Lockhart saw a child’s shoe sticking out of the detritus. He picked it up, and with it came a small leg up to the knee. In the moonlight, Lockhart could see a writhing body of agitated maggots fall out of the stump. He dropped the leg, his stomach starting to spasm. He vomited until his insides ached and burned. For minutes afterward, he stood with his hands on his knees, spitting the bile and mucus out of his mouth. He tried taking deep, calm breaths through his nose, but he caught that smell of decay, and retched again. There was nothing to come up, and he felt his stomach and throat burning with the spasms. Covering his face, he ran out, tripping over the rubble.

The Germans must have massacred most of the villagers in that church. Manoli had told him what had happened elsewhere. After the rapes and the executions, they would lock the population in the church and then throw grenades through the windows. Sometimes a flame-thrower was used, or machine-gunners casually stood at the windows and raked the pews. The only reason anybody had known of such actions was that occasionally a child had survived by lying under his or her dead mother.

For the next hour, Lockhart staggered around the corpse of Kasteli. He was beyond tears, and instead entered a limbo of shocked stupor. Where exactly he walked during the rest of that night, he never knew. Neither was he able to remember lying down in the shepherds’ shelter, but that was where he woke up at dawn a few hours later, shivering and hungry.

As he walked to Mount Ida that day, Lockhart recalled his father’s words, spoken some time after Lockhart’s mother had died: “The path of maturity is not a smooth hill, but instead a series of roughly hewn steps. Some are small and easy, but others are vast and tricky. But climb them you must, for when you stop, you die.” He and Richard hadn’t understood them then, but Lockhart found now that it seemed to be grief that gave him the ability to climb those steps.

He had climbed many, but he didn’t know if he had matured, or merely become more hollow. Mother’s death when he was five; father’s when he was twenty-three; Anna’s disappearance; Richard’s death in North Africa last year—was that what he was here to do? Was he merely destined to climb his way through sadness just to experience more of it? Every step made his life before seem frivolous, shallow. That made him feel worse, not more mature. Life had always been about him, John, not really about anybody else. Yes, there were people he loved and cared for, but was that for his sake or for theirs? And before he could put things right, they went and bloody died or disappeared. He had to see Anna again, to apologize for the fact that he had never loved her deeply enough, not because he hadn’t wanted to, but because he was too selfish to know how. But he knew now. Had it needed all these deaths—these slaughters—to tell him that? Perhaps. Their deaths had made him better, but that wasn’t why they died. They died because—there were no real reasons, just prosaic ones like illness, heart attacks and war, bloody war.