The Walled Orchard (45 page)

‘I don’t know,’ said Pericleidas. ‘Hell, Cleander, you know I’ve got a rotten memory for faces.’

That was enough for me. ‘Pericleidas,’ I said, before anyone could stop me, ‘do you remember going to Athens and seeing a play called
The General?’

Pericleidas blinked. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I remember it well. But surely — aren’t you the young fellow who was sitting next to me? Yes, I’ll swear you are. You’re the young fellow who wrote the play.’

‘Is my name Eupolis?’ I said.

‘That’s right,’ said Pericleidas, relieved. ‘You’re Eupolis, the playwright. I’m terrible at faces, but I never forget a name. Yes, this is Eupolis, I can vouch for that.’

‘Are you sure?’ said the magistrate. ‘You said yourself—’

‘No, it’s him all right,’ said Pericleidas. ‘If I’m right, he’s missing a bit of one finger.’

Now my hands were tied behind my back and he couldn’t have seen them. The magistrate ordered his men to untie me. I didn’t dare look down, in case my missing finger had suddenly grown back, just to spite me. ‘All right,’ said the magistrate, ‘I guess you’re who you say you are. But who’s this?’ He pointed to Aristophanes, and the crowd, who had been bitterly disappointed, started to hope once again. ‘You don’t know him, do you?’

‘We never claimed he did,’ I said quickly. ‘But I can vouch that this is Aristophanes son of Philip, an Athenian citizen.

‘Not
the
Aristophanes!’ exclaimed Pericleidas. ‘Why, sir, are you Aristophanes who wrote
The Acharnians
and
The Two Jugs?’

‘Yes,’ said Aristophanes. For once, there was no smugness in his voice, only relief.

‘Then I can vouch for him too,’ said Pericleidas.

‘No, he can’t,’ said the grey-haired man, ‘he’s just said he couldn’t.’

The magistrate made an angry gesture. ‘The hell with it,’ he said. ‘Look, Pericleidas, will you be responsible for these two?’

‘It would be an honour,’ said Pericleidas, gazing at Aristophanes as if he had just seen a vision of a god. Not at me, you understand. Just Aristophanes.

‘That’s good enough for me, then,’ said the magistrate. ‘All right, folks, the party’s over. Go home quietly, it’s after dark.’

The crowd drifted away, and Pericleidas hustled us both inside.

‘Stratylla,’ he shouted, ‘come here quick, and we’ll need hot water and towels. We’ve got company.’

I honestly can’t remember any more about that night. I think I must have fallen asleep on my feet, or something of the sort, because the next thing I remember was waking up in a bed, with light coming in through the window. For a moment I was confused; then I remembered what had happened, and that I was in Catana, safe, in a friendly house. In the bed next to me was Aristophanes son of Philip, snoring. I looked at him and realised, with a great surge of joy that nearly took off the top of my head, that I was no longer responsible for him.

CHAPTER NINE

D
on’t you hate it when you’re listening to a story or a poem; and the hero has just got himself out of a scrape by the tips of his fingers in Argos, say, or Crete, and then the scene suddenly changes to Tempe or Phocis, and there’s our hero, sitting in a nice clean tunic with his hair newly curled and his beard trimmed, having a bite to eat with the King and planning his next adventure? I do. I feel cheated. I want to hear how he got all the way from Argos to Phocis, which is probably more difficult in practical terms than duping the three-headed giant or escaping from the man-eating bull. Particularly since the three-headed ogre turned out to be incredibly gullible, or the hero was so laden down with magical hardware, pressed into his hand by some helpful god or other, that the whole Spartan army wouldn’t have stood a chance against him. No, what I want to hear is how he managed to hitch a lift on a ship without any money, and what he did for food and water as he crossed the mountains, and how he got past the King’s doorkeeper without a sealed pass and three chamberlains to vouch for him.

I am no Milesian cheapskate; I will not fob you off with an implied challenge to your imaginative powers. Before we return to violet-crowned Athens, I will give you a short account of our stay in Catana and the trip home.

At first, Pericleidas was thrilled to have the celebrated Aristophanes under his roof, and for three days we were treated like princes. Everything that twenty years’ accumulated proceeds of the dry-fish business could provide for our comfort and delight was showered upon us, and the only thing demanded of us in return was theatre talk. But neither of us could find very much to say to gratify our host’s modest, if eccentric, requirement. It was as if we had forgotten what it was like to be Athenian literary lions. Even Aristophanes could find very little to say about his own prodigious talents and triumphs, and I was quite useless. All I seemed able to remember was the Athenian expedition to Syracuse; it was as if I had been born the day I landed in Sicily, and the things I had done before that were heroic tales of the old days, when the world was young and the Gods still appeared openly to men. Although I pretended to, I couldn’t bring myself to believe in this mythical place called Athens in Attica, where they did nothing all day but grow food, write plays and talk to their friends about the weather and politics, and nobody died. The real world, I knew in my heart, was not like that at all. In the real world, terrified men marched down unknown roads and were trapped in orchards, or slept in ditches while the cavalry searched for them; and sooner or later this holiday would be over and I would have to put on my muddy old boots and cloak and go back to work.

