Halo

by Zizou Corder

  ‘What can we do for them?’ she cried.

  He didn’t answer for a moment, then he said, ‘I was going to spend this evening reading every treatise I can find, to see what is recommended. But as you see –’

  The courtyard was full of supplicants. They were not ill – they wanted Hippias to visit the sick person, who was elsewhere. He could not possibly visit them all.

  ‘You’re lucky to have caught me,’ he said. ‘Please, go inside and look through my library – see what you can find that will help us to treat these symptoms.’

  ‘Can I send your boy to Aspasia, to tell her why I am late?’ she asked.

  He smiled at her, nodded, and turned to leave with the next supplicant.

  She spent that whole night reading, and finding little of any use. Comfrey and plantain might help with the bleeding; a tea of terebinthine to cleanse the mouth, feverfew for the heat… nothing new. She fell asleep at Hippias’s desk. That was where he found her, returning from a house call, about to go out again on another.

  ‘Go home,’ he said. ‘Go on.’ She heard his voice in her dream.

  ‘No,’ she murmured. ‘Haven’t finished yet…’The lamp had burned out, and a slight moon shone from the doorway. Outside, all was dark and strangely quiet. In the distance she heard someone weeping.

  ‘Halo,’ he said. She blinked, and tried to be awake. ‘Go home. You will need to be strong, to take good care of yourself. Something very harsh has come among us…’

  She looked at him, his face tired and pale. ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said sadly. ‘It is like everything at once. I have seen more than twenty people now, twenty people with red inflamed eyes and bloody throats and mouths, vomiting, coughing, with stomach aches, aches in their chests, spasms… all in such pain… yet days ago I hadn’t seen one.’

  Halo tried to make sense of it. How could so many people suddenly be sick like this? Where did a sickness come from, that it could fall so strongly on so many people, just like that?

  Oh.

  There was a name for a sickness like that.

  It was not a name she wanted to utter.

  ‘Hippias?’ she asked. She looked up at him, and her eyes were solemn. ‘I heard there was a plague, in Lemnos,’ she said carefully. ‘Hippias – is this the plague?’

  The doctor had tears in his eyes. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I am lucky, I have never seen the plague. But I fear… I fear that if I saw the plague, it would look like this. I fear that this is the plague.’

  ‘Will they die?’ Halo asked. Her mouth was trembling. She locked her teeth together to hold her strength. Phobos.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They will die. Dark Hades will grow rich. The Gods have mercy on us all.’

  The school had closed. Three of the masters were sick, and one dead already. How many of the students, they didn’t know.

  ‘It’s worst among the country people,’ Hippias said. He had a big plate of baklava before him, and he was stuffing pieces of it methodically into his mouth as he talked. ‘They all live so close together in their camps, and they have no way to be clean even if they want to… They have no clean water supply, and nowhere to relieve themselves, and the sickness has gathered in the air around them…’

  Halo knew it was true. She and Arko had seen a country slave lying in the street, his eyes red. He shouldn’t be here, she thought. They had spoken to him – he had said he wasn’t ill, he was fine, he was just going home, he was staying with his owners by the Long Walls, he was all right. He didn’t look all right. But what could they do?

  Hippias had found nothing that could help – just the usual herbs and diets. Nothing new. Nothing special. ‘So do you mean that people will just have to suffer this illness, like any other?’ she asked him.

  ‘Yes,’ Hippias said. He stopped munching, and put his hands over his face. ‘We can try to make them comfortable – but they won’t be. We can try to keep them strong so they survive – but perhaps that will only prolong their suffering. Perhaps,’ he said, and he gave her the saddest look she had ever seen, ‘the best we can do for them is to let them die quickly.’

  She could hardly believe that kind, good Hippias was saying something so terrible.

  It all happened so fast. Gyges was dead within the first week, and after he died, Arimaspou said she was no longer to come. ‘If there is no cure, and no help, then there is no need for the doctor,’ he said. His face was as hard when he said it as it had been the first time she had seen him. It was as if there had been no friendship between them, no teaching and learning, no joking and growing fond.

