Halo

by Zizou Corder

  ‘I was their slave,’ she said. ‘They used me as a punchbag for their young boys. But yes, I liked some of them…’

  ‘Who did you like?’ he asked curiously. ‘Melesippus?’

  ‘I liked a boy called Leonidas, Uncle,’ she said – and as she said it she wondered why she had. Was it because one day he might be taken prisoner and brought before Pericles in chains and he might remember the name and say ah, yes, my boy Halo liked you, I will spare your life…

  Actually, yes. That, foolish as it sounds, was what she was thinking. And that was not all.

  We’re alone. Tell him.

  ‘Ah, those Spartan Leonidases,’ he said. ‘True, the one they are named after was a great man, a great warrior, a great king. If we still had kings, we’d want one like that. So, did you want to be a Spartan? Did you fall for their legend?’ He smiled.

  ‘No, Uncle,’ she said. ‘I only ever wanted to be a Centaur. Or an Athenian,’ she added quickly. And a boy… she didn’t say.

  He laughed at that.

  ‘Perhaps Manticlas is making their sacrifices for them,’ she said, gazing out over the evening. ‘Telling them yes, tomorrow is a good day for mighty Hoplites to dig up a cornfield and try to burn down a barn built of mud.’

  Pericles laughed again, and rested his arm on her shoulder in a friendly way. ‘Don’t worry, boy – you’ll have your chance to fight them yet.’

  ‘Pericles,’ she said. Her arms suddenly got the heavy feeling and her stomach seemed to be collapsing. ‘Phobos leave me!’ she hissed to herself. She was going to tell him. She had to.

  ‘Pericles.’ She gulped. He was looking at her in concern. Perhaps that was the last kind look she would ever have from him.

  ‘It’ll be all right!’ he said cheerfully, and then – he was striding off, due at the Assembly, calling that he would see her soon.

  He, and the moment, were gone.

  From then, Spartan fires, fed with Attic crops, burned daily. Their smoke spiralled on the hot summer air, and in the crowded city, everyone could see them, like taunting exclamation marks pointing out this farm or that. They could smell the scent of destruction. Even during those windless summer days, particles of smoky, oily ash fell on the streets and monuments of Athens. And the Athenians could see too when the fires went out – because new green corn is too alive, too full of sap and fresh growth, to make good fuel.

  Pericles still went each day to the agora to hear what the people were saying. Now, they told him he was a fool, a suicidal fool, and he must lead them out against the brazen, arrogant Spartans at once, and punish them, beat them, send them packing. The young men, those who had seen little enough of war to find it attractive, were furious at the offence to their dignity and that of Athens. Pericles was called a coward in the street. Some even talked of taking matters into their own hands. But Pericles held firm and calm.

  ‘Our ships will be ravaging their coasts as soon as this army leaves,’ he said. ‘The Spartans will pay, have no fear. But we must hold firm to our strategy.’

  With every gust of smoke the city grew tenser. Out in the agora with Arko, Halo overheard a commotion between a wagoner and a farmer.

  ‘We have no choice,’ the farmer was saying. ‘Give us somewhere else to go and we’ll gladly go there. But it’s not physically possible to have a body and keep it nowhere. If you like we will come and lie in your courtyard –’

  ‘I already have nine of my cousins lying in my courtyard,’ said the wagoner. ‘You may lie on top of them, if you like, I don’t mind. My point is just that you shouldn’t have built on the Pelagian Quarter, because it is sacred ground and you are bringing great bad fortune just when we rather need good fortune – or hadn’t you noticed?’

  ‘What do you want me to do? Go to Delphi and ask the Oracle’s permission?’

  ‘Oh please – the entire Spartan army is standing between here and Delphi…’

  ‘I know! It’s my farm they are standing on! My corn they’re uprooting – my vines they’re slashing to bits as we speak! That’s my point! In desperate times you can’t follow every old superstition…’

  ‘Oh! So the Oracle is an old superstition now, is it…?’

