The Walled Orchard (35 page)

Apart from myself, the only person who didn’t seem to be panicking was a small, round man who was sitting in front of a tire eating a very thin sausage. His tranquillity and the sausage seemed to draw me to him, and I walked over to his fire and sat down on my helmet beside him. He looked at me and returned to his meal, and neither of us said anything for a while.

‘You don’t seem worried,’ I said at last.

‘I’m not,’ he replied with his mouth full.

‘Everyone else is.

‘You’re not.’

‘Yes, but I’m dead.’

‘Well, there you are, then. Your worries are over.’

He sounded like a man from the hill country, and I asked him where he lived. ‘Here,’ he said.

‘No, but before that,’ I asked.

‘Can’t remember,’ he replied. ‘Been here so long,’ he paused to swallow a lump of gristle, ‘that I just can’t recollect.’

‘How long have you been here?’

‘A very long time.’

‘Tasty is it, that sausage?’

‘Be even better with a dab of honey. You got any honey?’

‘No.’

He had very big hands and forearms, and I guessed that he had once been a smith. He had that way of talking to you without looking at you that is unique to the trade. ‘So you’re not worried, then,’ I said.

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Nothing’s going to happen,’ he replied.

‘What makes you think that?’ I said. ‘The enemy are blocking up the harbour. That means they aren’t going to let us escape. They mean to wipe us out to the last man.’

‘They won’t manage that,’ he said.

‘Don’t be too sure.’

‘They never manage to kill everyone,’ he said. ‘There’s always one or two that get away. There was two men escaped from Thermopylae, so the story goes.’

‘And you reckon you’ll be one of the survivors.

‘That’s right.’

‘Why you?’

‘Why not?’

Why not indeed? ‘Trade you a bit of that sausage for an onion.

‘Don’t like onions. Never did. Only thing that grew where I used to live.’

‘Before you came here?’

‘That’s it.’

I leaned forward and pitched a small log on to the fire. All around us, the Athenian army was winding itself up into a thick knot of terror.

‘I used to write plays,’ I said. ‘For the Festivals.’

‘Comic or tragic?’

‘Comic.’

He looked at me again, chewing vigorously. ‘I used to like the Comedies,’ he said. ‘Never went much on the Tragedies. Couldn’t see any point in making up sad stories. Gets you down, that sort of thing. Me, I always look on the bright side.’

‘I can see that.’

‘The one I used to like best of all,’ he said, ‘was that Eupolis. He was funny, he was. I liked him.’

‘Really?’

‘He’s dead now, of course.’

‘Of course.’ I smiled. The smith went on eating his sausage. ‘Are you dead too?’ I asked.

‘Don’t talk soft,’ he replied. ‘Do I look like I’m dead?’

‘I just wondered.’

‘There’s nothing in this world,’ he went on, ‘that can kill me.’

‘Really?’

‘Nothing at all.’

‘I feel like that sometimes.’

‘I don’t feel, son,’ he asserted firmly, ‘I know.’

‘That must be a comfort to you.’

He broke off a very small piece of sausage and offered it to me. ‘You want to know why I know?’

‘If you like.’ I popped the sausage into my mouth and chewed. It was obviously home-made, probably out of cormorant.

‘When I was a boy,’ said the smith, ‘my whole family got drowned in a ship. Not me, I swam ashore. Odd, that, ‘cos I can’t swim. So I get myself apprenticed to a smith, only he gets killed by robbers, and his wife and his sons too. Not me. I hid behind the anvil till they went away. So there I am a blacksmith, with a forge of my own and a little bit of land to scratch away in, and I’ve just got married and had a family when along comes the plague and kills the lot of them, except me. Well, this is a bit of a facer, but I’m not one to complain, I get on with my business, and now I’ve got a bit more land that came from my wife and I’m really quite comfortable, except my neighbours won’t have anything to do with me. They say I’m unlucky, which is a bit of a joke. I must be the luckiest person in the whole world by now.

‘And then I get called up to do my bit in the war, and they put me on a ship, and this ship sinks and I’m the only survivor. I get ashore and fall in with some of our lads, and what happens but the whole lot of them get killed by the enemy — don’t ask me which enemy, mind, cos I’ve forgotten. Anyway, there I am in the middle of nowhere wondering what old Death’s got against me, when I get picked up by the enemy and taken along to the slave market, where I get sold to a Phoenician and bundled on board his ship. But I had no worries. I knew that ship was going to hit a rock and sink, and I’d be the only survivor; and I was right, too. Laugh? I nearly wet myself. Anyhow, I got back to Athens all right and carried on with my trade, and I’ve done all right for myself, got myself into the heavy-infantry class and everything. Then when old Demosthenes gets his fleet together he sends out for all the smiths he can get, and they pick me up, though I’m way over the age limit, and here I am. I’m telling you, son, I didn’t want to come on this. I really don’t fancy being the only survivor out of this lot.’

