The Road to Sardis

by Stephanie Plowman

  I moved along the grove, and then I came to a tree quite bare of leaves and fruit, but armour and weapons had been fixed to the trunk. I knew then that this was the equipment of my uncle, left as a trophy by his captors, as Thibron had described to me, and then I heard my uncle’s voice, quite clearly. ‘Do what you can for me, if you choose,’ he said, ‘but you must not join me. Shepherd the living, if you can; it was to save Athenians that we came to Syracuse.’

  Thibron was shaking me awake, and dusk was falling. He had brought food, wine, bandages, salves, and, apologetically, a rather old ambling horse. No need for him to explain I was unlikely to stay long on anything more mettlesome.

  He dressed my wound, and fed me. He had to help me mount. He sounded as if he were crying as he wished me luck.

  There was strong moonlight again, helping me to find the place of my uncle’s last stand, helping me also to see his armour and weapons erected as a trophy—almost exactly as in my dream. I wrenched them down, then hesitated for a moment. They were riven and useless in themselves; beyond denying the enemy the chance to flaunt them, I did not know what to do with them.

  The solution finally came simply enough. The field was strewn with great piles of shattered helmets and spears; I added my uncle’s equipment, all but the sword, to the biggest heap of wreckage. I think he would have wanted this.

  Then the ride to Syracuse—Thibron was right, of course, I could make little speed. The moon had vanished before I was close enough to the city to dismount, then, leading the horse, walk forward unsteadily to the north and wait for the dawn to show me the town gate.

  Syracuse was still celebrating; torches flared, sounds of laughter and singing were still rising from the city when the sky began to lighten in the east.

  As I rose to my feet, there was a burst of birdsong from a tree close to me. The sound made me whimper in sudden self-pity. The sun had already risen in Athens and there was birdsong in the green shade of Colonus, the nightingales themselves were still singing, and people were beginning another day, an ordinary day, with no bloodshed or pain or horror or loneliness—my whimpers grew into real sobs. Why did I have to be the only survivor, I, the weakest member of the family, why couldn’t Callistratus have been saved, or my uncle—or if they had to die, why hadn’t I been able to die too, why couldn’t I have been killed days before, and be out of all this loneliness?

  ‘It’s not fair!’ I found myself whispering, like a child. ‘Not fair! Why does it have to be me?’

  I didn’t want to stir myself up to fresh action, I simply wanted to stay where I was until, inevitably, I was discovered.

  But I knew, of course, that this was what I could not do. With no hope, with no terror, but with great weariness, I moved forward in the haggard light towards the gate of Syracuse.

  But my indifference—if indifference it was—left me when I drew near enough to see what lay outside there.

  The beasts had not attacked him yet, but the human animals of Syracuse had hurled mud and filth and stones at him. His face was darkened, almost unrecognisable, his body was broken, there was a great wound in his throat.

  My uncle had died by the hand of a public slave, and, an even more dreadful penalty, they had denied him the right of burial.

  Even as I stared from the shadows, a little group came out from the city. They may have been drunk after a night’s celebration, they may have been sober, but their intention they announced with roars of laughter—they were going to have a bit of fun with the corpses.

  It was then I knew how Achilles felt, the partial blindness, with everything blurred, the partial deafness, the only sound your heart thundering, ‘Kill! Kill!’

  I used my uncle’s sword, and so, I suppose, dishonoured it.

  They must have screamed with fear—shrieked for help—I do not know exactly what happened, but after I had struck down three or four, there was a great ring of people about me, hacking at me. It did not matter; hatred like mine makes you stop feeling pain or fatigue, you just go on fighting till you drop.

  And then I was thinking stupidly that I should have been dead minutes before—here was a whole circle of fully armed men about me—why hadn’t they killed me?

  I had killed plenty of Syracusans.

  But there were men trying to seize me, disarm me—a furious voice was shouting, ‘Take him alive, damn you!’

  It was a Spartan voice.

