The Road to Sardis

by Stephanie Plowman

  ‘Do you know what you look like?’ was his first remark. He sounded angry with me, but we both knew he was really furious because he’d betrayed himself.

  I said, ‘Can’t you forgive me for disgracing the family by letting myself go after some months in a stone quarry?’

  He said, still sounding angry, ‘Look at yourself!’ fished in the folds of his tunic and brought out a small bronze mirror.

  ‘Clever, hiding that from the Spartans all this time—three years, is it, since you sold us all?’ I sneered. But I took the mirror nevertheless and peered into it.

  It was difficult to recognise the face looking back at me; it was all eyes and cheekbones, bones jutting out sharply above the drawn cheeks, sunken eyes startling in their lightness in a peeling skin burned almost black, what there was of it, by sun and wind. In fact, the sight of that alien face, all angles and sharp planes beneath the matted hair so unmistakably and regrettably lousy, shocked me into saying, ‘I don’t know how you knew me—but you did, didn’t you?’

  But by this time he had pulled himself together. He took the mirror from me, and said, as he carefully stowed it away, ‘Oh, those good looks of yours may be dimmed, but they’re pretty indestructible, and there’d always be the pleasant speaking voice.’

  Feeling enormously at ease for one in these odd circumstances, I said briskly, ‘Well, I can hardly suppose my pleasant speaking voice brought you to Sicily for the mere joy of hearing it.’

  Alcibiades said, ‘I’ve come to get you out of the stone quarries.’

  ‘Conscience?’ I asked.

  He did not react to that. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Largely a matter of family feeling.’

  ‘It would never do for an Alcmaeonid to get lousy in a stone quarry?’ I asked pleasantly. ‘Well, this Alcmaeonid hasn’t much choice. How did you manage to tear yourself away from your loving hosts?’

  Alcibiades said, ‘Gylippus is the only Spartan who knows I’m here. Most people think he and I are off on a hunting expedition in the wilds—he went home a month ago to report progress, and came along at night to tell me that he’d seen my double outside the city gate. I said I myself should like to pay a stealthy trip to Sicily . . . His father was exiled because he took bribes, and you’ll remember your little adventure years ago which gave me the idea that Gylippus had the family feeling where precious metals are concerned?’

  ‘What did you bribe him with?’ I asked with interest.

  ‘Oh, I had a ring or two—and a rather nice cup—stowed away.’ He scowled suddenly. ‘The clumsy oaf’ll have it all melted down, and the workmanship’s exquisite.’

  ‘A great pity,’ I said, ‘especially since all your sacrifice is absolutely wasted.’

  ‘Meaning?’ he asked, very quietly.

  ‘I’d let you help me on one condition, that you bring back the dead.’

  He stood, and I sat, in a tiny room, and a distance dizzying in immensity stretched between us. ‘Aren’t you sure you won’t be regretting this in a week’s time?’ he asked after a moment’s silence.

  ‘In a week’s time,’ I said, ‘the odds are I’ll be dead, so the question doesn’t arise.’

  He said, lisping more than ever (I hadn’t noticed his lisp until that moment), ‘Well, at least let me wash your face and cut your hair before I go back. It’s crawling with lice; you offend the sight.’

  ‘The nose as well, I should imagine,’ I said cheerfully. ‘All right, you can cut my hair on one condition. I know you had friends in Argos; I expect you’re keeping up your contacts—’

  ‘Speak more quietly; Gylippus is probably crouched with his ear to the keyhole.’

  ‘I won’t mention any names, then, but can you get word to the man who put on Andromache—you remember him—telling him his son is a slave somewhere in Syracuse?’

  ‘No messages for yourself? Your grandfather?’

  ‘It’s better for him to think me dead.’

  There was nothing else important to say. He sent for a bowl of water and cut my hair, producing a pair of gold scissors that he said belonged to the Queen of Sparta. I remarked, ‘I suppose she’s madly in love with you?’ He said, ‘Of course.’ ‘Then you must be horribly bored with it all,’ I commented, and for a moment our eyes met, and we burst out laughing, and the family likeness sprang out again. I knew my sunken face mirrored his even as his mirrored mine.

  And then, to my infinite relief, Gylippus was back with us.