He made a vast encircling gesture, taking in the whole enormous camp. I shuddered slightly. I could see his point.

‘You came the same time as I did,’ I said. ‘I thought you said you’d been here a long time.’

‘It feels a long time, son. Nice talking to you.’

He got up, stretched his arms, and walked slowly away. I spat out the taste of the sausage into the fire and sat quietly for a while thinking of nothing much; then, for the first time since I remember — that is, since I got off the ship — I started to compose verse in my head. It was good, too, I realised, and I closed my eyes, so that the words would take in my mind and not blow away. I find that my mind is like a threshing-floor. Unless I close the doors of my eyes, the wind carries off the grain and the chaff together.

I found that I was turning the old smith’s story into a protagonist’s speech, for a play called
The Long Sufferer
or something like that. The plot would come later, or maybe there wouldn’t be the usual sort of plot, all politics and the usual jokes. That didn’t matter so much; it could just be a play about this extraordinary lucky-and-unlucky man, and how he saw the world, how it was unbelievably cruel to everyone else and unbelievably kind to him. I sat there and built that speech like you would build a wall, first one layer, then another one on top of it; or a pile of apples which has been heaped up too much, and the slave keeps on putting on more and more, so that you stand there waiting for it to collapse, but it doesn’t. It was a good speech, as funny as anything I had ever done, and as I heaped misfortune on to misfortune for this extraordinary character of mine, I forgot completely where I was or what was happening.

Then a taxiarch was standing over me and shouting something, and he wouldn’t go away, so I picked up my helmet and my shield and went where he told me to go, still hammering out the words of my speech, like the slaves at the mint hammering coins and tossing them into jars. I joined a long queue of men leading to a ship, and I got the impression that the army was being embarked for a big sea-battle, to fight as marines. But just as I was coming to the head of the queue they shouted out that there was no more room; so I sat down on my helmet again and got back to work. I was left in peace for a while, then someone else pushed me into another line of men. I lifted my head after a while and looked out over the harbour, as I groped in my mind for an article of clothing that scanned long-long-short, and saw our fleet moving out from the shore. All the ships were riding very low in the water, and every inch of them was crammed with soldiers. I commanded my mind to hold the speech and started to count the ships, for I had never seen so big a fleet in all my life. There were a hundred and ten.

Nicias appeared from somewhere and started to make a speech to us. He explained briefly what was happening; he had embarked as many men as possible on the ships, and they would try and break down the barrier the Syracusans had put across the mouth of the harbour. If they succeeded they would disembark and the ships would come back for us, and we would all go to Catana. If they failed, we would have to go to Catana on foot.

Then he started talking about honour and our city and freedom and so on, and my mind was just about to wander back to my speech when someone yelled out that the Syracusans were setting sail, and we all craned our necks to see what was going on. Out by the mouth of the harbour we could see the enemy fleet, and there seemed to be a depressingly large number of them, fanning out like the fingers of a hand.

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ someone shouted, ‘they’re sailing straight into them.’

He was right. Our ships just went ploughing on, while the Syracusans opened up to receive them. I think Demosthenes (who was commanding) reckoned he could split the enemy in two, break the barrier, and get out into the open sea, where he would be able to turn. The enemy would follow, and he would turn quicker than they expected and be on to them before they could form. It was a typically daring Demosthenean plan, but it was obvious that it wasn’t going to work. The Syracusans were too strong to brush aside like that, and our fleet had started to move too late. The enemy ships closed round us like fingers round a stone, crushing our ships closer together. It was brilliant work on their part. At least forty of our ships were trapped in the middle of a huge block, utterly useless, while all the enemy ships were spread out like a net; their ninety ships were engaging only seventy of ours, and ours were jammed and unable to move. They were the rocks and the Syracusans were the waves. In that enclosed space, of course, all our superior skills and seamanship were useless; the Athenians are open-sea fighters and need masses of space to execute their dazzling turns and sail-throughs. But in the harbour it was solid demolition work, like a land-battle on sea. Now I assume Demosthenes had foreseen this, which is why he crammed the larger part of his land forces on to the ships; but of course that was useless too, since the bulk of his forces were trapped on the ships in the middle and could do nothing. But what was worst of all was the way the Syracusans were fighting this land-on-sea battle. The normal way these affairs go is for the opposing ships to grapple on to each other and board each other for an infantry fight. But the Syracusans had rigged up rawhide shields over their ships so that our grappling-hooks would simply slide off; they drew their ships up alongside ours, just far enough apart so that our soldiers couldn’t jump aboard their ships, and let loose volley after volley after volley of arrows, javelins and stones. There was absolutely nothing our men could do; there was nowhere for them to take cover since they were all packed tightly on to the ships like horses in a horse-transport. They stood there and the Syracusans shot them, clearing our ships one by one.

