The Violet Season

Chapter 1: The Boats of Kali Limenes

The wind came off the Libyan Sea carrying the smell of wild thyme and salt, and Thalia Manikas stood knee-deep in the shallows, hauling the painter line of her father's smallest kaiki toward the stone quay. The boat was called the Agios Nikolaos, named for the patron saint of sailors, though her father said the saint had done precious little for him lately. The hull was painted blue and white—the colors fading now after three seasons without proper varnish—and the nets inside smelled of brine and fish scales and the particular sweetness of rope that had dried a thousand times in the Cretan sun.

"Thalia! The line—watch the line!"

Her sister's voice carried from the quay above, sharp and practical as always. Despina stood with her hands on her hips, her dark hair tied back under a cotton kerchief, squinting against the morning light. At twenty-four, Despina was only three years older than Thalia, but she carried herself like a woman of forty—shoulders set, mouth firm, eyes always calculating the next meal, the next mending, the next thing that needed doing before it fell apart.

"I have the line," Thalia called back, looping it twice around the iron ring set into the quay's face.

"You're letting it chafe. Bring it higher."

Thalia bit back a reply and climbed the rough stone steps, her bare feet finding the familiar grooves worn by generations of fishermen. The village of Kali Limenes sat in a shallow curve of coastline on Crete's southern shore, a handful of whitewashed houses clinging to the hillside above a natural harbor. It was May 1941, and the wild violets that gave the season its local name—the violet season, the old women called it, when the hills turned purple before the summer heat burned everything to gold—were blooming in great swathes along the cliff paths.

Their father, Yannis Manikas, was already up at the house, mending a net that had torn on the rocks two days ago. He was sixty-one years old, lean and weathered as driftwood, with hands so calloused they could grip a wet rope in a gale without slipping. He had fished these waters since he was seven. He knew every current, every reef, every underwater passage along thirty kilometers of coastline. He knew where the grouper hid in summer and where the swordfish ran in autumn, and he knew—though he did not speak of it—that the war creeping across Europe would eventually reach even this forgotten corner of the Mediterranean.

It had already reached the rest of Greece. The mainland had fallen to the Germans in April. The British and Commonwealth forces that had tried to hold the country were retreating south, many of them to Crete, where they dug in alongside the island's own small garrison. Rumors flew through the village like swallows: the Germans would bomb them, the Germans would invade, the British would hold, the British would abandon them. Nobody knew anything for certain, and so the fishermen of Kali Limenes did what they had always done. They fished.

"Papa wants us to take the nets to Matala tomorrow," Despina said as they walked up the path together. "Kostas the net-maker has thread."

"Kostas charges double now."

"Everyone charges double now. That's what war does before the soldiers even arrive."

Thalia looked out over the sea, which was impossibly blue under the morning sky, the kind of blue that made your chest ache if you stared at it too long. Somewhere beyond that horizon lay North Africa, and beyond that, the vast machinery of a war that had consumed half the world. It seemed impossible that it could touch this place—this tiny harbor, these whitewashed walls, the goats picking their way along the cliff paths, the old women sitting outside their doors stringing tobacco leaves to dry.

But Thalia had seen the planes. Three days ago, a formation of German bombers had passed high overhead, heading east toward the airfield at Heraklion. The sound of their engines had been like distant thunder on a clear day, wrong and ominous, and every person in the village had stopped what they were doing and looked up.

"Do you think they'll come?" Thalia asked.

Despina didn't answer immediately. She was watching a fishing boat round the headland—old Michalis Stavrakis and his grandson, coming in with their morning catch. The boat sat low in the water, which meant a good haul, and Despina's expression softened slightly. A good catch meant fish for the village, and fish meant another day of not going hungry.

"They'll come," Despina said finally. "They always come. The question is what we do when they get here."

"We fight."

"We survive," Despina corrected. "Fighting is for soldiers. We're fishermen's daughters."

