Halo

by Zizou Corder

  ‘I was born that way,’ she said drily. ‘I have had to pretend to be a boy, in order to be allowed to learn anything at all.’

  Hippias put down his piece of baklava. ‘So have you come to tell me you can no longer work with me?’ he asked.

  She laughed a little. ‘No, I’ve come to hear you say you no longer want me.’

  He rubbed his nose thoughtfully. ‘Is it still secret?’ he asked.

  ‘You are the first I have told, other than Aspasia and… Pericles…’

  ‘Will they keep your secret?’

  ‘I hope so…’ she murmured.

  He was thinking.

  ‘Then don’t tell anyone else,’ he said at last, urgently. ‘Please, Halo, don’t panic. Stay a boy. I need your help. So I need you to be a boy.’

  The ground seemed to stabilize beneath her feet. ‘Really?’ she said.

  ‘Oh yes, really,’ he replied. ‘Very, very really. But seriously – it mustn’t get out. Not just for your personal reasons. You are doing such good and useful work, but… I fear the people would not let you help them if they knew you were female.’

  She had been thinking about telling Arimaspou. She wanted to, now – telling the truth at last felt good, even when it hurt. Confiding in people she trusted. And if Hippias could accept her for what she was, then maybe…

  But would the Skythians really accept a female doctor? Living among them?

  No, she couldn’t imagine that they would. And for that reason she couldn’t risk it.

  Living with the Skythians, Halo wanted to earn her keep. And she hated staying inside the city, cooped up with everybody else. What would a boy do? Or an Amazon? she thought. They’d fight, that’s what… They’d ride out with the Skythians and Arko to protect Athens and the Attic lands.

  ‘You’re too young,’Arimaspou said.

  Halo glared at him.

  The next morning, she and Arko were up and ready in the cool black early morning, the rosy fingers of dawn splintering the eastern sky. She waited at the compound gate with Gyges’s brave and clever black mare, Ivy, and when Arimaspou and the others came silently out, their hooves muffled and their cloaks across their faces, she just silently joined the line. The Captain said nothing. Arko fell in at her side. Silently, they slipped out of the city gates, heading towards the sea and the east.

  The Spartan ravagers were early risers too. Not even during war do people want to work in the heat of the day.

  Arimaspou had a good idea where the Spartans would be that day – and he was right. A few kilometres along the coast, the Skythians gathered in a knot behind a group of cypresses, while Akinakes rode out to confirm the Spartan position.

  ‘They’re in the olive grove beyond the farmhouse,’ he called, low, as he returned. ‘Forty or fifty with axes, trying to chop trees down, and a few Cretan archers protecting them. No one on horseback.’

  It was easy to kick Ivy into motion with her heels, to gain speed and rattle up to pace, to gallop past the party in the olive grove, riding so fast, so furiously, shooting a rain of arrows at the Spartan men: thudderderNOW thudderderNOW thudderderNOW thudderderNOW!

  Halo’s blood was singing in her ears, her thighs tight around the horse’s strong round body, her bowstring taut on her thumb-ring, arrows clutched in her fist, letting them off one and two and three and four –

  She found she could, after all, shoot arrows into other human beings. She glanced across. Arko too was fighting to protect Athens.

  The band of Skythians didn’t stop – they just galloped on. They were shooting as they went in; they were still shooting as they rode out. The Spartans were left reeling – but the Skythians never knew. They never knew how many they had hit; who had hit, what damage had been done, what limbs pierced or lives taken.

  Halo preferred it that way. She only aimed at their arms. She wasn’t going to kill anyone. Death was still her enemy, whatever form it took, whoever it approached. That dark woman who had stood in her bedchamber, who Leonidas had laughed at – however or whenever she appeared, Halo was against her. Seeing so much of Death sharpened her aim, but it hadn’t dulled her mind. When Halo pulled her bowstring taut, loosed her swift arrows, and galloped away as distant Spartans clutched their arms and fell to the ground, she wasn’t trying to kill them. She just wanted them to go away.

  A kilometre or so on the Skythians wheeled round, dust flying from under their hooves. They circled and took stock of where they were. They checked that no one was wounded; they threw water down their throats from the leather water bottles; laughed and clapped each other’s shoulders. Then they rode on to the next place, and did it again. In the evenings, they ate, stretched out their muscles, treated any wounds, and slept.

