The Walled Orchard (41 page)

When the laughter had died away and those incapacitated by it had been led away to be calmed down with hot wine and cold water, I turned to the smith and said, ‘Well?’

He thought for a minute and then said, ‘Me, I’d rather have had some Euripides, but I guess that’ll do.’ Why does everyone want to be a comedian?

We must have made a hit, because there was actual competition among those Sicilian peasants — who wouldn’t normally give you the dandruff from their collars — as to who would give us a bed for the night, a decent meal, fodder for the horse, food for the journey, and even —incredibly — money. Aristophanes got extremely drunk and made quite a nuisance of himself with our host’s daughter, so we were very nearly killed after all; but I was too exhausted to do more than eat and smile gratefully, and then sleep. I was certainly too tired to be frightened any more, stone quarries or no stone quarries.

Just before I went to sleep my host came to see me. After spelling out in graphic detail what he would do to both of us if Aristophanes laid another finger on his daughter, he told me that a neighbour of his had just come in from the Elorine road, and had passed a certain farm with a large orchard. He had stopped to ask what was going on there, and he was told that there had been a great battle between the Athenians and the Syracusans. Not that it had been much of a baffle, he had been told. Nearly twenty thousand Athenians had gone into the orchard, but only six thousand had come out on their feet; and all of those were now in chains, together with their general Demosthenes, waiting to be marched on to the slate quarries, where Demosthenes would be beheaded and the rest would be kept until they were sold or died. They had taken all the money from these men, and it had filled four shields. Then the army had moved on to deal in the same way with the other Athenian army, under the celebrated Nicias.

I thought of Jason of Cholleidae, and wondered if he was still alive. If so, he hadn’t managed to keep my money after all. Then I thought of what Callicrates had been saying, just before he died.

‘Why did they stop shooting and take prisoners?’ I asked. ‘Did the man say?’

‘They ran out of arrows,’ replied my host. ‘Otherwise they’d have killed them all. Sleep well.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

T
he next morning, fairly early, we set off again. Aristophanes said that, since he had a hangover and was in great pain, he should ride the horse, but I persuaded him that this would not be a good idea by kicking him in the head, which seemed to satisfy him, because he didn’t raise the subject again for at least an hour.

Our host had advised me that the best way to keep out of sight would be to ride along the side of the mountains about half-way up (which is what we had been doing up till then); that way we wouldn’t come across the farmers in the fields or the shepherds up on the top, and so long as we stayed well away from the Acrae side we should be more or less safe. Considering Aristophanes’ conduct with regard to this man’s daughter I was in two minds as to whether we should take his advice, but I couldn’t think of an alternative, so we did. He said we should make Catana in three days, or less if we got a move on and didn’t get lost. We had been given more than enough food to last three days, and just over twelve staters in small coin; mostly Syracusan Arethusas, which are acceptable all over Sicily. Somehow this good fortune worried me; apart from our brief brush with the stone quarrying industry, things were going rather too easily.

This fear was starting to get to me by midday, and so preoccupied was I with it that I communicated it to Aristophanes. I should have known better.

‘It’s all right for you,’ he said. ‘You’re riding the horse.’

I said something vulgar regarding the horse, and went back to my worrying. Perhaps anxiety has prophylactic powers, I don’t know; but we managed to cover quite a few miles that day without running into any sort of trouble. We found a little hollow in the side of the mountain to stay the night in, and while Aristophanes was taking his sandals off and giving me a detailed description of the condition of his feet, I unpacked the saddle-bags, tethered the horse and went to sleep.

I knew as soon as I woke up that something was wrong.

‘Aristophanes,’ I said, ‘where’s the horse?’

‘I don’t know,’ said the son of Philip. ‘He’ll be long gone by now. You might find him, I suppose, but I very much doubt it. He’ll probably have gone off down the hill to the village. I think he liked it there.’

I frowned. ‘And how do you think he managed that, bearing in mind that I tied him securely to that tree-foot last night?’

‘Easy,’ replied Aristophanes. ‘I untied him, about an hour before dawn.’

‘Why?’

Aristophanes shrugged. ‘Because I was going to take the horse and ride on ahead. I’m sick of walking. But I tripped over something in the dark and he got away. I was going to tell you, so that we could go after him, but you looked so peaceful sleeping there that I didn’t want to wake you up.’

‘Well, that’s bloody marvellous,’ I said. ‘Now neither of us can ride the bloody horse.’

‘That’s what I call democracy in action,’ said Aristophanes. ‘If I can’t have him, neither should you.’ I threw a stone at him, but I missed.

