The Walled Orchard

by Tom Holt

  THE WALLED ORCHARD

  CHAPTER ONE

  We Athenians despise optimists, but we occasionally perpetrate unintentional optimism in the sacred name of shrewdness. For example: Dexitheus the bookseller commissioned me to write the history of my times for three hundred drachmas, at a time when History seemed to be the coming thing and paper was cheap. I settled down to my task and was happily scribbling away when he came to me and suggested that, since my life had clearly been so fascinating and packed with incident, it would be a good idea to publish my history in two volumes. Being somewhat over sceptical as a result of this long and fascinating life of mine, I assumed that he wanted to sell two volumes at a drachma each rather than one long one at one drachma three obols, and agreed. After all, it suited me fine, since I anticipated that Dexitheus would be left with a lot of copies of my first volume on his hands and would abandon the idea of a second, and that I would therefore get three hundred drachmas for half the work.

  Well, nothing definite has been said about the matter, but I believe Dexitheus still has plenty of Volume One taking up space in his barn at Gholleidae and getting nibbled by mice; but he has just come bounding back asking me how far I’ve got with Volume Two, and making vague breach-of-contract noises when he hears that I haven’t actually started yet. What his clever little soul is saying to him is that if enough people buy Volume Two, they’ll want to buy Volume One to catch up on the first part of the story, and then he’ll have some space in his barns again to put his winter barley in once it’s cut.

  Personally, I think Dexitheus’ reasoning is somewhat flawed, but far be it from me to argue with a man as depressingly litigious as Dexitheus of Cholleidae. I only mention this sordid little detail as an illustration of the Athenian character, and in particular my fellow citizens’ obsession with cleverness.

  You will understand the relevance of this if you’ve just finished reading Volume One, and recall that I broke my narrative at the point at which the great Sicilian Expedition was about to set sail. But I don’t suppose you have, so in order to do my duty by Dexitheus and the Muse of History, I will now give a very brief epitome of what is contained in the first roll. Once you have read this, you will immediately want to read it, and so before I begin I must just tell you that Dexitheus’ stall in the Market Square is just to the left of the shield-maker’s stands as you come in from the Acropolis past the Mint. Say Eupolis sent you.

  I, Eupolis of Pallene, the Comic playwright, was born thirty-eight years after the defeat of the Persian fleet at Salamis, and eleven years before the outbreak of the Great Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. I lived through the plague which killed the celebrated Pericles, catching the disease myself but being cured of it by the God Dionysus, and in my twentieth year I presented my first Comic play at the Dramatic Festivals, which came third out of three. I was not put off, and eventually won first prize with Maricas, which is undoubtedly the best Comic play ever written. By this stage I was married to one Phaedra daughter of Theocrates, whose temper was so filthy she made Medusa look like a kitten. At first we didn’t get on terribly well, but shortly before the start of this volume she had had her very beautiful face kicked in by a mule, leaving her looking as well as sounding like Medusa, after which her behaviour towards me became rather less ferocious.

  While all this was going on, Athens had been getting further and further into the Great Peloponnesian War; and, after the short, brilliant and disastrous career of the celebrated Cleon, had fallen under the spell of the celebrated Alcibiades. This Alcibiades had hit on the idea of conquering the fabulously rich island of Sicily as a means of replenishing our depleted exchequer, and had so filled the heads of his fellow Athenians with his idea that everyone, even I, wanted to be part of it. A great expedition was organised, and a huge army was raised, in which every man in Athens except me and a few people with only one leg seemed to be enlisted. I was livid at not being allowed to go, but on balance this didn’t seem to worry our leaders terribly much. Then, the night before the fleet was due to sail, a group of drunks (including my rival Comic poet and evil spirit Aristophanes son of Philip) smashed up all the little statues of Hermes in the City, causing a wave of superstitious hysteria. I was about the only eye-witness to this, by the way. For some reason which defies logical analysis, the Athenian people decided that Alcibiades was behind the sacrilege; but, not wanting to be deprived of their treat, voted that Alcibiades should continue to lead the Sicilian Expedition, subject to his coming back to Athens after it was all over to be impartially tried and executed for blasphemy.

