – Oriel having made it clear that she was disinclined to continue a conversation that she considered in poor taste – when Yorgos got up and leaned over her to the window. He pointed to an island that had suddenly come into view.

  ‘Helios,’ he announced.

  Standing out with breathtaking detail in the dazzling afternoon sunlight, like a primitive red-and-green sculpture arising from the depths of a peacock-blue sea, the island of Helios seemed like an inhospitable rock, a place out of time. And as the small prop plane began its descent, a sense of apprehension tightened its grip on Oriel. Damian Lekkas – a man with a dead heart, who fought sharks, played with wolves and whose brutal magnetism made women fall at his feet! The leader of Helios was beginning to sound more like a medieval overlord by the minute. Did she really want to work for someone who was feared, almost as a god, by his people?

  Lower and lower, the plane moved down towards the stretch of glistening sand that curved alongside the ocean like the undulating tail of a snake. The remains of a round tower, which in centuries past must have protected the harbour, sat jagged at the edge of a grey stone quay, whose crumbling walls extended to an old lighthouse, a grim sentinel guarding the toilers of the sea. Behind were mountains, topped by a huge cratered peak, shadowed with deep ridges as if the rock had been pulled and stretched towards the sky by a huge hand.

  They flew
over a group of low trees edging the quayside before heading for a clearing, where a wide strip of asphalt had been laid as a runway. Oriel’s heartbeat quickened as the small craft touched down smoothly.

  ‘We’re here,’ announced Yorgos.

  Oriel unfastened her seatbelt, looking forward to seeing this astonishing island close-up. ‘Helios is volcanic. I hadn’t realized,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. We’re not far from the island of Kythira, almost opposite the south-eastern tip of the Peloponnese peninsula. Like Kythira, Helios has a history of earthquakes, but we’ve been lucky so far. Apart from a few tremors from time to time, we haven’t had any major quakes for two hundred years.’ Yorgos stood up and swung open the door to the plane, letting in a blast of hot air, the heat rising in waves from the baked runway outside. He was about to pick up Oriel’s overnight case but, before he could come to assist her, she slid from her seat and grabbed the bag, alighting swiftly on her own. He frowned as he followed her out.

  ‘The Lekkas residence is about ten kilometres away as the crow flies, almost on the opposite side of the island. I’m going to drop you there,’ he told her, leading her towards a Jeep parked under a stretch of gnarled olive trees.

  It was cooler here than in Athens, with the breeze coming off the sea, but still sweltering enough to feel uncomfortable. Oriel’s first impression of Helios was one of blazing light, naked rock, cacti and thorns. Apart from the sparse olive trees, it was virtually without shade, unprotected from either sun or wind, and although the light was almost white in its brightness, this part of the island looked as desolate as any place she had ever seen.

  Oriel experienced an unfamiliar sense of nervousness as she followed the estate manager, who, she had to concede, had disarmed her with his remarks. Hundreds of questions raced through her mind. What if she didn’t hit it off with her new employer? He sounded like a dreadful womanizer and a complete despot to boot. Even if he didn’t hold any reservations about her having the job, what if she wasn’t up to it? She’d handled difficult and complicated assignments before, and had plenty of diving experience, but maybe this time she wouldn’t be so lucky. Then she quickly berated herself: it was not like her to be so self-doubting.

  When they reached the open-sided Jeep, Oriel let Yorgos take her case, which he stashed in the back of the vehicle. She looked around her at the remoteness of the landscape. This island was so very different to the others she’d seen, with its dry, red soil and scattered, shrivelled-up trees. To her, its almost derelict lighthouse and ruined round tower somehow seemed aggressive, guarded by flocks of screaming gulls that hovered menacingly overhead. It felt like an archaic place, desolate – cut off from the rest of the world.

  ‘This area of the island hasn’t yet been developed,’ Yorgos told her, as if uncannily reading Oriel’s mind. ‘It used to be part of a harbour, but approaching Helios by sea from this side is dangerous as there are fifteen miles of shifting sands. It’s been the graveyard of many a ship bound for the island.’

  ‘How eerie,’ she murmured, looking out to sea. Yet the archaeologist in her was fascinated by the imprints of the past that must lie undiscovered in such treacherous waters.

  Yorgos gestured for Oriel to get in before climbing into the driver’s seat of the vehicle. ‘A few years ago, the Kyrios decided to develop a new harbour on the eastern side. It was just a tiny fishing village but now it’s a small port with a marina and much safer since it lies in a sheltered bay.’

  She stared out at the bleak and timeless vista. ‘The island is certainly very wild.’

  ‘It’s not like this everywhere. Helios was divided between the two Lekkas brothers, Damian, the eldest, and Pericles, after the death of their parents and their uncle Cyrus not long after. Kyrios Damian’s part was planted with olive trees, and the plan had been to introduce blackcurrants to make something of Pericles’s portion.’ He paused, before adding: ‘If you ask me, Pericles was given the worst end of the bargain. It’s no surprise he didn’t make anything much of his part of the island.’

  Yorgos pulled a packet of cigarettes out of the top pocket of his shirt and lit one, squinting through the strong plume of smoke as he exhaled. ‘He was a fun guy to hang around with … very misunderstood. Anyhow, that’s another story.’

  ‘And the brother, Damian, what did he achieve with his part of Helios?’ asked Oriel, fascinated as this almost feudal story unfurled.

