The Witch in the Mountain Pass: Chapter 1
A Novel
Morn dawns; and with it stern Albania's hills,
Dark Suli’s rocks, and Pindus’ inland peak,
Robed half in mist, bedewed with snowy rills,
Arrayed in many a dun and purple streak,
Arise; and, as the clouds along them break,
Disclose the dwelling of the mountaineer;
Here roams the wolf, the eagle whets his beak,
Birds, beasts of prey, and wilder men appear,
And gathering storms around convulse the closing year.
— From Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage by Lord ByronChapter 1: Dağ Geçidi
At dawn, the autumn storm broke over the mountain pass and quenched the last of the blue-white flames that had consumed the witch’s taverna. The pass was situated in the southern mountains of Epirus. In bygone days it had constituted the ancestral home of the Suliotes, a people of Albanian extraction whose fabled valor was outweighed only by a reputation for brigandage and treachery. Epirus, the northwestern territory of Greece, often represented on old maps as “a dun and purple streak” symbolizing the land’s ruggedness, is a region whose history is as brutal as its terrain. It has been subject to many rulers: Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman. But arguably the most renowned was the dissolute and cunning Vali of Western Roumeli, Ali Pasha of Ioannina, whom Lord Byron called “the Muslim Buonoparte.”
Ali Pasha carved out a semiautonomous fiefdom north of the Gulf of Corinth. And it was here that he aspired to establish an everlasting dynasty encompassing not only Epirus but the mountains and marshlands of southern Albania. Yet the Suliotes stood in his way. And so, through a policy of systematic persecution aimed at neutralizing this menace at his doorstep, the Vali waged unremitting war against the people of Suli, culminating in the ruthless campaign of 1799.
“Smoke them out,” Ali Pasha ordered his commander, “like this…”—he said and puffed twice on the long-stemmed chibouk, grinning as the smoke wreathed his white beard and blue eyes. “Because if you fail, Qasim Bey,” he added mildly, “your severed head shall dangle from the covered market of Ioannina.” Then he moved his gloved hand in an arc through the smoke in a pendulum-like motion. “But you are bald, Qasim Bey. So we’ll wrap your melon in a kerchief.” Ali Pasha’s attendants laughed, and Qasim Bey laughed too.
Strongholds were erected atop the ridges of the mountains overlooking the ravines and canyons. For awhile the Suliotes held their ground well. Their marksmen shot at builders and workmen, most of whom were slaves and many of whom died.
At the base of a steep escarpment, the Ottoman Turks established a garrison called Dağ Geçidi (“the mountain pass”). It was built to prevent the Suliotes from accessing certain ledges and footpaths that they might have used to establish strategic dispositions from which they would be able to conduct ambushes.
The entrance to the pass was wide enough to accommodate two yokes of oxen walking side by side. At the mouth of the canyon the road bent sharply to the right, then it veered to the left (or north) where it opened into an ample enclosure with freshwater rivulets trickling down the gray rocks.
A cave on the southeast side of this enclosure led down to the river Acheron, whose waters rolled west to Glyki. An oak tree in the enclosure stood at the front of the cave, its branches overhanging it. Those who entered the cave from the enclosure had to step carefully over the tree’s knotty roots, but the floor of the cave was smooth and unobstructed.
Within the enclosure there was a second path that continued up into the mountains. This path was connected to a maze of trails that led north into Albania and northeast to the woods of Dodona and the city of Ioannina. The trails sometimes dead-ended into deep gorges and gullies. The narrowness and steepness of this labyrinth of trails made it negotiable only on foot, although goats and lean pack animals could squeeze through.
In 1801, thirteen Suliotes were apprehended in the enclosure of the mountain pass while attempting under the cover of darkness to smuggle ammunition from a boat on the river Acheron up through the cave and into the mountains. The kapitan ordered the men to be impaled and their bodies left to rot in public view within the enclosure as an example to those who would challenge the Pasha’s authority.
