The Walled Orchard (16 page)

Someone shoved me from behind, and I saw that we were moving on. The taxiarch was on his feet again, dusting off his cloak, and no one seemed to be seriously hurt. I fell in beside Artemidorus, and pushed my helmet up on to the back of my head. He did the same, and we were able to talk.

‘What was all that about?’ I asked nervously.

‘Could be the bandits,’ he said gravely, as if he were Miltiades himself, sizing up an enemy formation, ‘or it could just have been a couple of startled sheep or something, I don’t know. I don’t think the taxiarch’s too happy.’

I wiped the sweat out of my eyes, and my arm felt very weak. ‘What are we going to do now?’ I asked. ‘I mean, are we going on, or what?’

‘We’re going on, of course,’ said Artemidorus. ‘You wait till you’ve been in a couple of real battles. First time I was in a battle, we saw some horsemen coming up —great big cloud of dust, we were terrified. I pissed all down my legs and never knew it. Turned out to be our own men, actually. When we got to see the enemy we were all so knackered with marching up and down in the heat that we weren’t frightened at all, just glad to get it over with. This sort of thing is just routine.’

As we marched on I began to feel unbearably tired —my legs were weak, and I had to lean heavily on Little Zeus’ shoulder. Apparently, that was normal too, because of the sudden shock, but that didn’t make it any easier. I asked Artemidorus if there was likely to be any more trouble; he drew on his vast military experience and replied, No, probably not.

We had come round the side of a spur into a narrow defile, with the main bulk of the mountain on our right and a sort of rampart of bare rock to the left. I had known just such a place on Parnes when I was a boy, and had often lain there under a bent old fig tree, imagining that I was an Athenian general and a Spartan army had been foolish enough to march straight into this naturally perfect mantrap. The final deployment I had decided on, after a year or so of intermittent speculation, was to put my heavy infantry at both ends (like Leonidas at Thermopylae) and my light infantry on the heights on either side, shooting and throwing javelins.

Perhaps I should have been a general. I was just about to tell the story to Little Zeus when I felt a tap on my shield, like the first drop of rain on a roof. There were other taps up and down the line, and we started looking round. Then someone went down on his knee, lifting his shield in front of his face, and we realised what was going on; we were being shot at by slingers, positioned on the side of the mountain. This time, I wasn’t nearly so startled; in fact, it was almost a pleasant relief after the tension of the past couple of hours. What I wasn’t prepared for was sling-bolts coming from the other side of the defile. I braced myself as best I could, tucking my head into the hollow of my shield. But nothing came, although I could hear sling-bolts pattering down on either side of me.

‘Put your helmet down, you idiot,’ someone hissed in my ear, and I remembered that it was still perched on the back of my head. I put up my hand, and something smacked against my forearm. I swore, calling on all the Gods I could think of; then it occurred to me that the blow had not been particularly fierce; I could still move my fingers and everything.

Hold on a moment, said my soul inside me, they’re out of range.

I thought about it for a moment, then looked up to my left. Sure enough, I could make out a figure against the skyline; a boy, maybe thirteen years old, loading his slingshot. He was at least sixty yards away, much too far away to do any serious damage, especially to a man in armour. I suddenly felt extremely foolish; an Athenian heavy-armed infantryman, the terror of the Greek world, cowering under his shield against the blood-chilling but entirely ineffectual onslaught of a thirteen-year-old goatherd.

My fellow soldiers were slowly coming to the same conclusion; one man in particular. I can’t remember his name, but I think he was a shipwright by trade, and certainly not used to being made a fool of. He got up, laid his shield down carefully beside him, and turned to face the foe, for all the world like Ajax in the
Iliad.

‘All right,’ he shouted up the mountainside, ‘pack it in.’

There was no immediate effect; but after a while the pattering started to die away, and the Athenian expeditionary force resumed its formidable order. It was then that we noticed the enemy infantry, leaning on their spears at the mouth of the defile.