Thalia opened her mouth to argue, but something in her sister's face stopped her. Despina's eyes had gone distant, the way they sometimes did when she was remembering their mother, who had died of pneumonia the winter Thalia was twelve. After their mother's death, Despina had stepped into the role of managing the household with a competence that was almost frightening. She had been sixteen years old, and she had simply taken over—the cooking, the cleaning, the mending, the managing of their father's modest income from the boats, the negotiating with merchants in Matala and the larger town of Tympaki to the north. She had kept the family fed and clothed and together, and she had done it without complaint, and Thalia loved her for it even as she sometimes wanted to shake her.

They reached the house—a simple structure of stone and whitewashed plaster, two rooms downstairs and a sleeping loft above, with a courtyard shaded by a grapevine that their grandfather had planted. Yannis sat in the courtyard with the net spread across his knees, his fingers working the bone shuttle with mechanical precision. He looked up as his daughters entered and smiled, and the smile transformed his weathered face into something almost boyish.

"The Agios Nikolaos is secured?" he asked.

"Secured and bailed," Thalia said. "She's taking water again through the stern plank."

"I'll caulk her tomorrow. Sit. Eat."

Despina had already moved to the outdoor kitchen—a stone hearth sheltered by a reed awning—and was heating the morning's food: barley bread, a handful of olives, a cup of mountain tea sweetened with the last of their honey. It was not much, but it was what they had, and Thalia ate it slowly, savoring each bite the way Despina had taught her to do when the portions grew small.

They ate in the courtyard's dappled shade, and for a few minutes the world was as it had always been—the clink of cups, the rustle of the grapevine, the distant sound of the sea against the rocks, their father's quiet humming as he worked the net. It was a moment of such ordinary peace that Thalia would remember it later with a sharpness that felt like a blade between her ribs.

Because it was the last morning of peace they would know for a very long time.

The sound began just after noon—a low, rhythmic droning that grew louder and louder until it filled the sky. Thalia was on the cliff path above the harbor, gathering wild greens for the evening meal, when she saw them: wave after wave of transport planes, big lumbering Junkers with black crosses on their wings, flying in formation from the north. They were so low she could see the rivets on their bellies.

And then the sky bloomed.

Hundreds of parachutes opened at once, white and gray against the blue, drifting down like enormous jellyfish. They carried men—German soldiers, she realized with a jolt of pure terror—and the men were descending on the fields and olive groves to the north, toward the airfield at Maleme, toward the towns of Chania and Rethymno.

Thalia dropped her basket and ran.

In the village, everyone was already outside, staring upward. Old women crossed themselves. Children pointed and shouted. Yannis stood at the quay with his hand shading his eyes, his face set in an expression Thalia had never seen before—not fear exactly, but something older and harder, the look of a man who had survived one war and recognized the beginning of another.

"Inside," Despina said, appearing at Thalia's elbow. Her voice was steady, but her hand, when she gripped Thalia's arm, was trembling. "Everyone inside. Now."

The Battle of Crete, as it would later be called, lasted ten days. The sisters heard it mostly as distant sounds—the crackle of gunfire, the thud of explosions, the occasional scream of a diving aircraft. News came in fragments, carried by shepherds moving through the mountains or by fishermen who had ventured along the coast. The Cretans were fighting, they said. Farmers with hunting rifles, old men with knives, women throwing rocks. The British and Australians and New Zealanders were fighting too, and for a few days it seemed like they might win.

But the Germans kept coming. More planes, more paratroopers, more men and machines pouring onto the island. The airfield at Maleme fell, and after that the outcome was inevitable. By the end of May, the Allied forces were retreating south across the mountains, trying to reach the coast and the ships that might carry them to Egypt. Thousands made it. Thousands more did not.

The German occupation of Crete began.

The first soldiers arrived in Kali Limenes on a Tuesday morning in early June, a patrol of eight men in field-gray uniforms riding in a truck that labored up the narrow road from Tympaki. They were young—most of them looked barely older than Thalia—and they were sunburned and tired and clearly unhappy about being posted to what they regarded as the edge of the world. Their sergeant, a stocky Bavarian named Hoffman, spoke no Greek and communicated through a combination of gestures and shouting.