  I was suddenly aware that I seemed covered with blood, that my breath was coming in great, tearing gasps, and that someone was bending my right arm behind my back with the obvious idea of breaking the bone.

  And standing a few yards before me, glaring at me with a kind of sullen satisfaction was Gylippus. What was more, he was staring at me with an odd kind of recognition.

  There were two Syracusans—still living, I mean. The others in the group of a dozen or so were red-tunicked Spartans. A Syracusan said, raging, ‘Why take him alive? Why not kill him? He came rushing up like a wild beast—’

  Gylippus said, ‘Shut up. I want him alive, because the dead don’t talk, and I want a little chat with him.’

  Churlishly I determined to deprive him of that pleasure—only to open my mouth in the next moment when the second Syracusan began gabbling something about my trying to rescue Nicias’ corpse. In cold rage, I spat at them, ‘If I’d an army at the back of me, I’d never rescue his body! Let the dogs have him—he’s brought a worse fate on thousands of better men!’

  ‘It was Demosthenes’ body you were trying to get away, was it?’ asked Gylippus, looking more satisfied than ever.

  ‘Yes, Demosthenes, to whom Spartans surrendered at Pylos!’ I flared. ‘They were treated well enough! I’m his nephew, damn you!’

  He took it amazingly quietly. ‘Not much like him, though,’ he said, and then, quite inexplicably, ‘Just as well you’d lost your helmet.’

  The Spartan holding my arm growled, ‘What do we do with him?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Gylippus, staring hard at me. ‘Put him in a cart—he’s past walking the distance—and he can go north of the town to join the rest in the quarries. He’ll keep there.’

  Long before noon I was being pushed between strange, swollen shapes of rock into a cold, sour gloom, a place of nightmare even at first sight, a place where they imprisoned not only our bodies, but our spirits, and man after man went mad before he died.

  35

  The Stone Quarries

  So I joined my surviving comrades in the limestone quarries. There were seven thousand of us, and more. The quarry which imprisoned us was only a narrow pit, deep enough to entomb most of us, God knows, but offering no shelter. By day a brazen sun blazed down on us, so that when we were able to work, the heat dried up the sweat on our labouring bodies; the nights, in contrast, were bitterly cold, but better than the days because the stench did not seem quite so reeking when the sun had gone down, and when we did not have to move about, the limestone dust was not stirred up so much.

  They gave us half a pint of water a day and a pint of corn. On this, half the ration of a slave, we were supposed not only to keep alive, but to quarry stone for them. In the first weeks overseers would come in with an escort of guards, and flog us and knock us about if we were not working as hard as good slaves should, but after only a month the smells and the piles of corpses were too bad even for the nerves and stomachs of quarry overseers. People were dying, of course, right from the start, because the wounded had been thrown in with the rest and we could not dress their wounds or wash them, or keep that damned grey dust from settling on them. I was the only man there whose wounds had been given any proper attention. Thibron again proved my salvation.

  I found that some of my friends still survived—for a little while. Ariston was there, and because of Ariston, Glaucon remained alive—just. His wound would not have been a bad one in normal circumstances, but we were not living (to misuse the word) normally. So he rotted. The flesh went black, the dead skin sloughed off, and from a man still living the
re was the awful sweet smell of decay. Poor Glaucon, who had fought that long fight against his father so that he might learn the art of shaping stone, lay in stone rotting alive even before he was dead. They had said he might one day take the place of Pheidias, but he died at twenty-two in the stone quarry, silently. There was no point in speaking, even to me, his friend. There was no point in asking me to ease his pain—I couldn’t even keep the dust from his wounds, his eyes, his mouth. There was no point in giving me a message for his family, for Conon in particular, for we both knew I was as doomed as he.

  He was actually the first to die in the quarry, and we found his death a shocking thing, not because he had succumbed so quickly to his wound, but because of the realisation that we had no way of disposing of his body. The guards refused to take him away, and, of course, we couldn’t dig a grave for him in the limestone.