  ‘Cutting his hair!’ he said, in his obvious manner.

  I said, ‘I asked him to. Lice and long hair made me look too Spartan, I thought.’

  ‘Where are you taking him?’ demanded Gylippus, glaring. ‘Don’t let him set foot in Sparta, that’s all I say, or—’

  ‘I’m going back to the quarries,’ I said.

  ‘Back to the—’

  ‘The quarries. I prefer the company there to what I—’

  But he was not listening. He was bent up, guffawing with laughter. ‘All that trouble and expense for nothing!’ he bellowed at Alcibiades. ‘All that trouble and expense!’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said in his negligent way. ‘I’ve cut his hair for him.’

  ‘Then it’s the most expensive hair-cut in history!’ roared Gylippus. ‘Well, whatever you decide to do, you’ll have to get moving. Wherever he goes, he must be out of this place by dawn.’

  I tried to walk out of the room, but gave at the knees and crashed over. My last sight of my cousin was of burning blue eyes, a lower lip bitten until it bled, as I was hauled out, trying to waggle a filthy hand in farewell.

  Better to be myself, being hauled back to the quarries, than Alcibiades, returning to Sparta.

  Dawn was actually an hour past when I was brought back to the quarry entrance again. The noisome stench that came out made me shudder. The two guards stopped, looking at me not altogether unsympathetically.

  ‘Thinking better of it?’ one said. ‘The good-looking chap said to give you a couple of minutes to think.’

  It was a spring morning. The dew was bright on the grass, starred with crimson anemones. A stream was nearby, the water sparkled in the sun. Birds were calling. I supposed I must try to forget all this—that somewhere there was grass and running water and faces that were not doomed, and dust that was different, ordinary dust, the warm white stuff I had loved to play in as a child, dust stirred up by scores of chariot wheels, hundreds of sandalled feet, living feet.

  I stood staring at the patch of ordinary dust where the road branched off to the quarries as if it were all the gold in the Great King’s treasury. My stare, in fact, made my guards uneasy, they squinted in the direction I was looking, saw nothing, so one asked, half nervously, what I was looking at.

  ‘Dust,’ I said.

  ‘He’s off his head,’ came a mutter.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ I said. ‘I’m just reminding myself what ordinary dust looks like. The stuff we get—in there—isn’t like that. It’s old stuff. I think it was old when the world began, and even then it was the dust of death.’

  ‘Here,’ said one of my companions hoarsely, ‘that good-looking chap said something else. He said none of the fellows in there would ever know what happened if you took him up on his offer.’

  I bent down, let some of the nice ordinary dust trickle through my fingers, and then straightened up and, as best I could, squared my bony shoulders.

  ‘Yes, the fellows in there,’ I said. ‘I feel lonely away from them.’

  And I shambled back into the quarry.

  37

  ‘But few out of many ...’

  My return created as much of a sensation as one could expect in that half-way house to Hades. I was greeted as a rather gruesome-looking Persephone. In the brief interval between leaving the sunshine and being in the midst of my friends again, I had wondered what to tell them of my excursion into the outer world; I hurriedly decided to say that it was Gylippus alone that I had seen, and he was interested only—on behalf of his home gove
rnment—in my uncle’s contacts in western Greece, particularly in Messenia. But when the poor reeling skeletons came about me, patting me with bony hands to congratulate me on returning all in one piece, and the whispers came, ‘We’re glad to see you back, Lycius. It’s seemed so long, we’ve been wondering all the time—we couldn’t do anything, that was what was so awful,’ I could only say—and God knows I meant it—‘I’m glad to be back.’ And then I began to giggle. ‘Somebody gave me a mirror,’ I said. ‘You’ve no idea what a—what a sight I am—’ And Ariston croaked, ‘We’ve no idea what sights we are.’ And, incredibly, everyone was laughing, hard, creaking laughter, that was as physically painful as crying. But we went on laughing when I said, ‘Even Gylippus was shocked—because I was so—lousy.’ And the gallant laughter continued. ‘Shocking a Spartan because you’re so lousy—that’s something to tell your grandchildren—poor old Gylippus with his delicacy offended.’

