by Tom Holt
This fear was starting to get to me by midday, and so preoccupied was I with it that I communicated it to Aristophanes. I should have known better.
‘It’s all right for you,’ he said. ‘You’re riding the horse.’
I said something vulgar regarding the horse, and went back to my worrying. Perhaps anxiety has prophylactic powers, I don’t know; but we managed to cover quite a few miles that day without running into any sort of trouble. We found a little hollow in the side of the mountain to stay the night in, and while Aristophanes was taking his sandals off and giving me a detailed description of the condition of his feet, I unpacked the saddle-bags, tethered the horse and went to sleep.
I knew as soon as I woke up that something was wrong.
‘Aristophanes,’ I said, ‘where’s the horse?’
‘I don’t know,’ said the son of Philip. ‘He’ll be long gone by now. You might find him, I suppose, but I very much doubt it. He’ll probably have gone off down the hill to the village. I think he liked it there.’
I frowned. ‘And how do you think he managed that, bearing in mind that I tied him securely to that tree-foot last night?’
‘Easy,’ replied Aristophanes. ‘I untied him, about an hour before dawn.’
‘Why?’
Aristophanes shrugged. ‘Because I was going to take the horse and ride on ahead. I’m sick of walking. But I tripped over something in the dark and he got away. I was going to tell you, so that we could go after him, but you looked so peaceful sleeping there that I didn’t want to wake you up.’
‘Well, that’s bloody marvellous,’ I said. ‘Now neither of us can ride the bloody horse.’
‘That’s what I call democracy in action,’ said Aristophanes. ‘If I can’t have him, neither should you.’ I threw a stone at him, but I missed.
We no longer had the horse to bicker about, so we bickered about who should carry what. You will already know what we said if you have ever seen or read The Frogs, since Aristophanes filched that too; so I won’t bother to repeat it.
We had been walking for maybe three hours when Aristophanes started to complain that he was feeling feverish. I assumed that this was just another variation on the luggage theme and ignored him; but so persistent was he that I had a look at him, and saw that he was showing alarming symptoms of fever. This was the last thing we needed, and I confess that I lost my temper and started shouting at him, although not even Aristophanes would deliberately catch fever just to spite me (or not in Sicily, at any rate). He asked me several times what I intended to do about it, and I replied, truthfully, that there was absolutely nothing I could do except keep well away from him to avoid catching it myself. He seemed greatly offended by this, so to make it up to him I let him tell me the plot of the play he had left behind in the hands of a producer, with instructions to update the topical bits should they become outdated by the time the play came on. It was, he kept insisting, his masterpiece (every play he writes is his masterpiece, according to him), but it sounded pathetic to me — all about a city in the sky and blockading the Gods. But I didn’t tell him so, since the fever was getting worse by the hour, and he was starting to ramble in his speech. He went on talking, however, losing his place and going back to the beginning over and over again, until I could cheerfully have brained him with a rock to shut him up. In the end there was nothing for it but to stop and let him rest.
When he was lucid again, I gave him a cup of water (we had very little left, and we hadn’t passed a spring or pool for a long time). He drank it quickly, spilling quite a lot. I gave him some more.
‘Aristophanes,’ I said, ‘I expect you’ll suggest to me sooner or later that since you obviously can’t make it to Catana and there’s no point in us both dying in this miserable place, I ought to abandon you and try and get through on my own.’
‘Get stuffed,’ he replied. ‘You let me die, I’ll kill you.’
‘I thought you’d say that,’ I replied, ‘it’s a quote from one of your plays. In that case, we’ve got a choice. I don’t know the first thing about what to do when a man gets fever. We can either try and press on and get you to Catana while you’re still curable, or we can wait here and hope the fever breaks. What do you think?’
‘I think you’re a complete bastard,’ said Aristophanes with conviction. ‘Just get me safely to Catana, will you?’
‘So you want to carry on, do you?’
‘No,’ he replied firmly. ‘Get me off this god-forsaken hillside and under cover. If I die, my heirs will sue you for every obol you’ve got.’
Shortly afterwards he went off his head again, and I could see he was clearly in a very bad way. There was a funny side to it, of course; both of us had survived the Athenian camp, where men were going down with fever wherever you looked, only to get caught with it out on the clean, healthy hillside.
I suddenly got it into my head that it was going to rain, and that could be disastrous. So I draped the food-sacks round Aristophanes’ neck and hoisted him on to my back — he was so heavy I could scarcely walk — and set off in the hope of finding some sort of cover. It was nearly dark when I saw a little stone building with light coming from it, surrounded by some of the scrubbiest looking vines you ever saw. I wobbled over to it as quickly as I could and kicked the door hard.
