The Andartes surrounded me, Kopay, and the wounded soldier. One of them took the machine gun from my hands. Trembling, I sank to my knees. Nathanial lifted me onto his wide shoulders.
‘She saved our lives, men. And thanks to the little one, we add more firepower to our arsenal. That’s six machine guns she’s brought us! Come, we must honour our hero!’ he boomed.
The rebels clapped and whistled in admiration as I was carried shoulder-high to the villa. Josie painted the German’s wrist with iodine and then bandaged it before he was tied to a chair in the cellar. Two men went out to bury the dead soldier. Nathanial poured raki for everyone, and we slammed our glasses down and knocked it back. I kept glancing at the door in the hope Giovanni would appear, but he didn’t.
‘He’s gone, little one,’ Nathanial said quietly, guessing what was going through my head. ‘He’ll be back, don’t worry.’ He dished out more raki, but I told him I wanted to return to the hut on Mount Filerimos.
‘Then Tassos will also go, and stay with you tonight.’ He caught my nervous look. ‘Don’t worry, little one, you’ll be perfectly safe. Go now, before it gets too dark.’
One of the rebels put a record on an old wind-up player. The men sat in a circle, hitting the raki hard and watching Josie perform Tsifteteli, the sensual Greek belly dance.
As I passed through the front door, I turned and gave them a wave. They were true friends who had looked after me when I needed them. Nathanial had buried Irini and helped me with my grief. There had always been someone in the background, keeping an eye on me, making sure I was safe. The Andartes leader had married me to Giovanni. I was sad to leave them all.
Tassos, Kopay, and I squeezed through the wall of trees. I looked back at the villa once more, remembering the first time I had seen it, then we set off, up through the forest to Filerimos. My heart went out to Giovanni. Such a weight of guilt he carried. I hoped he would stay safe in the army. After all that had happened, even if I never saw him again, I had to know that he was alive and I prayed he would find happiness when the war ended.
Most of all, I hoped he would come back to me.
The three of us walked in silence, our surroundings silver in the full moon.
Tassos heard it first. He stopped, rested a hand on my arm, and turned his eyes towards the sky. Then I recognised it too, the drone of a distant plane. As it neared, anti-aircraft fire rocketed from the airport viewing tower. We both leapt when an explosion ripped open the night and illuminated the top of the hill.
‘Here!’ Tassos yelled, dragging me behind a fallen tree. ‘Get down!’
The whine of a falling bomb had me petrified rigid. Memories of the Levi’s house rushed back. Tassos threw himself over me, knocking me down. There was a second of silence, an explosion that deafened me, and terrible pain in my ears. In the same moment, a rush of air blew dirt and grit and forestry detritus through the trees around us. A thick branch crashed to the ground right in front of the tree trunk. I curled up against Tassos, sure we were going to die.
When I put my hands over my ears, I felt warm, sticky blood. In a few moments, the whistling in my head stopped and I heard a cacophony of explosions chasing each other down the mountain. Then an entirely different hit; not the dull noise of bombed earth and splintered forestry, but a hard, yet shattering, sound that pulsed through me.
‘Dear God! It’s the villa! Run! Run!’ I screamed.
We leapt to our feet and raced back the way we had come. Even before the wall of trees that hid the villa, there were chunks of pink masonry scattered about the forest floor. Motes swirled in the air like smoke. We pushed through and, where the villa had stood, there was nothing but an enormous pile of rubble, dust rising in clouds, and the silence of death all around us.
Then, a moan so horrible it made my flesh crawl.
I raced towards the sound and stared at the head of Nathanial. Oh! I thought he had been decapitated, but as I dropped to my knees, his eyes flicked open. Pleading. Half of his face had gone. His jawbone and strong teeth had been stripped bare and the bone shone pink in the moonlight. The Juliet balcony had crushed his chest, and below that was nothing but a mountain of rubble.
Hardly moving his lips, he said quietly, ‘Shoot me.’ With each breath, blood bubbled from his mouth and nose.
Oh! Tears raged down my face as I drew my pistol.
‘It’s an order . . . shoot me, little one.’
My hand was over my mouth, and I sobbed air in through my fingers. There was no hope for him. And he was clearly in agony. I placed my hand over his eyes and closed them, bent forward and kissed his forehead.
‘Now,’ he whispered through his teeth.
I squeezed the trigger. And he was gone. Oh!
I threw my head back and howled into the night. Tassos raced to my side, understood the situation and nodded.
‘It’s called a mercy killing,’ he said. ‘You did right.’
Tears raged down my face. ‘He ordered me to do it.’ I sobbed helplessly.
Then we both heard a muffled cry coming from the rear of the house.
