Like You'd Understand, Anyway

by Jim Shepard

  Made camp yesterday at 6 a.m., nearly done in from lack of food and water. Three of the seven horses lost, the other four nearly useless. All of us are afflicted by a fatigue that seems impossible to overcome. The buttons on our shirts by mid-morning are so heated as to pain us. Few men have ever laid themselves down to rest, if it can be called rest, as bereft as I have been today.

  November 20th

  Browne has somehow managed another expedition to the south on one of the fresher horses to ascertain how much water remains on our line of retreat. He returned this morning to report that one of the deepest and narrowest channels had long gone dry. With that source lost, there can be no water nearer to us than seventy-eight miles, and perhaps not there.

  The horses are at their wits' end. What grass there is flies to powder under their tread. The last ram has taken the staggers and Beale has ordered him killed.

  Whirlwinds blowing all morning from the NE increased to a furnacelike gale. The incinerating heat was so withering that I wondered if the very trees would ignite. Everything, animate and inanimate, gave way before it: the horses with their backs to it and noses to the ground, lacking the strength to raise their heads; the sheep and dogs huddled beneath the drays. One of our thermometers, graduated to 157 degrees, burst. Which is a circumstance I believe no traveler on this earth has ever before had to record.

  November 24th

  A party rebellious to my purposes now intends to strike out to the south in hope of relief. Browne reported this to me. And of whom was this party constituted? I croaked, gazing at him with what I hoped to be severity. Beale, he said. Hamilton and Mabberly Gould. Cuppage. Purdie. Mack and Moorhouse. And Mander-Jones, to lead.

  “That's everyone, besides Hill and yourself,” I told him.

  He agreed.

  “Cuppage is unconscious,” I reminded him.

  “Mack says he speaks for Cuppage,” he told me.

  I asked after his own status. Was he going south too?

  “I have just been there,” he said.

  I assembled the group and addressed the assembly without anger. I told them I could only insist upon all I had observed. And that I have always been open to reason. But that I was convinced that at present no hope lay to our south, at least not until the rains returned.

  They killed the rest of the bullocks and scraped and sewed their hides to carry water. They will take one cask and leave one. One dray, carrying only Cuppage, the water, and some dried beef and flour. Mander-Jones, who can hardly see from the bites of the flies, is leading nevertheless. He refuses to talk to me at any length. I asked what he wanted done with his specimens and notes and then regretted the meanness of the question.

  December 1st

  They are gone. The dogs that were left followed them out of camp.

  December 2nd

  Hill has made a stew of some of the beef. At the last moment Browne tried to arrest the mutineers' departure with a startling display of passion. Now he seems to have withdrawn into himself even more. “Do you think they have any chance?” I overheard Hill murmur some hours later while serving him his stew. Whatever he answered caused poor Hill to weep once he'd returned to his cooking fire.

  December 5th

  A squall has leveled our remaining tents and torn away the canvas covering of our dug-out. My papers are gone. What's left of our supplies has been scattered. I found a sextant and two goose quills. The weather remains infernal. A gale unrelentingly blows from the N or E. The flies do not relent. How is human foresight to calculate upon such a climate? We are all suffering from piercing pains in the joints. My gums are now hugely swollen. Hill's lower leg muscles are so contracted he cannot stand.

  We sit about with the aimlessness of aborigines, gazing into each others' eyes and preparing for the worst. Only when thinking of my companions do I have regrets. One of my father's favorite resolutions was always that life was worthless save the good that one might do. “We're forced to conclude, then, that for him, life was worthless,” Browne remarked during one of our early father discussions.

  December 11th

  We have pains and do not understand what they are. Browne has become unresponsive, immersed in his own unwinding. He has spoken of starfish and sea ferns. I do not know what we will do if he is laid low. He has always been one of those whom life pushed from one place to another. A useful naysayer, the kind Australians call a “no-hoper.”

  December 23rd–24th

  Hill is unable to walk. Browne and I have resolved to assay one of the unexplored ravines to our E. He speaks of a great flood there, and drowned cattle. Hill looks at him through his tiny spectacles with pity. Hill says he feels no pain while stationary. The skin of his calves and thighs is black and the discoloration is proceeding upwards.