‘Go away,’ said an old man’s voice from inside.
‘Open this bloody door, or I’ll kick it in,’ I said ingratiatingly, and after a while the door opened a crack and a long, pointed nose appeared.
‘What do you want?’ said the nose.
‘This man is dying of fever,’ I said. ‘I claim the sanctuary of your hearth, in the name of Zeus, God of guests and hospitality.’
‘We haven’t got a hearth,’ replied the nose, ‘just a tripod and a hole in the roof. What do you think we are, millionaires?’
That was a tricky one, since Apollo is the God associated with tripods, and Apollo couldn’t care less about guests and hospitality. However, I snatched my mind away from the theological niceties of the thing just in time to put my foot in the door.
‘I’m a desperate Athenian warrior escaping from a battle,’ I said. ‘If you don’t let me in, I’ll chop down all your vines.’
The nose said something unpleasant and opened the door. Now that I could see the rest of him, he turned out to be an extremely old man, once very tall but now bent almost double with age and rheumatism. I felt awful about forcing my way in on him so violently; but this remorse soon departed, for he was a singularly nasty old man.
‘There’s no food,’ he said quickly. ‘All my food is buried,’ he spat the word out triumphantly, as if he had foreseen my coming with the help of some mysterious divinatory art. ‘You’ll have to kill me first.’
‘I’ve got some food,’ I replied. ‘All I need is somewhere where my friend can rest until the fever breaks. I’ll pay you,’ I added brilliantly.
‘Pay me?’ His little round eyes lit up. ‘Silver money?’
‘Genuine silver money.’
‘Let’s see it.’
‘Can I put my friend down first?’
He nodded irritably, as if making a great concession. I shifted Aristophanes on to a pile of goatskins on the floor and straightened my back. Sheer bliss.
‘Let me see the money,’ said the old man.
I took out the linen purse I had been given in the village, turned my back and took out a Syracusan two-stater piece. It was not too badly worn and had no holes or banker’s cuts on it; a persuasive coin. I showed it to the old man. He stared at it.
‘So that’s what they look like,’ he said in wonder. ‘I’ll be seventy-three come the vintage, and I’ve never seen one of them before.’
I waited for a moment, to give him a chance to fall under its spell, and then said, ‘If my friend gets well, you can have it. For your very own.’
That seemed to have a remarkable effect on the old man. He started moving round the house at a terrific speed, tipping out the contents of
jars and poking up the fire on the little tripod until it roared. He was mixing something up in a little pottery mortar, and as he did so he sang a song in a language I could not understand. Then I realised he was not a Greek at all but a Sicel, one of the savages who lived in Sicily before the Greeks came. I have had little to do with non-Greeks in my life (apart from Orientals and Scythians, and you quickly get used to them) and he fascinated me from that moment onwards.
At last he seemed satisfied that his concoction was ready. As a finishing touch, he grabbed hold of the she-goat that was standing peacefully in the corner of the room and squeezed a little drop of milk out of her udders into the mortar; then he put it on the grid on top of the tripod to warm through. ‘We’ll have your friend up and about again in no time,’ he panted (for he had exhausted himself with all that running about). ‘Just let me see that coin again.’
‘Later,’ I said. He scowled horribly, and took the mortar off the tripod. Bending low over Aristophanes, he started smearing the stuff all over his face. Luckily, the son of Philip was barely conscious and didn’t seem to notice.
‘Give him a few hours, he’ll be good as new,’ said the old man.
‘That’s not saying much.’
‘You what?’
‘Forget it.’
The old man frowned, then shook his head. ‘I know everything there is to know about fever,’ he said proudly. ‘Get it myself every year. Nothing to it.’
‘That’s good to know,’ I said. ‘Now then, I’m going to need a horse or a donkey or something.’ I jingled the coins in the purse. ‘Can you help me at all?’
The old man seemed to undergo an inner torment. He seemed to hear the voices of the little coins, imploring him to obtain them and look after them; but of course he had no donkey, and no way of getting one. He gave me such a pitiful look that I regretted raising the subject. Then a smile started to spread over his face, originating somewhere behind his ears and drawing his lips apart, revealing a startling absence of teeth.
‘Sure thing,’ he said. ‘You wait right here.’
He scampered out of the house and disappeared, leaving me feeling highly perplexed. After a while I sat down beside Aristophanes and looked at him carefully. There was sweat pouring out of him, and he was starting to shift restlessly and moan. I wanted to pour water on him to cool him down, or at any rate do something, but I didn’t like to interfere. Whatever the stuff was that the old man had cooked up, it seemed to be having an effect.
