The Moonspinners Read Free Page B

asphodel, all but surrounded by towering rocks. Southwards, it was open, with a dizzying view down towards the now distant sea.
    For the rest, I saw only the asphodel, the green of ferns by the water, a tree or so near the cliffs, and, in a cleft of a tall rock, the spring itself, where water splashed out among the green, to lie in a quiet pool open to the sun, before pouring away through the poppies at the lip of the gorge.
    I swung the bag off my shoulder, and dropped it among the flowers. I knelt at the edge of the pool, and put my hands and wrists into the water. The sun was hot on my back. The moment of joy had slackened, blurred, and spread itself into a vast physical contentment.
    I stooped to drink. The water was ice cold, pure and hard; the wine of Greece, so precious that, time out of mind, each spring has been guarded by its own deity, the naiad of the stream. No doubt she watched it still, from behind the hanging ferns . . . The odd thing was – I found myself giving a half-glance over my shoulder at these same ferns – that one actually did feel as if one were being watched. Numinous country indeed, where, stooping over a pool, one could feel the eyes on one’s back . . .
    I smiled at the myth-bred fancies, and bent to drink again.
    Deep in the pool, deeper than my own reflection, something pale wavered among the green. A face.
    It was so much a part of my thoughts that, for one dreaming moment, I took no notice. Then, with that classic afterthought that is known as the ‘double take’, reality caught up with the myth; I stiffened, and looked again.
    I had been right. Behind my mirrored shoulder a face swam, watching me from the green depths. But it wasn’t the guardian of the spring. It was human, and male, and it was the reflection of someone’s head, watching me from above. Someone, a man, was peering down at me from the edge of the rocks high above the spring.
    After the first startled moment, I wasn’t particularly alarmed. The solitary stranger has, in Greece, no need to fear the chance-met prowler. This was some shepherd lad, doubtless, curious at the sight of what must obviously be a foreigner. He would probably, unless he was shy, come down to talk to me.
    I drank again, then rinsed my hands and wrists. As I dried them on a handkerchief, I saw the face there still, quivering in the disturbed water.
    I turned and looked up. Nothing. The head had vanished.
    I waited, amused, watching the top of the rock. The head appeared again, stealthily . . . so stealthily that, in spite of my common sense, in spite of what I knew about Greece and the Greeks, a tiny tingle of uneasiness crept up my spine. This was more than shyness: there was something furtive about the way the head inched up from behind the rock. And something more than furtive in the way, when he saw that I was watching, the man ducked back again.
    For it was a man, no shepherd boy. A Greek, certainly; it was a dark face, mahogany-tanned, square and tough looking, with dark eyes, and that black pelt of hair, thick and close as a ram’s fleece, which is one of the chief beauties of the Greek men.
    Only a glimpse I had, then he was gone. I stared at the place where the head had vanished, troubled now. Then, as if he could still be watching me, which was unlikely, I got to my feet with somewhat elaborate unconcern, picked up the bag, and turned to go. I no longer wanted to settle here, to be spied on, and perhaps approached, by this dubious stranger.
    Then I saw the shepherds’ hut.
    There was a path which I hadn’t noticed before, a narrow sheeptrod which had beaten a way through the asphodel towards a corner under the rocks, where a hut stood, backed against the cliff.
    It was a small, unwindowed penthouse, of the kind that is commonly built in Greece, in remote places, to house the boys and men whose job it is to herd the goats and sheep on the bare hillsides. Sometimes they are