The Walled Orchard (39 page)

The horse seemed to know where he was going, and after what seemed to me a grossly inadequate chase my pursuers reined in and turned back. I galloped on for a while, then slowed down to a gentle canter. When I looked round, I could no longer see the farmhouse, or even the tops of the olive trees in the walled orchard. There was nobody except me on the Elorine road, and it was drawing on towards evening on the sixth day since the battle in the harbour.

I drew up to let the horse drink from a little stream, and I found my mind was still sharp and clear. I had a good idea of where Catana was; to get there I would have to go in from the coast and round the mountains near Acrae; I daren’t cross them, since Syracuse lay just below them, at the other end of the Anapus river. After that I would have to pass Leontini on my right and cross the Simaethus, before making my way through the flat plains to Catana. Going that way, the distance could not be less than a hundred miles, and all the great cities I would have to pass on the way were allies of Syracuse. My other option was to try and join up with Nicias’ men, who were presumably not that far ahead of me up the road. But my soul wasn’t interested in that idea. Anywhere where there were substantial numbers of Athenians in this country was not likely to be safe.

The best thing, then, was to make for Catana. I looked up to my right at the mountains, and thanked Dionysus that I had been brought up in the hill country at home. A man can live off the land quite easily in the hills, if he knows how, and can make himself difficult to find. In the plains you can’t help being noticed — which is why the plainsmen are so sociable, I suppose, while hill people tend to be more withdrawn and suspicious. I took off my helmet and breastplate and dumped them under a fig tree. They were battered and dented, and I wasn’t sorry to be rid of them. I was tempted to get rid of my sword as well, but it had been in the family for many years and I would need something for cutting wood and sharpening sticks. I wrapped my cloak round it so that it wouldn’t be too obvious, and tried to remember how you do a Dorian accent. That was another stroke of luck; I had written many Comic Dorians in the past, Spartans and Megarians and the like, and since I’m a bit obsessive about getting my dialects right I had taken trouble to listen to as many Dorians as possible, and practised speaking Dorian at home, which used to aggravate Phaedra no end. I couldn’t pass for a Syracusan, of course, or any other sort of Sicilian; but I could probably get by as a Corinthian, and I knew the names of the streets in Corinth from the stories my grandfather used to tell us about his visit there on a diplomatic mission.

This pleasant and reassuring train of thought was suddenly interrupted by the sight in front of me of a man in infantry armour, with his helmet down over his face, running towards me as fast as his legs would carry him. Behind him was a mob of herd-boys, yelling and screaming and waving sticks and stones. One or two of them had swords as well, which they had presumably picked up from dead Athenians somewhere. The running man was plainly an Athenian, and the herd-boys were after his blood. It was rather comic in a way, since the eldest boy couldn’t have been much more than twelve years old; but there were at least ten of them, and there was no doubt in my mind that if and when they caught the soldier they could and would kill him. I felt a tremendous lack of enthusiasm about getting involved, but in the end I kicked the horse and rode forward.

‘Hey,’ I called out in my Corinthian voice, ‘what’s going on here?’

The Athenian stopped and turned, and the boys stopped too. ‘He’s an Athenian,’ said the tallest boy after a moment, ‘and we’re going to cut off his head.’

‘You can if you like,’ I said, as casually as I could manage. ‘Bit of a waste, though.’

‘Waste?’ said the tallest boy.

‘Use your brains, son,’ I replied. ‘They’re worth good money, Athenians.’

The child frowned; this had not occurred to him. ‘Are they?’

‘Forty or fifty staters, easy,’ I said. ‘You won’t get anything like the full price, mind, because this island’ll be swarming with Athenians for sale in a day or two. But forty staters is forty staters. It’s up to you.’

‘Will you buy him?’ asked the child hopefully.

‘I would if I had forty staters,’ I said. ‘Only I haven’t.’

‘I’ll take thirty,’ said the child decisively.

‘I haven’t got thirty staters, either,’ I said. ‘I haven’t got so much as a half-stater’ — I nearly said obol, but I remembered just in time — ‘for the ferry. All I’ve got with me is this horse.’

‘All right,’ said the child. ‘I’ll take the horse.’

At this his colleagues started to protest vehemently, but he shut them up by clouting them with the flat of his sword. ‘Well?’ he repeated.

‘Go to hell,’ I said. ‘This horse is worth twenty Athenians. And anyway, who said I was interested in buying Athenians? How would I get him home, for a start?’

‘We’ll tie him up for you,’ suggested a smaller child.