We no longer had the horse to bicker about, so we bickered about who should carry what. You will already know what we said if you have ever seen or read
The Frogs,
since Aristophanes filched that too; so I won’t bother to repeat it.

We had been walking for maybe three hours when Aristophanes started to complain that he was feeling feverish. I assumed that this was just another variation on the luggage theme and ignored him; but so persistent was he that I had a look at him, and saw that he was showing alarming symptoms of fever. This was the last thing we needed, and I confess that I lost my temper and started shouting at him, although not even Aristophanes would deliberately catch fever just to spite me (or not in Sicily, at any rate). He asked me several times what I intended to do about it, and I replied, truthfully, that there was absolutely nothing I could do except keep well away from him to avoid catching it myself. He seemed greatly offended by this, so to make it up to him I let him tell me the plot of the play he had left behind in the hands of a producer, with instructions to update the topical bits should they become outdated by the time the play came on. It was, he kept insisting, his masterpiece (every play he writes is his masterpiece, according to him), but it sounded pathetic to me — all about a city in the sky and blockading the Gods. But I didn’t tell him so, since the fever was getting worse by the hour, and he was starting to ramble in his speech. He went on talking, however, losing his place and going back to the beginning over and over again, until I could cheerfully have brained him with a rock to shut him up. In the end there was nothing for it but to stop and let him rest.

When he was lucid again, I gave him a cup of water (we had very little left, and we hadn’t passed a spring or pool for a long time). He drank it quickly, spilling quite a lot. I gave him some more.

‘Aristophanes,’ I said, ‘I expect you’ll suggest to me sooner or later that since you obviously can’t make it to Catana and there’s no point in us both dying in this miserable place, I ought to abandon you and try and get through on my own.’

‘Get stuffed,’ he replied. ‘You let me die, I’ll kill you.’

‘I thought you’d say that,’ I replied, ‘it’s a quote from one of your plays. In that case, we’ve got a choice. I don’t know the first thing about what to do when a man gets fever. We can either try and press on and get you to Catana while you’re still curable, or we can wait here and hope the fever breaks. What do you think?’

‘I think you’re a complete bastard,’ said Aristophanes with conviction. ‘Just get me safely to Catana, will you?’

‘So you want to carry on, do you?’

‘No,’ he replied firmly. ‘Get me off this god-forsaken hillside and under cover. If I die, my heirs will sue you for every obol you’ve got.’

Shortly afterwards he went off his head again, and I could see he was clearly in a very bad way. There was a funny side to it, of course; both of us had survived the Athenian camp, where men were going down with fever wherever you looked, only to get caught with it out on the clean, healthy hillside.

I suddenly got it into my head that it was going to rain, and that could be disastrous. So I draped the food-sacks round Aristophanes’ neck and hoisted him on to my back — he was so heavy I could scarcely walk — and set off in the hope of finding some sort of cover. It was nearly dark when I saw a little stone building with light coming from it, surrounded by some of the scrubbiest looking vines you ever saw. I wobbled over to it as quickly as I could and kicked the door hard.

‘Go away,’ said an old man’s voice from inside.

‘Open this bloody door, or I’ll kick it in,’ I said ingratiatingly, and after a while the door opened a crack and a long, pointed nose appeared.

‘What do you want?’ said the nose.

‘This man is dying of fever,’ I said. ‘I claim the sanctuary of your hearth, in the name of Zeus, God of guests and hospitality.’

‘We haven’t got a hearth,’ replied the nose, ‘just a tripod and a hole in the roof. What do you think we are, millionaires?’

That was a tricky one, since Apollo is the God associated with tripods, and Apollo couldn’t care less about guests and hospitality. However, I snatched my mind away from the theological niceties of the thing just in time to put my foot in the door.

‘I’m a desperate Athenian warrior escaping from a battle,’ I said. ‘If you don’t let me in, I’ll chop down all your vines.’

The nose said something unpleasant and opened the door. Now that I could see the rest of him, he turned out to be an extremely old man, once very tall but now bent almost double with age and rheumatism. I felt awful about forcing my way in on him so violently; but this remorse soon departed, for he was a singularly nasty old man.

‘There’s no food,’ he said quickly. ‘All my food is
buried,’
he spat the word out triumphantly, as if he had foreseen my coming with the help of some mysterious divinatory art. ‘You’ll have to kill me first.’

‘I’ve got some food,’ I replied. ‘All I need is somewhere where my friend can rest until the fever breaks. I’ll pay you,’ I added brilliantly.