  ‘You should stay at home,’ he said harshly. ‘Children should be at home. Don’t come here again.’

  Children! She was fourteen now. If she’d been a real girl her family would have been marrying her off… She was no child. But she didn’t argue with Arimaspou. He wouldn’t even look at her.

  ‘Let me at least mourn for Gyges with you,’ she said, and she was biting back tears as she said it, but Arimaspou was relentless.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Go home, and stay home. We don’t want you here.’

  She knew why he said it. He didn’t want her get the plague too. It still hurt, though, to be sent away.

  She strode home with her lips clenched and her teeth aching. Poor sweet Gyges, whose leg she had saved, and all for nothing. She had her head down, barging along, so angry and upset.

  She barged straight into somebody.

  ‘Sorry,’ she muttered, and glanced up. Shock grabbed her.

  It was Manticlas.

  Without pausing, instinctively, she dropped her head again and scurried swiftly on.

  Had he seen her? Recognized her? What’s he doing in Athens? That was the last place she expected to see him. He was a Spartan! They were at war! And who would come here, now the plague is blossoming? She must warn Arko – she must find Arko NOW.

  She rushed home, calling for Arko as she ran into the courtyard.

  ‘He’s not back yet,’Tiki called.

  He’ll be coming from the gym – I’ll go and meet him, she was thinking – but at that moment Aspasia, pale and fretted, grabbed her arm.

  ‘You’re not to go out any more,’ she said, without preamble. ‘It’s not safe.’

  ‘I have to find Arko!’ Halo said. ‘I have to go now –’

  ‘Arko is on his way home,’ said Aspasia. ‘He’ll be here soon. You have to stay in now, Halo.’

  She was deadly serious. And Evangelus had locked the courtyard gate.

  Arko’s on his way… He’ll be here soon. It’ll be all right.

  ‘You’re not to go anywhere,’ Aspasia was saying. ‘Not to the Skythians, not to school, not to Hippias…’

  ‘Not to Hippias!’ Halo exclaimed.

  ‘Most of all not to Hippias,’ said Aspasia. ‘Halo – my dear – let me tell you… Doctors, since they are most in contact with the sick, are among the first to die. We will all stay in the house now. Pericles has said. We will not let the plague feed on us.’

  Halo desperately wanted – needed – to go to Hippias. She wanted to discuss with him how they could find a way of treating these poor people, or a way of making them comfortable at least, or a way of stopping the miasmas10 of the plague from attaching the sickness to you, or a way of preventing it coming into a city… Why did plague behave as it did? It didn’t care who it took – true, the refugees from the countryside were suffering most, but some rich people had caught it now, as well – rich people, poor people, old people, young people, healthy people like Gyges, weak people like that country slave in the street. People who worshipped the Gods, and people who neglected their duty. She wanted to find out all about the plague. They couldn’t just let it stalk the city, casting people down, and nothing to be done – there must be something they could do.

  ‘But…!’ she protested… But she knew she would do as Aspasia asked. As Pericles asked. Though it felt like deserting the city, and i
gnoring her heartfelt desire, she and Arko would stay home, and stay healthy.

  Only it didn’t work out like that. That night, even before Arko came home, before she could warn him that Manticlas was in Athens, Halo developed a headache.

  There had never been such pain. A hundred broken arms could be stretched and reset, a thousand skulls could break on a thousand underwater rocks… Her head was burning. Her throat was burning. Wet, and burning, and tasting of old, wet metal.

  Her arms were shivering. Someone was trying to feed her. Foul coughing tore her burning throat. She was sick – blood and vomit.

  ‘I have the plague!’ she shouted. ‘Do I? Am I to die? I won’t die! I won’t die!’ She shouted a lot. Someone was trying to soothe her. ‘Go away!’ she shouted. ‘Go away…’ She couldn’t eat – there was nothing in her stomach to puke, but she kept puking. Her chest was burning, her lungs, her heart, her stomach. Someone was wiping her mouth, giving her water. Her body was stiff, stiff with spasm, but coughing and puking still. She was hot, her skin burning, she wanted to tear it off. Someone was bathing it with cool wet cloths; she felt the skin would come off in strips, washed off with the water, long tender red strips. She was horribly, horribly thirsty.