  ‘If we survive this, I’ll go to Delphi myself and make amends, but I still can’t leave my babies sitting in the middle of the road until the Spartans decide to go home…’

  It was not what Halo had expected of war at all. Where were the martial glory, the discipline, the honour of Thermopylae and all the strength and loyalty and blood and guts? All those little boys trying to push down a tree – and here were the warriors, actually trying to push down actual trees. So much for self-sacrifice and each man’s shield protecting his brother to the left. What were they protecting them from? A left-behind chicken on some Acharnaean homestead?

  This isn’t the noble Hoplite warfare that I saw them training for, she thought. You don’t need to spend days in the wilderness, living off the land and murdering Helots, to hack at olive trees and destroy vineyards.

  She wondered how they felt about it, all those proud young men.

  Down in the agora, Pericles told the Athenians, yet again, as often as they challenged him, ‘Sooner or later, the Spartans will get bored, and go away, and then everyone can go out again and rebuild and get back to normal.’

  Over at Acharnae, Archidamus told his young men, yet again, ‘Sooner or later the Acharnaeans will lose their patience, they will burst out to fight us, and we will beat them.’

  ‘It’s like a staring match, isn’t it?’ Halo said to Arko.

  ‘I just wish they’d give up and go home,’ he said.

  And, after two months of siege, of not telling Pericles, of wondering where Manticlas was, and whether he had found the Centaurs, two months of Halo and Arko not being about to do anything – the Spartans did give up and go home. Archidamus lost patience and Pericles won this match.

  ‘Is that it?’ asked Halo. ‘Is it over?’

  ‘Oh no,’ said Aspasia. ‘They’ll be back. It’s just beginning.’

  We’d better go quickly to Thessaly then.

  Xαπτερ 26

  It certainly seemed over.

  The very day the Spartans left, Halo and Arko raced out into the countryside, laughing and happy after months of being stuck in the smelly overcrowded city. The roads were already clogged with country people going home. The air was festive – everyone was glad.

  They were stopped in shock by the sight of the ruined farms – vegetable fields dried out, vines ripped out, trees burned. The land that had been so sweet and green and fruitful in the spring, full of blossom and new growth, was now desiccated and trashed. The farming families stood among the ruins of their homes, blank with disbelief. What would they do now? Some of them, stalwart and brave, started immediately trying to tidy up, digging their fields again, wondering if there was anything they could plant so late in the season. Halo and Arko walked and walked, watching as the country people tried their best to make good the damage.

  They went down to the port at Piraeus. Pericles was keeping his promise, and a hundred ferocious Athenian triremes were leaving to head round the coast of the Peloponnese to ravage Sparta and its allies. Halo and Arko saw them in the harbour, and remembered when they were small and Kyllarus had pointed out triremes from the clifftop. Then, the triple ranks of oars had looked like insect legs. Now, close up, they could see clearly the heft of the snub, dangerous battering ram at each prow, lying like a shark on the water-line, ready to plunge into the flank of an enemy ship, holing it and sinking it.

  Halo stared out at the sea, and the ships, and the distant islands. She saw dolphins leaping, and fresh white frills on waves far out to sea. She thought of deep, deep water, and of drowning.

  It was time to make her peace.

  ‘Let’s go to Cape Sounion!’ she said suddenly. ‘Let’s go now.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Arko.

  They walked, ran, and thumbed lifts from passing wagons on their way
to the silver mines at Laurium. The road was busy with everybody making up for all the time they hadn’t been able to get anything done, during the Spartan invasion.

  They were about halfway there before Arko said, ‘By the way, why are we going?’

  ‘I want to talk to Poseidon,’ Halo replied. ‘We’re going to his new temple.’

  The great Cape of Sounion faced south and east over the restless sea. Halo had never seen the Aegean before, and her heart lifted in delight at the sight of the changing colours of the shining water, the unspeakable beauty of the many islands, the late-afternoon sun dimpling the waves with silver, the rocks and the fish and the glory of the world.

  Without pausing, reinvigorated by the beauty, the pair trudged up the hill to the immense shining new temple. Halo stared up at it, dramatic on its hilltop, glowing golden in the evening sun. From that rock, King Aegeus had stood to watch for his son Theseus’s ship, and if the sails were white the prince would be alive, and if they were black he would know that his son was dead… only the sails were not changed, and he saw the black, and cast himself down from that great rock and died, and never learned that his son, Theseus, great king of Athens, slayer of the Minotaur, had been so excited about coming home that he had just forgotten to change the sails.

