by Colm Toibin
They moved warily in the direction of the house, which was down a long dirt track with olive trees on each side. There were no animal sounds at all and a sense after each step that this holding they were approaching had been abandoned a long time before.
As Orestes sat in the shade, the guards walked around the house, one of them exclaiming when he saw the well, situated at the side. The house, Orestes saw, was in good condition. The guards pushed the door and they went in.
Suddenly, there was a sound from inside, a sound of wood being smashed and then a woman’s cry and a man’s loud voice, and then the guards shouting instructions to someone to walk out now, to stand in front of the house. Orestes stood up as a couple, dishevelled and frightened, emerged, both of them talking at the same time to the guards. As one of the guards told the pair to be silent, the other entered the house again and came back out with a large ceramic jug of water and a cup. He handed the cup to the man and told him to fill it from the jug and drink it.
As the man drank the water, Orestes felt sick and his stomach began to suffer spasms. He tried to stay still but he found himself having to retch into a bush away from the others. When he returned, all he wanted was water. As he went to drink from the jug, one of the guards warned him to wait and told him gruffly that it was possible that the poison, were it in the water, would take time to manifest itself. They would sit and wait, and if, after a time, all was well, they would each drink from the jug. But not until then.
The woman and the man stood, both staring at the ground, as the two guards, who had moved into the shade, watched them. Orestes sat in the doorway. Even though no one spoke, it was clear to Orestes that the couple who had been discovered in the house were terrified, the man as much as the woman. He wondered if the water he had drunk had been, in fact, poisoned, and they were waiting for the signs of this to show.
Eventually, since the water had not poisoned the man, the two guards drank cup after cup so greedily that Orestes wanted to ask them if they had forgotten about him. Now that water was available, he was not sure if he could ever have enough of it. He walked instantly towards the jug when one of the guards indicated to him that he should. They had left enough for two cups for him. When he had drunk the second cup, he tilted the jug to get every drop from it.
Once he had finished, he looked over and saw one of the guards looking down the well. The guard then motioned to the man, ordering him to draw him more water from the well. Maybe, Orestes thought, they would be able to carry water with them, or perhaps spend the evening here in this house, or even a day or two. No matter what, he thought, they would need more water. The man stood by the well and tied the jug to a rope and lowered it down as the others looked on. Orestes noticed that the woman was even more nervous now than she had been before. She kept her hands by her sides, but her eyes shifted from one of the guards to the other and then to the house.
When the jug emerged from the well, the guard whom Orestes disliked handed the man the cup and told him to drink some. The man glanced at him proudly, as though he himself were the one in control. He did not speak. He then looked towards his wife. At that moment, as all of them were concentrating on the man and the jug, a number of children ran from the front door of the house as the mother screamed at them, encouraging them to run faster. There were four of them, three boys and a girl. Two of the boys and the girl managed to get away before the guards could properly follow, but the youngest of the boys – Orestes guessed he was four or five – was caught by one of the guards and dragged back and put standing beside his mother. He was crying loudly, words that Orestes could not understand, as the guard returned and stood beside the well.
Orestes started to cry too. He wondered if he should also try to run, follow the children, see where they had gone. He might, he thought, be able to explain to them who he was and where he had come from.
‘Drink the water,’ he heard the guard say to the man.
He watched as the man hesitated and looked at his wife.
‘One of you is going to drink the water,’ the guard said, and walked over and grabbed the boy.
‘Let the child drink the water if you are afraid to,’ he continued.
The mother, crying now, moved to take the boy away from the well.
‘Drink!’ the guard said. ‘I want to see you drain that cup. Fill it now and drink.’
Still the man would not fill the cup that he held in his hand. He looked to the distance as if help might come, or something might happen. He stood to his full height and the expression on his face became more tense and severe. He and his wife looked at each other as his wife lifted the child and held him higher in her arms.
‘If you don’t drink,’ the guard said, ‘I will bring your boy over here again and I will force a cupful of that water down his throat.’
The man appeared deep in thought. Even the child was quiet now. With an expression of dignity on his face, the man filled the cup. He held it in his hand and then he sighed and drank the water down in one gulp. Once he had done that, he walked towards his wife and child, rubbing the small boy’s hair and then stroking his wife’s head. With his other hand, he held his wife’s hand.
Slowly, the man separated himself from the woman and the child and started to cough. The sound at first was gentle, but soon it had a harder edge as the man brought his hands to his throat, as though he were choking. Then, as the pain appeared to get worse, he knelt down. He was gasping and calling out words. His wife, who still held the child in her arms, began to sing. Orestes had never heard anything like her voice before. In the palace when the servants sang, the songs were happy, and even at other times when he had heard singing, it was always a group, never a woman alone.
The voice was rising now and an imploring sound came from it. He understood that it was addressed to the gods.
The man was now shrieking in pain; his whole body shuddered as he lay on the ground, his hands around his neck as if he were trying to push the poison from the base of his throat into his mouth so that he could expel it.
