The Road to Sardis

by Stephanie Plowman

  ‘Odd kind of war, this is. We keep on the defensive, Pericles says. Well, as I see it, that means staying at home and being cautious, but—oh, no, says that good-for-nothing cousin of yours when I met him one day, no, it means we have to be active and daring abroad. “That’s why I’m off to Byzantium,” he says grinning. “To defend you. Lines of communication and trade routes, my dear sir.” “When I did my military service,” I said, “I did sentry-go in those old grey watch towers overlooking Megara, or the passes going down to Thebes—” “And very efficiently you did it, I’m sure,” said he, “but my dear old Deucalion”—impudent young swine that he is—“you’re out-dated. The modern Athenian does his sentry-go in God knows how many harbours in dangerous seas that are only names to you at the best.” ’

  I suddenly tugged at his arm. ‘That man!’ I said, pointing. ‘Isn’t he funny? Perhaps he’s drunk?’

  ‘That’s a mighty precarious thing,’ he went on, unheeding. ‘If some of our fellows lose their grip for an hour or so in some outlandish harbour or godforsaken beach or stretch of country that’s never been given a name, all of us here in Athens are finished!’

  He brooded unhappily. I went on tugging at his arm.

  ‘That funny noise he’s making,’ I said. ‘Is it singing? Because I don’t know what he’s saying, do you? But perhaps he’s a foreigner, he looks a foreigner . . .’ I gave a sudden whimper. ‘He’s not singing,’ I said incoherently. ‘He’s screaming. I—don’t like it. Let’s go.’

  The old farmer said with a sudden harshness he had never used to be me before, ‘Stand still—right where you are! Don’t you dare move.’ And very slowly he took half a dozen paces towards the man who lay screaming in the sun before us. His own face was suddenly ashen; the man’s face—

  ‘Why!’ I said with a giggle, for of course I had crept after him, ‘isn’t he funny! All red blotches and swellings!’

  ‘I told you to stay there!’ shouted the old farmer, in wild rage. ‘Damn my rheumy eyes!’ He turned and hurried back with me to where we had been sitting, to a group of scared men who, for the last five minutes had been discussing the man’s strange behaviour in worried voices that had not carried to his deaf old ears.

  ‘Get a doctor!’ he shouted. ‘Sailor, isn’t he? Where’s he from?’

  ‘Off a Carthaginian ship,’ someone volunteered.

  Another man said shrilly, ‘If it’s the ship I heard about, she had to put in here because she’d lost crew on a voyage from Africa, and was hoping to pick up a few extra hands.’

  ‘Come on,’ said the old farmer. ‘Run!’ And in the sweltering heat he began to hustle me back along the road to the City.

  By this time he knew well enough that if any bad news had to be broken to my mother, it was better to consult Tecmessa first. As soon as we had regained the house, he started to look for her, and when I, as usual, tried to look for her too he gave me a little push and said he wanted a word with her alone.

  ‘Because I’ve been naughty?’ I faltered.

  He said, ‘No, sonny. And if—if I don’t take you walking out much in future, don’t think it’s because I don’t like your company! Now, go to your mother.’

  Pericles was with Mother. I wished I had been permitted to go to Tecmessa to be tidied up before meeting him, and hung back at the door trying to smooth my hair and straighten my tunic. He sounded as humanly exasperated as an Olympian may.

  ‘And here am I,’ he said, ‘on the verge of sailing with the fleet to Epidaurus, having to leave my preparations to deal with this! Now, my dear Constantia, you do understand the facts, I hope. Your father left his property at Marathon jointly to you and your sister; are you quite certain you’ve never made over your rights to Alcibiades, or agreed to his selling the farm on behalf of the pair of you?’

  ‘Of course!’ said my mother in weak indignation. ‘Polystratus would be the person who would decide about that, and he—how can I get in touch with him when he—he’s—’

  ‘My dear cousin,’ said the Strategos hurriedly, ‘you mustn’t upset yourself in this way. I give you my word that Plataea will never be allowed to fall into enemy hands.’