The men were tethered facedown, so that the tips of the 14-foot poles could be inserted into their rectums. The poles were hoisted into the air and fell with a thud into holes dug into the living rock to receive them. The victims’ bodies oozed down the poles by their weight, puncturing their organs, muscles twitching. Their screams were so noisome as to startle the blackbirds. A handful were lucky and granted instant release when the pole pierced the heart or ran up through the brain. But some survived for days, groaning in agony, begging the passers-by to end their misery or alleviate their unslakable thirst for water.
Ali Pasha declared himself victorious in 1803, and in 1804 the Suliotes were expelled from Roumeli. Many fled to the island of Corfu where it was said they gathered on the shores at dusk to gaze tearfully upon the dun and purple mountains across the channel that they had lost.
When Sultan Mahmud II ascended the throne in 1808, he was resolved not to suffer Ali Pasha to flout the hereditary might of the House of Osman. In a general conclave with his commanders and viziers, the Sultan plotted the downfall of his rebellious slave.
The embattled Lion of Ioannina, sensing the tide was turning against him, reacted by dispatching emissaries to the Suliote refugees to woo them back to the mainland through flattery, riches, and generous inducements. Ali declared a general amnesty, exempted them from taxation, and restored to them their ancestral homeland in the mountains. “All I ask in return,” he said, “is that you fight as mercenaries on my behalf.”
The clans accepted his offer. The Suliotes returned to Epirus and helped solidify the Pasha’s power for nearly a decade. But Ali Pasha had overplayed his hand and was was betrayed and assassinated in 1822.
Qasim Bey hung the Pasha’s severed head from a rafter in the covered market of Ioannina, where it remained for 3 days before being despatched to the Sublime Porte, where it was presented to the Sultan on a silver platter.
Following the Battle of Navarino in 1827, the Turks’ sway over the Hellenic mainland diminished until it became nominal and something of a joke. The Sick Man of Europe had begun his terminal decline.
The garrison of Dağ Geçidi, which the Greeks pronounced “Dagitsidos,” was abandoned and became a sleepy Greek village tracing its foundation to 4 May 1834 because this was the date carved on the cornerstone of the town’s Orthodox church.
The Church of Dormition of the Mother of God was built midway up the path that led up to the mountain pass. It was constructed in the Byzantine style over the ruins of the Turks’ mosque. It became one of the modern architectural marvels of Epirus.
On 3 May 1934, one day before the town’s centennial celebration, the citizens of Dagitsidos gathered in the village square in the late afternoon to discuss whether a population of 99 souls was an unlucky omen for the town’s 100th anniversary celebration. The consensus was that it was bad news, and that a plague or drought could very well ensue. The sky was unseasonably overcast and had been so for several days. The men shrugged and speculated vaguely as to the cause, while the women clucked their tongues and gossiped about the situation in harsh whispers.
Although the twentieth century had passed through Dagitsidos, it seemed not to have left much of an impression. The village lacked modern amenities and conveniences. There were no paved roads, no electricity, no sewers, no running water, no radios. And there were not even any telephone or telegraph wires to connect the village to the other parts of Greece. Uncle Spiro’s truck was the only automobile in town. Every time Uncle Spiro indicated that he planned to use the truck, the mechanic in Glyki was sent for. Two or three days later, the mechanic would arrive, fire up the truck’s engine, check under its hood, kick its tires, and declare it operable.
Because there was nothing to do in Dagitsidos, the ritualistic gatherings in the town square had assumed the qualities of a municipal council. Between the citizens’ daily labors and frequent visits to the church to light candles and pray for the intercession of Jesus Christ the Avenger of Blood (whose help they sought in settling personal scores), they craved entertainment—something to while away the idle hours. And so the vexed question of the 99 souls of Dagitsidos came as a welcome diversion, however frightening its implications might be.
Someone suggested that Papa Nikolaos counted as two souls, since the Holy Spirit flitted around inside of him. But others doubted the soundness of this reasoning, since the Holy Father was prone to fits of dyspepsia and ungovernable flatulence, which the Holy Spirit would likely have found discombobulating and unwelcoming.
“There’s the cobbler’s daughter, Dorcas,” said the obese baker, massaging his knees. He sat on a plank bench against the barber’s white stucco wall. The bench sagged under his weight and was supported at one end by a broken-down, rusty mechanical device of long-forgotten utility that had been against the barber’s wall for a quarter of a century. “Dorcas is not only pregnant but fat,” the baker continued. “That means her baby will be healthy like me.—That’s another soul.”
