He watched the girl scurry away and realized that, despite her physical perfection, he was bored. Time for a new model soon.
Seconds later, a maid appeared with the pencil and paper he’d asked for, swiftly followed by Frankie Goulakis, a toothless peasant boy whom Makis Alexiadis had picked up at the side of the road one day out of curiosity and amusement, rather as one might a stray dog, and then kept around for the same reasons. Frankie was simple but reliable with straightforward tasks, and fanatically loyal to his master.
‘Take this to the caves.’ Scrawling a short note, Makis folded it and handed it to the boy. ‘Leave it in the usual place.’
Frankie nodded and left.
Glancing down again at the obscene display of wealth and modernity milling around in the gardens below him, Big Mak Alexiadis reflected once more on the ironies of doing business in modern Greece. Especially illicit business. While he received crucial information via encrypted text to his phone, the only way for him to safely pass on that information was via a piece of paper given to an illiterate boy, who would take it by donkey to the mouth of a cave where he would wedge it into a predetermined crevice. From there, another peasant would retrieve it and begin the long and arduous journey to his master, and from then onwards up an elaborate chain to Makis’s superior. The whole process might take up to two weeks, a frustrating but necessary set of precautions.
Technology was evolving as rapidly here as everywhere else in the world. But it brought with it a new set of risks. Detection. Interception. Trackability. As a result, the old ways were still very much alive and well in Greece. Makis Alexiadis’s superior insisted on them.
Sweat ran down the man’s face and back, his skin itching and burning beneath his simple woolen trousers and linen shirt. The sun, always fierce, seemed to burn today with a particularly fevered intensity. Almost as if he were being punished for toiling up the winding, rocky path to the convent. But of course, that couldn’t be. Father Georgiou had told him he was doing the Lord’s work by retrieving these messages from the cave and bringing them to Sister Elena.
‘Mother church needs you, Bazyli.’ That’s what Father Georgiou said. ‘Yours is not to reason why. You do your part and let the good sister do hers.’ Deeply pious and devoted, Bazyli would have loved to become a priest himself, but he knew in his heart he was not worthy. Instead he had devoted his life to humbly serving those greater and holier than he. That included Father Georgiou and, of course, Sister Elena herself, although the revered nun was surrounded by an aura of mystique that confused Bazyli, and sometimes frightened him. There was something else about her too: something womanly and of-the-flesh, something that belied the spiritual life she’d chosen and that made the simple man feel simultaneously happy and guilty in her presence. He dismissed these things as symptoms of his own sinful nature, and did his best to put
them aside.
The journey to Sikinos had been long and arduous, on foot and on horseback along thorny back-roads and, the worst part for Bazyli, the sea crossing that always made him vomit, no matter how calm the waters. Usually, by this point, just a few hundred meters below the appointed meeting spot in an orchard adjoining the convent walls, he would be feeling relief. Soon the journey would be over, the message safely delivered to the first link in the chain, and Bazyli could return to his smallholding on Paros, to his chickens and his sweet peas and his Bible. But today the heat made relief impossible. All he wanted was to stop and rest in the shade, right now; to sink his face into a cool pool of water and to drink and slake his raging thirst, like an animal.
Shielding his eyes against the blinding light, he looked once more up the hillside. And then, like a miracle, there she was, a black-and-white robed figure gliding down to greet him. Her face was veiled, hidden as always from the lustful eyes of men, and her female form completely covered by her habit. And yet the way she moved; her walk; the small, graceful movement of her hands, all mesmerized the messenger like some rare exotic drug.
‘Sister.’ Bazyli bowed his head as she came closer, dropping to his arthritic knees in both deference and exhaustion. ‘For you.’
With trembling hands, he passed her the folded paper, panting like a dog.
‘Thank you.’ The soft cadence of her voice flowed over him like oil. Sister Elena rarely spoke. In the three years he’d acted as messenger for Father Georgiou, Bazyli couldn’t have heard her utter more than ten words in total. Yet he knew that, in paradise, that voice would return to him; that he would bask in her words for ever.
‘Please.’ From beneath her robes she extracted a large, plastic bottle of water and handed it to him in exchange for the note, which she slipped into a pocket, unread. After he’d drunk about half of it, she produced a slab of cheese wrapped in paper, two large tomatoes and some bread.
‘It’s not necessary, Sister,’ he protested, but she insisted, pressing the food into his hands. Then she laid a single palm on the top of his head in blessing, before turning and gliding back up the hill to the convent gate, as smoothly and silently as she’d arrived, like a ghost.
She is goodness and kindness personified, Bazyli thought. The perfection of womanhood, like Our Lady, her life devoted to Christ.
He had never been tempted to read any of the messages he delivered, even though, unlike Frankie Goulakis, he knew how to read. He’d already sullied Elena’s spiritual purity with his own base, wanton thoughts – his desires long suppressed but never conquered. This was why he wasn’t a priest. But he wasn’t about to compound his sin by looking at that which was intended for another. For someone so far above Bazyli, he didn’t even know their name. Although he assumed Sister Elena must know it …
Finishing the water, he tucked the food into his knapsack and hurried back down the hill.
It took Sister Elena fifteen minutes to reach the glade, a secret, completely secluded spot surrounded by thick pines and with a tiny, spring-fed stream trickling through it with water that was always ice cold, no matter how boiling the sun. Because it belonged to the Order of the Sacred Heart, no locals ever came here – they were a respectful lot, the islanders, as steeped in religious obedience and social propriety as any medieval serf. Being outside the convent walls, the glade was considered ‘off limits’ by Elena’s fellow nuns too. It was her private kingdom, a place where – uniquely – she could be ‘herself’.
Whatever that meant.
So many reinventions. So many different identities. Different lives. Each of them ‘real’ in their own way.
It wasn’t like that for other people, she’d observed. In her fifty years on this earth, Elena had watched others grow and change and mature and evolve in a way that bore no relation to her own experience. Their lives weren’t static, exactly. But they were continuous, moving along in a straight line past recognizable milestones: birth, childhood, adolescence, youth, middle age, old age, death. Through it all you were still you.
But not for her. Elena had existed as several distinct people, with no continuity at all. There was her childhood self: happy and calm. Her adolescent self: passionate, idealistic, sensual. Then came her longest, most significant role – her adult self, alive with a dark energy that annihilated all that had gone before. It was in this incarnation that she had met someone who was to change not just her own life, but the life of the world. Someone she still served, in a way, to this day, as the brand on her thigh reminded her.
And yet, that self had died too, the day she arrived at the convent. And from her ashes had risen ‘Sister’ Elena. Quiet, patient, devoted, calm, a blessing to all her sisters and to everybody else whose path she crossed. Separated from the world by choice, no longer an influencer or even an observer, but a recluse, a willing outcast.
In the beginning, life at the convent had felt like a curse. A punishment. But over the years Elena had come to cherish the deep peace of the nuns’ routine as a blessing. It was a privilege to be free of it all: the striving, the passion, the conflict, and to devote oneself exclusively to God. To work and pray and sleep and leave no space in your heart for anything else.
She sighed. Such a pity it had to end.
Nothing lasts for ever.
Being ‘Sister’ Elena had been wonderful. But the letter in her hand meant that she was needed now for another role. She could no more stop this latest transformation than a caterpillar could refuse to spin its cocoon. It was time to shed her habit.
Someone who was greater than Sister Elena could ever be was soon to rise, Lazarus-like, from the dead.