In this mood, I freely admit, I wasn’t fit company for a stage-struck tuna baron. The only thing I wanted to talk about was the War — God, how I wanted to talk about that to someone; even Aristophanes. I tried once or twice but he put his hands over his ears and yelled until I went away. Most of the time, in fact, he spent drinking himself into a coma, which seemed to work well enough for him. But when I tried it, I fell asleep and dreamed about the War, and that was no good at all. And then Pericleidas would come bounding up, certain in his mind that at last we were ready to talk about cosy chats behind the scenes at the first rehearsal of
The Wasps,
and what Agathon said to Euripides about Sophocles.

I asked everyone I could about what had happened to the Athenians, and tried to find any other survivors who had made it to Catana. I found them, quite a few in fact; most of them hospitably locked up by the Catanian authorities, who regarded them as a public nuisance and were trying to negotiate a cheap price with a Phoenician slaver for the hire of a ship to send them back to Athens. But I heard that Nicias and Demosthenes were dead, and that most of the men who had been captured by the Syracusans had died of cold and starvation in the stone quarries. By all accounts, seven thousand men had survived the two massacres, in the orchard and the river bed, out of forty thousand who had left the camp. Of these, about four thousand lived long enough to be sold off, mostly to Phoenicians. Very few of those, I was told, were Athenians. A Corcyrean I met who had been in the quarries and had escaped said that the Athenians there had given up quite early and refused to eat, or had caught the fever and died. They had no will to live, he said, since they believed that their City was already dead. I also found out that the man who owned the farm with the walled orchard in it was called Polyzelus. He was a decent enough man, by all accounts, and when he came home and found his home knee-deep in bodies he was profoundly shocked and had to be taken away and looked after by some relatives. When he had recovered, he had to find some way of disposing of fourteen thousand dead Athenians, and for a long time he didn’t know what to do. All this time the Athenians were not smelling any more wholesome, and his neighbours were starting to complain. In the end, he hired every slave and casual worker in the district and got them to dig an enormous hole in a marshy part of his property where nothing would grow anyway, and shovelled the dead bodies into it until it was full. Then he raised a big cairn of stones over it, and set about recovering the quite phenomenal cost of this operation from the Syracusan government. By all accounts, the legal complications beggared all description, and he or his heirs are probably at it to this day.

After three days, Pericleidas came into the room where we slept and said, in a rather embarrassed manner, that he had arranged a passage home for us. We thanked him profusely. This seemed to make him feel worse. He explained that the ship we were going home on was one of his. We thanked him again. He explained further that all his ships were cargo ships laden with dried fish; they were therefore not immensely comfortable. We said that that didn’t matter; going home was the important thing. Actually, said Pericleidas, wretchedly, there was only enough room on these fish-cruisers of his for a
working
crew. He hated to impose like this, but…

So that is how, when anyone in a poem or a reading purports to give an account of what it is like to sail a ship on the open sea, I can stand up and tell him he’s a liar, because I have done it myself, and it’s no fun at all. You get very wet working a ship, particularly if you haven’t the faintest idea what you are supposed to be doing and the rest of the crew are muttering about you being bad luck and how they ought to throw you overboard before you bring on a thunderstorm. Oh yes, we were also chased by pirates in the Straits of Rhegium. They were very enthusiastic, those pirates, and were just about to catch up with us when one of the crew had the wit to shout out that our cargo was nothing more valuable than dried fish, and to throw a jar over the side to prove it. The pirates picked up the jar, opened it, and stopped following us, which must be a very significant comment on the quality of Pericleidas’ stock-in-trade.

And then, after a long and exhausting journey, we saw Cape Sunium on the horizon and heard the ship’s captain saying, with evident relief, that this was where Eupolis and Aristophanes were getting off. For two pins, in fact, they would have landed us at Sunium; but we persuaded them to take us into Piraeus by giving them the remainder of our Sicilian money.