  If that is not a complete summary of Volume One it will do to be going on with, and I think you have a general idea of who everyone is. Various other points to note, such as the fact that Aristophanes and I had been generally getting in each other’s way and on each other’s nerves since childhood, and that Aristophanes had an affair with my wife before her face got kicked in, will no doubt emerge from context, and you will guess without my having to tell you that the Callicrates who occasionally crops up was the son of my uncle Philodemus (who looked after me since I was orphaned by the plague as a boy) and general guardian angel, and that the curious person named Little Zeus was a hanger-on I acquired in the course of my boyhood as a result of a rash promise to plant out his tiny and unproductive holding of three acres in vines for him as soon as the War was over. I certainly won’t insult your deductive powers and general knowledge of Athenian history by telling you who Nicias and Demosthenes are, or how I came to be quite comfortably off and a member of the cavalry class by virtue of inheriting land from relatives who died in the plague. Now then, about Alcibiades.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Alcibiades was not a fool. He jumped ship as soon as he could and hurried off to Sparta, where they were very pleased to see him. The Athenians consoled themselves for his loss by holding his trial in absentia, which was almost as much fun as if he had been there. They didn’t get to hear him speak, of course, which was sad, but on the other hand they were able to find him guilty (which might have been tricky had he been present) and so prove conclusively that it was indeed he who mutilated the statues.

  The fleet carried on, with Nicias now the overall commander, and at home we waited anxiously for the news of the fall of Syracuse. But weeks passed, and no news came, and so we forgot about Sicily and started grumbling about how empty the City was these days, and how difficult it was to get together enough people for a dinner-party. The weeks turned into months, and still no news, until everyone in the Market Square was convinced that Nicias had finished in Sicily and moved on to the Golden Isles or the Islands of Perpetual Rain.

  The money that our loyal Sicilian allies promised us didn’t arrive, either, and we soon found out why. You remember that Alcibiades’ messengers had been entertained in private houses where everything was made of silver; well, the Sicilians had been clever there. A week or so before the messengers arrived, they had been all round the cities requisitioning every silver object they could find, and every single piece of coined money, and they had put on a special show for their Athenian guests. Then, when the messengers moved on to the next city, the silver preceded them, and the Sicilians prayed that the Athenians wouldn’t wonder why the silverware in Egesta looked so very like the silverware in Catana. As for public treasuries, they had covered the floor with figs and stones, and spread the coined money very thinly over the top, except for the areas near the doors.

  After we had got over our initial fury at being outwitted by the Sicilians, we decided to put the whole thing down to colonial high spirits and forget about it; after all, the treasury of Athena in the Acropolis was full of coined silver, and it wasn’t as if we were spending the money; rather, we were investing it, and a few hundred talents was a cheap price to pay for mastery of the world and the destruction of Sparta. But that, together with the Alcibiades business and the lack of reports of glorious successes, set people worrying about the project in a way that they had not worried before. But n
obody, not even the most paranoid of us, thought for a moment that the expedition should be recalled; only that someone somewhere ought to be punished for something at some time. This was so close to our normal state of mind that we soon stopped discussing it. Then a letter arrived from Nicias which was quite different from his earlier, utterly uninformative despatches.

  There is an art to writing military despatches, I suppose; my favourite is one supposed to have been sent by a Spartan officer later on in the War, which went something like, ‘Ships all sunk. General dead. Soldiers starving. Haven’t the faintest idea what to do next. Advise.’ Nicias’ letter was longer than that, but not much more cheerful.

  According to his letter, he had spent the time since his arrival in Sicily building walls. I knew from my own experiences in Samos how much the military mind loves a good wall, especially if it goes nowhere and gets under the feet of the infantry. It gives a man a sense of achievement to be able to point to a wall and say, ‘I built that’; and since (according to Nicias’ letter) there was nothing else he could hope to achieve in Sicily, I could understand why he had occupied his time in that particular way.

