‘A swizz. That’s exactly what it is.’ Tom sighs, takes a pull on his cigarette and pulls his knees up closer to his body, shivering in deep, painful spasms. He is too cold even to be frightened of the SS, and that, he supposes, is a benediction. He pushes back the rim of his helmet and peers through a fringe of dead fennel stalks to where a faint haze of tobacco smoke marks a Bren gun position. Beyond, he can’t see the Australians tucked in under the hillside. Besides the wind, the only sound is the hollow clank of goat bells from one of the lower slopes, and the occasional spasm of coughing from the ditches and shallow, scraped-out trenches that shelter his troop.

A thick, pearl-grey barrier of clouds rises behind the village on the ridge, swelling as it advances. All of a sudden the sun cuts through the gloom and a rainbow appears, startlingly bright. Without thinking Tom cranes his neck to look for its end, which hovers, tantalisingly, in the low pine scrub on the eastern slope of the gorge, tinting the dark green trees with hazy gold. There it is, his painting! He grins, and turns to see if Sergeant Duffield has seen the rainbow too, but he has just opened his mouth when it vanishes as suddenly as it appeared. It begins to sleet. The village drifts out of focus. The red tiled roofs lose their colour, and the trees on the sides of the gorge turn black, like the mottling of mildew on a damp wall. There is a sudden, rich growl of large engines coming to life beyond Vevi. And then, on the left, out of sight around the flank of the hill, the bright, insistent chatter of small-arms fire.

CHAPTER NINE

Attica, Greece, 26th April 1941

The road winds south like the bleached corpse of a snake, shimmering silver-grey with heat-haze, swarming with black shapes. Apostoli’s old Citroën is crawling along this exhausted road through flat farmland. It has been a wet spring, and the fields are green and speckled with wildflowers: yellow, red, purple, white. Zoë, in the back, is leaning out of the window, away from the eye-scorching tobacco smoke that fills the stained burgundy interior of the car. In front of her, Vangeli is picking his teeth. Apostoli, his face slack with the tedium of driving, has just pulled off his tie and undone several buttons of his shirt. ‘Fuck it,’ he mutters to himself. Next to Zoë, Pavlo is hugging his new bouzouki as if it were his baby son; like a baby, the instrument is swaddled in a garish peasant blanket. The idea of Pavlo as a father would make Zoë smile were she not so tired and bored. And frightened. A little frightened.