‘Pay me?’ His little round eyes lit up. ‘Silver money?’

‘Genuine silver money.’

‘Let’s see it.’

‘Can I put my friend down first?’

He nodded irritably, as if making a great concession. I shifted Aristophanes on to a pile of goatskins on the floor and straightened my back. Sheer bliss.

‘Let me see the money,’ said the old man.

I took out the linen purse I had been given in the village, turned my back and took out a Syracusan two-stater piece. It was not too badly worn and had no holes or banker’s cuts on it; a persuasive coin. I showed it to the old man. He stared at it.

‘So that’s what they look like,’ he said in wonder. ‘I’ll be seventy-three come the vintage, and I’ve never seen one of them before.’

I waited for a moment, to give him a chance to fall under its spell, and then said, ‘If my friend gets well, you can have it. For your very own.’

That seemed to have a remarkable effect on the old man. He started moving round the house at a terrific speed, tipping out the contents of jars and poking up the fire on the little tripod until it roared. He was mixing something up in a little pottery mortar, and as he did so he sang a song in a language I could not understand. Then I realised he was not a Greek at all but a Sicel, one of the savages who lived in Sicily before the Greeks came. I have had little to do with non-Greeks in my life (apart from Orientals and Scythians, and you quickly get used to them) and he fascinated me from that moment onwards.

At last he seemed satisfied that his concoction was ready. As a finishing touch, he grabbed hold of the she-goat that was standing peacefully in the corner of the room and squeezed a little drop of milk out of her udders into the mortar; then he put it on the grid on top of the tripod to warm through. ‘We’ll have your friend up and about again in no time,’ he panted (for he had exhausted himself with all that running about). ‘Just let me see that coin again.’

‘Later,’ I said. He scowled horribly, and took the mortar off the tripod. Bending low over Aristophanes, he started smearing the stuff all over his face. Luckily, the son of Philip was barely conscious and didn’t seem to notice.

‘Give him a few hours, he’ll be good as new,’ said the old man.

‘That’s not saying much.’

‘You what?’

‘Forget it.’

The old man frowned, then shook his head. ‘I know everything there is to know about fever,’ he said proudly. ‘Get it myself every year. Nothing to it.’

‘That’s good to know,’ I said. ‘Now then, I’m going to need a horse or a donkey or something.’ I jingled the coins in the purse. ‘Can you help me at all?’

The old man seemed to undergo an inner torment. He seemed to hear the voices of the little coins, imploring him to obtain them and look after them; but of course he had no donkey, and no way of getting one. He gave me such a pitiful look that I regretted raising the subject. Then a smile started to spread over his face, originating somewhere behind his ears and drawing his lips apart, revealing a startling absence of teeth.

‘Sure thing,’ he said. ‘You wait right here.’

He scampered out of the house and disappeared, leaving me feeling highly perplexed. After a while I sat down beside Aristophanes and looked at him carefully. There was sweat pouring out of him, and he was starting to shift restlessly and moan. I wanted to pour water on him to cool him down, or at any rate do something, but I didn’t like to interfere. Whatever the stuff was that the old man had cooked up, it seemed to be having an effect.

I must have fallen asleep — I was exhausted myself by then — because the next thing I remember is the old man shaking me violently. At first I couldn’t remember what was going on and I was greatly alarmed.

‘I got you a mule,’ he said. ‘Come and look.’

I dragged myself to my feet and followed him out of the house. Tethered to a dead fig tree was the most wretched-looking animal I have ever seen outside a silver mine. You could see at a glance that it still had all its ribs, but apart from that there was little to recommend it.

‘This is my neighbour’s mule,’ said the old man proudly. ‘I just bought him. You can have him for four staters.’

I burst out laughing — not as a negotiating ploy but out of pure hilarity. The old man scowled and said all right, two staters. Still sniggering helplessly, I excavated two staters from the purse and gave them to him. When he felt the coins in his hands, he looked like Prometheus receiving fire from heaven.

‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘If you haven’t got any money, how could you buy a mule?’

‘We don’t buy and sell with money up here,’ he replied scornfully. ‘Money’s for keeping. I gave him two hoes and a bushel of figs.’

‘You were robbed.’

‘That’s a good mule,’ he whined defensively. ‘He’ll keep on going all day, and doesn’t need much feeding. I’ve known him since he was foaled, poor brute.’

‘You’d better come and look at my friend,’ I said. ‘He’s not well.’

The old man sniggered, and for a moment I felt terribly suspicious. But when we went back into the house, Aristophanes was sleeping peacefully.