They went to the Tholos, the iconic circular sanctuary that had once been constructed out of twenty beautifully crafted and symmetric Doric columns, of which there were three that were still defiantly upright. Alexei and Philia walked through the remnants of the sanctuary until they stood directly in the middle of it.

  “This is it,” Alexei said quietly.

  “This is what?”

  “The omphalos,” he said. “The center of the world.”

  They looked up. They looked around them. They breathed it all in and let it change them.

  “It’s beautiful,” Philia whispered. “I don’t know what else to say. It’s enough to take our words from us, isn’t it?”

  “But for the sons of Cronus, opened the earth with a thunderbolt, and hid the holiest of all things in these scared hills. They were angry at the sweet voice, because strangers perished away from their children and wives, but they hung their lives there on the honey-hearted words, and it was good.”

  “Who said that?”

  “Pindar. He stood here once and couldn’t find words either, so he wrote a poem.”

  “It’s beautiful.”

  “I think so, too.”

  Philia smiled as she stood on her toes to kiss Alexei—

  “I’m glad that I’m here with you, Alexandros,” she said.

  “I’m glad that I’m here with you, too.”

  “Here, together, at the center of the world.”

  They built their camp among the ruins.

  They made another small fire beneath the ancient columns that would keep watch over them throughout the night. They were hungry as they sat together in silence.

  Alexei tried to calculate the rest of their journey.

  They were close. If they made good time they could be in Athens by the day after the next. If they were lucky. And if they didn’t run into any Germans on the road.

  Then he saw a man running towards them.

  Alexei stood together with Costa and Koukidis, but they recognized the man that was coming as one of Koukidis’ younger soldiers, and they all relaxed. The young soldier was out of breath as he reached them and Koukidis stood forward and grabbed him by the shoulders, shaking him—

  “What is it, man? Why the hell are you running so fast?”

  “… there’s a group of them … on the road … heading this way …”

  “A group of who?”

  “… soldiers …”

  “How many are there?”

  “… looked to be … around fifteen.”

  “Germans?”

  “… I don’t know … couldn’t get close enough … to see … their colors,” he shook his head, regaining his strength, “… I saw them and ran straight back …”

  “Good man,” Koukidis said, slapping his shoulder. “Good man. Now someone get Pheidippides here some water.”

  A canteen was passed to him.

  “You know you’ve already made that joke before,” Alexei said, as the soldier drank.

  “No, that wasn’t me. That was Costa.”

  “What does it matter?” Costa said. “A good joke is a good joke.”

  Koukidis and Costa both smiled, and they picked up their rifles, and so did Alexei, and the rest of the men.

  “Where are they?” Alexei asked the young soldier.

  “The same road that we came in on,” he told them. “Probably about three kilometers back by now.”

  Alexei turned to Costa and Koukidis—

  “We’ll go a little ways and find somewhere to meet them. They’ll have gone more themselves by then, and it’ll give us time to pick out a spot.”

  “Let’s hurry, then.”

  Alexei nodded and went back to his things to find extra ammo to put into a pouch that was on his belt and next to his knife. He saw Philia, watching him with concern, and she came to where he was readying himself.

  “Don’t worry,” he said to her. “I’m sure it’s nothing.”

  “But what if it isn’t?”

  “Then we’ll deal with it.”

  “How?”

  “The same way that we did in Agria.”

  She bit her lip—

  “Philia, we’ve been doing this for the last six months. Believe it or not, we’ve gotten pretty good at it.”

  She knew there was nothing left to say. There were enemies behind them, and they had to be taken care of.

  “We’ve come so far …”

  “We have.”

  “Don’t take any chances, alright?”

  He kissed her—

  “I won’t. We’ll be fine. Trust me. We’ll be back before you know that we were even gone.”

  Then Alexei left where he was standing with her.

  He walked to where Iannis watched his son, with Eleni next to him.

  Alexei paused for a moment in front of his father, then he bent down and took the Luger from his boot, the pistol that Iannis had given him before he’d left to go fight the Italians, the same pistol that had saved Costa’s life at Pogradec, and then both of their lives at the farm outside of Kozani.

  He handed it back to his father.

  “Just in case,” Alexei said, and their eyes met as Iannis took the gun, nodding at his son in return.

  “Just in case,” Iannis repeated.

  Then Iannis watched with Eleni and Philia both as Alexei left and joined the rest of the men who were waiting for him. They turned and hurried back down the mountain, the same way that they’d come, ready to fight whoever it was that was chasing after them.

  “How about here?” Costa asked.

  “Looks as good a place as any,” Alexei answered.

  They were about a kilometer back down the mountain and they’d come to a place where the road narrowed along a bend as it cut between two tall walls of jutting rock on either side.

  “Half of us on each side,” Koukidis said. “The same way that we did on the road at Agria. And we’ll make short work of them in the same way, too.”

  They nodded and spread out, taking their positions in the hills, hidden from view of the road but in places where they’d still have a clear aim and shot when the soldiers came around the bend.

