Late autumn folded into early winter. Above their isolated monastery, which grew colder every day, Mount Ida gleamed bright white with snow. No wonder the ancient Greeks thought mythical metalworkers lived here, Augusta thought, gazing toward the summit from her small window. The silvery limestone crags reflected snow against the gold of the sun, appearing as luminous mounds high in the sky.
Nicolas had brought in a few gas heaters to warm their mountain hideaway, and Augusta found that she didn’t mind the cold. She now had something new to look forward to: every week she trekked down the hillside, knocked on the brightly-painted front door of Xenia’s cottage, and spent an hour drinking herb-scented tea with her new Greek friend.
She loved the hours spent in Xenia’s warm, fragrant kitchen. With Augusta’s expanding knowledge of Greek, they were able to converse quite well. The elderly Greek woman seemed pleased with the company. She brought out photo albums of herself as a child, the brothers and sisters who had moved away from the mountains, the husband she had lost many years ago.
They often walked together in the sunny patches surrounding the small cottage. Xenia pointed out the edible greens, many of which grew even in the winter months—radiki, galatsida, agriozohos, roka, lapatho. The names sounded like music to Augusta, and when prepared by Xenia in her small kitchen, they produced a peppery, pungent explosion of taste.
“Good for your health in winter,” Xenia told her in Greek, as they walked through her garden one afternoon, collecting handfuls of tender shoots in their straw baskets.
“This one will keep the doctor away.” She stooped and caressed some gray-green tendrils springing up beside her stacked-stone wall. “Malotíra. For colds and stomach aches. We harvest in spring.”
Xenia pointed higher up the hill, toward the scrub lining the mountain path. “That one is dáfni, named after a girl who turned into a tree when the god Apollo pursued her.” Augusta squinted in the sunlight, noting the columnar shape of the shrub and its almond-shaped, emerald-green leaves.
“Today we use it for cooking and making tea. In ancient times it was used by the priestess at Delphi. She chewed leaves of the dáfni plant and was inspired to pronounce the oracle. They say chewing the leaves produces visions. I don’t know, I’ve never tried it!” Xenia gave Augusta a sly smile. “Do you know about the Pythia? The oracle at Delphi?”
“I’ve heard about her,” Augusta said. “The ancient Greeks believed the god Apollo spoke through the priestess, right? That she could tell the future?”
The old wise woman nodded. “Many important people, even great kings and generals, visited the oracle before starting any military venture or undertaking. They wanted to find out if the signs favored their success. No one began anything important without first consulting the Pythia. At that time she was one of the most powerful women in the world.”
“Wow.” Augusta glanced back up the mountain laurel, tossing its spindly branches back and forth in the breeze. “All because of the dáfni bush? The leaves told her the future?”
Xenia smiled, kneeling to tear off a few more shards of roka growing nearby. “No. Chewing daphne leaves does not reveal the future. All it does is drive one a little mad.” She removed an old spade from her apron pocket and began scraping earth away from some potato roots.
“The leaves produced visions for the Pythia. The men around her, the priests and important kings, interpreted her words as prophecies. She could say anything and it was considered fortune telling. Pythia once told the ruler of Sparta, ‘Love of money and nothing else will ruin Sparta.’ Well, that’s obvious! Love of money ruins the whole world. But her words were taken very seriously.”
Augusta knelt down beside Xenia and helped uncover the potatoes, digging gently in the loose soil with her bare hands. The earth smelled cold and delicious—the source of life. She thought about all the beautiful flowers germinating under the dirt, hiding away from the cool winter wind, ready to burst forth and bloom when the spring sun gave them the proper cue. How wonderful!
Inhaling deeply, Augusta rocked back on her heels and stared up at the azure sky. The sky had been this brilliant blue on the day she sat in the old Hippodrome in Istanbul with her father, learning about his work with the Cosmopolis. And the day she and Erol had taken the ferry out to Big Island, only to find Father Ephraim knocked unconscious in his own sanctuary.