When I say spears, I am exaggerating slightly. Most of them had sharpened vine-props, and some of them had nothing at all. There were four men sharing a suit of armour between them — one had the helmet, another had the breastplate, and the other two had one greave each; the rest of them had nothing but home-made wicker shields and tunics, and their feet were bare.

The taxiarch let out a great shout, and we charged, shouting
Io Paian!
at the tops of our voices. The Samians threw their spears and bolted, scrambling away over the rocks like sheep. Their volley fell well short, and we drew up, breathless but happy, our honour totally restored, to find that two of the Samians were still there. Just two, no more.

I heard the story later. One man, who was the son of an Infantry farmer, had slipped and twisted his ankle, and his lover had stayed with him to defend him to the death if need be. As a result he was extremely excitable, and he also had one of the few genuine spears in the whole band. I can picture him now, jabbing his spear in the general direction of a taxiarch and calling on some obscure local Hero.

Nothing would have happened if the taxiarch hadn’t still believed in the existence of the tax money. As it was, he wanted a prisoner to interrogate, and he sent two men forward to grab the Samians. The man with the twisted ankle made a remarkable recovery and rolled off down the hill as fast as he could; but our two men were on to the other one and he couldn’t follow. Instead, he ducked out of their way and ran forward, apparently straight at me. Then Little Zeus, perceiving a mortal threat to his five acres, jumped out and slashed wildly at him with his sword, smashing his wicker shield into pieces and taking a lump out of his arm. That was another mistake. The poor Samian turned and stabbed with his spear at Little Zeus, who of course had no shield to protect himself with. He jerked back out of the way, tripped over his feet, and came down heavily on his backside. The Samian raised his spear over his head — and I stabbed him.

I couldn’t believe that I had done it. There was this human body on the end of my spear, looking at me with such utter astonishment that I wanted to smile, and then turning carefully round, like a man who has stepped in something nasty in the street, and looking at the spear blade sticking out of his side. For a moment I thought he was going to strike at me; then I realised that he had forgotten about everything else except the extraordinary fact of there being a spear right through him. I don’t think it was hurting him. He just hadn’t expected this at all.

‘You
bastard,’
I heard myself saying. ‘Really, I’m sorry.’

I think he was going to laugh; then he suddenly collapsed, as if he had noticed he was late for his own death. His weight jerked the spear out of my hands, and his body sagged on to the ground. And there was blood too — so much of it, creeping along the weave of his tunic like the waves on the shore, except not pulling back. I broke a jar of honey once, and stood there watching it oozing out into the dust on the storeroom floor, visibly spoiling in front of my eyes, going expensively to waste. Yes, there was blood all right, and how dark it looks when there’s a lot of it. It was a fascinating sight for someone who has learned his Homer, line by painful line, and yes, that sort of blood is black, not red, just as it says in the
Iliad,
and a dead man does fall with a thud, and he does look rather like a felled tree, with his arms spread out like branches. He also looks rather like a man who has fallen over; he has short black hair and long, thin legs and a mole on his neck, and you wonder why he doesn’t get up.

Then Little Zeus started praising me in a great voice and thanking me for saving his life, and pledging his eternal allegiance, and that of his children and his great-grandchildren to me and my House for ever, and I turned and kicked him on the shins. And the taxiarch said, ‘What the hell was all that about?’ and Artemidorus was muttering about having the whole of Samos after us now, and what in God’s name did I think I was playing at? And someone pulled the spear out of his body and wiped it on the grass and gave it back to me, and said, ‘That’s one up to us,’ and there seemed to be a lot more noise besides. And for some time they stood there discussing whether we should take him down to the village or leave him up there for the kites and the crows, until they finally agreed on throwing some dust on his face as a form of burial and telling the villagers where his body was in case anyone wanted it.

So we didn’t get any tax-money in Astypylaea. From there we went to another village — I can’t remember its name — where they tried to play exactly the same trick, except that they claimed that the money had been stolen not by local bandits but Milesian pirates.

The taxiarch listened to the tale, which was well told, and withdrew as before into the village headman’s house. Outside in the street we could only hear a few thumps and some squealing, but when they came out again, the headman was rubbing his ears and the taxiarch was grinning. We got five minas in the end, which was three less than the assessment but all the silver we could find.