He tried to stand up as some black blood came out of his mouth and dripped into the dust. His eyes were rolling in his head and the pain seemed to have shifted from his throat to his stomach. For a while, as Orestes watched in horror, he held his stomach and roared in pain. But then a gurgling froth came from his mouth. He edged towards his wife, who continued her song, holding the child, who remained placid in her arms. The man became more still; then he turned and lay on his back, reaching so that his two hands were firmly around his wife’s ankles.
Both guards stared at this scene. The man’s eyes remained open, and his mouth too, but there was no sound from him, nor from his wife. The song had ended, and it was clear to Orestes that the man had died. One of the guards then motioned to him to come into the house. In the main room, there was a false wall made of wood, and behind the wall there were beds and a table.
They took what food they could – bread and cheese and some cured meat. They found another jug of water, but the guard shook his head, and even though Orestes felt a thirst more intense than the thirst he had while walking, he did not touch the water. Instead, they left the house, walking along the rough path towards the main route, leaving the woman standing with the child in her arms and the dead man below her lying on the ground.
They walked for some miles before they stopped. They sat down in silence and opened the knotted cloth with the food. Even though he had been ravenous, Orestes felt nausea rather than hunger. Without anything to drink, what they had taken from the house looked stale and dry. He watched each of the guards picking up a piece of bread and trying to eat it. None of them touched the cheese or the cured meat. Eventually, the food was wrapped up and they resumed walking until they chose a place to rest for the night in the shelter of some trees.
On the next day, they came to a deep, fast-flowing stream that they studied hesitantly until one of the guards said that if they did not drink from it they would die of thirst. When they had dru
nk, the two guards bathed. Although they encouraged Orestes to follow them, he did not want to take off his clothes in front of them. He watched them cavorting in the water, wondering if there were anywhere close by he could escape to and hide, but he was aware that they kept him in their sights at all times and was sure that they would catch him if he tried to get away.
It struck him now more forcefully than ever before that when he made his way back to the palace, he would tell his father about these two men and, if they had run away, he would ask him to find them, hunt them down, to search everywhere if they had to, and then have them brought to the palace in chains and put into the darkest room in the dungeon.
After two days’ more walking, still avoiding any wells that they came across, Orestes understood that they were not far from their destination, whatever it was. He was certain by now that he was not here because his mother or father had asked the guards to take him to meet them, that he had, in fact, been kidnapped and that there was nothing he could do to escape as long as the two guards were with him.
Although they seemed friendlier, and he imagined they might even tell him where they were going since they were so close, he decided not to ask. He would find out soon enough, he thought.
For the last stretch, they had to climb, and when the path petered out the guards had to guess which way to go, making wrong decisions a number of times and having to double back. For the first time in many days, they passed some goats clambering among the rocks. In the distance, once they got higher, Orestes could make out a flock of sheep on the plain below.
Then there was a huge cleft in the rock. They walked down what was like a sloping corridor and turned where there were steps cut leading down farther and winding around the side of a building. No one, he thought, would be able to find any of them in this fastness in the mountains. When they came to a door, they did not have to knock; it was silently opened for them by a man who did not look at them or speak.
Another man who was sitting outside a second door stood up when he saw them, however, and warmly hugged both of the guards. He began to smile and laugh at the very idea of their presence, and their arrival with this boy.
‘As though we don’t have enough here already,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Maybe this one has better manners than some of those I have inside. Do you see this toe? I have had to kick manners into them, and when that doesn’t work then they feel this.’
The two guards laughed as he lifted a stick he had beside him and whipped the air with it.
‘And hungry too. Is this fellow hungry?’
‘He eats like a horse,’ one of the guards said.
‘We’ll teach him,’ the man said.
He opened the door, which led into a long room full of beds with several long windows that let in shadow more than light. It took Orestes a moment to see that the room was occupied by ten or more boys, many of them close to his own age. Immediately, when he saw them, he knew that these were the boys who had been kidnapped. What was strange was that although they must, he presumed, have heard the door opening and must even have heard the voices outside before that, and must now be aware that someone new had come among them, none of them looked up at first, and when a few did lift their heads, they did not change the expression on their faces or seem to register anything at all.
No one spoke as he walked between the beds. Slowly, beginning with a boy called Leander, the grandson of Theodotus, whom he knew, he started to recognize some of them.
The door was closed. The guards had not come in with him. He was alone with this silent, pale group. When he locked eyes with one of them, he found a blank stare that became sullen and resentful. He moved towards Leander’s bed and thought to ask him something, but Leander turned away. Eventually, he sat on the floor at the end of a row of beds and looked around the room, wondering at what point someone would speak, or food would come, or something would happen. The silence was broken only by the sound of one of the boys coughing, a rasping cough that seemed not to be able to give whoever was coughing any relief.
Nothing happened until the smell of cooking rose from the floor below, which caused some of the boys to sit up in their beds. But still no one spoke. When Orestes walked back to the door, all of the boys turned away from him once more. He wondered if they did not actually recognize him, or if they thought that he was allied with the kidnappers.
