Earth and Air by Peter Dickinson

a word with your uncle, shall I?”
    I don’t want another dog! I want Ridiki!
    He suppressed the scream. It was a kind offer. Nikos was his uncle’s shepherd, and his uncle listened to what he said, which he didn’t with most people.
    â€œThey’ll all be spoken for,” he said. “He only let me keep Ridiki because Rania had dropped a skillet on her leg.”
    â€œBorn clumsy,” said Nikos. “May be an extra, Steff. Atalanta’s pretty gross. Let’s see.”
    â€œThey’ll be spoken for too.”
    This was true. The Deniakis dogs were famous far beyond the parish. Steff’s great-grandfather had been in the Free Greek Navy during the war against Hitler, stationed in an English port called Hull, and he’d spent his shore leaves helping on a farm in the hills above the town. There were sheep dogs there who worked to whistled commands, and he’d talked to the shepherd about how they were trained. When the war was over and he’d come to say good-bye the farmer had given him a puppy, which he’d managed to smuggle aboard his ship and home. Once out of the navy he’d successfully trained some of the puppies she’d born to the farm dogs, not to the lip-whistles the Yorkshire shepherds used but to the traditional five-reed pipe of the Greeks.
    Now, forty years later, despite the variable shapes and sizes, the colouring had settled down to a yellowish tan with black blotches, and the working instinct stayed strongly in the breed. Steff’s uncle could still sell as many pups as his bitches produced, all named after ancient Greeks, real or imaginary. They were very much working dogs, and Nikos used to train them on to sell ready for their work. But for Rania’s clumsiness Ridiki would have gone that way, as the rest of the litter had.
    All day that one moment of the dream—Ridiki vanishing into the dark, as sudden as a lamp going out—stayed like a shadow at the side of his mind. It didn’t change. He had a feeling both of knowing the place and of never having been there before. But if he tried to fix anything outside the single instant, it was like grasping loose sand. The details trickled away before he could look at them.
    He fetched his midday meal from the kitchen and ate it in the shade of the fig tree, and then, while the farm settled down to its regular afternoon stillness, went to look for Papa Alexi.
    Papa Alexi was Steff’s great-uncle, his grandfather’s brother. Being a younger son he’d had to leave the farm, and look for a life elsewhere. He wasn’t anyone’s father, but people called him Papa because he’d trained as a priest, but he’d stopped doing that to fight in the Resistance, and then in the terrible civil wars that had followed. That was when he’d stopped believing what the priests had been teaching him, so he’d spent all his working life as a schoolmaster in Thessaloniki. He’d never married, but his sister, Aunt Nix, had housekept for him after her own husband had died. When he’d retired they’d both come back to live on the farm, in the old cottage where generations of other returning wanderers had come to end their days in the place where they’d been born.
    The farm could afford to house them. There were other farms in the valley, as well as twenty or thirty peasant holdings, but Deniakis was much the largest, with Nikos and three other farmhands, and several women, on the payroll, working a large section of the fertile land along the river, orchards and vineyards, and a great stretch of the rough pasture above them running all the way up to the ridge.
    Steff found Papa Alexi as usual under the vine, reading and drowsing and waking to read again. Today Aunt Nix was sitting opposite him with her cat on her lap and her lace-making kit beside her.
    â€œYou poor boy,” she said. “I know how it feels. It’s no use anyone saying anything, is