  ‘In any case,’ said Mother tearfully, ‘Father wanted it clearly understood that the property was to pass, in due course, to his grandchildren, so my little Lycius will share it one day with Alcibiades.’

  ‘I don’t envy Lycius!’ said Pericles grimly. ‘I’m sorry for anyone involved with that young scoundrel. I was sorry for myself when I was his guardian, and his wretched school teachers earned their holidays! Well, that’s all I needed to know—he wanted money quickly, so he’s tried to sell land that isn’t his to sell. I should be able to put a stop to it.’

  Boiling with rage against the cousin who had tried to defraud me, I raced into the room, and said in a quavering voice, ‘And the beast kept telling me all the time that when he next had leave he’d take me to M-Marathon, and teach me to ride!’

  ‘Oh Lycius!’ said poor Mother, expecting an Olympian thunderbolt, ‘you’ve been listening!’

  But the Strategos said grimly, ‘On this occasion, I don’t condemn such conduct, Constantia. He can’t learn too early what his cousin’s capable of.’

  The old farmer came tiredly in. He really looked old now.

  ‘I wouldn’t break in on you like this, ma’am,’ he said to my mother, ‘but they told me Pericles was here, and what I have to say concerns him more than anyone else. Pericles, the boy and I’ve just got back from Piraeus. There was a sailor off a Carthaginian ship collapsed, started raving. Maybe he’s dead, now. They’d lost men on the voyage, I was told.’

  The Strategos asked slowly, ‘What was wrong with him?’

  ‘That I couldn’t tell you, because I ran this boy home before any doctor came, but he had great red blotches over him—swellings—’

  ‘A Carthaginian ship, you said—coming from Carthage?’

  ‘Yes, where they’ve been dying like flies all the summer, haven’t they? It came from Asia, spread to Africa—now it’s here. Plague.’

  My mother gave a sudden wail. ‘And we can’t get out!’ she sobbed. ‘We can’t get out!’

  * The nne Trade winds, blowing from June to September, the Greek sailors’ main standby.

  7

  Plague

  She kept saying this in the days that followed. Being seven years old, I told her stoutly that the walls of our home would keep the plague out, and if we never went out, we would be safe.

  People were already dying rapidly in the port area. The old farmer said, ‘And the doctors have gone to look after them, and they’ve been wiped out.’

  He said restlessly to Tecmessa that if he’d only himself to consider, he’d get out of the City while there was time—better to starve in the blackened countryside or take what he had coming to him from the Spartans than stay like a rat in a trap, but he felt he couldn’t leave his wife—above all he wasn’t going to leave our family in the lurch after we had given him shelter.

  Three of our slaves went, one after another. Then the old farmer’s wife. Then the old farmer himself. Tecmessa kept me shut away from everyone in a little storeroom that had never been used; she was fighting to keep plague away from me, but she could not keep out the sounds from the street, the wails of the mourners (but soon I heard no more of these), drunken shouts from desperate revellers, yells of dying agony from wretches screaming they had a fire inside, the awful sounds of retching. She couldn’t keep out the stench. They say the smell of death spread from the City to the Spartan camp, and they, guessing the appalling truth, moved south to the hill country round Laurium.

  My mother was taken ill one night. She had had me to sleep in her room; I had heard her sneezing from time to time, and thought she had caught cold—I could not associate anything as familiar and ordinary as sneezing with the noisy figure I had seen down in the harbour. But before dawn a hoarse voice I could scarcely recognise told me to find Tecmessa and not to come back.

&nbs
p; And suddenly I was conscious of the dreadful smell coming from her, and this stench of decay, coming from my mother who had always smelled of spring flowers, scared me more than her altered voice and looks, and I ran screaming for Tecmessa.