His observation won several grave nods. But Mama Irene interjected that babies didn’t have souls till the midwife cut the cord. Then she slapped her son who was pulling his sister’s hair and called him a soulless devil.
Tall, bony Agatha removed a clay pipe from her mouth and said mournfully, “Yiayia Elena’s dying.”
“God help us!” the women exclaimed and crossed themselves.
It was then that Mama Irene’s son cried out and drew the villagers’ attention to a bent old crone coming down the road out of the mountain pass. A blue kerchief wrapped around her head was decorated with flowers. She walked briskly and without a cane, but was leaned forward at a steep angle. She wore a chest harness and carried an earthenware jar (an amphora) on her back. As she approached, the townsfolk heard the jingling bronze utensils dangling from her belt.
All at once, hundreds of doves poured out of the mountain pass and formed a sort of halo over the woman. Then they flew off in the direction of Uncle Spiro’s olive groves.
The old hag studied the flight of the birds. Then she glanced slyly at the crowd. With a groan, she removed the chest harness and lowered the amphora to the ground. Then she raised her hands dramatically in the air. Her hideous grin disclosed four rotting teeth and a black tongue.
“I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness!” she shouted.
The villagers gasped. This sounded sacreligious, since Old John the Baptist had said the same thing in the Gospels. No one quite knew how to respond.
“I am the Oracle of Dodona!” she said. “I am the voice of the Sacred Grove!”
The children giggled.
“Yes, laugh!” the old woman said. She cackled hideously and executed a clownish dance. “Laugh!”—But then she cried out in pain and touched her ribs. She collapsed to the ground and sat in the dust by the amphora, looking spent and sad. She coughed and wheezed and plucked at the bronze utensils on her belt, which weren’t utensils at all, but rather jagged fragments of bronze with strange symbols engraved on them.
The children fell silent. They looked at their parents, wonderingly.
“The gods have sent me here,” the woman mumbled sullenly. Then she gestured behind her with her thumb at the road leading up to the mountain pass. “I wish to establish a taverna in that pass,” she said, “where the thirteen Suliotes were slain.” Then she clutched her heart and wept silently, overwhelmed by the weight of some unspoken burden she bore.
“I come to prepare the way for someone greater than I, for someone whose shoe’s latchet I am not worthy—et cetera, et cetera. But it will take me time to do this, unless Time…”—she stopped and looked in horror at the rafts and boats pulled up onto the north bank of the Acheron. “Unless Time takes me first.”
“What does that mean?” Mama Irene asked.
“It’s a foreshadowing of things to come,” the old woman said, wiping spittle from her chin. “A prophecy.”
There were three elders in Dagitsidos: Papa Nikolaos, who was not present that day because he hated his flock; Uncle Spiro, who was the wealthiest man in Dagitsidos and claimed descent from the bandit chieftain Odysseus Androutsos; and Uncle Costa, the fierce-eyed swineherd whom everyone loved. At the mention of the thirteen Suliotes, Uncle Spiro and Uncle Costa looked at each other. Everyone in the village knew the mountain pass was haunted, but it was only the two of them who knew the history of the thirteen impaled Suliotes.
The hag’s eyes slewed in the direction of the two old men, who were standing side by side. Then she yawned and pretended she hadn’t noticed them.
“That mountain pass is haunted,” the barber said, emerging from his shop. “It’s an evil place. People have died there recently.”
“People die everywhere, all the time!” the witch said. “Maybe there’s someone dying right now in this village—perhaps, as we speak?” Agatha removed her clay pipe and nodded in astonishment. “A man?” Agatha frowned and shook her head. “No, a woman!”
The townsfolk looked uneasily at one another. How could the witch know that Yiayia Elena was on her deathbed?
“I know that people die all the time,” the barber continued, “but in the mountain pass, they die mysteriously.”
The witch shrugged and said in a merry voice, “The dead are dead, the living are living. The evil [to kakό] in that place is gone. Now there’s profit [kérdos] to be made!” She made grasping motions with her hands, as if money mattered to her.