  They sat quietly.

  They all waited.

  They’d been in their positions for less than ten minutes when one of Koukidis’ men who’d climbed higher than the rest silently waved back down, and they knew that meant that their enemies were approaching.

  Alexei took aim.

  He flipped the safety off his rifle.

  The other Greek soldiers also took aim at the point in the road where they knew their enemies were about to appear.

  They waited.

  Then Alexei saw Costa raise his arm. He was motioning for them to hold their fire. Costa was at a spot further up than Alexei and had gotten his first glimpse of the men walking towards them and they weren’t wearing grey uniforms with green collars and shoulder straps: these men were battered and bloody, and they all wore dark green collarless tunics and steel brodie hats.

  They were British.

  The Greek soldiers smiled and lowered their weapons as Costa called out from behind the rock where he was hiding—

  “Where are you boys heading?”

  The British instantly fell into formation, rifles up and ready, scanning the hills around them—

  “Who’s there?” their Leader yelled.

  “Easy, mate. We’re Resistance,” Costa called back down. “We’re killing the same people.”

  “You’re Greek?”

  “Yes. We’re coming out now, alright?”

  The British lowered their rifles, as they kept looking around, and the Leader stepped forward as the Greeks came from their hiding spots and down to the road. Costa nodded to the state of their uniforms, the dirt and the blood that was caked on their clothes and skin—

  “What the hell happened to you guys?” he asked.

  “We ran into a few of them down the road a bit.”

  “Down the road where?”

  “Thermopylae, if you can believe it. The Hot Gates. History repeating itself, and all that.”

  The British Leader extended his hand—

  “John Worthington,” he said, and shook hands with Alexei, Costa, and Koukidis in turn.

  “Pleasure,” Costa said.

  “You fought them at Thermopylae?” Alexei asked.

  “Yes. Well, the British and the Kiwis together, that is. Have you ever seen a New Zealander fight? Didn’t know much about them before this, but bloody hell are they terrifying,” he swallowed, and continued. “We held the pass for as long as we could … it’s still the best route into southern Greece, the same for the Germans today as it was for Xerxes two thousand years ago. Of course they broke us there. We knew that we couldn’t win, but we held them … by God did we hold them. Leonidas’ spirit surely would have been proud, and I know that Byron was watching with a smile.”

  “And then what happened?” Alexei asked. “We’re a long ways from Thermopylae.”

  “We fought the Germans outside of Lamia again this morning, but it was a slaughter. They’re in Attica now, I’m afraid. They’re on their way to Athens, and there’s nobody left to stand in their way.”

  “Where are you headed?”

  “It’s just a race to Athens now. For everybody. We’re trying to get there before the Germans, to find a boat to take us to the British base on Crete. That’s where the RAF is now. We’ll continue to fight them from there.”

  Alexei and Costa and Koukidis and the rest of the Greeks looked at each other—

  “What is it?” Worthington asked.

  “Well, Mr. Worthington,” Costa said. “It looks like this meeting was meant to happen.”

  “How’s that?”

  “We’re headed the same way,” Alexei told him.

  “Strength in numbers,” Worthington said. “Bloody good.”

  He grinned back at them, and then shook their hands again—

  “Bloody good, indeed.”

  26

  April 23rd, 1941

  THEY LEFT DELPHI AT FIRST LIGHT the next day.

  Their group had grown now, there were more soldiers with rifles and bullets, but they still knew that if they met any Germans then it wouldn’t matter how many of them there were, not even if they had all the Resistance fighters in Greece, and all the British soldiers that had come to help, because the Germans had an unstoppable army.

  They went though the town again, and before they were gone, Eleni looked back at the ruins behind them.

  She was next to Alexei.

  “How come we never came here before?” she asked him.

  “There’d always been more time before,” he answered.

  She thought about it further—

  “I think I was afraid. I’d pictured it a certain way in my mind, and I didn’t know if I wanted that to change.”

  “Well, you’ve seen it now.”

  “And I’m glad,” she said, and she smiled. “I’m glad that I saw it before we left. We might not have the chance ever again.”

  “Was it what you expected?”

  “No,” she said, with one last look over her shoulder. “It was more. It was so much more.”

  Alexei looked back at Delphi once more himself.

  He was glad that he had come to the ruins later in his life, and not when he was younger. It meant more to him as an older man.

  No, not older, he thought.

  A man who’d been through all that they’d been through.

  Because isn’t that what age is, after all, an accumulation of experience, rather than time, and even though they were still young—him and Costa and Koukidis—they were old now. He’d once heard that a child dreams when a man doubts. He thought of his feelings on the road to Delphi, and he believed what he’d heard, and could see the wisdom and truth in it. Young men laugh at God, and fate, and all the other things that they cannot control, because they don’t need them yet. There’s time left, always still in front of them, always, always. It’s not until a man becomes part of the world, and broken in the way that the world breaks men, that you need faith, and you start searching for God.

  Alexei knew that’s what he needed now.

