Free The Gods Look Down by Trevor Hoyle Page A

derisively as Angel, and now somebody called his name in a soft undertone. When he didn’t respond the girl came closer, repeating his name in the same gentle tone. She was dressed in a cloak and hood which kept her face hidden so that only a suggestion of her features was visible to the curious onlooker.
    â€˜Get up, Angel, the dogs are getting a taste for you,’ and she kicked the scrawny animals away, indifferent to their yelps and squeals.
    The man struggled to his knees and with the girl’s support managed to stand upright. Even with his hunched deformity he was taller than her by half a metre, a tower of a man alongside her slender insubstantial figure. He pulled the tattered scraps of the rough shirt together across his crooked shoulders and followed the girl to where a tired-looking horse waited stoically between the shafts of a farm cart. She didn’t try to help him but merely stood watching as he hauled himself up on to the back of the cart and lay face down in the straw. The flesh of his back was raised up in an ugly welter of puffy stripes, the seven merging into each other. The girl climbed up and with a pointed stick spurred the nag into lurching motion.
    â€˜Don’t get the idea you have been rescued, Angel,’ Meria ben Shem Tov said above the creaking of wheels, jabbing at the horse’s withered flanks. ‘You have yet to settle with my father and he too will want his pound of flesh.’
    *
    The house of black sandstone, once the residence of a lord and landowner, stood on a gentle slope which, at the rear, fell away precipitously to a deep ravine where goats grazed on the scrubby vegetation. The single rutted track wound upwards through clumps of knarled olive trees and dense thickets of bougainvilia, their flowers vivid blotches of dark purple against the parched earth. The horse barely made the shallow incline and had to be encouraged a number of times by means of the specially pointed stick, eventually collapsing to a halt in the small paved courtyard surrounded by a wall constructed in the ornamental Moorish style.
    Meria ben Shem Tov threw back her hood and stepped down, ignoring the pathetic animal which sagged between the shafts, and told the man to go at once into the house. Her colour was high and her eyes fierce and dark above the sharp prominence of a nose which threatened to dominate her face: her features were strong and emphatic, in keeping with a character that was forthright, self-assertive, almost brutal in its disregard for the feelings of others. She was not yet twenty and already a fearsome woman who knew her own mind and wanted her own way; she was seldom denied it.
    In the great hall, beneath the large framed portraits darkened by woodsmoke, the stooping lame-shouldered giant calledAngel stood before the master of the house, a small thin man with large expressive eyes and pale delicate hands. He was physically unremarkable, except perhaps that his head was fractionally too large for his body; his manner was discreet, his gestures constrained and unemotional. Dagon ben Shem Tov spoke in a soft disinterested voice, though a spark of anger resided in his dark eyes. As his daughter removed her cloak and draped it across a chair he asked, ‘What’s the cretin been up to this time? Did he receive the lash for stealing?’
    Meria brushed the tousled black hair away from her forehead. ‘He was found playing with the children. You know what the townspeople are like, they jump at their own shadows.’
    â€˜Did he harm any of them?’
    Meria revealed her teeth in a cold smile. ‘Why should he harm them when he’s a child himself? They caught him making daisychains and floating them in the stream, so they dragged him into the square and whipped him.’ She adjusted her bodice and stood by the huge marble fireplace, idle and listless, kicking at the dead ash.
    Dagon regarded the hulking misshapen man and his hands fluttered like pale