  Our horse led us up a draw all night while we dragged along behind it. Daybreak found us in a smallish box canyon of some sort, sheltered, at least, from the sun. Browne then slept while I explored as best I could. It was an extraordinary place, and evidence of our inland sea. There were marine fossils and conglomerate rock that looked like termite mounds. The remains of strange undersea plants and fish fins were clearly evident. Grotesque shapes, and a great silence. I roused Browne to show him. We were both tearful at the sight. “The Beadle Sea,” he said to himself when he came around and looked. “No, no, the Browne Sea,” I answered, cradling his head, but by then he was again already asleep.

  I laid myself beside him, grateful for his presence. He always doubted my judgment but thought my leadership to be worth my blunders. We awoke some hours later to find the horse gone and twilight coming on. More sleep, Browne in a half-conscious state and making small gesticulations. It was as if he had been submerged in a kind of gloaming of the mind, an infant's fatalism. Near daybreak the moon rose in the E and the sun followed, warming us both. It was not possible to tell how long my friend had been dead. I eased my arms from around him and stood, then turned round myself and cried. I squatted beside him. When the sun was full on my head I found a flint and scratched onto the rock face beside where he lay J. A. BROWNE S.A.E. DEC 251840. I sat with my back to his side for another full day, taking only a little water at sunset. In the blue moonlight the stars seemed to multiply and wheel. I gazed upward full of grievance and self-justification. I called out that we should be done justice to. The canyon walls gave back their response. In the moonlight they became a luminous cerulean. I heard the slosh and slap of water in a great bay. I knew I had had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was. The wind picked up. My ears filled with sound. The blackness of a sandstorm dropped over the canyon rim like a cloak. Its force turned my friend onto his side. Its force turned my face to the rock. I saw strange wraiths. Wormlike, coiling figures. Terrible faces. My eyes clogged with grit. I hoped they would fill with everything they needed. While my throat filled with what poured over the canyon rim. And my heart filled with the rest.

  My Aeschylus

  I am Aeschylus son of Euphorion of Eleusis and I've come this day with my brother to take my place in the line with my tribe to meet the invader where he disembarks and drive him back into the sea. We've rested and waited six days in the Herakleion sanctuary on the plain of Marathon, with the Median fleet filling half the shoreline of the bay, even with their ships anchored eight deep. More men-at-arms are assembling before the Great Marsh than any of us have ever seen. We're told that their word for commander means “Leader of the Hosts.”

  At the eastern end of the marsh is a lake, which enables them to water their horses. A stream flows out of it to the sea. It's fresh enough to be drunk by cattle where it issues from the lake, but at its mouth turns brackish and fills with saltwater fish.

  Who knows me better than my brother Kynegeiros? Who's looked after me with more care? Whom have I disappointed as intensely? Who's been as terrible a household presence?

  Who's trained me? Who's pruned my independence? Who's stopped my mouth? Who's set my feet on the path of understanding, and shown that k
nowledge comes in suffering? Whose hard hand gave me this scar across my scalp, just because it could?

  We've spent six days checking and rechecking our kit and avoiding idlers and gossips. He's tried to interest me in his surgeon's packet: here's how you start the needle with the catgut twine; here's how you grip the narrow-nose to extract an arrowhead, as opposed to a sword shard. I don't need to be reminded that battlefield surgery can save a life. Yesterday to please him I sewed up some oxhide as practice.

  We marched all night through Pallene, skirting Mount Pelikos to the southeast, and arrived here on the plain at first light. The plain, empty of trees and left fallow for grazing, smells of the wild fennel that gives it its name.

  I'm all aches and pains. My brother has a month-old sprain that he aggravated on a gravely downhill track. I'm forty-four and he's forty-nine. We're no longer young men. We have families.

