lessons and was eager to get down to immediate practicalities.
'Napoleon wants the war between Turkey and Russia to continue,' he said abruptly. Tell us why? We, too, wish it to continue, naturally, until the Porte is defeated, but we should like to know your Emperor's reasons.'
'I do not really know them myself,' Marianne answered, after only the faintest of hesitations. In fact, it did not seem to her that she had any right to reveal Napoleon's plans, especially when these were still secret. 'I think he is chiefly anxious to remove the Sultan from the English influence.'
Theodoros nodded. He studied Marianne as though he meant to pierce her very soul, and then, apparently satisfied, he turned to the abbot.
'Tell her everything, father. She seems to be honest, and I'm willing to put it to the test. If she should betray me, she'll not live long enough to boast of it. Our friends will see to that.'
'I've not the least intention of betraying anyone!' Marianne broke in hotly. 'I'm tired of this everlasting suspicion! Say what you want and have done with it!'
The priest's hands moved pacifically.
'Some night soon, you will leave here in Yorgo's boat. This man,' he indicated the giant, 'will go with you. He is one of our chief people and a good leader of men. Because of that, five years ago, the Turks drove him from his home in the Morea and he has been forced to live in hiding, never staying long in one place. He moves constantly about the Archipelago, always on the run but still free, breathing fire into lukewarm hearts to ignite the torch of revolt and, with his courage and faith, doing all he can to help those who need his help. Today it is in Crete that he is needed, only he could do no good there, whereas there is much that he could do on the Bosphorus. Last night, at the same time as he brought you here, Yorgos brought a monk from the monastery of Arkadios in Crete. There is bloodshed there and the cries of the oppressed rise to heaven. The pasha's janissaries will plunder, burn, torture and impale on the slightest suspicion. This must stop, and Theodoros thinks that he has the means to stop it. But to do so, he must go to Constantinople, which for him is equivalent to throwing himself into the jaws of the wolf. With you, he has a chance not only to get in but also of getting out again alive. No one would think to question a great lady of France travelling with a servant. He will be that servant.'
'He? My servant?'
Marianne stared incredulously at the ferocious-looking giant, with his fiercely curling whiskers and his picturesque garb, thinking that nothing could be less like the conventional Parisian idea of a respectable butler or servant of a great household.
Melina smiled. 'He won't look quite like that,' she said with amusement. 'And he shall be an Italian servant of yours, since he speaks no French. All that we ask of you is to take him with you and get him into Constantinople in your company. You will be staying at the French embassy, I imagine?'
Remembering what General Arrighi had told her about the repeated appeals for help on the part of the ambassador, Comte de Latour-Maubourg, Marianne could not doubt for an instant that she would be warmly welcomed.
'I can't think of anywhere else,' she admitted, 'that I could go.'
'Excellent. No one would think of looking for Theodoras in the French embassy. He will remain there for a little while and then, one day, he will simply vanish and you can forget all about him.'
Marianne frowned. Her mission to the Sultana was delicate and complicated enough already; she did not see how she could afford to risk bringing worse trouble on herself by taking under her protection a proscribed rebel leader who was probably quite well known, since he dared not enter Constantinople openly. It was enough to wreck her entire mission and to ensure that she herself spent the rest of her life, assuming she was allowed to live, in meditating on her indiscretion on the mouldy straw of a Turkish gaol.
'Is it essential', she asked, after a moment's thought, 'that he goes there himself? Would it not be possible for me to do his work for him, somehow?'
The giant's sharp, white teeth showed in a ferocious grin and his hand stroked the chased silver handle of his knife.
'No,' he said, with a curl of his lip, 'you cannot do my work for me. You are nothing but a foreign woman and I do not trust you enough. But you have the choice of refusal, if you wish. After all, no one knows that you are here…'
Beyond a doubt, if she refused, this brute was capable of slitting her throat on the spot, church or no church. Moreover, she had a real desire to accomplish her mission and to escape from this rat hole so that she could find the brig again, with the piratical doctor and, more than all else, Jason and her friends. If it were fated that, after the joy of rendering a signal service to Napoleon, the only happiness left to her in this world was to see John Leighton hanged, then she did not mean to let slip even the smallest chance of bringing it about; and no such chance existed on Santorini.
'Very well,' she said at last. 'I agree.'
Princess Koriatis exclaimed delightedly but Theodoros was not yet satisfied. He damped his big hairy hand round Marianne's wrist and drew her close to the iconostasis.
'You are a Christian, yes?'
'Certainly I am, but—'
'But your Church is not ours, I know that. But God is the same for all his children, in whatever fashion they pray to him. So, you will swear, here, before these holy images, to perform faithfully everything that is asked of you in order to assist me to enter Constantinople and to stay there. Swear!'
Unhesitatingly Marianne stretched out her hand toward the images, their silver mountings glinting with points of gold in the flickering lamplight.
'I swear,' she said firmly. 'I will do it to the best of my ability. But—' She let fall her hand and turned slowly to look at the woman who called herself Sappho. 'I want you to know that it is not for your sake, or because I am afraid of you. I will do it for her, because she has helped me and I should be ashamed to fail her now.'
'Your reasons do not matter. But may you be damned to all eternity if you break your word! Now, father, I think we may go.'
'Not yet. We still have something to do. Come with me.'
They followed the abbot's black robe out of the chapel and through the white stairways and passages until they emerged at last on the topmost terrace of the monastery. Under the rising moon, it looked as white as a field of new-fallen snow. At that elevation the wind blew incessantly and Marianne shivered in her thin clothes, but the prospect before her was an amazing one.
From that height it was possible to see the whole of Santorini: a long crescent-shape of accumulated lava and volcanic slag, dotted with straggling white villages. Its deep bay was almost entirely enclosed by a chain of rocky islands that marked the rim of the old crater, now sunk beneath the waves. From Palaia Kaimeni, one of the two largest of these, Marianne could see a faint drift of smoke, and the wind brought a tang of sulphur to her nostrils. At the site of the monastery itself, the ground fell away sharply in a dizzy precipice dropping straight down, two thousand feet or so, into the black waters of the sea. Not a tree was visible in the cold moonlight. It was an apocalyptic landscape, a waste of stone to which man clung only by some miracle of stubbornness, in peril of his life. Those wisps of smoke looked ominous to Marianne, and she stared at them fearfully. The greater part of her life had been spent amid the green English countryside, a far cry from this scorched land.
The volcano is breathing,' Melina said, hugging her arms across her chest as though to keep herself from shivering. 'Last night, I heard him grumble. Pray God, he does not wake.'
But the abbot Daniel was not listening. He had walked on to the far end of the roof, where there was a small pigeon house. With Theodoros' help, he took out a large pigeon, fastened something to one leg, then let it go. The bird circled for a moment above the monastery and then flew off in a north-westerly direction.
'Where is he going?' Marianne asked, her eyes still on the vanishing white speck.
Melina tucked her arm comfortably through her new friend's and drew her back to the steps.
'To find a vessel worthier of the French Emperor's ambassadress than Yorgo's fishing boat,' she said. 'Yorgo will take you no farther than Naxos. Come, now. We must go in. It is past midnight and soon the bell will ring for the first of the night offices. We must not be seen here.'
The two women bade farewell to the higoumenos and followed the fat monk back to the monastery door. Theodoros, with a brief good night, had vanished into the depths of the building where he had been living for some days past. The night was much brighter now and on the long terrace with the cistern, even the smallest details stood out with chiselled clarity in a bleached universe.