When the door was finally opened, the boys walked to the floor below in single file, each with his head bowed. The only one who lifted his head as he passed Orestes was Leander. He looked at him for a moment and then shrugged. Once the line had passed him, Orestes joined the end of it, walking down narrow stairs to a cramped dining room with one long table where most of the boys sat, and a smaller table by a window where two of the boys placed themselves. One of them was coughing. It was the same sound that he had heard upstairs; he could see that the boy, whom he did not recognize, was in some distress, and that the coughing was causing him pain and raising the level of tension in the dining room.
Orestes watched the doorway to the kitchen, but no one appeared. Instead, two of the boys came with food that was passed down the table. As he took his place at the end, he saw that nothing was being given to the boy who had been coughing or the other boy at the side table. The rest all ate in silence. He concentrated on each boy on the opposite side in turn, trying to attract a glimmer of recognition from at least one of them, but those who noticed him staring returned only a deadened glance.
When they had finished eating, they stood and walked in single file back to the dormitory, Orestes following.
Since there was no bed for him, he found a place on the floor to lie down. He was woken a few times in the night by the sound of coughing and then finally, in the morning, he was woken again by the boys all around him. When he asked one of them where he should go to relieve himself, the boy did not reply and those close by edged away from him, concerned, it seemed, to stop him approaching them.
When he went to the door, he found it open. The guard whom he had encountered the previous day was sitting outside.
‘You,’ he said. ‘Two things. You go to the baths this morning. You stink like an old nanny-goat. You get fresh clothes with the others. Leave your old clothes there. And you need a slate. You keep the slate beside you at all times.’
‘What’s the slate for?’ Orestes asked.
‘You’ll find out soon enough,’ the man laughed. ‘So, you, to the baths now, this second.’
‘Where are the baths?’ Orestes asked.
‘Down the stairs here, and then down the next stairs. It will be better for you and everyone when you get rid of that smell.’
Having walked down the two flights of stairs, he saw that four of the boys were already in the baths. As he stood watching in the raked light that came from a slit in the side of the wall, two of them were whispering to each other, while the other two splashed the water vigorously, which muffled the sound. At first they did not notice him as he quietly removed his clothes. When he made to get into the bath with them, the two who had been whispering moved away from each other. All four of them looked straight ahead. He wanted to let them know that he would not tell the guard that they had been whispering, but it struck him that his speaking at all would merely increase their hostility towards him. Soon, all four left the bath, drying themselves in a space in the corner.
Once he was finished in the baths and had dried himself with one of the towels the others had left, he went upstairs to find the guard, who handed him some clothes and a piece of slate and a piece of chalk.
The guard walked with him through the dormitory and found him an empty space and then detailed two of the boys to help him carry from one of the lower floors a bed that he could use. As Orestes stood there in the fresh clothes, the slate in his hand, some of the boys were actually paying attention to him, looking at him closely. But when he nodded at one of them, the boy turned away.
The days went slowly and mostly silently. Three times a day the
y shuffled down to the refectory. Once a week, they could use the baths. In the baths, two made splashing noises with the water that enabled two others to whisper without being heard. This was, as far as he could make out, the only time the boys ever spoke to one another. Sometimes, in the night, he could hear boys howling and crying in their sleep, and, some of the time, the boy with the cough made a further rasping sound and then struggled loudly for breath, and this noise continued even after the guard, who sat through the night outside the door that led to the dormitory, came in and shook the boy or slapped him.
And then there was the slate. Slates had to be left at all times beside each bed so that they could be clearly seen. For any infringement of the rules, each boy had a mark on his slate, and this mark could be placed there only by a fellow captive, who would also place a symbol to identify himself. It took Orestes some weeks to work out the full details of this, as he never once saw a boy marking another’s slate. It must have been done in the night, he realized, but even on nights when he was awake he did not witness it.
At intervals there was an inspection, led by the guard whom Orestes had first met, but it could include one or two other guards. They would check the slates and then select the boys who had marks on their slates for punishment. These boys were taken outside or down into the dining room or the baths but sometimes also right outside the door. The severity of the beatings did not concur with the number of marks on the slate, but depended on the mood of the guards. Nonetheless, having a number of marks on your slate meant that you were more likely to be taken out and punished than if you had a clean slate, or very few marks.
But, Orestes noted, no matter how few marks the boy with the cough, whose name he discovered was Mitros, had, he would always be taken out. When he returned, he lay on his bed crying and then coughing until the two sounds merged.
As the marks on Orestes’ slate began to accumulate, he could not work out to whom the symbol beside the mark belonged. The mark was always made by the same person, put there during the night. Finally, one morning, as he studied the symbol, he noticed Leander looking at him. As Orestes knit his brow and then glanced up as if to ask if the symbol belonged to Leander, Leander nodded. A few times subsequently, Orestes tried to catch Leander’s eye, but Leander paid him no further attention.