  It was after this that Tecmessa said I must stay in the little storeroom. I had got my courage back by this time; I cried and said I wanted to see Mother, and later that night, hoping Tecmessa slept, I unfastened the storeroom door and crept along the corridor. The house was oddly quiet. I went to Mother’s room, and found her alone—Tecmessa had gone to fetch some water to cool her burning body. Mother lay looking at me; I said humbly, ‘Please, if I’ve been wicked, I’m sorry and shan’t do it again.’ Then my voice died away. She didn’t know me. The smell caught at my throat again, and now in the dim lamplight, I could see the red blotches on her pretty face. Then, suddenly, her body began to twitch, and she began to scream that she was burning. She died as I watched her.

  The Strategos did not return from Epidaurus for some time. If he had been in the City, he would have taken prompt measures that might have spared us some of the worse features of that time. But amid all the horrors of the plague—and God knows there were horrors enough—let this always be remembered of Athens; that there were no human sacrifices, as they offer up in barbarian cities such as Carthage in times of terror; there were no cruel hunts for Spartan agents, though it was commonly believed that the Spartans had poisoned the wells. Let this be not the least of the monuments to the Athens the Strategos made and loved.

  Then a second kind of sickness struck at Athens, a sickness with no violent symptoms, seeming, indeed, to be nothing more than profound exhaustion. It attacked Pericles—and Tecmessa. She had looked drawn, and her face had been quite pallid, but, bearing in mind much of what my poor old farmer had said, I concluded this was the inevitable result of being cooped up in a city. But there came the morning when, overcome by weakness, she fell back when trying to get up, and I was crying for the slaves.

  A doctor from Cos had come to Athens when the plague was at its height, and was said to have made some wonderful cures. Slaves went flying for him, and I sat by Tecmessa who said in a frighteningly hollow voice that I must not worry if she did not look at me, her eyelids felt so heavy she could scarcely lift them.

  I pressed my cheek against her limp hand and thought there was nothing for it—someone would have to go to Plataea and get in touch with Father—even if his duty would not allow him to come back, he might send us some comfort; there was none here.

  8

  Flutes and Red Tunics

  Before she fell ill, Tecmessa had thought it would be a good idea if Timotheus came over from Salamis to join me. He arrived looking bonier and paler than ever; he was wretchedly depressed because his father, half-Athenian, had a cousin called Eupedos, living in the City. Eupedos had been doing something of a military nature up in Thrace, but had sent word he hoped to be back in Athens soon, after which of course Timotheus must go to him. He had heard that Timotheus was hanging round Euripides, a fellow with notoriously dangerous ideas . . .

  Timotheus, naturally, flared up with rage at this; I used to try to comfort him with scraps of gossip I had picked up from the servants. Eupedos was immensely rich and childless, I said; he could give him a horse, no doubt, and anything he wanted. Timotheus refused to be comforted, and the implacable approach of the summer almost drove him to frenzy.

  And so he, too, had separately reached the decision to run away, back to Plataea, somehow to get inside and share everything with his father and mother and brother and sister. He would belong, then. Nothing else mattered.

  He had to tell me because I was his chief source of danger; if I missed him for hours on end, I might go whining to the servants so persistently that eventually they would be nagged into searching for him. So that very day he took me climbing up the twisting road leading to the Acropolis, and not far from the Temple of the Maiden he told me what he planned to do.

  ‘I’d go mad if I had to stay with Eupedos,’ he said. ‘Or I’d die. So I’m going back to Plataea, and you mustn’t tell a soul.’

  ‘Of course I won’t,’ I said heartily. ‘I’m coming with you. I knew hours ago I must see Father.’

  His reaction to this information was not very encouraging; he scowled at me murderously. ‘You’re not!’ he said. ‘You’ll spoil everything! You’re too young.’

  ‘I’m tall for my age!’ I said, tears in my eyes. ‘I will come! You can’t stop me!’

  ‘Why do you want to come to Plataea? This is your City.’

  ‘My father’s there,’ I said, my lip trembling. ‘He’s all there’s left now. And you can’t tell people to stop me, because if you do they’ll guess about you too. I shan’t tell them because I’ve given you my promise, but they’ll guess.’

  So he had to agree to let me go with him.

  ‘I’m not going to let you be a nuisance, mind!’ he said. ‘If you can’t keep up with me, that’s that!’