They requisitioned the schoolhouse as their barracks. They posted notices—in German, which almost no one could read—declaring a curfew, banning the possession of firearms, requiring all fishing boats to be registered and their movements reported. They took half the village's olive oil and most of the flour.

Despina watched all of this from the doorway of their house with her arms folded, her face expressionless.

"We do what they say," she told Thalia and their father that evening. "We give them what they ask for. We don't argue. We don't provoke. We survive."

"They took our oil," Thalia said.

"We have the oil we hid in the cave. We have the dried fish. We have the garden. We'll manage."

"For how long?"

"For as long as it takes."

Yannis said nothing. He sat in his chair by the cold hearth, turning a piece of driftwood over and over in his hands, and his silence was heavier than any words.

The weeks passed. Summer came on, hot and dry, and the village settled into the grim rhythm of occupation. The Germans were not cruel, not at first—Sergeant Hoffman even nodded politely to Despina when he passed her in the street—but their presence was a constant weight, a wrongness that infected everything. The fishermen went out as before, but now they had to report their catch and surrender a portion of it. The women cooked with less, mended more, spoke in lower voices. The children stopped playing in the streets.

Thalia could not bear it.

She felt the occupation as a physical sensation, a tightness in her chest that never eased. She lay awake at night listening to the German soldiers laughing in the schoolhouse, and she imagined a hundred different acts of defiance—cutting their telephone wires, poisoning their food, setting fire to their truck. She knew these were fantasies, dangerous and foolish, but the imagining was the only thing that kept her sane.

It was the shepherd Nikos Andreou who gave her something real to do.

Nikos was in his late fifties, a wiry, sun-darkened man with a face like cracked leather and pale blue eyes that missed nothing. He kept his flock in the mountains above Kali Limenes, moving them between high pastures along paths that only he and the wild goats seemed to know. He had fought the Turks in his youth, or so the old men said, and he carried himself with the quiet authority of a man who had seen violence and was not afraid of it.

Thalia had known him all her life—he was a fixture of the village, appearing every few weeks to trade cheese and wool for flour and tobacco—but she had never really spoken to him until one evening in late June, when she found him sitting on the wall above the harbor, watching the sunset.

"You look angry," he said without preamble.

"I am angry."

"Good. Angry is useful. Stupid is not."

He let the silence stretch between them, and then he said, very quietly, "There are people in the mountains who are also angry. They are doing something about it. Small things, for now. Messages carried between villages. Information about German movements. A radio hidden in a cave. Nothing dramatic. But it adds up."

Thalia's heart was hammering. "What kind of messages?"

"The kind that help the British know what the Germans are doing. The kind that help men who are hiding in the mountains—soldiers who didn't make it to the boats—find food and shelter and eventually a way off this island."

"I want to help."

Nikos studied her for a long moment. "Your sister would not approve."

"My sister doesn't need to know."

He nodded slowly. "Come to the sheepfold above the gorge tomorrow at dawn. Tell your family you're gathering herbs. Bring a basket to make it true."

Thalia went. And that was the beginning.

The work was simple at first. Nikos gave her small pieces of paper, folded tightly and sealed with wax, and told her where to leave them—under a specific rock at a crossroads, in the hollow of a particular olive tree, tucked into a crack in the wall of the church at the neighboring village of Kaloi Limenes. She never knew what the messages said, and Nikos never told her. She was a link in a chain, nothing more, and the anonymity was both frustrating and, she had to admit, sensible.

She was good at it. She was young and strong and knew the paths, and she could move through the landscape with the ease of someone who had spent her entire life scrambling over rocks and through gorges. She learned to read the land for signs of German patrols—tire tracks on the road, boot prints on a path, the glint of binoculars on a ridge. She learned to time her movements to avoid the patrols' patterns, which were rigid and predictable in the way of an occupying army that believed it had already won.

She told no one. Not her father, not Despina. She left the house at dawn with her gathering basket and returned in the afternoon with wild greens and herbs, and if Despina noticed that she was gone longer than necessary, she said nothing about it.

But Despina noticed everything. That was the thing about Despina—she noticed, and she filed it away, and she waited.

The summer burned on, and the occupation tightened like a fist.