  Looking up, Halo felt shy. She didn’t want to have to talk to priests. She didn’t want to have to walk up to this great building… she wanted to speak to Poseidon herself, privately. Her heart was as restless as a ghost.

  ‘Let’s go down there,’ she said, pointing to a rocky route down to the beach below. ‘Let’s do it the old-fashioned way…’

  Do what? thought Arko, as he scrambled down behind her. She had a determined, sad look in her eye, and he was not going to leave her alone.

  He was slower than her, with his hooves and his delicate legs. When he got to the beach, she was sitting hunched over, carving something into a thick piece of driftwood. Two pieces. He watched, without disturbing her.

  When she was done, she unfolded herself, and handed him the two salty bone-like slabs of wood – sections of plank from an old wreck, he thought, worn smooth and strange by many years in the sea, and bleached by salt and sunshine.

  They were wet with tears, and on each one, Halo had carved a name.

  On the wet, smooth sand, she was scurrying to and fro, poking among rocks above the tideline, collecting twigs and dried-out seaweed and gnarled, pale driftwood. She piled it up, like a tiny pyre for a funeral.

  She held out her hands and Arko handed her the two named slabs. She laid them on top. Then she went and washed, carefully, in the scudding, mild wavelets, the damp sand sucking at her feet.

  Finally, she took out the ember-bearing fennel stalk9 she always carried and carefully, steadily, brought a handful of dead leaves to leaping flame from its slow-burning heart.

  ‘Poseidon,’ she called, into the rising breeze of the evening. ‘Lord Poseidon, all these years my parents have floated unburied in your waters, my father Megacles and my mother Aiella – Poseidon, please…’

  She and Arko stood, heads bowed; the only mourners at this strange funeral.

  As the flames died down, and the smoke drifted away over the sea, Halo went to the edge of the rocks and looked out.

  It didn’t feel enough.

  And suddenly, on the spur of that moment, she yanked her golden owl, pulled it off her neck, and cast it into the waters. The leather thong fell at her feet.

  ‘Halo!’ cried Arko.

  ‘It is all I have to offer, Poseidon, please recognize my sacrifice, Poseidon, please help the souls of my parents, who gave me this…’

  ‘Halo, your owl!’

  She was crying. ‘I want them to be all right,’ she said, tears running down her face, staring out to sea. ‘Please, Poseidon, let me know they are all right…’

  And at that moment, she heard a strange and wild call, out to sea.

  ‘What’s that?’ she cried.

  Arko was looking out, searching the darkening water.

  ‘Look!’ he shouted.

  She stared where he was pointing.

  There was a fringe of light – a scattering of diamonds, thrown and spattered against the wine-dark sea. It arched, and fell… and reappeared, three metres ahead.

  A smooth dark form led the crystal chain – or trailed it.

  A nymph?

  No. It was dolphin, leaping before them, twisting and jumping in the waves, throwing beautiful arcs of phosphorescent sea-droplets out into the evening air. And crying out – as if to them.

  ‘Is it talking to us?’ Halo asked, amazed.

  ‘I think it is,’ said Arko.

  The dark, shining creature danced on its tail, flicking sideways along the crest of a long rolling wave, its tail twitching brilliant diadems of light. It was smiling, nodding its head, singing. Arko and Halo gazed at it in amazed delight.

  ‘It’s Poseidon’s messenger,’ said Arko. ‘He has taken pity on you…’

  ‘It’s a miracle,’ said Halo, and she sat down as if her legs had been unstrung.

  ‘I think it is,’ said Arko.

  The dolphin spun, and dived, and reappeared again and again, until the night overtook it: its dark shape faded into the darkness of the night, and only the eerie sprinklings of phosphorescence told them where it was. And then that too flew, and dropped, and faded, for the last time.

  Halo put her hand over mouth, and whispered thank you, thank you, thank you, over and over.

  ‘But your owl!’ said Arko, as they walked back to Athens the next morning, stiff and dazzled after their night on the beach.

  ‘My owl doesn’t matter,’ Halo said. ‘I feel peaceful about them now. I know that they’re all right.’

