The Walled Orchard

by Tom Holt

  ‘I do wish you’d forget about that—’ I started to say.

  And you’re really coming too?’ he continued. ‘You’re sailing with us?’

  ‘Yes,’ I replied.

  ‘That’s the best news I’ve heard all month,’ said Little Zeus. ‘Now I know everything will be all right. And we’re in the same regiment, of course; why didn’t I think of that before? It’ll be just like that time in Samos, when you killed the enemy champion and saved my life.’

  People were looking round and pointing, and I could feel my face burning with embarrassment. ‘Keep your voice down,’ I muttered, but it was too late.

  ‘What’s that you said?’ asked one of the men next to us. ‘Is this bloke some sort of hero then?’

  ‘Was that Pericles’ campaign in Samos?’ asked another.

  ‘Who is he, anyway?’ said a third. ‘Hey, Crito, come over here. There’s a man here killed a general in Samos and saved the entire fleet.’

  I made an attempt to slip away, but it was too late. Little Zeus was answering questions from all sides, confirming that I was indeed a hero, and that they were all lucky men to be in the same regiment. It was several weeks before I was able to live it down.

  In case any of you have ignored my earlier excellent advice and haven’t yet secured a copy of the first half of these memoirs of mine (Dexitheus informs me, by the way, that he still can’t see the floor of his barn for copies of it, but that the mice seem to enjoy it tremendously, which is one of the nicest things anyone has ever said about anything I’ve written), I should make it plain that I didn’t actually kill a general in Samos. I did kill a Samian of sorts, in circumstances that would have been very funny but for the blood and loss of life, and anybody with the sensitivity of one of those thick-skinned Egyptian animals, who live in rivers and whose name escapes me for the moment, would have taken particular care to see that the subject was never mentioned in my presence again. But that was Little Zeus for you.

  We boarded the ships, and stowed our equipment as best we could, and waved and shouted to the people on the quayside; and then we were off. We were going to Sicily.

  Except that we went the long way round. First, we had to meet up with Demosthenes, who was chasing round Laconia with the Operational Fleet; and, Demosthenes being Demosthenes, he couldn’t resist a few little diversions on the way.

  The idea was that we should raise a few troops here and there, on the principle that you can never have enough men, so we scooped up some Argives, who didn’t really want to come but didn’t like to refuse; then, since we happened to be passing Laconia, we stopped off and spent a pleasant few days chopping down olive trees, rooting up vines, and generally getting our own back for what the Spartans had been doing to us since we were all children. It’s a strange feeling for a farmer to destroy vines and trees. At first, you don’t enjoy it at all, but after a while you get into the spirit of the thing and it becomes immensely entertaining. I got the feeling that I was venting my fury not only on the Spartans but also on the recalcitrant, perverse and incomprehensible Spirit of Nature, which torments anyone who lives by growing things. ‘Take that,’ I found myself saying as I put an axe to a fig tree, ‘that’ll teach you to get blight and leaf-rot for no readily apparent reason.’

  While we were there, we also fortified a little isthmus as a safe haven for runaway helots, and then sailed on towards Corcyra, stopping on the way to sink a Corinthian ship at Pheia and take on more heavy infantry at Zacynthus and Cephallenia, while Demosthenes went off collecting light infantry in Acarnania. Do I sound, by the way, as if I know where all these places are? That would be misleading. The fact that I have been somewhere does not necessarily mean that I know where it is, or anything about it at all. The truth is that we Athenians are not great geographers, although we claim to be. In Assembly, listen gravely to the Great Men discussing the strategic value of Caulonia, or the implications of the situation at Syme for the route to Cnidus, and we vote for whoever speaks best; we haven’t the faintest idea where Syme is, any of us, but not one of us would admit this for a second.