‘Then how would I transport him, without the horse? Talk sense.’

The tall child thought for a moment, and the other children gazed at him in confident expectation. ‘Twenty staters,’ he said, ‘and that’s my final offer.’

‘Tell you what I’ll do,’ I said wearily. ‘His armour’s worth fifteen on its own. You take that, and I’ll give you this ring and bracelet for the meat on the hoof. There’s ten staters weight of fine silver in them, not to mention the workmanship.’

‘All right then,’ said the boy sullenly. ‘You lot, get his armour off.’

The other children obeyed this order with relish. They were none too gentle about it either. For my part I pulled off the ring and bracelet. They had been a present from Callicrates. I leaned over and handed them to the child.

‘You won’t die poor, will you?’ he said nastily.

‘No, but you might,’ I replied. ‘You were going to cut his head off, remember?’

They tied a long strip of rawhide round the Athenian’s hands and neck and handed it to me. I took it and wrapped it round my wrist, and kicked the horse.

‘Which way are you going?’ said the boy.

‘Acrae,’ I said.

‘Straight up from here’s the best way,’ replied the boy, ‘and turn left up that cleft in the mountains. That’ll take you straight there over the top.

‘I know,’ I replied. ‘Come on, you,’ I snapped at the Athenian, ‘or you’ll feel my boot up your arse.’

‘What are you doing in Acrae?’ the boy called after me.

‘Wouldn’t you like to know?’ I shouted back, and rode off away from the road towards the mountains.

As soon as the children were out of sight I jumped off the horse and started to untie the rawhide. It was the first time I’d seen the face of the man whose life I’d saved. I recognised him.

‘You’re a total arsehole, Eupolis, you know that, don’t you?’ he said savagely. ‘Why didn’t you just give them the fucking horse?’

I should have guessed when I saw the bald head emerge from under the helmet. I should have guessed when the God told me to look after ‘his favourite comic poet’ rather than to look after myself. I should have known he didn’t mean me.

It was Aristophanes the son of Philip.

CHAPTER SIX

‘A
dmit it,’ Aristophanes said. ‘You’re lost.’

‘If I’m lost,’ I replied, ‘which I’m not, it would be because I did as you suggested and turned right at the top of the hill instead of left, as those children said I should.’

‘If you had turned left,’ replied the son of Philip, as if talking to an idiot, ‘we would now be in Acrae. We do not want to go to Acrae. They would kill us if we went to Acrae. We want to go the other way. Therefore it was necessary for us to turn right, to avoid going to sodding Acrae.’

‘Perhaps,’ I conceded, ‘what you say is true, although I would be prepared to point out the basic fallacies in your argument if I wasn’t so bloody thirsty. But let us assume that you are right. That still doesn’t mean we’re lost.’

‘I think it’s my turn to ride the horse now.’

‘You don’t get a turn. I bought you, remember. I was robbed.’

It was the morning of the second day since the walled orchard, and I had had more of Aristophanes than I could take. One thing was certain. He wasn’t going to ride my horse. I would hamstring the animal first.

Aristophanes had been with Nicias’ men, and shortly after the armies split up he had got lost in the darkness.

He had finally managed to make his way on the Elorine road, but had slightly misjudged which direction he should take. He had therefore been walking back towards Syracuse for quite some time when he met up with the murderous children. When I asked him how grateful he was to me for saving him from them, he looked extremely surprised and asked me what I meant. Surely I hadn’t imagined that he was frightened of a bunch of kids? I pointed out that he was running away from them. Had he been playing a game with them, I wondered? He gave me a scornful look, and said that since they were obviously intent on starting a fight, and since he, having at least some vestiges of decency about him, could hardly start beating up twelve-year-old children, however vicious they might be, the only course open to him was to retreat. Then I had shown up and started interfering. He couldn’t do anything then, of course, for fear of blowing my cover as a stage Corinthian. In fact, if anybody had saved anybody’s life, he had saved mine. For a while I was at a loss for a reply to this, but then I thought of one. I told him he couldn’t ride the horse. I might be under orders from the God to look after this scumbag, but I was damned if I was going to get blisters in the process.

