The Magus - John Fowles [164]
eye. He appeared stunned, hardly able to walk. He didn't notice me until the last moment, when he stopped, looked at me wildly. I had a swift acrid stab of terror, that this really was some village boy they had got hold of and beaten up--not someone to look the part, but be the part. Without warning the soldier behind him jabbed him in the small of the back--something that could not be faked. I saw it, I saw his spasmic jerk forward, and the--or so it sounded--absolutely authentic gasp of pain the jab caused. He stumbled on another five or six yards. Then the colonel spat one word. The guards reached roughly out and brought him to a halt. The three men stood there in the path, facing downhill. The colonel moved down to just in front of me, his lieutenant limping beside him; both backs to me. Another silence; the panting of the man. Then almost at once came another figure, exactly the same, hands tied behind his back, two soldiers behind him. I knew by then where I was. I was back in 1943, ten years before; I was looking at captured Resistance fighters. The second man was obviously the _kapetan_, the leader--heavily built, about forty, some six feet tall. He had one naked arm in a rope sling, a rough bandage covered in blood round his upper arm. It seemed to have been made from the sleeve torn off his shirt; was too thin to staunch the blood. He came down the path towards me; a magnificent Klepht face with a heavy black moustache, an accipitral nose. I had seen such faces once or twice in the Peloponnesus, but I knew where this man came from, because over his forehead he still wore the fringed black headband of the Cretan mountaineer. I could see him standing in some early nineteenth-century print, in folk costume, silver-handled yataghan and pistols in his belt, the noble brigand of the Byronic myth. He was actually wearing what looked like British Army battle-dress trousers, a khaki shirt. And he too was barefoot. But he seemed to refuse to stumble. He was less battered than the other man, perhaps because of the wound. As he came up level with me, he stopped and then looked past the colonel and the lieutenant straight at me. I understood that he was meant to know me, that I had once known him. It was a look of the most violent loathing. Contempt. At the same time of a raging despair. He said nothing for a moment. Then he hissed in Greek one word. "_Prodotis_." His lips snarled on the v-sounding demotic Greek _delta_. Traitor. He had great power, he was completely in his role; and in a barely conscious way, as if I sensed that I must be an actor too, I did not come out with another flip remark but took his look and his hatred in silence. For a moment I was the traitor. He was kicked on, but he turned and gave me one last burning look back across the ten feet of lamplight. Then again that word, as if I might not have heard it the first time. "_Prodotis_." As he did so there was a cry, an exclamation. The colonel's rapped command: _Nicht schiessen!_ My guards gripped me vice tight. The first man had bolted, diving headlong sideways into the tamarisks. His two guards plunged after him, then three or four of the soldiers lining the path. He can't have got more than ten yards. There was a cry, German words, then a sickening scream of pain and another. The sound of a body being kicked, butt-ended. At the second cry the lieutenant, who had been standing watching just in front of me, turned and looked past me into the night. I was meant to understand he was revolted by this, by brutality; his other first look at me was explained. The colonel was aware that he had turned away. He gave the lieutenant a quick stare round, flicked a look at the guards holding me, then spoke--in French; so that the guards could not understand. "_Mon lieutenant, voild pour moi la plus belle musique dans le monde._" His French was heavily German; and he gave a sort of mincing lip-grimacing sarcasm to the word _musique_ that explained the situation. He was a stock German sadist; the lieutenant, a stock good German. The lieutenant seemed about to say something,