The Walled Orchard

by Tom Holt

  Of course, everyone you meet in Athens claims that he had the plague and survived it; somehow it’s regarded as a mark of great moral and spiritual merit, as if you have been tried and acquitted by the Gods. Even the little general who wrote the book says he had the plague, and to be fair to him his account of the symptoms is at least recognisable. Mind you, he also gives you the impression that he was there on the spot when all the famous and significant speeches were being made, and since some of these took place simultaneously in opposite corners of Greece, I doubt very much whether he was sitting there with his wax tablets on his knees taking down every word as it cleared the speaker’s teeth. I do know for a fact that I did have the plague, and that only the intervention of the Gods saved my life.

  The plague arrived in Athens on a grain boat, and was soon making its presence felt in the Corn-Chandlers’ Quarter. At first nobody took much notice, since most corn-chandlers are resident foreigners and one more or less makes no great difference to anyone. But soon it began infecting citizens, and then we all realised that we had a major problem on our hands.

  My own experience of the plague was this. I had been on a visit to my aunt Nausimache, and there was gossip going around the City that she was having an affair with a rich corn-chandler called Zeuxis, who came from somewhere near Mytilene. In fact, if you have a copy of Cratinus’ Ants (I don’t; I lent it to someone years ago, like a fool) I think you’ll find there’s a reference to that affair in it. Anyway, the plague was one of those diseases which you can catch from other people, and my guess is that she caught it from Zeuxis and I caught it from her; I distinctly remember her giving me an auntly kiss when we arrived, and wiping it off with the back of my hand when she wasn’t looking.

  A day or so after this visit, I started getting these quite unbearable pains in the front and sides of my head, as if some idiot had knocked over a brazier inside my brains and they had caught fire. Then my eyes started to itch, just as though I had been peeling onions, and something horrible happened to the inside of my mouth. Even I could tell that my breath smelt like rotten meat, and my tongue was swollen and tender.

  My grandfather, who I had gone to live with after my father died — I think I was about twelve at the time — took one look at me, diagnosed plague, and had me locked up in the stable with the goats and donkeys. The last thing he needed, I remember him saying as he put up the bar on the door, was a house full of plague, and if that was the Gods’ way of rewarding him for taking in orphans he was going to have to think very seriously about his theological position. Luckily we had a Libyan housemaid at the time, and she had got it into her head that her black skin would protect her from the disease. She reckoned that if she fed me and looked after me and I got well again, my grandfather would be so pleased that he would set her free and let her marry his understeward, and so she brought me out the scraps from the table and a jug of fresh water every day.

  So there I was once again, entirely surrounded by goats, and the disease went into its next stage. For about a day I could not stop sneezing and coughing, and I vomited up bile of every imaginable colour; there was one peculiar shade of yellow that I have never seen since, except in some rather expensive Persian tapestries that someone was selling in the market. Then my skin broke out in little blisters which itched unendurably; but I think some God whispered in my ear not to scratch, and I managed not to, somehow. The worst part of it was the thirst, which I simply cannot describe, and here I think my grandfather’s treatment of me saved my life. You see, I had only a few cupfuls of water each day, and sometimes nothing at all when the maid forgot or couldn’t get away, whereas I have heard since that the people who were able to drink as much as they liked invariably died. In fact, my belief is that once the God saved me from the disease itself, this lack of water stopped me from catching the murderous diarrhoea which killed more people than the plague did, and which inevitably follows the disease itself, like a stray dog following a sausage-maker. After all, what with no food and no water, there was nothing inside me to come out, and so my body was spared the convulsions of the diarrhoea and I survived.

  I fully appreciate that I must have been an unlovely companion while the disease was on me, but from that day to this I have not been able to forgive the attitude of the goats and donkeys towards me, which was little short of downright offensive. Did they come and bleat reassuringly over me, and soothe my fevered brow with their tongues, like they are supposed to do in the old stories? Did they hell. They all backed away into the far corner of the stable and didn’t even come across to eat the leaves and bean-helm in their mangers, and the hungrier they got, the more they seemed to blame me. This made me feel absolutely dejected, as you can imagine, and for a while I felt like giving the whole thing up.

  On the seventh day of my sickness the maid stopped bringing food and water and I resigned myself to death, which was not a concept I had given much thought to previously. I remember thinking that it would be nice not to have to go to school any more, but that it would be rather a shame that no one would ever see one of my Comedies. However, I consoled myself with the thought of meeting my father again beside the waters of the Styx, always assuming that I could recognise him after so many years. Then I started worrying about how on earth I was going to pay the fare, since Charon the Ferryman takes nobody across the river unless he pays his obol. Then I remembered hearing somewhere (I think it was in a Comedy) that Charon had finally retired and that an Athenian had bought his pitch, increasing the fare (naturally enough) to two obols, but letting Athenians across for free. This comforted me greatly, since I had been greatly distressed at the thought of spending the rest of time on the wrong side of the river with all the murderers and parricides and people who hadn’t been buried properly, and so I settled back to die in peace.

