The Walled Orchard (42 page)

‘That old poultice never fails. Even works on Greeks,’ he added, full of wonder. ‘I always thought there’d be more malice in a Greek than it could draw out, so I put in more of everything.’

‘He’ll be all right, then?’

‘Soon enough,’ said the old man proudly. ‘Mind, if you hadn’t brought him to me when you did, reckon he’d have died on you.’

I nodded gravely and gave him the four-stater Arethusa. He took it like a mother receiving her baby from the midwife, sat down on a jar by the tripod and played with it for a while, rubbing grease from his hair on to it to make it shine.

I suppose I should have been sleepy, but I wasn’t; and the old man showed no signs of being tired. For a crippled man, in fact, he was unbelievably active. When he had gazed his fill on the profile of our Lady Arethusa, he turned to me and said, ‘So you’re a soldier-boy, are you?’

‘Sort of.’ It was many years since anyone had called me a boy.

‘Athenian, you say?’

‘That’s right.’

‘That’s in Greece, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

He shrugged, as if to say that it was too late to do anything about that now. ‘So who’re we fighting, then?’

‘Us.’

‘You what?’

‘You’re fighting us. The Syracusans against the Athenians.’

He looked at me as if I was mad. ‘The Athenians against the Syracusans?’

‘Yes. I’d have thought you’d have known.’

‘We don’t get news here,’ he said, and his voice suggested that he didn’t hold with news. ‘Why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why are the Athenians fighting the Syracusans?’

‘They felt like it.’

That seemed to satisfy him, for he went back to studying his coin. I was feeling hungry, so I opened the food-sack and poured out some flour into my bowl. ‘Have you got any water?’ I said, looking pointedly at the three-quarters-full pitcher on the floor.

‘No,’ he replied.

‘If you give me some water I’ll give you some flour.’

He picked a wooden bowl off the floor and handed me the pitcher. I gave him some flour.

‘What about him?’ I said, nodding towards Aristophanes.

‘In the morning.’ The old man was mixing up his porridge. ‘Have you got any honey?’

‘No, but I’ve got an onion.

‘An onion!’ Was there no end, his expression suggested, to this man’s wealth of strange and delightful luxuries? I cut the onion in half with a small knife that was lying on the floor, and threw half to him. He caught it and bit into it as if it was an apple. ‘I used to grow onions till maybe three years ago, but then the seed died.’

‘Why didn’t you get some more?’

‘All the seed died in the neighbourhood,’ he replied. ‘Maybe they’ve got some over to Acrae, but I haven’t been there in forty years.’

‘They’ve got some at the village a day or so back from here.’

‘The hell with it,’ said the old man. ‘So the Athenians are fighting the Syracusans?’

‘That’s it.’

‘Foolishness, if you ask me. I was a soldier once,’ he said, as if he had suddenly remembered after a long time. ‘But we were fighting the Carthaginians. That was a long time ago. When I was eight years old.’

‘Wasn’t that young to be a soldier?’

‘We were men earlier then. That was when there were kings in Sicily, in old Hiero’s time, or was it Gelo, I forget. That was when the Persians were fighting the Greeks,’ he said, as if revealing some great secret. ‘But we were fighting the Carthaginians. That was a long time ago,’ he added.

‘It must have been,’ I said.

‘It was a big battle,’ he said. ‘Don’t rightly know how we came to have any part of it. I was a slinger, and two of my brothers with me, and my father and my two elder brothers, they were archers. Good ones, too. We went out — oh, must have been two weeks from here, with that old king Hiero or Gelo, and you never saw anything like those Carthaginians. They were strange people, all black-skinned some of them, like olives. We won, too, but my father and my brothers, they got themselves killed and I got my back all messed up, when a chariot ran over me, and that was my fill of the wars right enough. But those Carthaginians — well, I wouldn’t have missed seeing them. Did you ever hear of that war?’

‘That was the Battle of Himera,’ I replied.

‘Himera,’ he repeated. ‘I never knew that before. Himera, you say?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Well I’m damned. I never knew it had a name.’ He shrugged again. ‘Never too old to learn, hey?’ Then he nodded forward and fell asleep. I took another look at Aristophanes and then lay down beside him and closed my eyes.

