The herders were welcomed this time because they brought three roasted goats. The trouble started when one of the soldiers, who was from Macedonia, took a herder aside and tried to tease him into teaching him one of the goat dances. They danced together, the soldier clumsily, the herder nimbly, miming obscenities at one another. Spyro and Panos watched with the other men, and Spyro laughed till his throat was sore. Then Austinos came over and objected, and some other people who had laughed at first now grew offended and called for an end. The musicians stopped, the soldier apologized and sat down, but the herder kept on. Then his friends came and danced too. The herder women began to sing for the men and stamp their sandals. When anyone tried to stop a man, he would make dirty signs and pull away laughing. Then one old woman, at least thirty, in a skirt made from a silk housecoat thrown out by some woman in town, with necklaces of shells, teeth, and polished wood, started to do the forbidden dance that the women do alone in the mountains. Some of the fishermen cried out. Someone called the herders Gypsies and said they should go away and leave decent people alone. Three boys were suddenly beside her, their light eyes frightened, but their hands knotted. Two older men stepped beside her as well, one with arms like rocks in a sausage skin. The other could have been the goatherd they’d met before on the road. “How come you have men about you, Lady?” It was Costa who called. Though his tone was contemptuous, he still called her Lady rather than woman. “Who are these standing by you now?”

  “These are my sons,” she gestured to the boys. “And these are their fathers.” People gasped, but she creased her lips back from yellow teeth. “Though I need not one of them to protect me from any man here.”

  Just then the Orthodox Father, who had been taking a glass of sweet Samos in another shack, came up to see what the confusion was, still holding a half-eaten, winy apple. “Come now, come now,” he said, striding through the crowd by the door where the dancing had been going since noon. The sun was down and there was only gray light left in the west. “This is a holiday,” the Father said. “A saint’s day. This is no time to quarrel.” The Father wore his long hair in a little bun at the back, as the herder men did, and most of them respected him. But the woman—

  The old woman in the bright dress gave a growl of disgust

  Panos, who was holding Spyro’s arm, suddenly squeezed. They had laughed at the dance before, but it was suddenly as if the lewdness had been ripped away revealing—evil or good, Spyro did not know, but it was vast as the secrets behind his sister’s unsettling stare.

  “Be friends,” continued the Father, “this is Saint Barbara’s day.”

  “You dirty Her with a name that can be said by men,” the woman answered with drawling contempt that turned to rasping laughter. “You try to make Her a saint, a chattel to your weak little god who can die and be reborn only once. It is Her day, the day of the Earth, that potters and farmers and miners have held holy since before your weakling came to die in his turn as gods before him have died, as gods will die after him, while She rules always.”

  “My daughter—”

  The woman stamped her foot, spat, and everyone, including the Father, jumped. Just then the whole sky split, and trundled into the sea. The priest went down on his knees with his hands over his face. Some people screamed, and Spyro’s heart pounded so slowly and hard his chest ached, and he felt weak. Rain flushed from the clouds as the last light disappeared. When Spyro wiped water from his face, he saw all the herder women were dancing. Fear and fascination ranged through the miners and fishermen who had run from the other shacks to see. Men hustled their wives, sisters, or daughters away so they would not see, or perhaps learn from the forbidden steps and rhythms, then rushed back across the mud to watch for themselves. People jostled, pushed, and somewhere a fight began. Panos had to shake Spyro’s arm three times before he gained his brother’s open-mouthed attention. “Piope! Where’s Piope!”

  Spyro closed his mouth and shook his head. “I don’t—”

  “For the sake of Kyrios Jesus, find Piope, before—” Thunder deadened his last words, and Panos lurched away.

  Spyro started in the other direction. In a lightning blaze, he recognized his sister. Her scarf had blown off and her hair streamed. He grabbed her hand. . . but the gray eyes that turned to him were a stranger’s.