‘Somebody stop them, for God’s sake,’ shouted a man near me. ‘That’s not fighting, it’s just killing.’

For a while I couldn’t understand; then it started to make sense. It was basically the tactic Cleon had used at Pylos, when his light infantry with their slings and bows had conquered the invincible Spartan heavy infantry, who had no bows and so could not shoot back. I started to laugh, for it struck me as unbearably comic that our own cleverness should be used against us in this way, until somebody got very angry with me and threatened to kill me if I didn’t stop laughing. I tried to explain the joke to him, but he couldn’t grasp the point. Meanwhile, Demosthenes and his squadron had managed to break a hole in the ring of enemy ships and was running for the shore as fast as possible. The Athenian ships in the centre followed him as best they could, pouring out of the gap he had made like water out of a punctured skin; but the Syracusan reserves were waiting for them and hit them as they came out, and there was a quite awful mess until the Syracusan ring was broken somewhere else and ships started pouring out of there too. Because there was so little room for manoeuvre, particularly with empty or sinking ships all over the place, neither side was able to do anything much; there was just a horribly confused jam. It reminded me irresistibly of a net that has just been drawn up and landed in the bottom of a boat; and the ships were all the fish, heaped on top of each other and thrashing and wriggling furiously.

It seemed to go on like that for hours and hours. I don’t know what you would call it; it certainly wasn’t a sea-battle. The ships didn’t ram each other, they collided, and you could hear the oars being broken off, like the branches of a falling tree; and you could hear the screams of the oarsmen as the handles of their oars were driven back and through their bodies, or they were crushed against the side of the other ship. And then one of our ships would break free and make a dash for the shore, with half its oars broken, perhaps, or a great hole in its side; and our men on the shore would cheer it on so desperately that you imagined that if that one ship got away we would all be saved. And sometimes it made it to the shore, and sometimes a Syracusan ship would catch up with it and rake it with arrows, shooting the oarsmen dead at their oars, so that our ships would suddenly lose speed and come to a pathetic halt or drift round in a circle, struggling like a bird with a broken wing. And some of our ships managed to outrun their pursuers, broken oars and all, and dash across to where they thought they could see a force of Athenian infantry on the shore who would protect them; and they would flop up on to the beach like so many tunny-fish, only to discover that the men they had seen were Syracusans and not Athenians. When they discovered that, they didn’t even bother to fight, but simply allowed themselves to be cut down where they stood. And whenever one of our ships was lost, all the men round me would shriek and yell and throw themselves on the ground as if they were completely mad.

Eventually the Syracusans withdrew. I heard afterwards that they had run out of arrows and felt they could achieve nothing more. Our ships were able to limp back to the shore, and every single one of them had dead men on its decks. But just as the battle was dying away, we saw a Syracusan ship being driven towards us by two Athenians; it had somehow got separated from the others and allowed our two to get behind it. The encounter between these ships was a remarkable sight, considering the wretched state they were all three of them in; it was like a fight I once saw between three decrepit old men, who hardly had enough life between them to keep from falling over; yet they were lashing out wildly at each other with their sticks and dealing their puny blows as if they were the Achaeans at Troy. As the ships drew nearer to us, the men around me fell silent, watching the attempts of the Syracusan to break away from its pursuers. For my part, I must confess, I wanted them to succeed, for I could make out the expressions on the Syracusans’ faces as they came close in to the shore trying to turn, and they looked so pitiful that I could see no earthly point in their being killed, now that everything had been so conclusively decided. But for once that day the Athenians prevailed, and the enemy ship, after several desperate attempts to turn, ran aground on the beach and was unable to move. As soon as it came to rest, the men around me let out the most ferocious whoop of pure pleasure that you could possibly imagine and splashed out into the shallow water. In a matter of minutes they had turned every man aboard that ship, living and dead, into so many cuts of butchers’ meat; including a couple of our Corcyrean allies, whom the Syracusans had fished out of the water earlier on. I distinctly heard these men yelling out who they were, but nobody took any notice, and I was reminded of a bad day in the Assembly or the Law Courts, when the voters get an idea into their heads and refuse to listen to the opposing view.