To do him credit, Aristophanes took this very well; and apart from trying to pull me down from the saddle every now and then, he had accepted the situation like a man. Luckily, I had woken up before he did that morning, and was up and mounted before he had opened his eyes. What he had taken an objection to was my very sensible idea that we should continue in the character of master and slave. He couldn’t do a Dorian accent to save his life — I auditioned him very carefully, and he was utterly hopeless — and so we desperately needed some reason why a Corinthian should be taking an Athenian towards Catana. The only possible explanation was that he was my slave and that I was taking him to Leontini to sell him at the market there, where there wouldn’t be such a glut of Athenian prisoners and I might be able to get a respectable price. And if we were going to play master and slave, it stood to reason that the master would ride the horse and the slave would walk. Aristophanes couldn’t think of a (sensible) objection to this, but he continually complained about having to have the rawhide round his neck. It was degrading, he said, and it was giving him a sore throat. Also, he objected, what if I got carried away with my role and actually did sell him as a slave in Leontini? He wouldn’t put it past me, and I had to confess that the thought had crossed my mind. I was triumphantly vindicated, however, when we were stopped by a detachment of Syracusan cavalry, although the son of Philip couldn’t see it.

‘They didn’t ask us what we were doing or anything,’ he said. ‘They just wanted to know if we’d seen any Athenians.’

‘There you are,’ I replied. ‘We were so convincing they didn’t feel the need to ask.’

‘When I get home I’m going to prosecute you for enslaving an Athenian citizen.’

‘When you get home you’re going to pay me forty staters.’

‘You thieving sod,’ he said. ‘You only paid ten.’

‘I’ve got to take my profit, haven’t I?’

‘You’re only making the jokes because you’re riding the horse,’ he said.

By sticking to the slopes of the mountains and keeping the peaks on our right, I knew that we couldn’t go far wrong. You may legitimately ask how I came to be such an expert on the geography of south-eastern Sicily; well, I had managed to get a look at a map after the sea-battle. It was a big thing, engraved on a bronze plate and bearing the name of the celebrated geographer Histiaeus, and I found it on the shore, all wet. I imagine it had been in one of the Syracusan ships which got sunk, since I knew perfectly well that no one in our army had such a thing. Eventually Callicrates insisted that it should be handed over to the Generals, but not before we had memorised its contents. Thanks to that map, I was fairly confident that I knew where to head for, and if my estimate of the distance was anything near right, I reckoned that it shouldn’t take us more than a week, barring mishaps. All in all, I was reasonably happy about that side of the problem. What worried me was getting there. We had no food and no water, no money and nothing to trade except Aristophanes’ cloak and my sword; neither of which we could sell without arousing suspicion.

‘We could see the horse,’ Aristophanes suggested.

‘No, we couldn’t,’ I replied firmly. I had become very fond of that horse. ‘If things get really bad we might eat him, but otherwise we’ll keep him. Understood?’

‘No.’

‘Besides,’ I went on, ‘the last thing we want to do is go into any form of town, village or settlement. That would just be asking for trouble.’

‘You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?’

It was a startling accusation to have to face, and I didn’t reply. But there was a degree of truth in it, at that. After the utter helplessness of the sea-battle and the march, it was exhilarating to be one’s own master again, to be free. It was almost a pleasure to be daring and take risks, just so long as the risks remained reasonably theoretical.

‘There’s always plenty to eat in the hills,’ I said, ‘if you keep your eyes open. We shouldn’t have any trouble.’

‘Such as what?’

‘Berries,’ I replied airily. Last night we had eaten the bread out of the dead cavalryman’s saddlebag. There wasn’t any more. ‘Wild figs. Wild olives. That sort of thing.’

‘Correct me if I’m wrong,’ Aristophanes said, ‘but don’t figs and olives and berries generally grow on trees?’

‘Yes indeed.’

‘And can you see any trees? Anywhere?’

‘Strictly speaking, no. But we’re a bit high up here.’

‘So why don’t we go a little further down?’

‘Because,’ I said, ‘it’s nice and even up here and I can ride the horse. Also it’s likely to be cultivated land further down, and that means there’ll be people.’

‘In other words, we’re going to starve.’

‘Be patient,’ I said. ‘There are also rabbits, hares, deer and wildfowl up in the hills. We aren’t going to starve.’

Aristophanes expressed grave doubts about this, but I persuaded him that I was right by pulling quite sharply on the rawhide, nearly choking him.

‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘accident.’

As the day wore on, however, and I started to feel steadily hungrier, I began to wonder if my confidence was well located. We had found several wild olive trees by this time, but there were no olives on them, this apparently being the off year. We found a hive of bees, and we finally succeeded in breaking it open (after being stung rather too often for our liking) but although there was plenty of wax in it there was no honey. We also saw a hare, but the hare saw us first.

‘All right,’ I said, ‘what do you suggest?’

‘I suggest we go down the hill,’ Aristophanes said.