  Here is our country's situation as we understand it: the Persian has come in response to our support of the Ionian revolt and the burning of his citadel at Sardis. He has come with the combined nations of Media, Sakai, Ethiopia, Egypt, Dacia, Scythia, Bactria, Illyria, Thessalia, and India. He has come through Rhodes, Kos, Samos, Naxos, Paros, Karystos, and Eretria, subjugating each as he went. Everywhere his fleet has put in, he has demanded and received hostages and men-at-arms. He has come in such numbers that the disembarking alone has taken, according to the local farmers, nine days.

  We are of the deme Eleusis and the tribe Aiantis, and when our strategos draws us up in battle order, we will be in the place of honor on the right flank, the sea off our shoulders. We will with our other Attic demes and allies form a rank facing the invader that is sufficiently long but insufficiently deep. Our leaders call it Stretching the Soup. The rest of us call it, with quiet irony, Our Challenge.

  I channel the rote and the new and unseen. My head has always been the busiest of crossroads, a festival of happy and unhappy arrivals. In the hours before daybreak when I was a boy, god sent me words as visitors. I told my brother. Back then I was still in his favor. I kept my stylus and wax tablet within reach by my bedside. In the mornings I showed my mother too, examples like loosed and winged. I remember that Tartarean troubled her in ways that I didn't understand.

  “Where did you get these words?” she asked. “Who's been speaking to you?”

  “Kynegeiros,” I always said. Which made her think the words came from him. When he denied it the first time—I was ten, he was fifteen—our father had him beaten. Some of the words were evidently impious.

  “Tell me about the words,” my brother told me later, while I helped him with his back. “Don't tell them.” We gathered and crushed in a pestle the foxglove and sorrel, and I applied the paste to the welts he couldn't reach.

  What I told him caused him concern. He questioned me about whatever else I may have noticed by way of omens or signs. He talked about how to know if I was speaking only with myself. I became his new responsibility. He gave himself over to it, his resentment plain.

  Even so, I didn't stop. In the mornings I'd scratch Onus and Dyad in the loam of our herb garden. He'd explain their meanings. When our other brother Anacreon or our father happened near, we went about our business, the scratchings our secret.

  But when we were alone again, he'd say, “Who's giving you these?” I didn't know, I told him. Where was I hearing them? he'd ask. In my head, I'd tell him. This caused him to hold his forehead with his fingertips.

  Once he asked how I felt when they arrived. I didn't know. Did I hear a voice, or see the words in my head? I didn't know.

  So he broke my wax tablet and was angry with me for a week. It scared me. And pleased me. Maybe, I thought, I was headed down the wrong path. Now, words from elsewhere still marshal themselves, rebel or obey me, send their havoc out into the world, and my reward is the laurel wreath. But back then, I spent my time alone in the hills above our house, telling myself that if I couldn't read the meaning of such signs, I could at least learn something about my world.

  Anacreon also kept track of my strangeness, but with more hostility. He was the firstborn and eight years older. Usually I told myself that I had one brother who understood and one who didn't, but the week Kynegeiros was angry I wandered around alone, collecting signs to ask him about later, once he'd begun speaking to me again: the wind on a ridge line like a rush of voices, or patterns in a poplar's bark that repeated themselves in one of its taproots. When he finally took me back, I asked him: did my difference mean I was one of the elect, or cast out? He cuffed me for my presumption. I didn't persist, but decided to act, and to let the inner spirit follow the outer shadow. I had him cut my hair in what he said was the ancient Doric style: close-cropped at the forehead and long in the back. I modeled as many of his behaviors as I could, the way children learn about the clean hand and dirty hand and which you keep to yourself. Both of my brothers took pleasure in their manners, speaking only when addressed. They were respectful with their gaze, their greetings commendable.

  After matricide had especially disturbed him, he asked me to remember the first time the words had appeared. Did I remember? I thought I did: a morning when I was three or four, in a powdery season of little rain. I'd had barley dust on my hands. He'd been seated nearby. He must have been eight or nine. He'd been watching Anacreon working a rasp up and down an ash shake for a javelin. As I watched him watch, my heart rose and fell, rose and fell, and no one knew. A word appeared before me: starfish. A crow dropped to the ground and both my brothers made note of it and Kynegeiros shooed it away.