  We found that it was the youngest of us, the boys, who complained first, and died first. We learned fairly soon that it was better not to talk, because talking made us so thirsty, but the sudden chill in the air the moment the sun dropped from sight in the narrow cleft of sky above us always seemed to give us vile tempers—then we would complain, quarrel. You would feel a murderous hatred for the wretch huddled next to you; he was noisy, took up too much room—any people whose proximity you might have found tolerable were distant, separated from you by huddled stinking heaps of bones and rags.

  Only one regular duty remained in our ghastly remnant of an army; that was the duty of the first man who woke in the morning, and his task was to go round shaking those who had fallen asleep with him the night before. When this task was mine, I never knew if I were shaking a man still living or yet another corpse.

  I have said that seven thousand of us were taken prisoners. Most of us were Athenians, but a proportion were our allies—from Greece itself, from Sicily, from Italy. God knows how many of us were still living after seventy days, but people came and yelled at us from one of the quarry openings—and the sound of a strong voice now that we were used only to cracked whispers and moans was so shocking that I, for one, had to grit my teeth to prevent myself from screaming—that the allies from Greece itself, Argives chiefly, of course, were to come out.

  We were in no state to take in the news anything but slowly. It took me about ten minutes to gather what was being said, and then I dragged myself about the floor of the quarry, peering into one gaunt, dust-grimed face after another, until I came to Philocles, who, with the rest of his company had been captured the day after the surrender.

  ‘What do you think it means?’ he whispered.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I whispered back. ‘It may be a good thing—may be bad.’

  ‘If it’s a good thing,’ said Philocles, ‘say you’re an Argive. I’d swear to it.’

  I shook my head slowly. ‘No,’ I began to say, ‘I can’t do it—you wouldn’t try to pass yourself off as an Athenian and leave the other people from Argos, would you?’

  Then the whispering started, dry, rustling waves from those nearest the entrance, who had seen what happened when one Argive had managed to stumble out. He had been told that the allies from Greece itself were to be branded on the forehead with a horse (the emblem of the victorious cavalry of Syracuse) and sold as slaves. To poor wretches such as us, the prospect of branding and a normal slave’s life seemed like the promise of the Elysian Fields; a procession of scarecrows began to stagger to the entrance with all the speed at their command, reeling, falling in their trembling weakness, but then, if they couldn’t get to their feet again, crawling on, sobbing, ‘I’m an Argive—an Argive—not an Athenian,’ scrabbling in frantic haste towards the glorious prospect of branding irons and singed flesh and the masters’ whips—and away from the dead, the dying, the Athenians.

  Philocles whispered again, ‘Come with us; no one will give the game away. Look, some of your people have passed themselves off already!’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I stay.’

  ‘Then I stay with you.’

  I don’t think he would have gone if one of his comrades had not called in a cracked voice to the Sicilians that the son of Timocrates, the richest man in Argos, was crouching there in the far corner—Timocrates would give all the money in the world to buy back his only son.

  Then he was dragged off, gaunt, spectral, body skinned raw by the sun, the most elegant young man in Argos, to be branded and sold; and one by one the other mainland allies went, dragging themselves or dragged by others, all the living ones. The corpses and dying they left with us, to the hideous, evil buzz, never ending, of the flies, to incessant staring, from dead or living eyes at the distant strip of blue visible through the narrow cleft at the top of the quarry, to terrible dreams from which we awoke screaming and shouting, from worse dreams, in their way, which tormented us all, dreams of water—I myself dreamed night after night, remembered day after day, the cool spring in the shade of the plane tree on the farm at home—and the others dreamed and babbled of all the springs of Hellas and Sicily and Italy.

  And now the dying went on more quickly, less quietly. Until the Argives had been taken—for life—and we had been so clearly left for death, I think we had all resolved that we would clutch on to life as fast as we could, hold on, whatever happened, as long as we could. But after that day, few continued the struggle.

  So died the flower of our youth. And then one night the men came for me.