A twinge of regret gnawed at her. She still missed Erol, but there was a reason she had to move on, to live her life without him. There were unscrupulous people out there, like Efendi and Hasan, and maybe the mysterious Rumelov himself. And countless more, probably. Criminals doing terrible things, wrecking innocent people’s lives. That’s what she was here for. She and her father would do everything they could to make the world safer, better, more just. That’s why she was sitting with Xenia on a remote mountaintop in Crete, completing her training. Without Erol. She would just have to make this personal sacrifice, like her father had sacrificed a comfortable family life in exchange for international espionage. Life was full of trade-offs and hard choices. This was her choice.
Plucking a few potatoes from the rocky soil, Augusta added them to her straw basket. They would have a good stew of potatoes, carrots, and mixed greens, with Xenia’s signature spices thrown in and blended at just the right moments. Her father was joining them later, bringing some cured meat he had picked up last time they were at the farmer’s market. They were looking forward to a cozy late afternoon around Xenia’s wood-burning stove, which was much warmer than her own poorly-heated corner of the old monastery.
Still, she knew all the discomfort was part of her training. She had to get used to cold, pain, hard work, and challenges. Her father had told her some heart-stopping tales about the scrapes he had gotten out of with a little ingenuity and a high tolerance for uncomfortable situations. The physical training was just one part of it. Mostly it was a mental game, a willingness to face the unknown, to trust in your own capabilities, to think clearly when your life depended on it.
Brushing the dirt off her knees, Augusta stood up and followed Xenia to the far corner of her garden, where she was cutting off sturdy stalks of broccoli and cauliflower. Gently breaking off some of the tender broccoli leaves—Xenia had taught her how delicious they were in stew—she wondered if she was really cut out for the life of a spy. How would she handle a truly dangerous situation? Would she freeze, or faint, or collapse in hysterics? Her father had been training her in the art of managing her thoughts and emotions—impressions, he called them—but she wasn’t sure she would remember his instructions when she felt most afraid.
Everything she’d done so far was meant to prepare her for the moment when she needed it most. Last week they had hiked through the wild and beautiful Samaria Gorge, rappelling down its sheer vertical cliff faces to test her strength and agility. The week before they had overnighted at the ruined palace of Knossos, built by the Minoans almost three millennia ago to house their royalty. By day the marbled palace drew tourists by the thousand, but at night it became a labyrinth of toppled stone columns, underground passages, and doorways leading to nowhere. In other words, the perfect place to hone her stealth skills of pursuit and escape. Tracking silently through the once-grand halls of Knossos, beneath the haughty, charcoal-lined eyes of Minoan queens, was an experience both terrifying and sublime.
But perhaps the most terror-inducing of all was cliff diving above the caves of Matala. Even though she hadn’t worked up the nerve to jump from the highest point, she was proud of herself for leaping off one of the lower cliff ledges into the iridescent sea below. As utterly frightening as it had been, she now knew she was capable of jumping if she ever needed to.
Next to the physical training, the mental training seemed like a piece of cake. But Augusta knew it was actually the most important part of her preparation for the future. If an agent cracked under pressure, or made just one bad split-second decision, she could endanger her own life and others. Her physical fitness was nothing without psychological fitness. She had to sharpen her attention to her impressions, to make sure all her thoughts were true, accurate, objective. Fear and anger, she had learned, were the result of incorrect assessments of the situation. It was imperative that she eliminate untrue thoughts, staying focused only on her objective.
“So, what you’re really saying,” she had told her father, as he explained the importance of attention, “is to follow the facts. Eliminate opinions and emotions, and just consider one fact at a time. I remember Grandfather saying something about following the facts. That’s what I did when I rescued Erol from the Rumelovs.”
“Did you?” Her father raised his eyebrows, but he didn’t look altogether impressed. “Well, that’s certainly a good place to start. That will help your mind stay clear and objective about the situation, not get caught up in unnecessary details that will distract you or weigh you down.”
He paused, as if choosing his words carefully.
“Facts are the foundation of good judgment, but that’s not all there is to it. You also have to decide what’s appropriate in each situation. For example, sometimes it may be appropriate to jump from an airplane, and other times it may not be. Facts lead you to your decision, but they can’t make the decision for you.”
“You mean like whether or not you have a parachute? That’s an important fact that will determine your decision.”
“Yes, exactly!” Nicolas smiled at her. “An agent must assess all the facts of the situation and make the best possible decision. You need your facts to be clear, accurate, and unclouded by mystifying emotions, which will always obscure your judgment. But espionage is more like an art than a science. You have to go with the flow. Facts and situations can change quickly, so what was appropriate at one moment may not be right at the next moment. It’s not a static process. It’s very dynamic. In a way you are always making decisions on the spur of the moment, based on what came in the moment before.”
