PROLOGUE
‘WHATHAVETHEYdone to you now?’
Almost thirty years ago, six-year-old Galen Pallas had heard the weariness in hisyaya’s tone as he’d stepped in their home high on the hilly Greek island of Anapliró.
Galen’s shorn black hair had been full of mud, his clothes torn and his face bruised, so there had been no denying that there had once again been trouble...
And, again, it had seemed it was all his faut.
‘Galen!’ Yaya had been cross when she’d found out the reason the boys had again ganged up on him—and she’d blamed Galen. ‘You don’t tell your teacher that she’s got bigger after the summer.’
‘She said it to me, though...’ Galen had frowned. It was the first thing everyone said when they saw him!
Yaya had turned from the stove and held her hands apart. ‘I meant you don’t comment on someone’s size...’ Yaya had looked skywards for guidance and muttered some prayers. ‘I am too old for this...’
‘I didn’t say it to them, though,’ he’d pointed out, ‘just the teacher.’
‘They are boys being boys and you provoke them. Trust me on this,’ Yaya had insisted. ‘Sometimes it is better to say nothing, or even to lie. Your first thought, your first response, is not always the appropriate one. Galen, you offend people...’
With the table laid Yaya had brought over dinner, and though Galen had closed his eyes as they’d said prayers, his mind had been somewhere else, and as she’d started to serve he’d told Yaya the truth. ‘I would never kick someone, or spit on them, or call them names, no matter how much they offended me.’
And they offended him daily! Calling him arompot, or robot, for his undemonstrative ways. Laughing because he lived in the hills with histrelós yayaas they all called her. Yes, she was eccentric, and she wept in church, and at times openly on the street. Galen knew she was almost demented with grief at the loss of her family. Hispapuhad died before Galen had been born, and when he had been two Galen had been in an accident that had claimed his parents.
Yaya had been left to raise him and, as he was frequently told, it was not an easy task.
‘Galen, you are different...’
He watched how Yaya’s glass of water trembled as she brought it to her mouth, and he hated the trouble he caused her. ‘You need to think before you speakeverytime. You want to fit in, don’t you?’
As a child, and later as a teenager, Galen simply hadn’t.
Oh, but as a man...
His brilliant brain had soon been so in demand that the world had rather quickly decided it might be wiser, as well as extremely profitable, if it chose to fit in with him.