  I told them my story and they accepted it, then I went off to the little corner I’d made my own. I dropped down and wondered how much longer I’d live, and felt glad to be back with faces gaunt as my own—those other faces, the faces of people outside, had been so sickeningly fleshy and ruddy, and the eyes had seemed all wrong. And their voices were too loud.

  But I didn’t ponder over my encounter with the outside world for long; from the moment I re-entered the quarry, the whole episode had a kind of dreamlike quality about it. My chief feeling was regret that it had happened. Otherwise I should have been out of my misery all the sooner.

  But a week later those of us who still survived left the quarries for good.

  They came and yelled at us that we were being taken out to work in the public prison, or perhaps they did not really yell—hunger and weakness distort senses badly; perhaps they spoke in an ordinary way. Hard labour, they said. That made us go off into fits of ghostly mirth again, and the noise scared them more than any angry shouts would have done. The flickering eyes of one of the guards fell on me—I stood out because of my cropped hair—and he said, ‘Tell ’em to shut up!’ I asked myself what Callistratus would have done, and retorted in as loud a voice as possible, ‘If we’re to do hard labour, give us more food.’

  ‘I can’t say anything about that,’ he said, coughing and retching. ‘But for God’s sake tell ’em to get moving out of this stinking place.’

  ‘We’ve never exactly been voluntary guests,’ I said, reflecting this would have provoked fresh cursing from Gylippus about Athenians trying to be funny on their deathbeds.

  And so we who lived crept out into the sun again. We could not bring our dead, but somehow we found the strength to bring with us those too sick to walk, even our dying. The guards objected, but obviously felt there was no point in arguing at length with madmen. We came out slowly, trying, as best we might, to remember that soldiers, even if defeated soldiers, had gone in. Most of us, of course, didn’t believe it was really happening, it was another dream, for our feet were heavy as lead, seeming to drag back at every step, and strange voices echoed about us, sounding at one and the same time both too loud and too distant.

  Outside, the magistrates of Syracuse and other prominent citizens awaited us, flanked by scores of guards. I imagine they had come to make speeches at us, but at first they were unable to speak. The look of incredulous horror on their faces was funny in its way; one of them, to our great pleasure, keeled over in a dead faint at the sight of us.

  Eventually they told us all over again that we were to work in the public prison—hard labour. We all laughed again too, but by this time I was beginning to take my cues in the comedy properly, so I repeated my line about increased food. The chief magistrate asked, ‘Who are you?’ and I said, ‘The son of Polystratus—Demosthenes was my uncle.’

  He started to say, ‘Impossible, the nephew of Demosthenes, if you mean the one captured at the gates of Syracuse, was a young man—’

  I grinned, as a skeleton should grin, and said, ‘I celebrated my twenty-fourth birthday in your quarries.’

  My rather marked transformation did not embarrass me as much as it embarrassed him, but then, I had lived with the transforming process.

  Then they marched us off, presumably towards Syracuse. Crowds watched in silence; if the sight of me had left even Alcibiades speechless, the sight of a few hundred Gorgon heads was more than likely to lead to silence all round. I think only two remarks were made to us, and both came from children.

  One small boy, held up in a green-faced father’s arms, said, ‘Hi! Is that all of you? I don’t think much of this—they said there’d be hundreds and thousands of you, a regular procession!’

  I said, ‘There were seven thousand of us six months ago; ask your father why the others aren’t with us,’ and left the boy trying to calculate aloud how many of us were missing; I don’t think the people about him liked those calculations very much.

  And then another childish voice cried in all innocence, and no malice, ‘Did you think you could capture Syracuse?’ and Ariston replied very gently, ‘We would have done it too, child, only the gods chose otherwise.’

  As we entered the city, I saw something rather odd in the crowds lining the street; hitherto, as I have said, they had been the well-to-do, and the men had nearly all been above military age. It was different outside the prison; there I saw rank upon rank of young men. I whispered to Ariston, who raised his head and gave a calculating glance.

  ‘Trouble?’ he said.

  ‘I don’t know. We’d better warn the others to prepare for anything.’

  ‘That’s one thing life in the quarries does for you; the prospect of getting torn limb from limb doesn’t scare so much now,’ said Ariston equably.