  The truth behind Nicias’ letter was that he was in a hopeless mess. Because he had been his usual cautious, painstaking self, he had given the Syracusans plenty of time to sort out their internal problems (they killed a few people, I believe, which seemed to solve everything) and they had presented a united and resolute front to the invading army. They also had promises of help from our enemies in Greece, and the Spartans were sending them a general. The worst thing about it all was that there were rather more Syracusans than we had been led to believe, and they were by no means incompetent when it came to the arts of land and sea warfare. Nicias’ only intelligent colleague, a brave and fairly honest man called Lamachus, had been killed, and the General could see no way of achieving his mission without substantial divine intervention — a plague, say, or a large-scale earthquake. Obviously the sensible thing was to call it a day and go home; but if he tried that, he would be in court on a capital charge before he had time to take off his helmet. His only chance of being around to taste the next vintage was if he was actually recalled; then at least he could say (at his trial) that he had been just about to trample the towers of Syracuse level with the mud when the Paralia had drawn up on the beach with his marching orders.

  So, being Nicias, he tried the tactic he had used the first time, and which had gone so disastrously wrong. He begged to inform the people that, in order to do the job he had been sent out to do, he needed twice as many ships and twice as many men, and every four-drachma piece in Attica and the Empire, plus a colleague or two to help him with the command, plus could he please come home now, because his kidney trouble made it impossible to do his job properly? He realised that if the forces he had requested were sent to him, Athens would be emptied of men, almost entirely without any form of shipping larger than a lobster-boat, and bankrupt; but if Athens wanted Sicily, that was what it would take.

  Oh my beloved city. You listened to the letter of Nicias, you made a few speeches, you coined a few clever phrases, and you sent Nicias everything he had asked for, except his recall. I think it was only then that I realised the true extent of your power and your wealth and your resources of ships and men, and your imperishable stupidity. To have mounted an expedition like the first fleet would be beyond any city or confederation of cities today; but to raise and man a fleet bigger even than that, and to send it out on the strength of a single letter from an idiot — that was an act of such magnificent folly that no man can ever blame you for it. It surpasses even the lunacy of the Persians. And to wage this war thoroughly, to the death, to the last drop of blood, you called on the brilliant Demosthenes, your ablest general, and sent Eupolis son of Euchorus, of the deme of Pallene — and five thousand or so others — to help him do it.

  ‘For God’s sake, woman, stop fussing,’ I said to Phaedra as I prepared to set out for Piraeus, ‘and don’t worry, please. We’ll be back before you know we’ve gone.’

  ‘You keep saying don’t worry,’ she said, packing my ration-bag tightly into my shield, ‘and I’m not worrying at all. If anyone’s worried, it’s you. Now are you sure you’ve got everything?’

  ‘Of course I’ve got everything.’

  ‘Spare blankets?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Clean tunic?’ ‘Yes.’

  ‘Needle and thread?’ ‘Yes.’

  ‘Spare helmet liner?’

  ‘Oh hell, no. I knew I’d forgotten something.’

  She grinned triumphantly. ‘I’ve packed it in with your food. It’ll smell of cheese rather a lot, but you won’t mind that.’

  ‘You bitch,’ I said, ‘you did it on purpose.’

  I looked out of the door. The sky was growing pink, it would soon be dawn.

  ‘Hector didn’t call his wife a bitch when he went out to fight,’ said Phaedra.

  ‘But Andromache was a sweet, loving and good wife,’ I replied, ‘and you’re a bitch.’

  ‘That would account for it,’ she said.

  I frowned. ‘Don’t you want to have the last word, Phaedra?’ I said. ‘That’s unlike you.’

  She smiled. ‘I’ll have it when you come home,’ she said. ‘I’ll pass the time by thinking of nasty things to say to you when you come back. Oh, Eupolis, you do look silly in your armour.’

  ‘I feel silly,’ I said, shaking my head to make my plume nod. ‘Whoever first thought of putting bits of horsehair on top of helmets has a lot to answer for. Be good.’