  So for a few weeks, Halo shot Athenian arrows at Spartans, and in the evenings, she took Cretan arrows out of Skythians. Messages still came from Aspasia, but no message came saying, ‘Pericles says come home, everything is all right, he’s agreed to let you study.’

  Halo was becoming a Skythian: living, eating, sleeping, guarding, training, fighting. She even asked Arimaspou if she could have her own Molossian puppy.

  ‘A female,’ she said. ‘I’ll train her. I’ll call her… Amazon.’

  Arimaspou smiled. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Let’s see what the future brings us.’

  And as soon as the Spartans left, well, there was still the plague to be fought.

  Halo found out, that harsh, sick summer, what she could do. She could fight, she could tend wounds, she could learn from Hippias and she could care for the victims of the plague. One patient of Hippias had hired a man to take her sister’s body and throw it on someone else’s already-burning pyre. ‘What else could I do?’ the woman cried. ‘I have no money, there’s no wood left, it’s all been burned in other pyres. There’s no one left to carry her even. Everyone’s dead. The mourners – all dead. What would you do?’ and then she hurried away from Halo, consumed with shame.

  A year ago, Halo thought, I stood on the rocks at Cape Sounion making offerings to Poseidon for my parents. Nine months ago, Pericles made his beautiful oration at the splendid funeral for the men killed in the war. And now, this decent woman has to throw her sister’s body on a stranger’s pyre as if it were an old rag.

  Halo’s heart squeezed tight inside her, as if trying to make itself small so it wouldn’t have to feel the pain of this long summer of death. Everywhere she went, she took her medical kit: the tea that helped people sleep, the unguent to soothe their rashes, the needles to lance their sores, and a clay tablet on which to record how many days they spent in which combination of which types of suffering, and how exactly the plague was killing them. Word got round that she was willing to help, and many people came to the Skythian compound or to Hippias’s, asking for her. Among them was Bokes, slave boy to her old music teacher, Philoctetes, who had often helped to slice the fruit and serve the picnic, back in the happy days. She could see from his face that he brought no good news.

  ‘Master’s granddaughter is sick,’ he said, so very quietly.

  He needed say no more. Halo picked up her bag, set her jaw firm, and followed him.

  Arimaspou watched her go, his damaged face unreadable.

  Everything was worse. It was as if people had no resistance, physically or mentally. As soon as eyes grew red and throats sore, everyone threw up their hands in helpless misery, and gave up, pitched into a horror which grew more dreadful every day.

  Lenane, the music teacher’s granddaughter, was weeping when Halo arrived. She was in the early stages. ‘The Gods have deserted us,’ she cried out, over and over.

  Her older brother, Alexis, was there at the bedside. He was drunk, although it was only midday. ‘She’s right,’ he said unevenly. ‘Why should we live by their laws when believers and non-believers alike are dying?’

  ‘Hush, my child,’ their mother squawked. ‘It’s against the law to say such things!’

  ‘Well, why obey the law?’ Alexis cried. ‘What, will the
Skythian Guard come and take her away to prison? So what? She’ll be dead by then anyway, as likely as not!’

  His mother put her face in her hands.

  ‘Halo, don’t bother with being good,’ he muttered. ‘Good people die even quicker than bad people. Why bother? My brother inherited all our father’s money when he died two weeks ago – you know it’s true, Mother – and now – ha ha! – they’re both dead, and Lenane is nearly dead, and soon we’ll all be dead. Spend your money now, Halo, it can’t help you…’

  ‘You should all leave the sickroom,’ Halo said calmly. ‘For your own protection. If you stay near her, the sickness will pass to you.’

  She said it automatically. She knew they wouldn’t go. How could they? They loved Lenane. They wouldn’t leave her alone.

  Philoctetes, sad and silent, sat at the back, strumming his lyre quietly, and said nothing. Halo touched his shoulder lightly.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Alexis mumbled. ‘I’m just having fun. Might as well. We’ll all be dead soon and the Gods don’t care. Halo, just steal our money now, what’s left of it, and just have some fun. For tomorrow we die. And nobody cares. Tra la la la la.’