  There was a line of guards keeping the crowds back; they wouldn’t be able to manage it if the hefty boys near the prison started shoving in real earnest, and—I caught a sudden flash as the sun glinted for a betraying moment on steel.

  ‘They’re armed,’ I muttered.

  ‘Well,’ said Ariston, as the line of guards bent before the swaying mass, rallied for a moment, broke for good, ‘if I see any good clean steel coming towards me, I’m jumping forward and putting myself straight in its way. I’ve had enough of—’

  But the steel was for use only on the mercenary guards—weapons were sheathed as the owners came rushing towards us, young hands grabbed us urgently, violently, but not to kill us, to drag us, not limb from limb, but away from the guards, and a young man whose face I vaguely remembered was hauling me along, arm about my shoulders, babbling, ‘Lycius—it is Lycius, isn’t it? I was looking for you, but I’d never have known you if I hadn’t the message about your hair being cut—I’d never have known you . . .’ He kept repeating this in horror, until I gasped how did he know my hair was cut?

  ‘Quick,’ he said. ‘Here are the horses. Let’s get away out of the city first, then I’ll tell you.’ He added apologetically, ‘Yours is a very quiet animal.’

  Quiet she was, but too tough an assignment for me. I think that practically broke his romantic heart, that for the second time the dashing Athenian cavalryman confessed he might fall off the most docile of beasts.

  ‘Get up behind me then,’ he said, ‘and hold on. Can you manage that?’

  They had to hoist me up and dump me in the saddle like a sack of meal, but I managed to cling on to him, and then Thibron—yes, that was the name—began his breathless recital, how the tall man with the red-gold hair and the blue eyes had come to him and his friends one night and said he was in Syracuse for only a matter of hours, but long enough to start things moving so that the Athenian survivors were brought out of the quarries to work in the prison.

  ‘How could you start things moving?’ Thibron had said suspiciously. ‘You sound like an Athenian yourself.’

  ‘I have a few trinkets left; Gylippus, the Spartan, doesn’t give a fig for the exquisite workmanship, but he likes the precious metal content. If I want him to do anything, I have to press a few more craftsmen�
�s masterpieces into his ugly fist. Half a dozen paid my passage to Syracuse; a few more have induced him to go to the magistrates and suggest Syracuse would make more out of the prisoners if they were doing hard labour here in the town. They still listen to him to a certain extent, and his simple soldierly appeal to their pockets should be successful.’

  ‘Why do you come to us?’ said Thibron, his hand on his dagger. One of his friends got up and put his back against the door. The blue-eyed man laughed. ‘Earlier on Gylippus had told me a huge joke,’ he said. ‘Athenians had evaded capture because Syracusan boys sheltered them—in return for hearing choruses from Euripides. So I made enquiries as to which young gentlemen were the most fanatical devotees of Euripides, and your name was mentioned at once, so I’ve come—’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘First to tell you what’s being proposed; secondly, to ask a favour—I’m not used to asking favours, but I may soon be able to repay you—with advantage.’

  ‘The favour was, that we’d get you away,’ said Thibron. ‘The moment he mentioned your name, I said, “Lycius! Is he still alive? Of course I’ll get him away somehow—you needn’t describe him!” But he kept saying I must remember you’d be the only one with cropped hair—“That’ll be the only way you’d recognise him,” he kept saying. I know now what he meant,’ said Thibron wretchedly.

  After a moment he said, ‘He was an Athenian, wasn’t he?’

  ‘He’s my cousin,’ I said carefully. ‘We’ve been on bad terms for some time, but—well, there’s a family feeling, I suppose.’

  ‘I asked him if he wanted me to pass on any message,’ resumed Thibron. ‘He said, no, except that he’d rather like you to have the last trinket he had left, all the others had gone to get Gylippus to put his idea before the magistrates, but he’d kept one specially for you. I have it here. Look, I’ll stop the horse and you can sit in the shade of this tree for a breather. I’ll help you down.’

  I fell off the horse like an old, old man; he sat me under the shade of a plane tree, gave me a little golden grasshopper. I stared at it as if I’d never seen it before; yes, he would hold on to those particular trinkets to the last. They would symbolise so much to him.