Athens, the ninth day

From Mavromation bus terminal to Cape Sounion is, it turns out, four hours in the round trip. Had I known this setting out, I may have been less eager to go -

So it's probably just as well I set out in blithe ignorance this morning for the 0930 coastal bus to Sounion.

The coastal bus does exactly what it says on the tin. It travels along the coast from Athens, through Glyfada and Vouliagmeni, until you're out in sere rocky hills specked with olive trees overlooking a sea so blue and wave-tipped it looks too perfect to be real, with islands so close you imagine you could swim to them.

The bus on the way out had a small problem with its klimatismos: it wasn't working all that well. So after a while the somewhere-west-of-middle-aged Greek lady in the seat beside me got her battery-powered fan out of her giant purse, and I got to enjoy the slight sideways draught. (And also to communicate in my pathetic Greek.)

After many long windings on the edge of the sea, the pillars of the Temple of Poseidon hove into view on their headland promontory. Poseidon's temple is remarkably well preserved (or possibly - this is Greece - well-resurrected), columned rows standing upright on a massive built platform of a base. The Temple of Athena, just down the hill, is less fortunate: its remains are preserved to about knee-high, and hard to distinguish from a distance among the scrub.

The bus wound up to its terminus, about two hundred metres down from the sanctuary, and we passengers disembarked into a wind that snatched at shirts and hats, pushing and prodding to catch you off-balance. (My hat blew off twice. Fortunately both times it caught in a thorn bush after a brief chase, and I was able to retrieve it with no harm done. After the second time, though, I stuck it in my bag lest the wind be third time lucky.

Despite its location, it's a touristy spot. I wandered around the top, and scrambled among thorny bushes in search of a good view of the sea. I ended up walking back up to the entrance hut along a line of recent excavation of a fortress wall - I didn't realise until I was on top of it, and by then I wasn't going to go back the way I came. (It's high summer, so there aren't many Ephoria/Ministry of Culture research excavations ongoing right now. The excavation area was deserted.)

At the gate, I asked the nice official lady (in Greek) which way to the beach? For swimming? The route she pointed me at turned out to be a narrow right-of-way leading down among the scrub, a track of dust and eroded volcanic tufa and pebbles and stones that looks as though it floods in winter. There were, of course, prickly bushes. But the tiny cove at the bottom - adjacent to a hotel, though the patch the track terminated at was free of sunbeds and umbrellas - was worth it: clear water, fine sand, blocks from the fortress wall half-tumbled at one corner, little fish that occasionally nibbled one's feet.

I stayed in the water for about an hour, just splashing around in the shallows, before I headed back up to the bus-stop and the over-priced tourist cafe where I paid entirely too much for bad cake and good ice-cream.

Then the bus came. This bus was the inland bus: it wound back via Lavrion through the humpy hills of Attica to Mavromation, and I dozed on the way.

And now I'm back at the institute, where I must do more laundry and play musical rooms.

Books 2011: There once was a time I was sure of the bond

Books 2011: 116-118


116-118, Chris Wooding, The Weavers of Saramyr, The Skein of Lament, and The Ascendancy Veil. Collected as The Braided Path.

I read The Braided Path in one sitting on Thursday afternoon and night. It's a trilogy that plays with reader expectations: you start off thinking epic fantasy - with rifles, and by the end of the first book your expectations have been subtly undermined. By the end of the second book, if you haven't figured out that this isn't your Triumphant Return of the Lost Heir fantasy, you haven't been paying enough attention.

The Weavers of Saramyr are twisted sons of bitches whose magical powers have given them real leverage with the noble families of Saramyr. For two centuries, they've worked to prejudice the people of Saramyr against anyone else who can do magic, calling them Aberrant. When it emerges that the Empress's daughter, her only heir, is Aberrant, the floodgates are loosed on a conflict that will tear the Empire of Saramyr apart.

The consequences of the Weavers' ascendancy play out over the course of the trilogy, an in-story time of roughly ten years. There are gods and spirits, war and politics and betrayal, interesting new cultures and magic both fascinating and dreadful. Through all this, we follow Keiku, whose family's death propels her on a course that will lead her into the very heart of the struggle. Keiku is an appealing character, whose development over the course of the books is eminently believable. Wooding's dab hand with characterisation is in play throughout, able to make deeply unpleasant people sympathetic. The Weavers are a tad one-dimensional in their puppy-kicking evil... but the reasons behind their madness are interesting enough to make that a minor quibble.

This isn't a wholly uplifting story. What triumph is achieved is won at great cost, and it is very far from being a triumph to wholly rejoice in. But it is, at least, a satisfying end to a compelling story, and one that I'm happy to have read.