  ‘He actually took over the running of the whole of Helios and ended up paying an annual income to Pericles, as he also did for their cousin, Kyria Helena.’

  ‘Why didn’t she have a share of the land?’ Oriel wanted to know.

  ‘That’s how it’s done here, the rules of the island.’

  ‘The rules of the island?’

  ‘On Helios, a girl does not inherit land, she receives an annuity. That’s how families keep their land intact. Now, since the murder two years ago, it all belongs to the Kyrios.’

  Oriel’s head turned sharply. ‘Murder? You mean the brother, Pericles?’

  Yorgos put the key in the ignition and paused. ‘Not only Pericles, God rest his soul.’ He took a quick drag on his cigarette and crossed himself with the same hand.

  Oriel’s eyes widened. ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘What I’m saying is that the Lekkas family has been touched by tragedy more than once,’ he replied solemnly, watching her intently.

  It was on the tip of Oriel’s tongue to ask more questions, but prying felt wrong. Clearly the estate manager revelled in being the keeper of knowledge about the Lekkas family and she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of providing a too-willing audience. Yet, inevitably, her curiosity was piqued. If there were a grisly story involving the Lekkas family, no doubt she would find out soon enough.

  Yorgos stared into Oriel’s eyes with a curious little smile. ‘You are beginning to think that it wasn’t such a good idea to come to this island after all, eh?’

  Though her apprehension was increasing steadily, Oriel lifted a defiant chin. ‘Not at all, I have come here to do a job. What happens on this island, the gossip, the rumours, is not my concern.’

  ‘Well, let me know if you want to return to the mainland,’ he persisted. ‘I’ve seen others turn tail once they find out what living on Helios, with its accursed ruling family, is like.’

  He added slowly: ‘The island has a history, Despinis Anderson. A dark, passionate history, just like the tragedies of our ancient mythology, which cannot be ignored. Whoever lives here cannot help but get caught up in the dramas of Helios. They are part of everyday life.’

  Yorgos studied her, one hand on the steering wheel where his cigarette smouldered between his thick fingers, the other still on the ignition, waiting to turn on the engine.

  Oriel felt her heart thud quickly with a combination of excitement, indignation and fear. Was this some kind of warning? It seemed bizarre and melodramatic. She made her voice sound cool enough not to divulge her inner turmoil: ‘I have signed a contract, Kyrios Yorgos, and I’m not in the habit of reneging on my word.’

  Her reply seemed to annoy him, and he threw away his cigarette half smoked. ‘What can I say? A very commendable trait in normal circumstances, I admit, but I wouldn’t speak too soon.’ Then the Jeep’s engine came to life and they were off.

  The road towards the other end of the island took them over harsh terrain, Oriel’s hair streaming behind her as the Jeep bucked its way over the bumps and stones. She almost forgave the arrogant presumption of Yorgos Christodoulou – although she hoped she would have little to do with him in the weeks to come – as he turned out to be a remarkably knowledgeable guide. Above the grinding noise of the Jeep’s engine, he pointed out the cliffs rearing up with ravaged-looking remains of buildings on their crest. Somewhere inside these great rocks there were grottos, he said, where the islanders had on occasion taken refuge from pirates in times gone by. Towering precipices rose sheer from the sea, and the slashes in the rock, he told her, were beli
eved to have been cut by St George’s sword.

  Before them, the hills rolled like waves of an angry ocean and to the side of them lay rocky escarpments and steep gorges. It was just the sort of place where, in the language of Dodwell and other early nineteenth-century travellers through Greece, ‘a false step would mean death,’ Oriel thought, as they bumped along the road at an almost vertiginous speed.

  It was like a dark fantasy world from an adventure book, and Oriel was all for adventure! She was the only child of ageing parents, who had tried to cosset and protect her for most of her life. This had, no doubt, bred in her a desire for escape and excitement. She had simply rebelled against her mother’s and father’s good intentions, finding every opportunity to assert her independence from them.

  It was partly why she had been drawn to archaeology in the first place. As a young girl, she had spent many nights under her bedcovers with a torch, reading about the lost civilizations of the past, intrepid explorers and their tales of derring-do, imagining what it might be like to be a heroic adventurer who could travel back in time and experience those worlds for herself. Her mother was conventional down to her bones and although she had been proud that Oriel had secured a place at Cambridge, she was nevertheless alarmed at her choice of profession. Muriel Anderson had looked at her daughter with a slightly dismayed expression. ‘Are there any lady archaeologists, darling? Isn’t that what men usually do?’ From that day onwards, Oriel had been even more determined to follow her own star.

  Oriel lifted her eyes towards the mountain she’d noticed from the air, which had been looming over their ride up the cliffside; it was huge and dominated the scenery, almost bewitching in its monstrosity. Yorgos followed her gaze.

  ‘You are looking at Typhoeus, our volcano. The great dragon!’ he said dramatically.

  Now that he had mentioned the volcano, Oriel realized there was a pervading smell of sulphur that hung in the air, giving a diabolical flavour to the scenery. Yes, she could see its resemblance to a hideous behemoth. Or rather, a vast mouth with a good many teeth missing, like the model of a monster’s jaw made by an infernal dentist. White wisps rose from the top like the fumes that give away a secret smoker hiding behind a wall. Grim and forbidding, it frowned over the island.