  Halo tried not to listen. She wiped Lenane’s forehead.

  ‘Well, Zeus and Apollo may not care,’ burst out the mother, ‘because we’ve offended them, but there are other Gods. There are foreign Gods who might help us, if we treat them right. There’s the new god – we could go to the secret priest…’

  ‘Who?’ blurted her son. ‘Why would they care about us, if Athena herself can’t do anything for us, in her own city? We’ve had the Grand Dionysia every year to thank Dionysus for lifting the plague from us – and here it is back again. Does he care? Gods are nonsense, Mother.’

  The mother started crying.

  Lenane was coughing blood.

  Alexis swore, and went to find more wine.

  Halo blocked her ears, bit her lip, and cleared up the blood.

  ‘I don’t blame them for being like that,’ she said to Arko later. ‘What do they have to hold on to, after all? Hippias says what’s happening is that the miasma has returned. The air is infected. But he doesn’t know what to do about it anyway.’

  ‘Well, all I hear is that the Gods are offended, because the country people are living in the temples, so the Gods are letting us die, and now they are more offended because people have died in the temples, and we are not providing proper funerals, and the Gods are even more offended because there are dead bodies lying around in the temples, because everybody who might bury them is dead. And no, Halo, it’s not your job to go and bury them. You’re doing enough to help.’

  But Halo knew that the day before Arko had picked up a dead child from the street, wrapped it in his cloak, and laid it in a big grave that a rich man had had dug, for everyone to use, down at Kerameikos. Arko hadn’t told her – Akinakes had, after a citizen had come to thank him for the Centaur’s kindness.

  ‘There is goodness out there,’ Halo said. ‘Even though the city is going mad.’

  They were walking home to the Skythians, the same route they had walked so often. The streets were quiet and empty. That was one good result of the plague – the Spartans had left early.

  ‘The Gods may be killing us,’ said Arimaspou, ‘but at least they are protecting us from the Spartans. We should be grateful.’

  Halo and Arko both laughed at that. A bitter laugh.

  At least it meant the desolated land around Athens was still safe for riding out. She rode Ivy and watched how the green of spring was giving way to the dry ripe gold of high summer. Some farms had recovered well from the previous year; their vegetables were plump and their olives green and silver hanging in the heat. Others, though, stood empty and neglected. Their owners had not returned.

  They must be dead, Halo thought. Drowned or slaughtered in the Peloponnesian raids, ravaged by the plague. Their vegetable patches were overgrown, tangled and desiccated; the land uncared for, the vines spreading wildly, unpruned, with stunted little bunches of grapes drying out where they grew. The olive trees were hacked about and half burnt. The occasional stray chicken clucked, scrawny and hungry as it scratched for food in the dry earth. These farms hurt Halo’s heart as she rode by.

  Going home that evening, a group of men, completely drunk, were shouting at a slave girl running an errand, and no one told them to behave. The chancers and con men were out on the streets of Athens too.

  ‘Where do they crawl out from?’ Halo wondered, seeing the rabbit-foot man hovering, still trying to sell rubbishy amulets and false hope, and a man dressed all in white telling a small group that the mysteries of Dionysiac revels were the only proven way to prevent getting the plague, so if they would just give him the money they had on them right now, he would arrange for them to be initiated…

  ‘They were always there, just waiting for an opportunity,’ snorted Arko. ‘People cling to those false hopes like drowning men to a floating plank when they have nothing else.’

  The next morning Halo went again to Philoctetes’s house. Lenane was no better. She was suffering dreadfully. Looking at her, Halo remembered everything about how it felt, and she had to wrap her heart very tight not to give way to grief and sympathy for the girl. But Halo falling apart wouldn’t do any good for anybody.

  Alexis was there too. Today he was sober, and weeping, howling with grief for his sister’s pain. His mother was trying to comfort him, and Philoctetes sat, silently as before, lightly picking at his lyre, at the back. Halo knew it wasn’t even worth trying to make them leave. Alexis was right. They would probably all die now.

