We passed Kermia: the road wound past it. Another ambulance stood beside the flying control tent. A sadly misused Auster was sitting on its side at one end of the tarmac – a wing had been ripped off but it hadn’t burned. They must have been having a run of bad luck. Just before we started to climb up into the Kyrenia range Warboys pulled over so that we could have a drink. He fished a couple of warm bottles of Keo from under his seat.
‘Don’t worry, old son. We’re off duty, ain’t we?’ I gave him the second-hand book I’d bought for him from Alev’s library. It was Holly Martins’s The Lone Rider of Santa Fe. I think he was genuinely touched by the gesture. He riffled the pages before he put it in his small pack. ‘Very nice of you, old son. I shall enjoy it.’
‘My pleasure.’
‘I’ll give it back when I’ve finished it.’
‘Don’t bother: I’ve read it – pass it on.’
‘Right you are. Ready to go? We’re only half an hour from St Hilarion now.’
St Hilarion sits at the top of a mountain pinnacle commanding the plain to the south, and the road which runs north to south between Kyrenia and Nicosia. The people who built it were probably very nice people, although a lot of them were Venetian, so you never know. Only three good things ever came out of Venice: proper drinking chocolate, the ombra, and girls in dominoes lifting their skirts in dark alleys during a Festival of Fools. I met a Venetian a few years ago who boasted that Venice was the true father of international banking: I suppose that says it all, really. Anyway, the Venetians had a lot to do with how St Hilarion looks today: crouched narrow on a mountain top, like the petrified skeleton of a constipated vulture. It’s made of stone all right, and kind of droopy . . . but you can’t mistake the air of tension in the architecture.
The castle is supposed to have been an inspiration for Walt Disney when he was making Snow White, so remind me never to visit Orlando. The road up to the damned place is narrow, cutting past precipice and pass, and narrowing to widths that even a naked cyclist would shrink from. Warboys sprinted us up it as if he was driving in the Monte Carlo Rally.
Maybe that was something to do with getting away from what looked like a lorryload of armed Afghan tribesmen, who were trying desperately to keep up with us. I looked nervously over my shoulder and told him, ‘Don’t look now, but I think we’re being followed.’ I think I’d borrowed the line from Dick Barton.
‘Don’t worry, they can’t get past.’
‘But don’t we have to get back down past them?’
‘Good point. Should have thought about it.’ I think he was about to laugh.
‘And what happens when they get within rifle range?’
‘They already are. You worry too much, Charlie. If they were going to bang off at us they would have started before now.’
It was good to be in the hands of a professional, as the gardener said to . . . OK, so you’ve heard that one before.
There was another truckload of shaggy armed tribesmen barring the gatehouse to the castle when we reached it, but they didn’t look quite the same. There was a qualitative difference between the ones chasing us, and the ones in our way, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. They let us through, and into the castle, but moved to block the lorry following us. It stopped, and the two groups did the head-to-head thing. They blew the horns of their vehicles in protest against each other, and then fired their rifles in the air.
‘It’s like dealing with children,’ Warboys told me. ‘How on earth are they going to run the show when they have independence, and have to manage their own affairs?’
‘Wait a couple of mins until my heart has slowed down, Tony. Then you can explain in simple words what’s going on.’
He pulled us to a halt in the shadow of a crumbling wall just inside the main castle court. It was narrow, like the fortress, and followed the line of the rock it sat on. Looking down into the plain I could clearly see two birds of prey circling high over the tents at Kermia: the lads had better watch out for their dinners.
Warboys whistled a tune. The first bars of ‘The Red Flag’. He was probably only doing it to annoy the Greeks, who had taken a political position somewhat to the Right of Oswald Moseley. What’s modern Greek for ‘Hurrah for the Black-shirts’?
‘The lorry behind us is full of TC resistance men, Charlie – the TMT. They are resisting the Greeks, and they are here to look after us. The ones who let us through into the castle are EOKA GCs. They’re the enemy – they’re resisting us.’
‘Then aren’t we on the wrong side of this fight?’
‘Who said it was a fight, old son? We’re just coming to lunch.’
There was a table in the sun in the middle of the court. It had a white tablecloth, and was set with three places. The chairs looked rustic and solid. A mixture of breads, fruits, meats and cheeses climbed around bottles of white wine which still bore the beads of the water they had been cooled in. The man waiting for us, a priest, stood, smiled, and opened his arms. Tony Warboys accepted the invitation, and they hugged each other. I wasn’t as surprised as I had been the first time, although all the men