Then Uncle Costa sang a line from a popular ballad: “There’s evil [kakό] found in profit [kérdos]…”—And he pointed to Uncle Spiro, who was rich and stingy. Then the townsfolk laughed, because they knew the next line was: “And it profits not an evil man.”
Uncle Spiro’s face went red. “I never charge any of you when I hitch my wagon to the truck and tow you to Glyki to sell your wares in the marketplace. I don’t charge because I know how important it is for our community’s economic well being.”
“But you take a cut of what we sell,” the baker said.
“The truck needs petrol, you fat dog!”
The witch jumped up and raised her voice: “Then I can stay in the mountain pass of Dagitsidos?!”
Everyone’s eyes fell on the two elders.
Uncle Spiro nodded magnanimously to show that the rumors of his stinginess were unfounded. Uncle Costa lifted his hands, as if to say that the issue had never been his to decide, even though it was only Uncle Costa’s opinion that carried weight in Dagitsidos, since Uncle Spiro was an idiot and Papa Nikolaos was disinterested in the town’s affairs.
The witch picked up her chest harness and slung the straps over her shoulder. Two boys rushed forward to help her secure the amphora to her back. Then she walked up the same path she’d come down from. But then she stopped and turned, because there was something else she wanted to say.
“Now that I’m a citizen of Dagitsidos, rejoice! The town now has 100 souls!”
Everyone cheered when they realized this was true. The witch had solved the town’s dilemma on the very eve of its centennial celebration. They wondered how she’d known this was the thing they’d been debating on her arrival. It seemed to lend credence to her claim of having special powers. She seemed indeed to be a witch. It had been a long time since anything so curious and interesting had happened in the sleepy Greek village of Dagitsidos.
The witch, seeing the smiles on their faces, waved at townsfolk amiably and walked away, whistling tunelessly to herself. As she disappeared into the mountain pass, the flock of doves returned from the Uncle Spiro’s plantation and flew toward the mountain. The birds moved against the black clouds in separate flocks that looked almost like thirteen winding sheets fluttering on the wind.
Once the witch was gone, the townsfolk resumed their discussion of the upcoming celebration. But Uncle Spiro and Uncle Costa moved off to the side and fell into a nervous huddle. They weren’t quite sure whether the addition of a 100th soul belonging to a witch was a good or bad thing for Dagitsidos.
The cobbler’s daughter, Dorcas, didn’t like to wear shoes. She ascended the path leading up to the mountain pass. She progressed with difficulty, not because she was afraid of stepping on rocks (the pads of her feet were tough as iron), but because she was 8 months pregnant. She carried a basket containing half a dozen eggs. Curiosity had gotten the better of her. She planned to test the witch’s magic by offering these blatant symbols of fertility to the old woman in exchange for a prognostication on the gender and future prospects of her child. She was also concerned that her own fate might be similar to that of her mother’s, who had died in childbirth bringing her into the world. But it was more important to her that the baby survive. “If I die in the process,” Dorcas thought, “so be it.”
Dorcas was a grateful person. This was her first pregnancy. She hadn’t expected it, but was thankful to God for granting her the gift. Her father was a perpetually glum man. Dorcas equated glumness with ingratitude. She no longer respected her father, and sometimes she wondered if she ever really had. He was pleasant enough and sociable between his long bouts of melancholy and depression. He’d asked her one day with feigned interest who’d given it to her. Dorcas refused to reveal who the father was. With her mother dead, she was looking forward to being the matron of the household. But it upset her that this pathetic old man whom she didn’t respect would have to stand in as the baby’s surrogate father until Manolios, the carpenter’s son—the boy with the cleft lip who’d “given it to her”—was ready to leave his parents’ home.
Dorcas wanted her own place—far away from her father’s hovel that reeked of shoe leather, boot blacking, and regret. Manolios was himself a carpenter—a damned good one too. He’d build them a house and furnish it with new fixtures: window frames, shutters, door jambs, and a sturdy door with a bolt and a latch. He’d make a crib for the baby, cupboards, tables, chairs, and a bed frame for the bed, where they’d enjoy each other’s company and make more little ones. Dorcas had chosen the place where she wanted him to build the house.