  36

  Offer of Escape

  I cannot describe exactly what happened because I was in a desperate way at the time; Ariston and some of the others gathered that I was to be taken out and tortured because one of the men hauling me out cursed and said, ‘Have you ever seen anything more lousy!’ and his companion had growled, ‘Careful with him, though; don’t let him die on us. He’s Demosthenes’ nephew.’

  Ariston and all the others who could move, clawed feebly, gallantly, at the burly figures dragging me away, and those who could not move but still had a voice left, croaked curses and protests. But my captors brushed off the attacks as easily as if they were beset by a swarm of midges in summer.

  We all thought that some kind of information was to be wrenched out of me. The prospect didn’t scare me very much—not because I was heroic, but because I knew I was so weak that if I didn’t die on my way to the torture chamber, I’d go at the first twinge of whatever they chose to apply to me.

  It was dark outside, dark as in the quarry, but the air was different. ‘This is fresh air,’ I said to myself, ‘Good air!’

  But fresh air was not real to me after six months, and I could not really be sure that it was good. In fact, when it came rushing into my lungs, I choked, was almost sick with the keenness and freshness of it. When I had finished coughing, I collapsed again, and they got me into some kind of cart. We lurched off, and I fainted. I don’t know how long I was unconscious, but when I recovered I was in a small room lit with a single oil-lamp, and a harsh voice—a familiar voice—was grinding on that I must be brought round and made to talk.

  Odd how your wits work—or don’t work. Earlier that day I had been fretting in a stupid kind of way because I could not remember much about people back in Athens; my grandfather’s face I could not recollect, for example, or how he spoke. Yet this gruff voice, which I had heard only twice before, I placed at once. ‘Don’t make me drink Spartan black broth, Gylippus!’ I said. ‘I’ll tell you anything rather than face that.’

  The hard blunt-featured face seemed to swim into my line of vision.

  ‘By God!’ said Gylippus, with genuine interest. ‘You Athenians try to be funny on your deathbeds.’

  They gave me some good Syracusan wine, pouring it into me as fast as they could; I choked, and a lot went over me, but at least the wine-smell overwhelmed some of the other smells, and when they hauled me up into a chair, I stayed there and did not pitch off.

  Then they all went out, and a few minutes later I heard another step. With my heightened hearing, now as keen as that of any othe
r animal, I heard it when the approaching man was some distance away, and somehow I managed to drag myself up on to my feet. This, no doubt, was the executioner. And there comes a point in suffering when the victim willingly offers himself to the executioner.

  But it was not the executioner who came in.

  And I had not been brought there because of my uncle—it was because of another relative, and that relative was staring at me now.

  I suppose it’s rather odd in a way, that the sheer shock of seeing Alcibiades didn’t send me crashing over; I think that what kept me conscious—and standing—was the look on his face. God knows he was consummate actor enough—could any other man play a part so cunningly to deceive as long as he did the most suspicious swine on earth? But at the sight of me, even his mask slipped a little. This must have been one of the few occasions when those blue eyes of his showed honest horror. I don’t suppose he had turned a hair when he’d heard what was happening in the stone quarries, but to see one of his close blood-relatives lousy, incredibly filthy, starving, half dead, with the marks of lashing white on his skeleton of a body—well, I’m one of the few people who can say they have seen Alcibiades look disconcerted. A dark flush spread over his face, and the quarry slave’s eyes were not the ones that looked away first. He just said my name, and then he went to the table and—in a clumsy way quite unlike his usual studiedly graceful manner—poured out two cups of wine. I took one and drank the warming stuff: I wanted all my wits about me in this amazing encounter. I also reseated myself carefully on the chair. And he still went on staring.

  I could not know, of course, how shocking I and all my comrades looked now to any outsider. I felt no shock when I saw that the flesh of Ariston’s face and body seemed to have been eaten away, leaving nothing between the dry cracked skin (where skin remained), and the skull and skeleton. I was not shocked because I knew I looked the same.