War Games Read Online Free Page B

playing cards. Perhaps doing card tricks.
    Tonight, no one sat outside. Not Papa. Not Zola. Not Old Mario.
    Poking his face into the front room, Petros blinked against the lamplight. His sister and Elia’s sister, Maria, sat at the card table, putting the puzzle together. “Sophie, where’s Papa?”
    Neither of them looked up. “Down the well.”
    “Why?”
    “One of the tributaries has gone dry,” Sophie said briskly. “Get that goat out of here.”
    Petros heard Mama talking to her friends as they workedon their knitting in the kitchen. To take his sister’s mind off Fifi as he cut through, he said, “Lambros has come home.”
    Sophie gave him a sharp glance. “Has he been injured?”
    “His feet are bleeding,” he said.
    “Mama,” Sophie cried. She leaped off the divan and followed him to the kitchen, wailing, “Mama, Lambros is dying!”
    Clattering over the marble floor, Fifi stayed right behind Petros as he dashed past Mama and Elia’s mother and grandmother—all of them suddenly talking at once. Petros let the kitchen door slam against the house as he burst through.
    Petros slowed, letting his eyes get used to the darkness again. He saw the white of Zola’s dog turn at the sound of Fifi’s hooves on the gravel. He didn’t bark. He didn’t care to fight a goat.
    Old Mario and Zola stood looking down the well. Zola was very much the taller of the two. Petros crossed to Old Mario’s side, and they stood shoulder to shoulder. Only recently he’d noticed he was for the first time as tall as someone who wasn’t a child. He still liked the novelty of it.
    A great deal of cold air rose from the well. This was welcome in the heat of daylight, but now it chilled Petros as he leaped up to cling to the thick rock wall, letting his feet hang and his weight rest on his forearms.
    The mouth of the well was as big across as Mama’s kitchen, to accommodate the copper buckets, barrel-shaped, but larger. Petros looked down, but there was only the cold and greater darkness. He asked, “Papa climbed down?”
    Zola said, “He wants to see if a tunnel has collapsed.” This was delivered in the tone of superior logic that Zola had adopted at the old age of fifteen.
    Petros could rarely hear this tone without arguing with it. “There’s still plenty of water.” There were several tunnels bringing water to the well.
    He’d been down below to stand hunched over in one of these only once, carrying a tool to Papa when he was making a repair. It wouldn’t trouble him if he never had to go below again. It had been dark, except for Papa’s lamp, and cold. Too cold.
    “You made a lucky escape,” Zola said.
    When Petros looked the question at him, Zola said, “Papa’s thinking about bigger things than trading goats.”
    At a shout from deep within, Zola hurried to the pump house and threw the switch. The motor started with a
putt-putt-putt
, and the belt whined as it turned. The tarnished green buckets jerked, then began to move, the chain creaking as it stretched over the axle.
    When the buckets reached the top, water spilled into the reservoir and trickled along tiled gutters to the garden. The empty buckets shifted lower, then lower still, working up to a steady pace. Curious, Fifi put her front hooves up against the well.
    “How do we fix a tunnel?” Petros asked Old Mario. The old man made a rolling motion with one hand that suggested a great deal of trouble.
    Papa emerged from the darkness, ghostly. He stood on theedge of one of the buckets, holding on to the chain, coming up and up, until he could step onto the rock wall circling the well. His wet shirt hung nearly to his knees. He jumped to the ground, shivering like a wet dog.
    Petros began, “Papa—”
    “Bring me a dry shirt. Two dry shirts.” Papa shook himself, spraying icy water over everyone. “Go.”
    Petros ran through the kitchen with Fifi at his heels. When the women called to him, he shouted, “Elia saw him too,” over his shoulder. In