Meditating on these things, she squinted because she wasn’t sure whether she was permitted to think of Manolios as her husband, since Papa Nikolaos hadn’t yet waved his hands in the air and muttered things in formal Greek that made it all official before God. But since it was an irrefutable fact that the marriage had been consummated, Dorcas would continue to regard Manolios as her husband and personal property.
“But how long must we wait?” she asked herself in exasperation, as she entered the canyon at the mouth of the mountain pass. Maybe the witch would answer this as well, although Dorcas already knew the answer. “I have to wait,” she said in frustration, “until Manolios shows his parents the same balls he showed me the night he bumped up and down on my belly and gave my belly this bump!”
Manolios told Dorcas he was afraid to tell anyone that it was he who was the father. The shock of the revelation, Manolios claimed, could kill his grandmother, Yiayia Elena, who’d been on her deathbed since Easter two years prior, whispering prayers and confessing ancient crimes between bouts of insanity. A living corpse, she clutched in one hand an icon of St George, and in the other a photograph of her fifth and final husband (whom she’d allegedly murdered), Mihalis, father of her beloved daughter Philippa.
The mother of Manolios, “Philippa of the Holy Vision,” whom the citizenry of Dagitsidos revered as a saint, had ordered her son to bathe his grandmother, feed her, and carry off her waste—not because Philippa was a charitable person, which she was not, but because she could not stand the shriveled old bitch and was embarrassed to be her daughter. Never had there been a more awkward biological pairing of the sacred with the profane. Yiayia Elena’s controversial past of serial elopements and inexplicable homicides had cast a pall over Philippa’s efforts to promote her own reputation as a receptacle of God’s will. It was a reputation Philippa had painstakingly nurtured over the years following her miraculous vision of Saint Andrew fishing in the river Acheron.
Philippa had been pregnant with Manolios at the time. The suddenness and unexpectedness of the miracle startled her so much that she fainted; and the clay pot that she’d brought to the river’s edge fell from her arms. The vessel shattered and the wise women of Dagitsidos explained to her that this was the origin of Manolios’s cleft lip. Tall bony Agatha found Philippa unconscious beside the river, the cool water lapping her feet. When she woke, she spoke lucidly of “a kindly old man” whom she’d never seen before in Dagitsidos.
“It was strange,” she said. “So very strange. He stood in the distance casting his net, and seemed to bless me with his eyes. He told me, without the process of language, that his name was Andrew and that he was a fisher of men.”
Two years later Philippa saw the same old man selling fish in the market of Glyki, but she thought it wise to suppress this intelligence, fearing it would embolden Papa Nikolaos, who was skeptical of Philippa’s vision.
Dorcas knew Manolios loved his grandmother Yiayia Elena more than he loved his father or mother. He seemed to consider it an honor and sacred duty to make his grandmother's final days (which had dragged on for two years) as peaceful as possible. What Dorcas didn’t understand was why Manolios felt this way toward his grandmother.
Yiayia Elena was the only person in Dagitsidos, other than Dorcas, who’d always treated him kindly and respectfully, who’d never made fun of him or called him a broken pot because of his cleft lip. Sometimes, Yiayia Elena would open her eyes, and a beatific smile of recognition would overspread her wrinkled face. Once, in a state of wild delirium, Yiayia Elena told Manolios that a woman would come to Dagitsidos: “She shall give you a glimpse of your future, and she shall wear my black robes when I’m gone.”
Assuming his grandmother was raving as the end drew near, Manolios spoke to no one about it. That was four months ago.
As Dorcas entered the enclosure, she recalled the dream she’d had that morning. In it Yiayia Elena told Manolios that a woman would come to Dagitsidos, “who shall give you a glimpse of your future, and she shall wear my black robes when I’m gone.” Then Dorcas stood stock still and almost dropped the basket of eggs, because the witch was sitting at the mouth of the cave under the oak tree staring at her fixedly. The hag had been breakfasting on snails, which she plucked—like berries—from the cave’s damp walls. She sucked the meat from the shells, then cracked the shells like pistachio husks and cast them to the ground.