  The shell of her ear, the high-boned cheek, the corner of her wet mouth gleamed in yellow light from the shack window. As the rain roared between them, he tried to pull away, but the herder woman grabbed his other hand and leaned close, hissing, or was it singing, in that odd accent between music and laughter, “Come with me, Greek. Lie down on your back in the wet earth, and I will ride you where rider never rode horse—”

  Spyro ran. Water struck his face, got in his throat, and he began to cough. He tried to get inside a shack, but it was too crowded, and people were yelling about something. For a long time he crouched under the dripping eaves in the back; then sounds coming through the rain frightened him, and finally he reached the head of the path back to Adamás.

  Lightning bleached the rock behind a familiar figure twenty feet ahead, bulling through the rain. “Panos!” Spyro began to run. When he grabbed his brother’s shoulders, Panos turned and caught him. Spyro pushed his face against the wet sweater. Then he pulled away.

  His brother’s back was caked with dirt, too thick for even this torrent to wash away. Spyro ran his hand up through his brother’s hair. The front was slick and clean, but the back was filled with mud. Panos started forward angrily. Spyro followed, wiping water from his eyes with his dirtied hand. “Panos, what—”

  Piope reached home the next morning while rain still fell. She was dirty, exhausted, and immediately caught a fever that lasted nearly a week. Three months later, Paniyotis had to pay Marias, the carpenter who had lost his arm in a freighter winch last year, and so could never be more than an assistant, five thousand drachmas to take Piope for his wife, and Spyro had to work a month on his sister’s new house under Marias’ crabby and impatient instructions.

  The time just before the wedding was strained, and Piope cried most of it. Once she broke all her shells and ran into the mountains where something unpleasant must have occurred; when she came back three days later, she had strange scratches on her face that couldn’t have been from brambles, for they were in ordered, parallel strokes. She refused to tell what had happened. But during the whole time, where many a father or brother would have turned her out, Panos never said a word.

  Water lapped from the old bay of Milos, pulling a single file of sand across the rock by Spyro’s foot and into the sea. Spyro looked out where She slept. Fear and sorrow tightened his throat. And the fear had to loosen if the sorrow were to leave him.

  Suddenly he pulled his sweater over his head and jerked his wrists from the sleeves. He flung his pants back on top of it. Then he crouched, drew in his breath, and leapt.

  Water struck cold into the crevices of his body. The winter Aegean warmed to him quickly though. Summer lingered under the sea well into December. Pressure built on his eyes and ears, and he refused to come up, even when over a minute had passed and his chest hurt. He arced before blurred and blued rock. Then something above dove to the water, plummeting in silver toward him.

  At the same moment, directly before him, he saw the stone thing. Twice broken, it jutted from the rock slope, arms twined with carved snakes and shingled weed. Weed bearded Her gaping face, clotted Her eyes. Spots on Her chipped shoulders glittered gray-black. He was very near, perhaps ten feet. As he turned, She waved a long net toward him. As it settled about him, he thought, She isn’t asleep! She isn’t asleep at all! He clawed still deeper in the cool tow.

  The form above him—a live woman, he realized suddenly—reached him at last, seized his hand through the strings. And strings tore.

  As they rolled upward, Spyro looked back to see other webs sailing gently from the stone arms. All the lost nets, snagged yearly from fishing boats that dared Her waters, swirled around the huge, pointed, black breasts.

  The woman beside him tugged his arm, and air began to seep from Spyro’s nose, the bubbles tickling his eyelids. He kicked hard, and dragged her halfway up before he lost her. When he broke surface, he was blind with pulsing blood, and he thought for a moment he was going to vomit.

  He heard her splash beside him, and took long strokes forward till hands scraped painfully on rock. Water streamed his face and it was hard to hold his head up. She—probably one of the strong herder women—had been under perhaps half as long as he had. He heard her wet hands slap the rock, a splash, then a slap again as she pushed herself back from the lip. He shook hair and water from his eyes, and looked up.