  He instantly agreed, of course, that we couldn’t leave until we knew Tecmessa would get better. However, when the doctor from Cos came next day, he went away smiling and said that though he could only treat diseases—the gods alone could cure—he was certain now that Tecmessa would live.

  So that night I crept into her room, found her sleeping deeply, and kissed her cheek and whispered, ‘Tecmessa, I’m going to see Father. I wish you could come, dear!’ I tiptoed away and went to Timotheus’ room, shared his bed until about an hour before dawn, and then, in our oldest tunics, we crept out and away, ready to sneak out through the Dipylon Gate when it opened. Timotheus left a letter in the kitchen. ‘Gone to Agora,’ it said. In the chest where my clothes were kept we left another note, firmly secured by a dried lemon. ‘Gone to Plataea to see our fathers,’ it said. ‘Don’t tell Tecmessa. Don’t worry.’

  They would not find this, we reckoned, till darkness fell again, and they wondered why we had not come home for supper, and went to see if I had taken a cloak. But by that time we should have had more than twelve hours’ start.

  It was easy enough getting out of the gate. It was early May, and refugee families were going to bring back what they could of the harvest before the Spartans came up to burn the crops. They took with them the entire family—every pair of hands counted—and there were children as small as I was trudging along in the dark. We attached ourselves to one such family and trotted out past the Scythian guards. I thought we were done for when a kind-faced woman riding on a donkey said, ‘Sometimes I think I’ve too many kids to know ’em all, but I never had a baby with those bright grey eyes.’

  ‘Please,’ I piped, ‘we’re hurrying to catch up with my father—he’s gone on ahead.’

  ‘—nor with that well-bred little voice, I know!’ she said, staring more than ever. ‘Honest now, your father is on the road ahead?’

  ‘We’re going to join him, truly!’ I said.

  ‘But where’s your mother? She wouldn’t like her pretty little fellow to be running about . . .’

  ‘My mother’s dead,’ I said desolately, and then she gave me a hug and a handful of figs, and left me to plod on beside Timotheus, along the Processional Way to Eleusis, the road white and dusty, the sea shimmering on our left, but the morning still too early for any heat. We trudged on, two strange little figures, clinging shyly to the outskirts of any group that might give us some kind of cover, past the monuments to long-dead heroes, through the Pass of Daphne, until we came to the spot where the Eleusis road forks for Corinth and the Peloponnese. We knew what to do then. We pattered along the righthand fork, the road for the North, and, as the shadows shortened, we began to cross the wide plain with the great groves of olives, no more now than charred stumps studding the red earth, a strangely silent land where no cocks crowed, and no goats bleated.

  And then at last the road began to wind up through the hills, wooded hills seeming haunted to me in the growing darkness, but Timotheus, who must have noticed my flickering ey
es every time there was a rustle from the side of the road, said briskly, ‘Are you tired? We’ll stop at the next stream.’

  ‘To sleep?’

  ‘No, idiot—to drink. My brother Callistratus says you must never camp by a stream because the noise of the water hides the noise anyone may make creeping up to you.’

  Yes, Callistratus was sensible, I mused later, as in the brief twilight I lay down by an ice-cold stream and lapped like a dog; streams were dangerous places, you got so used to the sound of the water that in a way you were deaf. It was not nice to think what things might come creeping up to you under cover of the falling water.

  We rejoined the road, plodded on until darkness was absolute, then turned aside and huddled together under Theron’s old cloak that we had rolled up and brought with us in addition to our stock of bread and olives—far more sensible to have one big cloak, we felt. I had carried the food, Timotheus the cloak. Before the sound of the wind in the trees, mingled with the strong fragrance of the pines, soothed me to sleep, I remember thinking that conversations with Callistratus, who would not remain a stranger much longer, seemed far more fruitful than conversations with my cousin. Callistratus told you useful things; Alcibiades only wanted to score off people.

  Next morning dawned splendidly. We were up and on our way before the scarlet anemones, drenched with the dew of night, had raised their splendid heads.