The amphora leaned against the tree trunk. The bronze fragments, which had hung from the witch’s belt when she arrived the previous day, were tied to a single branch overhanging the cave’s entrance. The bronze fragments tinkled whenever a breeze came up from the River Acheron. The cooing doves on the ledges of the enclosure had streaked the rocks white with their shit.
“I’ve brought you some eggs,” Dorcas said.
The witch looked at the basket, then at the girl.
“I don’t eat eggs,” she replied.
“I thought you could use them for a fertility spell for me.”
“You don’t need a fertility spell. You’re pregnant.”
“I know…But I don’t want anything bad to happen to my baby. It could die before it comes to term. Or I might die giving birth to it, which wouldn’t bother me so much, but the baby wouldn’t have a mama to take care of it and that might make it die too.”
The witch sighed and stood up. “I’m not a midwife,” she mumbled. But she put her hand on Dorcas’s belly. Then she abruptly looked up into the sky because the doves had taken flight.
“Do you want these eggs or not?” Dorcas asked.
“You’re the one that needs nourishment,” the witch said, “although you seem to get plenty of it. Your baby needs nourishment, too. Eat the eggs for the baby.”
The witch seemed upset by the way the birds were moving.
“Those doves follow you around, don’t they? Do you talk to them?”
“Something like that. Go home and eat your eggs. I almost said ‘go home to your husband,’ but the doves told me all about that.”
“I can’t eat eggs,” Dorcas said. “They’ll give me gas and I get enough discomfort in my stomach from the baby moving about.” Dorcas said all this in a casual, matter-of-fact way. She was quite impressed that the birds had told the witch the background of her relationship with Manolios in such a short time.
Dorcas looked into the witch’s gimlet eyes. “Can I ask you something else?”
“You want to know whether it will be a boy or a girl?”
“Yes,” she said.
The witch’s face melted into an expression of sadness. “Would you love it any differently if you knew?”
Dorcas looked down at her bare feet. She was ashamed.
“I think you would love the baby no matter what… Isn’t that so?”
Dorcas nodded.
“Even if it were born blind, deaf, lame, slow in the head, or had a scar—a cleft lip? Like the boy who ‘gave it’ to you? None of that would matter to you. Because you are a grateful person, Dorcas the cobbler’s daughter…. Gratitude is pleasing to the gods—even the one God you worship.”
Dorcas gripped the basket with both hands. “Thank you,” she said.
The witch laughed and shouted mockingly, “Thank you!—‘Thank you,’ says grateful Dorcas!” The witch bellowed and her voice echoed through the mountain pass. She addressed the doves on the ledges and walked to the center of the enclosure. “Thank you!” She bowed. “Thank you!”
Dorcas realized the discussion was over. She was pleased by how it had turned out. But her happiness was about to be redoubled, because the witch called after her, saying, “Grateful Dorcas, you shall be married before the next full moon.”
Dorcas asked hopefully, “Then Yiayia Elena will be dead?”
The witch looked at the cave, because the bronze fragments hanging from the oak branch were tinkling.
“Did you hear me?” Dorcas asked. “I said, ‘Will Yiayia Elena be dead by then?’”
“More or less,” the witch replied ambiguously. Then she walked back to the cave and disappeared inside of it.
Late that night the witch lay sleeping with her legs in the cave and her head resting on the oak tree’s roots. She was plagued by a horrible nightmare. Poor Dorcas was crying over the body of her newborn. “Why?” the girl wept. “Why?… What did I do wrong, O God!”
The witch’s eyes snapped open. She rose in a fury and cried out, “No! You will not let that happen!” She pointed her crooked index finger at the bronze chimes tinkling overhead. “Her child will be born in full health, and Dorcas the cobbler’s daughter shall live to bear more.”
The birds cooed in agreement. The chimes went silent as if chastened.
“Now let me sleep!” the old woman said and yawned. She rolled over onto her side and rested on her arm. But she was grinning to herself as she did this. It was important to rebuke the gods every now and then, so that they did not forget that it was solely by our sufferance that they existed at all.
Continue to Chapter 2
Wow! So intrigued. I can’t wait to see what happens next!
Your expressive words “pull the reader in” & the detailed historical references create an authentic setting to make all events & conversations feel lifelike & intimate. Nicely done!