  After Corcyra, then, we went to the Iapygian Promontory, the Choerades (which, I am reliably informed, are islands quite close to the Iapygian Promontory), and Metapontum, which is somewhere in Italy. On the way we gathered a great host of outlandish-looking people, including a number of Italian Savages, before dropping in at Thuria (I have not the faintest idea where Thuria is). There, or somewhere quite like it, we landed and had a parade, marched about for a while until the locals politely asked us to go away, and then sailed on to a place called Petra. At every place we stopped we took on yet more reinforcements, until nobody could quite remember who we had with us, let alone why. But in the end I think we had about seventy-three ships, seven or eight thousand heavy infantry (Athenian and foreign) and goodness knows how many light-armed troops, savages as well as Greeks, when we sailed up to Nicias’ camp outside Syracuse one fine morning. We were feeling supremely confident after our journey, which had been more like a holiday than an expedition, and we felt that not even the gods could stop us now.

  The shore was lined with men waiting to greet us. We saw the flash of their shields long before we made land, and immediately started waving and shouting. Some of the men on the deck with me were looking out for friends and relatives, others were searching for the piles of loot and captured weapons which we all expected to see; everyone else was looking out for the smoke of the cooking-fires. Because we had taken on more troops than we had expected in Italy and all those other places, the supplies of food had started to wear a little bit thin; and although we were by no means hungry, none of us would have refused a large meal by that stage. And what we had seen of Sicily from the sea — one enormous wheat field, trimmed at the edges with vineyards and topped off with the olive groves that go right the way up the few mountains they have on the island — was enough to make anyone salivate, let alone men like us who scratched about in the dust on the side of the mountains of Attica. The general consensus was that we would be greeted with tureens of pea soup, followed by roast mutton with mountains of white bread, huge square chunks of cheese and heaped dishes of beans, washed down with neat wine and milk. A considerable minority wanted to add roast thrush, tunny and eels, but the rest of us were not convinced, despite their eloquence.

  But when at last we were close enough to see the men on the shore, we started to worry. They didn’t look like a conquering army somehow; more like a crowd of slaves just coming out from a shift in a big workshop, or down the silver mines. Only a few ran out to meet us; the rest just stood and watched, without moving, as if we were a vaguely interesting spectacle but nothing to do with them; and those that did come seemed to be shouting something about food, and which ships were carrying it, and did we need any help unloading it? So instead of jumping out into the sea and wading or swimming ashore, we waited until the ships had stopped moving and the taxiarchs told us to disembark.

  I recognised a face among the men standing on the beach — Callippus, a man from Pallene from whom I had once bought a diseased goat — and as soon as I had answered to my name I slipped out of line to talk to him. I greeted him cheerfully and asked him how things were.

  ‘Terrible,’ he said, without any visible emotion — he seemed totally uninterested in any of what was going on —’particularly after the sea—battle yesterday.’

  ‘What sea-battle?’

  ‘I forgot, you won’t have heard,’ he said. ‘The Syracusans heard you were coming and attacked us, twice. The first time they didn’t get very far, but yesterday they hammered us. For God’s sake,’ he suddenly shouted, ‘they don’t fight fair.’

  I stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘You won’t believe this,’ he said, lowering his voice. ‘The Syracusans kept us fooling around all day, sending their ships out and then drawing them back, until our men had got thoroughly bored and gone back to base for their dinner. Then they come roaring out, this tim
e for real, and our men rush away from the cooking-fires on to the ships, starving hungry — the Syracusans timed it beautifully — and try to get into some sort of order. There’s a god-awful mess, and while the ships are fighting each other in the proper way, they send out hundreds of little boats full of javelin-throwers and archers and shoot up the crews of our ships, while we just flounder about like beached whales and can’t do a thing about it. They sank seven ships and damaged I don’t know how many more. It was total chaos. Did you ever hear the like, Eupolis? You just can’t fight these people, on land or sea. They don’t say put and they don’t fight properly; they just shoot at you and run away.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said soothingly. ‘We’re here now. Demosthenes won’t take any of that stuff, you’ll see.’

  ‘Sod Demosthenes,’ said Callippus, ‘what can he do? These men are savages. They don’t fight like we do.

