Greek Fire by Winston Graham Page A

remember.”
    â€œELAS tactics were unvarying. By 1943 they were far the best equipped force in the field. They were the only one with any outside propaganda system, the only one with a proper organisation, because it had been in existence before the war. In addition to doing a little sparring with the Germans to satisfy the British and the Americans, they took on one by one the other resistance movements and wiped them out. It was the same technique as they applied to your father. Each resistance group, each leader of a resistance group was given the alternative—be absorbed by us, toe the party line, or else. The ‘else’ was to be denounced as collaborating with the Germans and then liquidated. I can give you the names of eight or ten such groups—with their leaders—who went that way. Not three or four killed but hundreds massacred. Some of them were my oldest friends. Only Zervas with EDES survived because he was too big and tough to be destroyed.”
    â€œYou were in Athens at the end?”
    â€œYes, and I didn’t like that either.”
    She shrugged. “ Perhaps my father was lucky to be shot by a firing squad. At least he was luckier than my mother and some of the others.”
    For a while they had met on neutral ground. He had tried deliberately to slacken the tautness between them and had succeded better than he’d hoped. They reached Levadia soon after eleven and here swung off the main road on to the loose and uneven surface of the mountain road. A few clouds had blown up, but through them the snow-headed peaks watched them as they passed.
    â€œThat’s Parnassus,” Anya said.
    Gene stared ahead.
    â€œI used not to think it existed in fact. I thought it was part of a legend, like Zeus and Aphrodite.”
    â€œNobody knows now what is legend and what is history,” she said. “Perhaps there is not all that difference.”
    â€œHave you ever been to the summit?”
    â€œNo. August is the time.”
    â€œIt doesn’t look difficult. How high?”
    â€œOh—three thousand metres perhaps. The snow’s treacherous of course.”
    â€œNext time we come, let’s arrange to go.”
    â€œAre you very sure of yourself? Or very unsure? Deep down. I’d like to know.”
    â€œPhysically I’m sure,” he said. “ The way a rat’s sure. Once you’ve lived in holes, you come to know your own muscles, your own teeth, your own sense of smell. Being wanted by a few tired policemen doesn’t worry me. But about you I was never more unsure in my life. Anything you detect to the contrary is purely coincidental.”
    â€œIt’s bad to be on the run,” she said, after the minute she had taken to digest what he said. “Even from a few—tired policemen. Bad for something inside oneself. It is like driving on one’s brakes too much. I know—though I had it for only a few weeks.”
    They began to climb by hairpin bends. At one point three ragged children stood by the way offering to sell them bunches of anemones. When Gene did not stop they leapt across the rough moorland like goats and were waiting patiently at the next corner above. When he still went on they got to the third corner before the car, and here Anya made him stop and buy the flowers. Afterwards they went on again between walls of rock and skirting dark and tangled forests. Arakhova was reached clinging uncertainly to the side of the gorge. Then the mountains drew right in upon the pass, they skirted the face of the precipice and began to fall gently into Delphi, which came in view with the clustered tiles and huddled streets of the modern village standing athwart the road and the white skeletal remains of the sacred shrines climbing in tiers to the foot of the great Phocian wall.
    Gene found Michael Miehaelis’s house just short of the village, and the poet, white moustache gleaming like a scar on his old brown face,