  Katina, naked and wide-eyed, crouched on the rock, her black braid trailing between her breasts, the ends making little circles against her skin. Her breasts were goose-fleshed around the brown, shriveled nipples. As she gulped her breaths, her stomach, behind the wet braid, took a single crease, smoothed, creased.

  “Why—?” Below the water he felt warmth coiling through the place where fear had been. Katina, as though she were reaching for something she did not know were hot or cold, took his wrist. “You better come out.”

  He nodded, his mouth open—and swallowed brine as a wave washed him. Coughing again, he pushed up on sore hands, then rolled against her. His wet shoulder struck cool against her thigh, then warmth broke through. “Why—” he asked again, “why are you here?”

  He thought she was going to brush his cheek. But she said, “I come here too, sometimes—when I’m sad. I swim here, because it’s alone, and nobody else does, and—I followed you.”

  “Why did you follow me—I mean, down there?”

  “When you jumped, I thought you didn’t want to come up.”

  “I didn’t want . . .?” Though sorrow was still real, when he had faced Her beneath the water, the fear had gone. And without it, the laughter came up, this time free and freeing. He lay on his back, rocking his head and laughing, his thick hair sloshing against her calf. Then he took her shoulder and pushed himself to his elbow. Water coursed the runnel of his spine. “Not me! No! When I go down, I come up!”

  She looked at his horny yellow hand on her shoulder. “Men have felt that way before about brothers. Why else should you come here to where She . . .” She inclined her head toward the water.

  Spyro dropped his hand to her knee; it fell palm up, the fingers defining a cup. “Tell me, Katina,” he whispered, “if She sleeps here, what was it the archaeologists carried away from the slopes that is now in the Paris museum?”

  Katina shrugged. “Just another statue, the same sort as the Turks carried away from here by the dozen. It must have been one the Turks simply overlooked.”

  “The herders tell the story, ne?”

  She shrugged. “But the archaeologists should have listened to the herders’ tale more closely. The herders say She stood on the top of the tower guarding the Old City that was sacred to Her, until the tower fell in an earthquake. We exported obsidian to Egypt even before Minos flung his net over the seas. But that statue they found was of white marble, from Paros, while we have only poor red marble here; and the herders say She was chipped from black glass.” She twisted her head to look again.

  “You come to swim here?” He rose to his knees as she turned back, “and you are not afraid of Her?” He stood up. She looked up at him, then suddenly pushed herself back against the rock, pulling in her shoulders. Her lips gemmed with sea water, parted. “But you are afraid of me?”

  She shook her head quickly, but her eyes began to dart around and about his body. What light came past his left hip banded the right side of her face and body with gold. Nakedness, a corollary of circumstance a moment past, was suddenly something powerful about himself, glorious about her. He stooped, bending above her till one knee rubbed against her wet arm, and her staring face darkened with the shadow of his. He took her neck in both hands, as she bent back her head, the muscles stretching under his palms, and touched her ear with lips and teeth at once.

  A goat’s bleating above became laughter. Twigs and gravel burned his back, and Spyro leaped away, nearly slipping.

  The goatherds, two boys and a girl, were scrambling up the foundation, looking back, poking each other, and giggling. Glory and power became tingling heat.

  Katina was nervously slipping up her skirt when he looked back. Spyro stood a moment, then, confused, reached for his sweater and butted through the wool for the neck. The knit scratched the skin under his arms.

  At the foundations, Katina hesitated before accepting his hand. He had hesitated before extending it. When she took it, he saw indecision in her face. He pulled her up over the rock, and she looked at him very straight all the time. “I don’t like this place, this little Island,” she began again. “It is somehow like we are all caught inlike Panayotis. Then one dives below and discovers even She is bound in the nets of men.” She shook her head. “I do not like this place.”

  “I am going to leave Milos,” Spyro said.

  They were both surprised. He spoke the thought as he’d formed it, and its articulation was strange and amazing.