When I woke up next morning, the old man was exactly where he had been the night before, and I realised that he had died in the night. I found a mattock under a pile of rags and dug a grave outside the door — it was terribly stony ground, and I blistered my hands. Then I laid his body in it and put the four-stater piece in his hand, for the ferryman; it was just as well, I thought, that I had come along when I did, or he would have been stranded on the wrong side of the river for ever. Then I closed up the grave and sprinkled a little flour on it. It was the first time I had ever conducted a burial all on my own, but I think I got it right. After I had done everything I could think of, I went into the house and let the she-goat out.

Aristophanes was sitting up and yawning. ‘What’s going on?’ he said sleepily. I turned on him angrily.

‘Now look what you’ve done,’ I said. ‘You’re nothing but bad luck.’

‘The hell with you,’ he said. ‘I’m starving. Where are we?’

I told him. ‘That’s a stroke of luck,’ he said.

‘What do you mean, a stroke of luck?’

‘Well,’ Aristophanes explained patiently, ‘all we have to do is find where he buried his food, and we’ll have plenty to get us to Catana.’

Just then, I could have killed Aristophanes. ‘Get out of my sight,’ I shouted. He stared at me, and went outside. A moment later he came back in again.

‘What the hell’s happened to the horse?’ he said.

‘You turned him loose,’ I replied, ‘remember?’

‘No. Why should I want to do a thing like that?’ Then he seemed to notice something. ‘Eupolis,’ he said, ‘what’s all this muck all over my face?’

‘You threw up,’ I said. ‘You’d better wash.’

‘Where’s the water, then?’

‘There isn’t any.’ I gathered up the food-sack and went out to see to the mule.

Oh God, that mule. You know what the Pythagoreans say about the souls of the dead returning to this world in the bodies of animals; well, that mule must have housed the spirit of someone who didn’t like Comic dramatists —some Athenian politician, say, or an oversensitive Tragedian — because it took against the two of us from the very first moment. This was very strange, since it was obvious from one look at the animal that we were the first human beings ever to go out of our way to supply it with such commodities as food and water. But perhaps it was a diehard Syracusan patriot; at any rate, we got no cooperation from it whatsoever. In particular I remember its charming habit of stopping dead in its tracks for no discernible reason and making the most extraordinary noise I have ever heard outside a play by Carcinus. It was also lazy, vicious and lecherous, and had it not been a reincarnated politician, I could have sworn it was the embodiment. of one of Aristophanes’ protagonists —Philocleon, maybe, or Strepsiades.

But Aristophanes was blissfully happy just because he was riding and I wasn’t, which at least took one problem off my mind. He was still weak and not much use for anything, but at least he didn’t look as if he would die at any moment (which was how I managed to tell him from the mule). Now that he was riding at leisure, like a gentleman, he started up an unending stream of conversation, which I was unable to take much part in owing to fairly continuous shortness of breath. He told me what was wrong with Athens, the conduct of the War, the Attic Comic drama, my plays, my marriage, the state of the mountain tracks in Sicily, the mule, the weather, my personality, his intestines, the Athenian commanders in Sicily, the Syracusan commanders in Sicily, Sicily itself, the Gods and the food, with frequent cross-references and recapitulations. By the time we reached the river Terias (which was as far as we could go in the mountains before crossing into the plain) I knew his opinion on every conceivable subject as well as or better than he did himself. I can honestly say that, with the exception of the second book of the
Odyssey,
which they made me learn when I was a boy, I have never learned anything less useful or with more suffering.

We differed in opinion as to how we should tackle the final leg of the journey to Catana. My view was that we should get down to the coast as quickly as we could, then press on and have done with it. There was, I argued, a reasonable chance that anyone we met once we crossed the river Symaethus would be either friendly or indifferent, probably indifferent, and that our one main problem would be to get past Leontini in one piece. Aristophanes, on the other hand, was not worried about Leontini, but doubted very much whether our food and the mule would last us as far as Catana. He therefore wanted to go into Leontini, sell the mule, buy another mule and more food, and stroll onwards to Catana without undue haste. All the Sicilians we had met so far had been helpful and friendly, he said, and since we had money there was no point in starving ourselves and making ourselves ill just for the sake of excessive caution.