  Now I hadn’t slept at all since the disease started, and I think I must have fallen asleep then, for I swear I saw Dionysus himself standing over me, leaning on his vine-wood staff and wearing a Comic mask and boots, with the floppy leather phallus which all the actors wear in the Comedies dangling from his groin. He seemed very big and fierce and jolly, but I wasn’t frightened by him, or particularly surprised to see him there at all.

  ‘Cheer up, Eupolis of Pallene,’ he said, and the whole stable seemed to shake, like those caves down south that are supposed to vibrate to the pitch of your voice. ‘Pull yourself together and stop snivelling; you’ll have to put up with far worse things than this before you see the last of me — in the front row of the Theatre when they hiss that clever Chorus of yours, and in the walled orchard, of course. But remember, you owe me some prizes which you must pay, and I’ve hand-reared you from a puppy to write me a Comedy or two. If you die now and leave me to make do with that idiot Aristomenes, I’ll never forgive you.’

  I wanted to promise but I couldn’t speak; so I nodded, and kept on nodding, and then I was definitely asleep, because I remember waking up. And when I did wake up, I knew that I was going to live; just as you can feel when you walk into a house whether anyone lives there or not. I know that I just lay there for a very long time, filled with a joy that kept me warm and made me forget how hungry and uncomfortable I was; not because I had escaped death and was clear of the pain of the disease, but because I had seen the God of Comedy and been promised success. It had been well worth the disease, I reckoned, to get that promise.

  After a long, long time I remembered that I was starving hungry, and I thought it was time to do something about it. I started shouting at the top of my little voice that I was well again and wanted to be let out, but nobody came; so I assumed that nobody believed me, which was reasonable enough. So, as soon as I felt confident that I had my strength back, I examined the door of the stable, which was barred on the outside and wouldn’t budge. Now, after surviving the plague and being promised a Chorus by the God, a little thing like a stable door wasn’t going to get in my way, and so I sat down on the manger and thought hard. Unfortunately, probably because the war kept
interrupting my education, I had never been taught how to get out of locked stables — unless you count that bit in the Odyssey where Odysseus escapes from the Cyclops’ cave, which I had been made to learn by heart. But I say that doesn’t count, because the circumstances of that case were quite unique and highly unlikely to recur. Just as I was starting to feel baffled, I caught sight of my uncle’s old black donkey, and I had an idea.

  As soon as I was cured, the animals (who were just as hungry as I was) had resumed eating and drinking, and had finished off all their fodder. They were now getting extremely restive, and I saw how that could be turned to my advantage. You see, this old black donkey of my uncle’s, which he kept for hauling olives and ploughing in the season, had the sort of temper you only usually come across in bath-attendants and the commanders of naval vessels, and hunger had not made him any sweeter natured. I’ll swear that donkey hated everything and everybody in the world; but what he hated most of all, with the possible exception of other male donkeys and hard work, was being prodded in the ribs with a sharp stick. I happened to have a sharp stick handy — it had been in with the fodder in the mangers — and so I wrestled him over until his hind legs were almost touching the door of the barn. Then I took my stick and gave the donkey the most terrific poke and sure enough he lashed out with his powerful legs and gave the door a tremendous kick. I waited until he had settled down again and prodded him once more, and once again; and that was about as much as the stable door could take. The bar snapped, and at once I shooed the donkey away and threw myself at the door. It gave way, arid out I rolled into the blinding sunlight of the yard. As I picked myself up, I saw that the little finger of my left hand had snapped clean off, just like a dead twig, although I hadn’t felt a thing. I picked the finger up and stared at it — it had shrivelled away into a little white stick and it smelt quite disgusting — and I tried to fit it back on, but of course it wouldn’t stay. Eventually I gave up and threw it away, and a crow who had been busy with something behind the muck-heap fluttered over and took a very tentative peck at it. Apparently, the loss of fingers and toes and even whole hands and feet was quite common among people who had survived the plague, but of course I didn’t know that at the time and it startled me considerably.

  Well, there I was, safe and sound, and I wanted to see the expressions on everybody’s faces when I walked in and told them I was well again. Being a horrible child in many ways I thought I would give them a surprise, so I crept over to the back door and tiptoed in to the inner room, where I expected my grandfather would be sleeping after his midday meal. But he wasn’t there; instead I saw my mother, sitting bolt upright in her chair in front of her spinning-wheel, as dead as Agamemnon. I could see from the state of her and the horrible expression on her face that she had died of the plague; typically she had stayed at her household duties to the last, so that Hermes would be able to report to the Judges of the Dead that she had died as a woman should. That was my mother all over.