As we cruised round the Attic coast, I suddenly started to feel sick. That was not the motion of the ship —I had got over that after the first couple of days of our voyage; it was a sort of fear, that Attica would not be what it had to be, in order for me to stay sane. Attica had to be a happy ever after, a place where the story could end. I had tried to picture it in my mind while I was in Sicily, but no image would come; and I had put together a rather unconvincing reconstruction to take its place. This Attica was half an enormous theatre filled with laughing people, backing on to a maze of cosy little streets, and half a sort of pastoral idyll, jammed permanently at the end of the olive harvest, with carts creaking down narrow lanes. The reason why I chose the olive season was that I could remember what an olive cart looked like; it had two wheels, an ox between the shafts, Aristophanes in the storage-jar and cavalrymen all round it. The cavalrymen seemed a little out of place in Attica, but that couldn’t be helped. Now if this phantom Attica didn’t exist, what was I to do? I realised, as we sailed on from Sunium, that I really didn’t want to go home; that was the very last thing I wanted to do.

Aristophanes was also very quiet. We had spoken very few words to each other since we reached Catana, and we seemed rather embarrassed to be in each other’s company, as if each knew a terrible secret about the other and didn’t trust him to keep his mouth shut. In my case of course, I did know quite a few things about the son of Philip that would, if made public, utterly destroy him in Athenian society, and I felt sure that he had invented a corresponding number of calumnies about me; but although we said nothing to each other about it, we seemed to have reached an agreement that when we got home, we were going to have as little to do with each other as possible.

But of course you don’t want to hear all this; you are asking yourself why, if we were coming from Sicily, we passed Sunium before reaching Piraeus. Well, if you had used your head you would have realised that our captain wouldn’t want to go further down the Argolid than he absolutely had to, what with the War and everything, and had thus sailed straight from Methana to Sunium across open water. He then backtracked from Sunium to Piraeus, intending to go back the way he had come after that. The result of this complex manoeuvre, besides bad temper on everyone’s part, was that we didn’t make Piraeus until about half an hour before dawn.

I don’t know what exactly I had been expecting; whether I had assumed that the Polemarch and the Council would be there to meet us, with garlands and honey and flute-girls, or perhaps a more modest delegation led by one of the lower ranking magistrates, or perhaps just a few friends and relatives. Instead, there was nobody to be seen anywhere, not even the usual crowd who lounge about the docks waiting for someone to spill a jar so that they can dart across and steal the contents. The only living creature was a dog, whose barking brought the toll-collector out, and he was only interested in separating the captain from his harbour dues, and took no notice of us whatsoever.

When I say us, by this time I mean me. As soon as his feet touched Attic soil, Aristophanes was off like a startled polecat, without a word to me, the captain or anyone. He just muffled his face in his cloak and vanished, I think in the general direction of the City; but I couldn’t say for sure. I felt it would only be polite to thank the captain for putting up with me on the voyage, so I did this. The captain made no reply, so I shrugged my shoulders at the world in general, pulled my cloak round me, and started to walk towards Athens.

Of course the old Long Walls between Athens and Piraeus are no longer there, and I suspect that many of you who are reading this will not remember them. That morning, they seemed to go on for ever, and although I had walked that way hundreds of times in my life, they seemed very foreign and unfamiliar to me as I trudged along under them. I don’t know why, but I got it into my head that the City was actually empty, and that all its people were now in a hole in a marsh on the estate of Polyzelus. It was a very eerie sensation, I can tell you, and I didn’t like it at all. But when I was half-way to the City I saw a man hurrying up from the opposite direction, and to my overwhelming joy I recognised him. In a way it was like seeing a ghost, but he was real enough — Cleagenes the corn-merchant, who I had done business with a few times.

‘Hello, Cleagenes,’ I shouted.

He peered at me (he was short-sighted) and replied, ‘Hello, Eupolis. I haven’t seen you about for a couple of weeks now. Have you been in the country?’

I stared at him. ‘Come off it,’ I said, ‘I’ve been in Sicily with the army. I’ve just got back.’

Cleagenes gave me a curious look. ‘Don’t be funny at this hour of the morning, Eupolis, there’s a good lad. The army isn’t back yet.’

Back yet? ‘Honestly, Cleagenes,’ I said, ‘that’s where I’ve been.’

He frowned. ‘Have you come back with a message for the Council or a letter from Nicias or whatever?’ he asked. ‘If so, you’d better—’

‘Nicias?’ I said. ‘Nicias is dead.’

‘Dead?’

‘Dead.’

Cleagenes pondered this for a moment. ‘That’s not very funny, Eupolis,’ he said at last. ‘I suppose you’re just going home from a party with some of your peculiar friends. Take my advice, lad. Go home and sleep it off before you offend someone important. Some people have got sons at the War, you realise.’

Cleagenes bustled away, leaving me standing with my mouth open. But there was nothing to be gained by gawping (as my grandfather used to say), so I pressed on into the City towards my house. I saw a few people out and about once I had passed through the gate, but I didn’t stop and talk to any of them. Something told me that the best move at this stage would be to keep my head down until I had managed to find out what was going on.