Earth and Air by Peter Dickinson Page A

it?”
    Steff shook his head. He didn’t know how to begin. Papa Alexi marked his page with a vine leaf and closed the book.
    â€œBut you wanted something from us all the same?” he said.
    â€œWell . . . are there any caves up in the mountains near here? Big ones, I mean. Not like that one on the way to Crow’s Castle—you can see right to the back of that without going in.”
    â€œNot that I know of,” said Papa Alexi.
    â€œWhat about Tartaros?” said Aunt Nix. “That’s a really big, deep cave, Steff. It’s on the far side of Sunion.”
    â€œOnly it isn’t a cave, it’s an old mine,” said Papa Alexi. “Genuinely old. Alexander the Great paid his phalanxes with good Tartaros silver. There were seams of the pure metal to be mined in those days. You know perfectly well you persuaded me to go and look for silver there once.”
    â€œOnly you got cold feet when it came to crossing into Mentathos land. We were actually looking down at the entrance, Steff . . .”
    â€œYou wouldn’t have been the one Dad thrashed. Anyway, you knew it was a mine, back then.”
    â€œOf course I did. But that doesn’t mean it can’t have been a perfectly good cave long before it was ever a mine. Nanna Tasoula told me it used to be one of the entrances to the underworld. There was this nymph Zeus had his eye on, only his brother Dis got to her first and made off with her, but before he could get back into the underworld through one of his regular entrances Zeus threw a thunderbolt at him. Only he missed and split the mountain apart and made an opening and Dis escaped down there. That’s why it’s called Tartaros. Nanna Tasoula was full of interesting stories like that, Steff.”
    â€œAnd you believe in all of them,” said Papa Alexi. “You know quite well it was a mine.”
    They wrangled on, deliberately trying to keep Steff amused, he guessed. He tried to pay attention in a dazed kind of way. All he knew was that he had to go and look at the cave, if only to get rid of the dream. It couldn’t be helped that it was on Mentathos land. There’d always been bad blood between Deniakis and Mentathos, and it had been worse since the troubles after the war, when some of the young men had fought on opposite sides, and terrible things had been done. Papa Alexi made the point himself.
    â€œDon’t you go trying it, Steff,” he said. “It’s not only Mentathos being a hard man, which he is, and he’d be pretty rough with you if you were found. He’d make serious trouble with your uncle. His father sold the mineral rights to a mining company. They came, and cleaned out any silver there was to be had. On top of that they’ve still got the rights, fifty-odd years. No wonder he’s touchy about it. Last thing he needs is anyone finding silver again.”
    â€œSteff just wants to look,” said Aunt Nix. “It’s to do with your dream, isn’t it, Steff? Tartaros. I bet you that’s where it came from, your dream. Eurydice, after all. You remember the story, Steff . . .”
    He barely listened.
    Of course he knew the story, because of the name, though he hadn’t thought about it till now. Ridiki had already been named when he’d got her, so in his mind that’s who she was, and nothing to do with the old Greek nymph she was named from. But that didn’t stop Aunt Nix telling him again what a great musician Orpheus had been in the days when Apollo and Athene and the other gods still walked the earth; and how he’d invented the lyre, and the wild beasts would come out of the woods to listen enchanted to his playing; and how when his wife Eurydice had died of a snakebite he’d made his way to the gates of the underworld and with his music charmed his way past their terrible guardian, the three-head dog Cerberus, and then coaxed Charon, the surly ferryman who takes dead