  And so, with the great monument of Greece behind them, and the sun rising in front of them, they continued to walk.

  They made good time through the mountains, and once again, instead of heading down into the valley to use the main road to Athens, Alexei made the decision to push as far south as they could, until they were almost hugging the Gulf of Corinth. It would be slower, staying in the mountains, but there wasn’t any other way to avoid the Germans, especially after the information that Worthington had brought, which was really only confirmation of what they’d feared and in their hearts had probably known all along.

  Alexei found himself walking next to Worthington. He took the chance to ask him about his family, about how he’d come to Greece, and where he was from back in England—

  “Yorkshire,” he said. “Up in the north. Famous for our terriers and our pudding,” he added with a smile. “How about yourselves?”

  “Agria,” Alexei told him. “A small town near Volos.”

  “Coming from that far north I assume that you’ve seen your fair share of fighting.”

  “Yes, we’ve seen our fair share.”

  “Where?”

  “In Albania first, against the Italians. And then we fought at the Line when the Germans came.”

  “Is that so? We all read about it in the papers, of course. London could talk of nothing else. They made it into a proper Greek tragedy, the old and ancient rising one last time in pride to fight against the unbeatable monster. Tell me how it really happened?”

  And so Alexei told him their story as they walked.

  He told him about the beginning of the war, and their first action at the Kalamas River, and then at Kalpaki, when they didn’t know what they were doing. He told them how cold and hungry they’d been in Pogradec, and how Costa had saved them because of the girl that he was sleeping with and the letter that she’d received. Alexei couldn’t recall the girl’s name—how long had it been?—and then they walked a little further, and it came back to him.

  Adelina.

  He told Worthington how they went home after Pogradec, and he told him of his wedding to Philia, and the house that he’d started to build for her on the bluff above their city.

  And then Alexei told him of the Metaxas Line.

  He told him of how they fought there for longer than anyone thought they ever could have fought, and how maybe it was like the papers in London had said after all, and then he told him of how it had ended. Alexei told him of the journey back home with Costa, and of Jurgen, and the bridge outside Larissa, and all that they had seen in the Greek countryside. And then they finally reached Agria, and Alexei told him what they did when they heard of what the Germans had done to their families and their city.

  Worthington listened to the whole thing.

  They continued to walk together, in silence for a few more paces, and then when Worthington finally spoke, it was with great emotion.

  “You should know that the whole world has watched your struggle,” he said. “And you should also know that you’ve given the world courage when so many of us had none. You gave us our first victory, in the mountains in Albania. You fought the Germans at the Line, when so many others wouldn’t have. You should have heard Churchill’s broadcasts and everything that he said about the Greeks. They say that history is written by the victors, and that so often they get it wrong, but you and your people deserve everything they’ll write about you when this war is over. You truly are the people sprung of Achilles and Alexander. I’ve never been more sure.”

  “And what about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “How’d you end up here, so far from home?”

  “I volunteered.”

  “You volunteered?”

  “Of course. How many of us are fortunate to live in a time like this? To be able to be a part of such great things?”

  “You wanted to fight?”

  “We spoke of Byron earlier. There’s certainly a little bit of Byron in all of us that have come here from England. Why else would we be here, if not for the same reasons? It’s history and courage that we admire, as humans and as men. That’s the legacy that he gave us. And it’s no different for you, Alexei. How you and your people still share the blood of Alexander and Achilles, your great heroes. If you don’t think that still lives on in this land, then you need to look around again, and see all that you’ve done these last months. The odds that you’ve beaten. The courage that’s inspired us all. People speak of blood as if it’s distant, and it fades. But it doesn’t.”

  Alexei heard these words, and he knew Worthington would never know how much they meant to him—

  “Pothos,” Alexei smiled.

  “It’s a Greek word,” Worthington said, shaking his head. “What does it mean?”

  “There’s no word for it in English.”

  “What is it in Greek?”

  Alexei paused, reaching back as he tried to think of the best translation that he could come up with—

  “Desire, longing, passion, regret.”

  “That’s all in the same word?”

  “Yes.”

  “It sounds complicated.”

  “We’re a complicated people.”

  “So it would seem,” Worthington smiled, as he took out a cigarette and offered Alexei one, and when Alexei refused he put his own to his lips and lit it—

  “Are you afraid?” Alexei asked as Worthington inhaled.

  “Afraid of what?”

  “Dying in a foreign place, halfway across the world, in a land that’s not your own, so far from your home, your wife, your family.”

  “No. I thank God every day that I was brought here. I think of my sons. What would I tell them if I’d stayed home and tended the farm while others rode off to do the great things that every book and every poem and every song in all the world’s been written about? I’d be trimming hedges and plowing fields while other men took their places in history. I want to be a part of that, too. My sons are young now, but when they’re grown, they’ll understand, and they’ll be a part of it as well, like their father was, during whatever great times they’re born into. That’s the benefit of education, isn’t it? It haunts us. The great journeys and deeds of others. It gives us so very much to live up to.”