  ‘I suppose,’ said Arko. ‘Still, it’s a pity.’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ she said stoutly. She still wore the leather thong, worn smooth by the many years round her neck. She was sad about the owl. Of course she was. But there – it had to be done. Giving the owl had shown Poseidon the depth of Halo’s need. And Poseidon had noticed, and responded.

  ‘And now,’ she said, ‘isn’t it time we went north?’

  ‘Will you come with me?’ he asked. ‘Aren’t you Athenian now, with your family and everything?’

  ‘Half Athenian,’ she said. ‘Half Centaur, half whatever my mother was…’

  ‘That makes you one and a half people…’ Arko said.

  ‘That’s me,’ she said with a grin.

  ‘You can’t go,’ said Aspasia. ‘It’s still dangerous out there. You can’t just go off. You’re a child. You’re – Halo you’re a girl!’

  ‘So what?’ said Halo. ‘Isn’t that the whole point? I came to Athens to find who my parents are. I’ve found them and honoured them and now I must go and… there are reasons I must go. I’ll be with Arko. We’ll be fine.’

  ‘What will I tell Pericles?’ whispered Aspasia.

  ‘Tell him I’ll be back,’ Halo said, and she kissed her, and she left.

  After all her previous adventures, Halo expected trouble and hardship – but the journey was easy. Aspasia gave them food and blankets and water and money and soap and a map, plus travelling boots for Halo and a new cloak for Arko. ‘It gets cold in the north,’ she said.

  Halo packed them up, and Arko slung the bags across his back. They were well equipped. They knew where they were going. Strangers did not try to kidnap them, once they had read Arko’s tattoo, or observed the size of his biceps and his hooves. They walked in the cool of morning and evening, slept in the heat of day, talked for hours, swam in the sea, padded along in companionable silence. When Halo was tired, Arko let her ride on his back. She felt like a child again. And when they slept, they slept as they had when they were little, curled up under the stars.

  They passed country families renewing their farms; they saw the animals returning to Attica from Euboea; they passed the battlefield of Thermopylae, and saw the monument there to the fallen Spartans. They stopped to r
ead the inscription:

  Go, tell the Spartans, stranger passing by,

  That here, according to their laws, we lie.

  Three hundred Spartan Hoplites had held off the entire Persian army here, for two days and nights, long enough to save Greece from invasion. They had all died.

  ‘Do you still think of your Spartan toad?’ Arko asked, later that night.

  ‘I do,’ she said. She couldn’t say anything else. And that night, Halo dreamed of Leonidas.

  Soon they were in Thessaly, walking the dim woods that seemed to go on forever. How easy it is to be brave, she thought, with your friend at your side, your brother. The wolves and the shadows and the scorpions didn’t bother her at all.

  The villages of men were easy to find; those of Centaurs much harder.

  At the end of their third day, they settled by a small lake, deep in the forest, made a fire and caught some fish. So far, they had seen nothing, no sign.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Arko. ‘We’re in the right area, and we’re making plenty of noise. They’ll find us.’

  Halo tried to feel convinced. But she had been lost and hungry in a forest before, and she didn’t like it. It’s different now, I have Arko…

  And she heard a quick rustle… Wolves? Spartans?

  And a sudden vast racket, shrieking and yelling… Female voices!

  ‘Sweet Apollo, it’s Arko! It’s Halo! It’s Arko and Halo!! Arko and Halo!!!’

  A tumble of flesh and flanks and tails and hooves and long red hair fell out into the glade – Pearl and Lucy.

  ‘We saw your smoke so we came down to see who… Oh Apollo, it’s really you – well, look at you so grown up – oh, and you’re all right – oh, Arko, dearest Arko… oh, Halo…’

  Without ceremony Halo was lifted on to Arko’s back. A massive galloping rushed them through the woods. She was utterly out of breath and almost in tears when she slid to the ground at the Centaur village.

  They were all there. Chariklo, tears pouring down her face. Kyllarus, hugging Arko, hugging Halo. Chiron, opening and closing his mouth like a shocked codfish. Pearl and Lucy, jumping up and down, so proud and happy to have been the ones to find them.