  “You are?”

  “Ne. I have nothing here. My sister is married. My brother—is dead.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Piraeus, I think. Yes, to the mainland at Piraeus. I will work on the freighters there.”

  “You—really will go?”

  He nodded. “Ne.”

  “And it will not be hard for you, just to leave?”

  “Old, waterlogged nets tear easily.”

  “I am afraid to go,” Katina said.

  “I am too,” Spyro admitted. “But I’m going.” They reached the donkey trail.

  The evening star led the crescent moon from the sea. The sky was purple behind the lime bluffs. They had only been walking a minute when Katina said, Tm going too.”

  Spyro smiled at her, then looked at his feet.

  “I am going to Syros,” she went on. “Though I may come to see you in Piraeus. One can go from Syros every day, not just once a week. From Syros I can go anywhere. Anywhere!” Suddenly she ran a few steps forward and laughed.

  From the high bluff laughter returned, as though another woman laughed above them.

  Spyro took her arm and they walked together.

  “I am going,” she repeated.

  “I think you are,” Spyro said. Then, a few minutes later, when they reached the asphalt road, Spyro said, “I am more important than the nets I cast.”

  “Yes.” She frowned toward the shadows in the bluff, “I think you are.”

  —Mykonos

  January 1966

  CORONA

  Pa ran off to Mars Colony before Buddy was born. Momma drank. At sixteen Buddy used to help out in a ’copter repair shop outside St. Gable below Baton Rouge. Once he decided it would be fun to take a ’copter, some bootleg, a girl named Dolores-jo, and sixty-three dollars and eighty-five cents to New Orleans. Nothing taken had ever, by any interpretation, been his. He was caught before they raised from the garage roof. He lied about his age at court to avoid the indignity of reform school. Momma, when they found her, wasn’t too sure (“Buddy? Now, let me see, that’s Laford. And James Robert Warren—I named him after my third husband who was not living with me at the time—now little James, he came along in . . . two thousand and thirty-two, I do believe. Or thirty-four—you sure now, it’s Buddy?”) when he was born. The constable was inclined to judge him younger than he was, but let him go to grown-up prison anyway. Some terrible things happened there. When Buddy came out three years later he was a gentler person than before; still, when frightened, he became violent. Shortly he knocked up a waitress six years his senior. Chagrined, he applied for emigration to one of Uranus’ moons. In twenty years, though, the colonial economy had stabilized. They were a lot more stringent with applicants than in his Pa’s day: colonies had become almost respectable. They’d started barring people with jail records and things like that. So he went to New York instead and eventually got a job as an assistant servicer at the Kennedy spaceport.

  There was a nine-year-old girl in a hospital in New York at that time who could read minds and wanted to die. Her name was Lee.

  Also there was a singer named Bryan Faust.

  Slow, violent, blond Buddy had been at Kennedy over a year when Faust’s music came. The songs covered the city, sounded on every radio, filled the title selections on every jukebox and Scopitone. They shouted and whispered and growled from the wall speaker in the spacehangar. Buddy ambled over the catwalk while the crossrhythms, sudden silences, and moments of pure voice were picked up by jangling organ, whining oboe, bass and cymbals. Buddy’s thoughts were small and slow. His hands, gloved in canvas, his feet in rubber boots, were big and quick.

  Below him the spaceliner filled the hangar like a tuber an eighth of a mile long. The service crew swarmed the floor, moving over the cement like scattered ball bearings. And the music—

  “Hey, kid.”

  Buddy turned.

  Bim swaggered toward him, beating his thigh to the rhythms in the falls of sound. “I was just looking for you, kid.” Buddy was twenty-four, but people would call him “kid” after he was thirty. He blinked a lot.

  “You want to get over and help them haul down that solvent from upstairs? The damn lift’s busted again. I swear, they’re going to have a strike if they don’t keep the equipment working right. Ain’t safe. Say, what did you think of the crowd outside this morning?”