  I asked if he remembered. He didn't, but held his wrist as if trying to immobilize one hand with the other. When he let go, he said that he did remember the way my expressions, at that age, had been comically severe.

  My brothers and their friends played their war games at the edge of our wheat field. When I followed they chased me away.

  When I returned they chased me away again. At home I attempted descriptions of the architecture of the stalks, the leaf blades sheathed around the stem or the spikelets' airy intricacy. Just being in the field made a force in my chest levitate. But my excitement went too far and somehow upset my family. I tried to confide in Kynegeiros when I caught him alone, but it repulsed and alarmed him that I was so tireless in search of attention, as if he'd found a spider in his soup.

  He was already forced to spend time in my company, responsible for ensuring that I arrived, daily, at alphabet lessons and music. When he came of age at sixteen, I marched alone with other boys in ranks from the music master's house to the physical trainer's palaestra. I sang “Pallas, Terrible Stormer of Cities” and “Ajax on His Rock” and played the hedgehog game. I missed him. At home in the afternoon, where I was allowed to watch him play knucklebones or wrestle Anacreon, I sang and resang songs for him. I pretended that I was also sixteen.

  That year he commissioned a first helmet like our father's, a variant on the Corinthian design. I was permitted to lift it from its peg and run my palms through the brush of its crest. I coped with the excitement by breathing through my mouth.

  And my head was becoming an open gate that the world streamed through. Brothers muscles honey wine stones. Honey brothers muscles stones wine.

  He lost patience with me again because of it. In the afternoons they shut me into the outer courtyard, but I followed their games by keeping my eye to the gate latch. They played at quail-tapping. The bird when rapped on its head sometimes stood its ground and sometimes backed out of the ring. They cheered it on or cheated by scaring it, exchanging coins on the basis of its behavior. I watched and sang battlefield paeans and imagined civic crises that would call forth a muster of even the youngest boys.

  Anacreon loved the sea and spent his free time assisting the fishing fleet. Kynegeiros helped, but sometimes went his own way. When he did, I followed, reciting lists like figs, limes, almonds, olives, and lemons that soothed me and displaced the pressure of other lists that, arrayed in squadrons, so unsettled my brother. T
o lose me he leapt walls or rushed up high, gravelly hillsides. When he succeeded, my day was ruined. Eventually I'd continue on, miserable. I'd follow flying beetles riding the hot air up those same hillsides, or investigate the drowsings of hornets.

  When I found him again, our eyes met like bones jarred in sockets. What did I want?, he'd demand, and again disappear. I always wondered, by what miracle was the dust and the rock around me transformed into speech? When he talked to me it was like a duet in which the other voice was silent. When I thought of him it was like a sign from god that I wasn't ready to read.

  But whenever he talked to Anacreon about me, he'd say, My Aeschylus this, and My Aeschylus that. Anacreon spoke to him of me the same way: Your Aeschylus this, Your Aeschylus that.

  Our decision to wait six days was not unanimous. Every knot of two or more citizens has become a discussion group. Hellenes have, after all, made arguing black is white a sport. My brother and I when not engaged in drill have walked the shoreline, both for training and to keep our own counsel. Sometimes we walk until Phosphorus, the morning star and light-bearer, leaves Hesperus, evening and western star, behind. Should we have stayed behind our city walls? Could we continue to wait for the Spartans? Should we have attacked while more of the enemy was disembarking? And why had they waited? Concern for their cavalry and its vulnerability to our camp's shelter in the sacred grove? Or were we drawn here, so that our city could be betrayed and given over, like Eretria? The last three nights there's been a waxing moon above the bay. When it wanes, the Spartans' Karneian festival will end and they'll begin their march to us. We walk every night through the wavelets combing in onto the sand. We walk until the watch fires are banked down. Stretches of the shore are a seafarer's junkyard, with stove-in and disintegrating small boats offering up their salt-eaten and mealy spare parts along the high-tide mark.