  I found our Syrian houseboy doubled up in the corner of the inner room — he had taken off his sandal and bitten clean through the thongs — while the Libyan maid was lying in the storeroom. The pain had clearly been too much for her to bear, poor creature, and she had cut her own throat with the fine ivory-handled razor my mother used for shaving her legs and armpits. However, I could find no sign of my grandfather anywhere in the house, and I began to hope that he had somehow survived, and maybe even gone to get help. But I found him, too, a little way down the street, which was utterly quiet and deserted, the way an Athenian street never is. He was in one of those big stone troughs set up to catch rainwater in the dictator Pisistratus’ time, and I guess that he found the thirst so unendurable that he had jumped in and drowned. It was a sad way for such a man to die, for he had been at the battle of Plataea, when the Athenians and the Spartans had defeated King Xerxes’ army and killed his great general Mardonius.

  It was a most peculiar feeling to come out of that stable and find that all my family and household had died without letting me know. While I had been ill, I had assumed that I was the only person in the whole of Athens to be afflicted, and that if and when I ever got out of there the world outside would be roughly the same as it had been when I went in. As I stood there looking at my grandfather floating in the rain-trough, I must confess that I felt little or no grief or sadness, and ever since then I have never been able to take the Choruses in the Tragedies very seriously. You know what I mean; the Messenger bustles on with the news of the great disaster, and at once the Chorus start moaning and singing Aiai and Hottotoi, and all those other things that people are supposed to say when they’re upset but never do; and then twenty lines or so later they’ve pulled themselves together again and are saying that the Gods are just. Whereas, in my experience at any rate, I find that bad news takes at least a day to sink in properly, and it’s only after people have stopped sympathising and are saying what a callous brute I am that I start going to pieces. Well, there you are; I felt no great urge to lament or tear my hair, only a sensation which I can best describe as a Godlike detachment, as the Gods must feel when they look down and see mortal men. After all, I had survived and everyone else in the whole world hadn’t; this created a division between them and me as wide as that which separates the immortal Gods from mortal men. I couldn’t feel any sorrow, or even any involvement, just as a human being can never feel involved when he pours boiling water on an ants’ nest and so wipes out a city which in their terms might be as great as Athens or Troy. Perhaps, after all, I was too young to have feelings, or I was stunned by the sheer scale of the disaster. But I don’t think so; I felt the same way when I was a grown man in the walled orchard, and that was just as great a disaster, or maybe even greater.

  So there I was, standing by the rain-trough and thinking these deep thoughts, when I saw a man in armour hurrying up the street with his cloak round his face to keep the bad air out. I was just thinking that this was pretty foolish, since there is no special magic in a cloak that can counteract the effects of plague and death, and that was just another example of the folly of these puny mortals, when the man caught sight of me and nearly jumped out of his skin. Of course, I said to myself, he’s frightened at seeing a God: I must reassure him; so I called out, ‘Don’t be afraid, I won’t hurt you.’

  ‘The hell with you,’ said the man. ‘You’ve got the plague, haven’t you?’

  ‘No,’ I replied, ‘I had it for a while but the God cured me. You’re quite safe, I won’t infect you.’

  He didn’t look at all convinced, so I started describing the symptoms and how I had recovered, and then he wasn’t so frightened. It turned out that a fellow soldier of his had had the plague and survived, and so he knew I was telling the truth. He came over and sat down on the edge of the trough, with his cloak still up around his ears; but I could see his face. He was about twenty-two, with a long thin nose and sandy hair just starting to recede from his temples.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked him.

  ‘Callicrates,’ he replied. ‘I’m looking for the house of a man called Euthydemus son of Euxis, of Pallene.’

  ‘The house is down there,’ I said, ‘just before you get to the corner; but if you’re looking for Euthydemus himself, you’ll find him right behind you.’ For of course Euthydemus was my grandfather’s name and Euxis was his father, and our village and deme was Pallene.

  Callicrates looked round but could see nobody; then he caught sight of the body floating in the trough and started violently.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ he said, ‘what do you want to go playing tricks like that for? You nearly gave me a fit.’

  ‘Honestly,’ I said solemnly, ‘that’s Euthydemus there. I should know, because I’m his grandson, Eupolis. All the rest of us who were in the house are dead, except me. The God cured me, like I said.’

  Callicrates stared at me, as if I had just told him that Babylon had fallen. ‘Is that true?’ he said, after a moment.

  ‘Of cours
e it’s true,’ I said. ‘If you don’t believe me, you can go and have a look for yourself, but I wouldn’t advise it. They all had the plague, you see.’

  He was silent for a very long time, staring at the knots on the thongs of his sandals as if he expected them to burst into flower. Then he turned his head and looked at me gravely.

  ‘Eupolis,’ he said, ‘I am your cousin, the son of your mother’s elder brother Philodemus. My father and I have been away at the war and we’ve only just come home. As soon as they told us about the plague my father went off to see if our house was all right, and he sent me to look for his sister.

  ‘I’m afraid she’s dead,’ I said gently, for I could tell that the shock of seeing my grandfather had unnerved him and I wanted to spare him any further pain; he was only a mortal and might be upset. ‘But she died at her spinning-wheel and I’m sure the Ferryman will take her over for free, since she was Athenian on both sides. Have you got any water in your bottle? I’m really thirsty and I don’t want to drink the water in the trough.’