I considered this. ‘Let’s compromise,’ I said. ‘Let’s go down the hill later.’

‘How much later?’

‘This evening, when it gets dark. It might be a bit easier then.’

That evening, we went down the hill. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling, coming off our nice empty hillside, where there had been nothing to see except a few goats, into fields and terraces which seemed full to overflowing with chatty farmers. Actually, I don’t suppose we saw more than three people, and only one of them spoke to us. He asked us the way to Acrae. But it was still nerve-racking; and when we saw a village up in front of us, I felt decidedly uncomfortable and wanted to turn back. As for Aristophanes, he was plainly terrified. He was sweating profusely and at every sound he would jerk his head round and stare wildly. I think it was the sight of his obvious terror that made me decide to press on.

I cannot for the life of me remember the name of that village; which is strange, because I can picture it in my mind so vividly that you would think I had lived there for thirty years. It had what I suppose might loosely be described as a street, lined with a number of impressively built but dilapidated houses, and at the head of the street was a little brick and thatch shrine. Aristophanes had completely lost control by now, and was quite insistent that we should go and take sanctuary in this shrine. I was not in favour of this proposal. To begin with, I doubted very much whether sanctuary would work in this armpit of the earth, since it is not exactly reliable in places like Athens and Sparta. But even if it did, I could see no prospect of us ever getting out of the shrine once we had gone into it, and I had no great wish to spend the rest of my life, which might be quite long given the history of longevity in our family, in a thatched hut in Sicily. I suggested that we go to the smithy instead, to see if we could get a cup of water and sell the horse.

‘Sell the horse?’ Aristophanes gasped.

‘Oh, so you’re not deaf after all. I thought you didn’t have holes in your ears?’

Now you don’t realise it, but that was a remarkably witty thing to say, since in those days slaves used to have their ears pierced as a way of marking them out from free men. Well, I thought it was funny. Aristophanes didn’t; he just told me to keep my voice down. But he was obviously pleased that we were going to sell the horse.

There were about six men at the smithy, and the usual cluster of boys and youths who love the sight of other people working, and they all turned and stared at us as we walked diffidently into the firelight. There was a quite harrowing silence for what can only have been a minute or so (but which seemed longer) during which time I tied the horse’s bridle to a tethering-post. Then I tried to make conversation. Unfortunately, somebody had secretly built a mud wall across my throat which stopped the words getting out, and for a while all I could do was gurgle. Finally, I forced myself to say something like, ‘Good evening, friends, my name is Eupolidas of Corinth, I’m a merchant passing through on my way to Leontini and I’m taking this Athenian slave with me to sell in the market there, only I dropped my purse with all my money in it somewhere in the hills and so I’ve got to sell my horse.’

There was another long, long silence, during which the blacksmith laid down his hammer and wiped his hands thoroughly on his tunic.

‘Going to Leontini, are you?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Wouldn’t do that if I were you.’

‘Oh?’ I tried to look unconcerned. On reflection, I don’t think I made a tremendously good job of it.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘They don’t like Athenians there.’

‘You mean I wouldn’t get a good price for my Athenian slave?’

‘I mean you wouldn’t get a lead stater for your Athenian head.’

That was what I thought he had meant. At this point I should have drawn my sword with a flourish and done something brave, but instead I just melted, like a hunk of cheese left negligently in front of the fire.

‘Not in Leontini you wouldn’t,’ the smith went on. ‘Out here we couldn’t give a toss.’

I stared at him as if he had just grown an extra ear. ‘Oh,’ I said, or something equally brilliant.

‘Nothing to do with us,’ said a large man sitting on a three-legged stool beside the hearth. ‘I mean, anyone can see
you’re
not dangerous.’

Now you might be affronted by that, but just then I thought that was the nicest thing anyone had ever said about me. I relaxed slightly.

‘Mind you,’ went on the smith, ‘we could probably get a price of sorts for the two of you. Not a lot, of course, but something. Well, for him, anyway.’ He pointed at Aristophanes with a pair of tongs. I pointed out, in a voice robbed of conviction by extreme terror, that there would be little point to this, since the market would soon be flooded with much higher quality Athenian slaves, and that he might well find himself stuck with us, eating our heads off at his expense and virtually unsaleable. He gave me a funny look, as if a cut of meat on his plate had just sat up and told him there was too much vinegar in the marinade, and stroked his chin thoughtfully. There was another silence, and I was starting to get nervous again when a little bald man poked me in the ribs with his stick and said, ‘So you’re Athenian, are you?’