  Her mind was not her own. Her mind was… she had no mind to know where her mind was. Asclepius, Apollo, she called, in her mind, perhaps in reality too. Her body was not her own. A million insects owned it, twitched it, crawled in it. She just burned, and wailed with fear, and it never ended.

  And then it did. She woke. The room was dark and cool. Someone was in the room.

  ‘Come,’ it said. It was a woman, dark-haired, dark-eyed, with a face that didn’t care. ‘Come, and it will be over.’

  Halo didn’t want to go with her. ‘No!’ she cried loudly, and the sound of her voice, strong now, woke the other person in the room – she hadn’t known there was another person. He was lying asleep, his head on his arms, across the end of her bed. She wailed, ‘No!’ to the woman, and he lifted his head. His green eyes were clear.

  ‘Go away,’ Halo wailed. ‘I don’t want you to die. Go away, Leonidas…’

  ‘I’m not going,’ he said. ‘I’m staying with you.’

  ‘Come on,’ said the woman, gently, to Halo, and at that Leonidas jumped up lightly, and grinned, and laughed at the woman, saying, ‘Come and get her. If you dare.’

  And the woman glared at him, and he laughed again, and came back and sat by Halo. He took her hand, wiped her face with a cool cloth, and gave her water to drink.

  When Halo looked up, the woman was waiting, looking bored.

  ‘She’s not coming,’ Leonidas said. ‘You can stand there as long as you want.’

  The woman stood.

  Leonidas was stroking Halo’s hair.

  She slept.

  She woke.

  The woman was still there in the doorway.

  Leonidas was still there by her bed.

  ‘You’re not going, are you?’ he said to her, and Halo smiled and said, ‘No.’

  Leonidas turned to the woman. She seemed to be fading.

  ‘See you next time,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Bye!’

  ‘Bye!’ Halo called.

  Then she was asleep again. The next time she woke she was being held over a pot, her bowels lurching. For three days and nights every waking moment she was propped up on the pot. Someone fed her water, and emptied the pot and coaxed chicken broth into her poor bashed-up mouth.

  It was no longer bleeding.

  She was no longer puking.

  She lay in bed another week, not speaking. Then one morning she said, ‘Where’s Leonidas?’

  ‘Out in the olive groves in Paralia, hacking down good Attic trees,’ said Arko. ‘No doubt.’

  Her eyes were still closed. So were Arko’s. He was so tired, so very tired. He had been at her side throughout her illness. He didn’t know if she was properly conscious now or not. She’d talked all kinds of chaotic nonsense over the past few weeks. Who knew what was real to her or what was not?

  ‘No, he was here,’ she said.

  ‘They didn’t come near Athens,’ he said. ‘They saw the smoke from our funeral pyres; they heard the stories told by runaways more scared of the plague than of the Spartans. They’re ravaging round Laurium instead – cleaner, healthier air, down by the sea. They didn’t have to come and scare us – the Gods have got us half dead already – why should the Spartans bother?’

  ‘He was here,’ she murmured. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Arko!’ he said – but he jumped up at this question, and paid attention. ‘Halo? Halo!’

  ‘Halo?’ she said. ‘Hmm. I don’t know. Are you a friend of Leonidas?’

  ‘I’m your friend,’ he said. ‘Are you awake?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Mmm. Awake. Hungry.’

  Arko fed her three bowls of kykeon. She was too weak to feed herself.

  ‘Leonidas was here,’ she said. ‘Death was here. She asked for me. Leonidas told her to come and get me, if she could.’

  ‘Death is a woman?’Arko asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you saw her?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Halo.

  ‘But you didn’t die…’

  ‘Leonidas wouldn’t let me,’ she said.

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  Later, when she was better, she thought it very strange that Death had waited so long for her before giving up. As far as Halo could remember, Death had been there by her bed for a while. Arko said, judging by what Halo had been saying, it had been most of one night.

  ‘You’d think, wouldn’t you,’ Halo said, ‘that she’d be busy elsewhere. With all the other people dying.’

