Birds Without Wings by Louis De Bernières Read Free Book Online

themselves. Directly into the walls were cut niches for stoves, guns and brass cooking pots.
    These lowest rooms were blessedly cool in the summers, and in the winter were commonly occupied by animals, whose natural warmth eased the chill of the room above, which itself was accessible either by a wooden ladder, or by stairs cut out of the rock. In the upper room were to be found the hearth and the divans, arranged around three sides of the room, with a fine carpet occupying the central space.
    Because each house had a roof that was almost flat, this amounted to an extra room when the weather was fine, the same roof acting as a trap for rainwater, which flowed directly into a very large cistern built on to the side of the structure. Thus, for the most part of the year, the women were saved the arduous task of fetching water from the wells, or from the river that cut through the very lush flood plain immediately below, where almost everybody owned a few decares of land for cultivation. Each house also possessed a separate earth closet, which had to be emptied frequently in hot weather on account of the oppressiveness of the flies. There were those who used it only when the women were cooking, because then the insects left the closet in order to investigate the food.
    Naturally, not all the buildings corresponded to this pattern, for over the centuries the population had grown a little, and there were more conventional houses on the periphery, and on the hillside opposite, that were divided into a selamlik, which was, as it were, the reception area, and the haremlik, which was the private quarters. Nonetheless, the habit of hacking extra rooms out of the rock also pertained in these buildings, and they had the same heavy walls, as thick as the length of an arm, and the same dark and tranquil interiors that had the effect of diminishing one’s sense of time.
    Some of the houses, it is true, were so overcrowded as to be almost hellish, for it was the custom then, as in many places it still is now, for the sons to bring their new wives into their paternal house. If there were many sons who married, and produced numerous children, then there was neither room to move nor sleep, nor was there any privacy, and there was much bad temper, especially during times of pernicious weather. Upon the death of the family patriarch, however, the sons and their families would move out to new houses where the cycle would begin again, and there would be a few years of spaciousness in one’s own house, which seemed both disconcerting and marvellous.
    Behind the town the scrubby hillside rolled to a gentle crest, and beyondthat there was a small depression that, had it had more ambition, might have amounted to a valley. There were a few vertical rock faces, for the land had originally been laid down in flat layers that had been folded and broken by the uncompassioned northern drift of Africa and Arabia. Many of these faces had been carved into elegant façades for sepulchres in Lycian times, but one had been deeply excavated for lime, and beyond, just over another crest, was the sharp and stony incline that fell steeply down to the vivid waters where the Aegean merges into the Mediterranean Sea. It was in this wasteland between the town and the ocean, a place fit only for goats, that the man who came to be known as the Dog took up residence among the Lycian tombs, becoming a spectre even before he had properly died.
    Sometimes it happens that the manner of a man’s death is discernible beforehand in his face, and sometimes it is clear from the manner of a man’s life. In the case of the one they named “The Dog,” it was always clear that he would die alone and in squalor, because this was what he had explicitly chosen when he undertook to lead the life that he did.
    Karatavuk and Mehmetçik were very small boys at the time, but they would never forget the day that the Dog arrived. They had been sent out by their respective mothers to gather wild