I flatly refused to go into Leontini, and Aristophanes refused, equally flatly, to make a dash for the coast. The only possible compromise was to make a stroll for the coast, and that, needless to say, was what we decided to do.

I am not saying that that was the silliest decision ever reached. For example, you may remember that Theseus decided that it would be perfectly feasible to abduct the Queen of Hell, and Icarus saw no reason why he should not fly just that little bit higher and thus enliven his flight to Greece with a better view of northern Crete. I still maintain that it was the silliest decision in living memory, and will need sworn evidence from at least two reputable witnesses before I change my opinion.

We spent our last night on the mountain bickering, and set off early the next day across the plain. It was impossibly hot that day, and the mule had probably remembered something nasty Aristophanes had said about its foreign policy in its previous existence, for it stopped and started as often as a sacred procession in a thunderstorm. We were soon in open country, following what was clearly a main road, and the passers-by (who we met far too frequently for my liking) all seemed to stop and stare at us as we made our irregular way towards the little village on the horizon. I cannot say what most aroused their suspicion, but the fact that we were shouting at our mule in the Ionian dialect must have made them curious, to say the least. Whatever the main reason was, they must have felt sufficiently uneasy to mention us to the cavalry captain at the village, who was out patrolling for stray Athenians making their way to Catana.

We didn’t know that, of course, when we made our way past a little grove of trees, arguing with each other about what to do next. Our minds were taken off the problem by the sudden appearance of three men in armour blocking our way.

My first reaction was to scream with terror and run. But one of the men dashed forward and grabbed the bridle of the mule, and said, ‘Please God, are you Athenians?’ He said it in Ionian.

‘Yes,’ said my moronic comrade, ‘Aristophanes son of Philip at your service. Are you Athenians too?’

I took another look at the three men. They were dirty, ragged and starving. It was a fair bet that they were Athenians. Their spokesman thanked the Gods volubly, and begged us to tell them where Catana was, and whether we had any food.

‘Catana is over there,’ said the son of Philip, ‘and we have plenty of food for all.’

I tried to object to this last statement, but Aristophanes would have none of it, and very shortly we had all retired into the grove and eaten the last few husks out of the grain-bag.

Our three compatriots were Nicias’ men, and they had had a rough time of it. After they had devoured everything there was to eat except the mule (to which, as far as I was concerned, they were welcome) they told us their story. Nicias and his command were either dead or captured; they had been caught by the Syracusans and harried down to a river. Because, by that time, the whole army was out of its mind with thirst, the men had thrown down their weapons and crowded into the river to drink, and the Syracusans had shot them while they drank. But the Athenians went on drinking, although the water by now was fouled with blood, and fought each other for possession of it. When the Syracusans had emptied their quivers they charged, killed as many as their stomachs would allow, and took the few survivors prisoner. But fifteen neighbours from Eleusis had managed to fight their way out. Of that number, these three had made it thus far. The other twelve were giving the crows of south-eastern Sicily a rather inadequate meal — inadequate since ten of them had died of starvation. The remaining five had been on the point of giving up themselves when they found a goat wandering on the hillside. After spending their last reserves of energy cornering this goat, they killed and ate it; but the local goatherds saw them and ran down to the village nearby, where a cavalry patrol was resting after a large meal. The cavalrymen came thundering up the hill and killed two of the Athenians, who had eaten too much on empty stomachs and were unable to move; but the three had fought back and driven the cavalrymen off with rocks and their bare hands, and run for their lives. They now had no idea where they were and were desperately hungry again, and they were sure that the cavalry were after them, and would be upon them in the next few hours. So they thanked us tearfully for our food and our companionship, but urged us to get away as quickly as we could.

I was all in favour of this; but Aristophanes wouldn’t listen. I think he had decided that it would be a glorious thing to save the lives of his fellow citizens, who had been fortunate enough to step under his shadow in their hour of trial. He was feeling decidedly cocky, as I have told you, and had come to regard this escaping-through-Sicily business as pitifully easy for a man of his intelligence and talents. He declared that he would not abandon them now, and that if they did exactly what he told them, he would bring them safely to Catana. They stared at him for a moment, then clasped him by the knees and called him their saviour; a scene which I found highly distasteful.