  ‘You’d think,’ said Arko.

  Many, many people had died while Halo was sick. All the schoolmasters had died. The man from whom the cook bought vegetables had died. Two slaves next door but one had died. More than a thousand of the four thousand Hoplites sent to Potidaea had died. Pericles’s sister had died.

  ‘But I have not died,’ said Halo.

  ‘No,’ said Arko.

  ‘And you have not caught it,’ Halo said to Arko sharply. ‘Even though you were nursing me.’

  ‘No,’ he said with a shrug.

  ‘Though you could have.’

  ‘I suppose,’ he said, looking embarrassed.

  ‘You risked your life,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, well…’ he said. ‘We didn’t want anyone else changing your chiton, did we? And actually, I think Centaurs don’t get it. I’ve never heard of a plague among Centaurs. And it doesn’t affect horses.’

  ‘Interesting,’ she said. ‘But you don’t know for sure. So you’re a fool – unless – have the doctors found any way of treating it? What did you do to care for me?’ she asked, suddenly eager.

  ‘No, they have found nothing,’ he said. ‘Hippocrates himself has come from Cos – he is recommending sea water, and burning fragrant smoke, with pitch and resin – but nothing is changing.’

  ‘Smoke!’ said Halo. ‘Interesting. Where is he? I want to hear him speak…’

  ‘When you’re stronger,’ said Arko.

  ‘I feel strong!’ Halo said. ‘I feel… how long have I been ill?’

  ‘Two weeks,’ said Arko.

  ‘Hm,’ she said. ‘And how are Pericles and Aspasia?’

  ‘He’s leaving soon,’ said Arko. ‘He’s taking the fleet round the Peloponnesian coast: Epidaurus, Troezen, Hermione, Prasiae. He’ll be off as soon as the Spartans leave. There are some things to be grateful for.’

  As soon as Halo was well enough, Arko took her out. They went to see Hippias. The city, as they walked across, was as strange to her as the weak legs she walked on. The sky was still blue, the sun was still bright, the air was still clear… but it was very different. The streets of the city, normally so noisy and lively, were quiet, almost empty. Such people as they did see were sad and subdued. Passing houses, through the open windows they heard not the usual laughter or c
onversation or the busy sounds of everyday work, but sighs, and muffled footsteps, and bursts of wailing from women and children, wails of pain, or of loss and mourning. They passed three funeral processions, the women crying, the men stern-faced. In the agora, a few knots of people were gathered. One was shouting – what was Pericles going to do about it? The Gods were angry! Athens was polluted! Something must be done.

  Some of the country people, it seemed, had left already, heading back home now that the Spartans had retreated. Scraps of their makeshift houses stood forlorn by the walls of the temples, dirty and neglected in the hot sun. A small girl sat by one of them, her face tear-stained. By another, a dog ran to and fro, sniffing, lost. But most of the shacks were still occupied – the country refugees sat in the shade by the walls, very still, very quiet. They looked as if they feared attracting attention – as if, if they made any noise or moved too fast, the plague would notice them, and come and get them. The angry voices from the agora were still audible, but these people took no notice.

  Out in the town that day, Halo did not see a single person smile.

  ‘This is terrible,’ she whispered to Arko. ‘This is so terrible.’

  ‘Nobody knows what to do,’ Arko replied. ‘Nobody knows what has caused it. One of the market boys is telling everyone he saw Spartans poisoning the reservoirs down at Piraeus…’

  ‘Is it true?’ she gasped.

  ‘No one knows,’ he said. ‘The priests are saying that Apollo is offended, because the Pythia told the Athenians never to occupy that bit of land – you know the Pelagian Quarter? By the Acropolis? They are reminding everyone of the plague at Thebes, caused by the blood-pollution of Oedipus, when he murdered his father, and married his mother – and of how Apollo sent a plague on Agamemnon’s army at Troy, when Agamemnon disrespected his priest…’

  Halo remembered Homer’s description of Apollo’s piercing silver arrows, raining down on Agamemnon’s men for nine days and nights, slaughtering them. Was that what had happened to her? Had Apollo shot her down?