  ‘I will,’ she said, ‘then I can be bad when you get home. You will come home, won’t you?’

  ‘Now I say “Yes” and you say “Pity”?’

  ‘That’s right.’ She kissed me, and pulled my helmet down over my face. ‘Now get on, or you’ll be late, and I’d be ashamed if my husband was the only man in Athens to miss the boat.’

  Then she pushed me out of the door and slammed it, and I walked away as quickly as I could, without turning my head.

  On my way to Piraeus I bumped into Callicrates —literally, since my helmet had fallen down over my eyes, and I couldn’t see where I was going. For a moment I didn’t recognise the man in armour on the hem of whose cloak I had just trodden; but as soon as he cursed me for being a clumsy idiot I recognised his voice.

  ‘Callicrates!’ I said. ‘What are you doing dressed like that?’

  ‘Is that Eupolis under that chamber-pot?’ He lifted the helmet up. ‘I was just coming to find you. I thought we could go down to Piraeus together.’

  I stared at him. ‘Are you coming to Sicily too?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Late addition to the list this morning. They wanted to make up the numbers.’

  I was so delighted I hardly knew what to say. ‘Why, that’s marvellous!’ I cried. ‘I’m so pleased.’

  Callicrates frowned at me, just as he used to when I was young and did something stupid. ‘Why?’ he said. ‘What harm have I ever done you?’

  ‘But don’t you want to go, Callicrates?’ I said, mystified. But he only shook his head, so that the plume on his helmet nodded.

  The nearer we came to the docks, the more crowded the streets became; and I have never seen such a curious spectacle. It was like a cross between a pageant and a funeral. There were dancers and flute-players and women handing out garlands, and next to them wives and mothers dressed in mourning, wailing and shrieking as their men tried to prise their fingers off the hems of their cloaks. There were sausage-sellers, and jobbing poets, and painters with trestle tables offering to do a five-minute portrait of the departing hero on a wine-jar or oil-flask for a drachma, and next to them old women from the country selling charms to avert evil; and spear-polishers and crest-makers and while-you-wait shield menders, and fortune-tellers and sprat-sellers (in case anyone had forgotten to bring his rations); and creditors waiting for their debtors, and moneylenders, and men offering to take short leases on land, and lan
dlords wanting their rent, and merchants buying options on shares of loot, and old soldiers promising to tell you everything there is to know about Sicily for an obol. And, directly underneath the most magnificent plume you ever saw in your life, Aristophanes son of Philip, giving last-minute instructions to his Chorus-trainer about the two plays that he had committed to him in case he wasn’t back in time to see to them himself.

  Callicrates and I avoided him as best we could — he was in a different regiment sailing on a different ship —and took our places in the line for our names to be pricked down. As I stood there, I saw a head towering over all the others. It was topped by a battered green helmet that had probably last seen action when Themistocles was General, and it was reciting a passage from the Seven Against Thebes to a somewhat restless audience.

  I asked Callicrates to keep my place for me, and went to see. Sure enough, there was Little Zeus, in fine voice and a suit of armour that was far too small for him. As soon as he saw me he broke off in mid-strophe and called out my name in a voice that must have shaken the trees on Parnes.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked. ‘I thought you went with the first fleet.’

  ‘The idiots,’ he said passionately, ‘the wretched, miserable fools at the Polemarch’s office, wouldn’t let me go. They said my armour wasn’t good enough, would you believe.’

  “Well,’ I said, ‘it’s not exactly pristine, is it?’

  ‘This is my new armour,’ he said coldly. ‘It cost me twenty drachmas and a yearling goat, every last coin I had. A complete waste of money, I may say — there was nothing at all wrong with my old armour, nothing at all. The helmet belonged to my great-great-grandfather, who wore it before the Persians came.’

  I couldn’t think what to say to that. Luckily, I didn’t have an opportunity to say anything.

  ‘But I look upon it as an investment,’ Little Zeus continued. ‘At last, I promise you, I’ll be able to pay off my debt to you. On my word of honour.’