  They’re really vicious, I tell you; they aren’t interested in winning battles, they’re interested in killing people without getting killed themselves. It’s inhuman.’

  ‘Demosthenes will make them fight,’ I said. Callippus laughed sourly and shook his head.

  ‘Did you bring any food on those ships?’ he asked. ‘We’re starving to death here.’

  ‘You can’t be,’ I replied. ‘For God’s sake, you’re the besiegers.’

  ‘Tell them that,’ he said, waving his hand in the direction of Syracuse. To be honest with you, I hadn’t really looked at the city — that sounds very strange, but I hadn’t. I looked now; it was just a city, with walls and a gate. ‘Do you know they hold regular markets in there? With merchants and fishmongers and sausage-sellers and everything? We’re down to a couple of pints of flour a day out here. They throw their crusts over the wall for us, and we actually go and pick them up.’

  I felt as if whatever I was standing on had suddenly given way. ‘You’re exaggerating,’ I said. ‘It can’t be as bad as all that.’

  ‘It’s going to get worse,’ said Callippus, grinning unpleasantly, ‘with you lot to feed as well. I take it you haven’t brought any food.’

  ‘We thought … for God’s sake, this is the richest country in the world. Where’s all that wheat and cheese?’

  ‘Good question,’ replied Callippus. ‘But Nicias has managed to get the whole of Sicily against us, somehow or other.’

  ‘Can’t you bring anything in by sea?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course,’ said Callippus impatiently. ‘We get things from Catana and Naxos, just enough to keep us from starving. No more.’

  ‘But this is terrible,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’ He grinned again and walked away, like a man going to a funeral. I went back to our ship and told my friends what I had heard. They had been told the same, many times over. Meanwhile, Nicias’ men had got bored with us and had mostly wandered away, making us feel like fools.

  I remember one time someone got up a rumour —completely untrue — that the King of Somewhere Else had sent the Athenians a present of a million bushels of wheat, and it was being handed out to all adult male citizens in the Market Square. Of course, I jammed my feet into my sandals and sprinted off as fast as I could; and sure enough, there were crowds of people milling around with big jars on their shoulders. The only thing that was missing was the wheat, which (like the King of Somewhere Else) did not exist. Even when the point sank in, we stayed there for some time — the general feeling was that the Archons ought to open up the granaries to compensate us for our disappointment. Anyway, that was what it was like, that day we landed in Sicily.

  So there you are, commander of a huge and useless army; your men are demoralised and have nothing to eat, the enemy is in a strong defensive position with no incentive to come out and fight, and has just beaten you at sea. What do you do? Attack, of course.

  Demosthenes had seen that the only way to break into the city of Syracuse was by going over the slopes of Epipolae, which is a large rocky hill, roughly triangular, on the other side of the city from the sea. It wouldn’t be easy; but we would either take the city or prove that the job was impossible — and either way, we would all soon be going home.

  So, after a miserably hungry night, we set off early next morning to damage such olive trees and vines as Nicias’ men had overlooked, down by the river Anapus; apart from a few bored-looking light infantry, we saw no enemy soldiers and had a pleasant enough time — we even caught a couple of skinny-looking goats, which we converted into an approximation of food. I was particularly struck by Little Zeus’ attitude to the laying waste of crops, bearing in mind his Herculean efforts to squeeze a living out of the hide of Mother Demeter. After the first hour or so, he seemed to go absolutely berserk; he had got hold of a big double-headed axe from somewhere, and he fell upon a small plantation of fig trees like mad Ajax killing Agamemnon’s sheep. So strenuous were his efforts that he quite wore himself out — and he broke the axe, missing the trunk of a tree with the head and so striking the shaft against the wood and smashing it in two. When I asked him what had got into him, he confessed that he hated fig trees; he always had, and he always would.

  What with the goats, and smashing things up, and stretching our legs after all that time on board ship, we all came to the conclusion that fighting under Demosthenes was much better than work. In fact, the only man who didn’t seem to be enjoying himself was Callicrates, who was always far too sane and well balanced a person to come to any good end in this life.