  Later that day, she saw Alexis again, on a corner by the Leokorion, the new sanctuary built in honour of the daughters of Leos, who gave their lives to save Athens from a previous plague. Lots of these new shrines were popping up; no one had any faith any more in the shrine to Athena Hygeia, on the Acropolis, which was meant to keep disease away. A wealthy man called Telemachos – who had paid for the communal grave to be dug – was even talking about bringing Asclepius to Athens from his home in Epidaurus, and building him a fine new temple. But until the war was over, he couldn’t even start negotiating for it.

  Religion has gone the way of law and order and common sense, Halo thought. Telemachos is rare. Nobody else cares. Everyone’s so scared.

  Alexis was talking intently to the rabbit-foot man. His face was tense and desperate.

  Halo hesitated and thought of turning back through the warren of alleys and steps on the side of the Acropolis, to avoid him. She didn’t want to talk to him – what could she say, after all? But the alley was narrow, and she could not help overhearing a few words of conversation.

  ‘As soon as you can, get them to come, for the Gods’ sake,’Alexis was saying. ‘For the sake of whatever God you like, I don’t care. Tonight.’

  He was giving the man something – money, she thought. She ducked down a side alley.

  What was that about?

  The next day, she found out.

  When she went to Philoctetes’s house, the slaves were wailing, the mother was in hysterics before the family altar, Alexis was standing white-faced as a statue by the door, and Lenane was dead.

  ‘But she’s only in her fourth day!’ Halo exclaimed. ‘What happened?’ Her only sense of safety came from knowing what the plague would do – if it didn’t do what it was meant to do, and follow the pattern, then what good were her observations? What she had learned would mean nothing… she would be lost.

  ‘What happened?’ she cried again, taking out her tablet to make notes.

  ‘I killed her,’ said Alexis.

  Halo stared at him. She felt the heat of shock under her skin.

  ‘I couldn’t bear it,’ he said, his eyes skittering around the room. ‘I wanted to do it myself but I couldn’t… I tried last night after you went… I’m not ashamed, except of not being brave enough to do it myself. But there’s a man you can go to… everybody knows…’
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br />   Halo couldn’t believe what she was hearing.

  ‘There are two of them,’Alexis declared, and tears started to stream down his face. ‘There’s Polemides, a soldier, and another, Telamon. They’ve lost everything. Polemides did his mother. Telamon did his sister: he had sat by her through it all, and on the fifth day he did her. He’ll do the same for anyone who gives him enough money to stay drunk for another day. The new god blesses it – he understands we are suffering too much already. His business is good.’

  ‘Oh, sweet Athena, good Apollo,’ Halo whispered. ‘What is happening to us? What is happening?’

  ‘Remember their names,’ cried Alexis, wild-eyed. ‘You might need them.’

  Halo knew what Alexis had done was wrong. She knew that what those men were doing was wrong. But – but –

  They were, in their way, trying to prevent suffering, just as she was. It was sympathy which made them do that dreadful thing.

  There’s a topic for the philosophers to discuss, she thought bitterly. But those killers are better than people like the amulet sellers. At least they’re honest about what’s going to happen.

  As usual, she discussed it with Arko.

  ‘Honest!’ he said. ‘Seems like honesty was the first casualty of the plague. Have you heard about the new god?’

  ‘Alexis mentioned a new god. Is it Heracles Alexicacos? The daughters of Leos?’

  ‘No, a new new one. He’s called Balbo or Bolbo or something, and he’s going to save us all, apparently. He comes from the east, he has horns like a bull, and he can cast out the plague. He has no temple, but he accepts sacrifice, and on the third day of your sickness this god will come and toss you on his horns until the plague is chased out, and then you recover. He has a secret priest who no one is allowed to see.’

  Halo would have laughed if it hadn’t been so tragic. ‘They are so desperate for something to believe in that they will believe anything,’ she said.

  ‘No, really,’Arko continued, in a tone which told her he didn’t believe a word of it. ‘I met a man who’d met a man who swore it had happened to a man he met. He said this man had seen the god. He explained it all – the red marks on the body are where his horns gore you. Yes, they suffer, but in the end it’s worth it. Sometimes, yes, the eyes or the fingertips are lost forever in the god’s struggle with the plague, but it’s a small price to pay for survival.’