“What?” Augusta made a face. “That sounds impossible. How are you supposed to do that?”
“Mainly through practice,” her father said. “But all the training you’re doing now will help you to make an informed and responsive decision when the time comes.” He clapped his hand her shoulder. “You have to trust yourself. Trust your judgment, trust your ability to respond. You’ll be ready.”
Augusta wasn’t so sure.
Her basket now overflowing with garden vegetables, she followed Xenia into the stone cottage and set her harvest down on the kitchen table. They began rinsing and scrubbing the produce as Xenia simmered some delicious-smelling broth on the stove. Everything was so warm and cheerful here, so safe, certain. As she sliced the earthy potatoes, Augusta breathed in the comforting scent of Xenia’s homely kitchen.
Suddenly she was reminded strongly of her grandmother’s kitchen, with its warm cinnamon smell of apple cobbler and pecan pie. This time of year Grandmother would be baking gingerbread cookies, which Augusta had loved to decorate when she was a little girl. Why had she ever given up her comfortable life in North Carolina? She could be there right now, buying Christmas presents and munching the heads off gingerbread men at her grandparents’ old farmhouse. She could have sold the lost discourses, opened an art gallery, and lived the life she had always dreamed of.
But for some reason she had chosen a different path. A life of mental training, physical discomfort, and social sacrifice. She had chosen to be cold and alone. All in the name of something she wasn’t sure she could ever fully grasp. Justice. What was it, really? What did it have to do with her?
“Ow!” Augusta had sliced into her own finger, which began bleeding profusely. She grabbed an old rag from the table and pressed gently to stop the blood. “Sorry,” she said apologetically to Xenia. “I was going too fast.”
Calm as ever, Xenia smiled and returned to the stove. “I saw you. You were slicing vegetables like they were your enemies. Slashing at them. You will always cut yourself like that.”
She plopped some chunky potatoes into the stew.
Augusta looked at her, confused. Fighting against vegetables? For the first time, she wondered if Xenia might be a little senile. Maybe she had just misunderstood.
“I don’t understand.”
Xenia picked up a knife and began flaying a head of broccoli. In her expert hands the knife blade gleamed and hummed, lopping off tidy little florets, creating order from chaos.
“You see? You find the opening, the joint where it connects, and you cut there. The vegetable will give way, allowing itself to be sliced. Or the meat. Or the wood. Whatever you are cutting.”
Augusta observed as the older woman worked her way through the mound of produce on the small kitchen table, slicing, paring, peeling. Long after her finger had stopped bleeding, Augusta stood and watched, entranced by Xenia’s unhurried, rhythmic motions as she prepared the soup. She certainly did look like a sculptor who knew every inch of her material. Every flaw within the block of marble. Every curve of the driftwood. Bringing to light the innermost secrets of each substance.
And suddenly she understood what they all meant—Xenia, her father, her grandfather. Carve with the grain, her grandfather had said. Find the opening.
See the beauty in what’s there, Augusta thought to herself. She envisioned herself back home in her studio, coaxing beauty from the stolid raw materials in her hands. This was just like sculpting, really. Moving past the heart-pounding fear, the distaste for uncertainty, it was like producing a piece of art. Work with what you have.
As Xenia’s tourlou simmered away on the stove, Augusta felt calmer and happier than she had in months. She was confident she could handle whatever life threw at her. Follow the facts, yes, but more than that, look for the opportunities in what’s around you. Don’t fight the world. Turn it to your advantage.
Just then, she heard three rapid knocks on the door. Her father pushed open the front door and called, in Greek, “Hello? Can I come in?”
“Come, come!” Xenia waved him in. “The soup is almost ready.”
“It smells wonderful,” Nicolas said, inhaling deeply. “I wish we could join you for dinner, but something has come up. I’m afraid we have to leave immediately.”
“What?” Augusta moaned. “Right now? We’ve spent all afternoon cooking.”
Nicolas turned to her with an urgent look. “I know. I hate to pull you away, but we really need to get moving.” He motioned her to the door.
“I’ve just had news. It’s time.”