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Fiction. This story is invented. The people and events do not exist. Only the mountain, its thyme and its birds are real.
Leni climbed to the apiary before dawn, as she always did, and Hymettus waited for her as if not a single day had passed.
It had rained since the evening, the thin rain of October. On the step of the stone cell her grandfather had left her for a storeroom she found a child. Twelve at most. He was holding a box with a dead bee in it, and he asked without a greeting:
"Kyra Leni, is it true that the honey from here was the best in the world?"
That was what the villages below called her, and the boy had it from his grandmother. Leni laughed. "That's what the old ones say. Pliny, they say, Virgil, a lot of names. All I know is how mine tastes."
She handed him a spoon. The boy closed his eyes.
"It smells burnt," he said.
"It smells of thyme in June, when the mountain is baking and the phrygana crackle. Thyme doesn't love easy things. It wants stone and sun, and whatever it gives, it gives by the drop."
They climbed together to the flat ground above the hives. The city below was a grey sea whose lights went out one by one. Above the scrub a small bird wheeled, quick, and vanished into a kermes oak.
"Sardinian warbler," said Leni. "It never leaves. The others come and go. This one stays and holds the mountain together."
The boy looked at his box. "My bee died."
"They all do. A bee works as long as the light lasts and leaves behind something sweet she will never see. You don't call that an unfair life. You call it a life that arrived."
They sat on a stone. Leni took out bread and cheese. They shared both, and the boy, who until then had spoken like a grown man, began to speak like a child. He told her his father worked abroad, that his mother never had time, that he had heard of a lion that once lived on the mountain and frightened the people.
"A fairy tale," said Leni. "But a good one. Mountains need lions, even in stories. Otherwise nobody fears them, and what you don't fear you don't look after."
The sun came up behind the hills of Mesogeia and the scrub turned suddenly gold, as if it had spent the whole night gathering light. Leni stood and opened the first hive. She gave the boy a cloth.
"You'll help them wake up. Slowly, no rush."
They worked until the air grew warm. When the boy went down, he had a small jar in his pocket.
"How much is it?"
"It's not for sale," said Leni. "You'll eat it and tell me how it tastes. If it says something to you, we start again in March."
Halfway down the path the boy turned. Leni was still standing there, small against the large mountain, and the mountain, for a moment, seemed to stand around her.
Author's note. Leni and the boy are invented. The details of place rest on the sources of our articles: the fame of thyme and honey (Kathimerini, citing Pliny and Virgil), the scrub and the Sardinian warbler (Hellenic Ornithological Society, GR126) and the tradition of the lion of Hymettus (Liontari cave, Odysseus). The apiary, the state of the hives and the dialogue are imagined.