  While we were busily occupied in this manner, Demosthenes had been attacking the outlying fortifications of the Syracusan position with battering-rams, without any success at all. Most people are terrified of battering-rams; the noise of them, and the way they make the ground shake, and the fact that, being tree-trunks, they cannot be killed. But the Syracusans were quite blasé about it all; they threw burning torches on to the hide canopies that protect the men operating the ram from arrows, and then shot the men down as they ran away. It was all rather humiliating; and when Demosthenes sent some heavy infantry forward to try and recover the rams before they were burnt to ashes, they shot arrows at them too, until the weight of arrowheads in their shields made them too heavy to carry, and they had to withdraw. A few men were killed; but they were Zacynthians and Corcyreans, so nobody was unduly upset about it.

  In fact, Demosthenes had only done these things —ravaging the countryside and making his attack on the outer defences — to satisfy himself that they were pointless, and to make the Syracusans think that he was as unimaginative as Nicias. What he really had in mind was something utterly Athenian in its daring, novelty, and sheer ambition. He had made up his mind, as soon as he first set eyes on Epipolae and learned that the Syracusans had three large camps up there, to attack the position by night. After all, nobody had ever done such a thing before, so it would be totally unexpected. In the dark, the Syracusans’ local knowledge would be useless; and, above all, so would their arrows, javelins and slingshots, about which he had heard so much. Once we were inside the wall, the enemy would be utterly terrified, not knowing where we were or what we were up to, just as the defenders had been at Troy when the Greeks came out of the Wooden Horse. We would keep in touch with each other by shouting secret passwords, and this would terrify the Syracusans even more.

  When we were told of this, we didn’t know what to think; but the sheer cleverness of it all so caught our imaginations that we could scarcely wait until nightfall. Although most of us were exhausted from all the work we had done during the day, we couldn’t sit still to rest, for we were all too excited. One thing was certain; this was quite unlike any other campaign anyone had ever been on before. No marching all day with a heavy sack on one’s back, or building endless walls for no very good reason, or tramping up and down outside impregnable walls wishing one was somewhere else. There was a feeling of being involved in something very special and important, and everyone was talking, very quietly and intensely, to everyone else — not just their neighbours and friends and relati
ves, but people from the other side of Attica whom they had never met, or even to the foreigners. We all suddenly felt that Demosthenes was a friend of ours, someone we knew personally — and still our leader, of course; in charge and somehow incapable of failure. It was like being a child again, and being in one of those gangs of herd-boys who elect a king and execute daring raids on other people’s orchards; there was that same thrill of taking part in something daring and exciting, with a strong dash of danger about it but no real fear of death or injury. It’s hard to imagine grown men feeling that way. Perhaps it was because the whole City seemed to be there; it felt more like a festival or a holiday than a military expedition, with so many of one’s friends and neighbours present. There were plenty of strangers, of course, but you felt that you were bound to know someone who knew them. As it started to get dark, we lit our camp-fires and moved around like an army going to bed, and as we did so we kept running across people we knew, friends and distant cousins and the like; I met five or six men who had been in choruses of mine, and many neighbours, and (needless to say) Aristophanes son of Philip. He was creeping furtively round the back of a tent with what looked like a baby in his arms, and when I called out his name he jumped high in the air..

  ‘For God’s sake,’ he hissed, as he recognised me, ‘what did you want to do that for?’

  ‘What have you got there, Aristophanes?’ I demanded. ‘You’re acting very strangely.’

  ‘Since when have you added informing to your list of accomplishments?’ he muttered. ‘Go and play with the Syracusans, there’s a good boy.’

  It suddenly occurred to me that Aristophanes’ baby might be a wineskin. ‘Let me guess what you’ve got under your cloak,’ I said loudly.

  ‘If you must know,’ he said, ‘it’s a dead play. One of yours, by the look of it. You know, stunted, off-colour, never expected it to last as long as it has. I’m going to give it a decent burial, if there are any compost-heaps in Sicily.’