‘That’s Josie!’ I jumped to my feet, hope rising in my chest. I glanced at Nathanial and remembered how he helped me to come to terms with Irini’s death. Poor Josie, her heart would break.
We raced around the debris, following the pleas for help, until I realised they were coming from the cellar grill.
Kopay sniffed and scrabbled in the wreckage, looking up occasionally with an excited bark.
‘Josie! Are you there?’
‘Help us, we’re in the basement! The ceiling’s collapsing and we can’t get out.’
Kopay whimpered, twisting in agitated circles.
An explosive crack of masonry splitting apart, followed by more dust billowing out of the vent.
‘Quickly!’ Josie cried. ‘It’s crumbling around us.’
Tassos and I lobbed great chunks of sandstone off the small iron grill until Tassos managed to drag it free.
We hauled Josie out, and then the German, whose hands and feet were still tied. Josie told us she had gone down with food for the soldier when the bomb exploded and I realised that trivial kindness had saved her life.
She sat on the ground, her head in her hands, then looked over the demolished building. ‘A direct hit. Is anyone else . . .?’
I shook my head. ‘Sorry, Josie.’
‘Nathanial?’
‘Sorry, Josie, he’s gone. We must leave. We’ll return in the morning. I just need to speak with Tassos, then we’ll go to the hut.’
The full moon had passed its zenith. Pine trees swayed in the breeze, their long, thin shadows moving back and forth across the pale dust and rubble. Ghostly fingers of death caressing the final resting place of the Andartes of Rhodes.
My friends were buried together in a mass grave. This was what war did. It destroyed lives, families, homes, and the children’s future. My own family came to mind. The German was around the same age as Danial.
‘I’ll shoot that Nazi bastard,’ Tassos said viciously, drawing his pistol from its holster.
I shook my head. ‘No! He’s hardly more than a boy, Tassos, younger than you. Haven’t we had enough killing? I’m sick of it. We’ve seen too many lives lost here. Think about it. What difference will it make if we let him go?’
‘We have to kill him to avenge Nathanial! A life for a life.’ He raised the gun level with the soldier’s head.
I pulled my pistol out of the saddlebag and pointed it at Tassos’s head.
‘I said NO! Nathanial’s struggle was for peace, not murder. Our fight isn’t about killing as many of the enemy as possible.’
Tassos stared at me. ‘It’s not?’
‘No, of course it isn’t. It’s about saving lives and ending the war as soon as we can. I won’t be party to senseless acts of barbarism, but if you shoot him, I swear, I’ll shoot you. As you said, a life for a life.’
‘But he’ll tell them about us.’
‘You really believe so? What do you think he’s going to say? A little girl crept up and shot his partner, a dog got his machine gun off him, and a beautiful woman fed him home-made food while he was tied to a chair?’
The soldier spoke in Italian. ‘I won’t make trouble for you. I swear on my mother’s life.’
‘What’s your name and how old are you?’ I demanded.
‘Gustave Merkle. I’m eighteen, from Berlin.’
Tassos lowered his gun. I lowered mine. Everyone sighed.
Before Josie untied his feet, I patted him down, until I recognised the jingle of money in his pocket. I retrieved the coins, took two, and put the rest back. I returned to Nathanial and placed the coins over his eyes.
‘Goodbye, sir,’ I whispered, standing to attention and saluting him. ‘I’ll see you in the Elysian Fields.’ I covered his face with rubble and rocks to protect him from vultures and foraging animals.
I returned to the back of the building. When the young German was out of sight, we checked the debris again for signs of life but found none.
We three, along with Kopay, moved into the hut on mount Filerimos. Over the next days, Tassos taught me to use the catapult and we became friends, although our relationship was purely platonic. Josie mothered us, cooking and cleaning. Because my old dress was in rags, she made me a sort of uniform with trousers out of a brown blanket that was going spare.
I continued to wear Evangelisa’s pretty dresses to commit petty acts of sabotage, and I found that particularly painful. Sometimes I’d try to analyse all that had happened, and I came to the conclusion that Evangelisa had saved Giovanni’s life. If my sister hadn’t been shot, Giovanni would not have signed up for the army, and therefore would have been in the villa at that fateful moment.
As the months slipped by, I realised Tassos avoided giving me missions that could put me in any actual danger when we tried to disrupt the Germans.
‘Is this the best I can do?’ I asked Tassos. ‘Cut phone wires and poison wells? I have to stop the war, for my family! Why are you suddenly afraid I can’t handle more serious action?’
He stared at me for a moment and then called Josie. ‘I don’t think she understands her situation,’ he said. ‘You’d better tell her.’
She took me into the hut and explained.
I was pregnant.