After that, we met with a different sort of obstruction as we toured round Samos. Instead of ostentatious courtesy and stringy but complimentary goats for our evening meal, we were greeted with barred doors and showers of stones and potsherds whenever we entered a village. It was obvious that the Samians were expecting us, for when we broke into their houses we found that everything of value had been removed. Our taxiarch (who was growing up fast) realised that there was no hope of keeping our movements a secret or arriving unexpectedly at any place; so he thought of another and a better way.

At the next village we came to, he sent us out to secure the headman, whom we found hiding under an overturned barley jar in his house, and sat this gentleman down on a mounting-block in the Market Square. He then explained to him, slowly and loudly, that he was fed up with traipsing through this god-forsaken island in search of what was obviously enchanted silver; he was going to stay right here in this village until it was time to go home, eating and drinking as much as he pleased and letting his men do the same. To pass the time, he added, he would set his men to building a little shrine, as a memento of our stay. As soon as it was completed, he added, he would personally dedicate this shrine to the Luck of Miletus, in memory of a little-known Milesian Hero who had been killed here when some princes of Miletus sacked the village ten or so generations ago. But since he was not an ostentatious man, he would not name himself as founder on the foundation-stone; instead, he would inscribe it with the names of all the villages he had visited, and send a herald to the main cities of Samos inviting all pious men to come and worship there. He stood up, as if his discourse was finished; then he turned round and added, in a nicely matter-of-fact way, that if by some miracle the tribute-money was suddenly to arrive from the villages he would be so busy checking it and drawing up accounts that he would have no time for his pious undertaking, and the other Samians would probably never know of their fellow citizens’ religious zeal.

The next morning, we awoke from a sleep curiously untroubled by stray dogs, mysterious falls of rocks and sudden inexplicable noises (which we had come to accept as a way of life in Samos) and set out to quarry stones for the shrine. But when we arrived in the Market Square, we found a small group of harassed-looking Samians holding donkeys on short reins; and on the donkeys’ backs were jars overflowing with coined silver. We tipped them out on to blankets and started to count, and the mixture of denominations alone was a feast of entertainment. There were Athenian Owls and Aeginetan Turtles, Horses from Corinth and Carthage, Lions of Leontini and Arethusae from Syracuse; there were Ajaxes from Locris Opuntia, which few of us had seen before, and some very pretty coins with doves on them that nobody could identify. There were even Persian sigloi, stamped with the King dressed as an archer, which must have dated back to before the wars, when Samos was still part of the empire. In fact, it seemed to us that some people had been digging very deep into ancient reserves to find us all this silver; in some cases, a little too deeply, for we found when we made up the final account that we had just over twelve staters a man more than the required sum. But by then, of course, all the silver was so thoroughly mixed up that there was no way of telling which villages had paid too much; and since it would undoubtedly cause bad feeling among neighbours if we tried to sort the matter out, we decided to forget all about it and accept the surplus as a sort of anonymous gift.

The taxiarch put all the money back into the jars and sealed each one with a leaden seal. Then he sent for the headman, who this time came a little more willingly, and sat him down as before in the Market Square. By now quite a crowd of Samians had gathered to see the money, and the taxiarch drew us up in front of the jars before he started to speak.

He started by confessing that up till now he had held a very poor view of Samian loyalty to Athens. He had somehow got it into his head, he said, that the Samians didn’t want to pay their contribution to the cost of fighting the Great War of Freedom; that — perish the thought! — the honest men of Samos had forgotten who had freed them from the Persian yoke and given back to them their ancient freedom and privileges. But it was time, he continued, to revise that view. He had learned, from this truthful old man their headman, that leading citizens from all the villages had walked all night along treacherous mountain roads, undoubtedly shadowed all the way by the terrible outlaws and bandits of whom he himself had personal experience, just to be able to pay their taxes. Such behaviour, he said, cried out to be acknowledged; it shone like a beacon in a treacherous and ungrateful world.