I must have fallen asleep — I was exhausted myself by then — because the next thing I remember is the old man shaking me violently. At first I couldn’t remember what was going on and I was greatly alarmed.
‘I got you a mule,’ he said. ‘Come and look.’
I dragged myself to my feet and followed him out of the house. Tethered to a dead fig tree was the most wretched-looking animal I have ever seen outside a silver mine. You could see at a glance that it still had all its ribs, but apart from that there was little to recommend it.
‘This is my neighbour’s mule,’ said the old man proudly. ‘I just bought him. You can have him for four staters.’
I burst out laughing — not as a negotiating ploy but out of pure hilarity. The old man scowled and said all right, two staters. Still sniggering helplessly, I excavated two staters from the purse and gave them to him. When he felt the coins in his hands, he looked like Prometheus receiving fire from heaven.
‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘If you haven’t got any money, how could you buy a mule?’
‘We don’t buy and sell with money up here,’ he replied scornfully. ‘Money’s for keeping. I gave him two hoes and a bushel of figs.’
‘You were robbed.’
‘That’s a good mule,’ he whined defensively. ‘He’ll keep on going all day, and doesn’t need much feeding. I’ve known him since he was foaled, poor brute.’
‘You’d better come and look at my friend,’ I said. ‘He’s not well.’
The old man sniggered, and for a moment I felt terribly suspicious. But when we went back into the house, Aristophanes was sleeping peacefully.
‘That old poultice never fails. Even works on Greeks,’ he added, full of wonder. ‘I always thought there’d be more malice in a Greek than it could draw out, so I put in more of everything.’
‘He’ll be all right, then?’
‘Soon enough,’ said the old man proudly. ‘Mind, if you hadn’t brought him to me when you did, reckon he’d have died on you.’
I nodded gravely and gave him the four-stater Arethusa. He took it like a mother receiving her baby from the midwife, sat down on a jar by the tripod and played with it for a while, rubbing grease from his hair on to it to make it shine.
I suppose I should have been sleepy, but I wasn’t; and the old man showed no signs of being tired. For a crippled man, in fact, he was unbelievably active. When he had gazed his fill on the profile of our Lady Arethusa, he turned to me and said, ‘So you’re a soldier-boy, are you?’
‘Sort of.’ It was many years since anyone had called me a boy.
‘Athenian, you say?’
‘That’s right.’
‘That’s in Greece, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
He shrugged, as if to say that it was too late to do anything about that now. ‘So who’re we fighting, then?’
‘Us.’
‘You what?’
‘You’re fighting us. The Syracusans against the Athenians.’
He looked at me as if I was mad. ‘The Athenians against the Syracusans?’
‘Yes. I’d have thought you’d have known.’
‘We don’t get news here,’ he said, and his voice suggested that he didn’t hold with news. ‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why are the Athenians fighting the Syracusans?’
‘They felt like it.’
That seemed to satisfy him, for he went back to studying his coin. I was feeling hungry, so I opened the food-sack and poured out some flour into my bowl. ‘Have you got any water?’ I said, looking pointedly at the three-quarters-full pitcher on the floor.
‘No,’ he replied.
‘If you give me some water I’ll give you some flour.’
He picked a wooden bowl off the floor and handed me the pitcher. I gave him some flour.
‘What about him?’ I said, nodding towards Aristophanes.
‘In the morning.’ The old man was mixing up his porridge. ‘Have you got any honey?’
‘No, but I’ve got an onion.
‘An onion!’ Was there no end, his expression suggested, to this man’s wealth of strange and delightful luxuries? I cut the onion in half with a small knife that was lying on the floor, and threw half to him. He caught it and bit into it as if it was an apple. ‘I used to grow onions till maybe three years ago, but then the seed died.’
‘Why didn’t you get some more?’
‘All the seed died in the neighbourhood,’ he replied. ‘Maybe they’ve got some over to Acrae, but I haven’t been there in forty years.’
‘They’ve got some at the village a day or so back from here.’
‘The hell with it,’ said the old man. ‘So the Athenians are fighting the Syracusans?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Foolishness, if you ask me. I was a soldier once,’ he said, as if he had suddenly remembered after a long time. ‘But we were fighting the Carthaginians. That was a long time ago. When I was eight years old.’
‘Wasn’t that young to be a soldier?’
‘We were men earlier then. That was when there were kings in Sicily, in old Hiero’s time, or was it Gelo, I forget. That was when the Persians were fighting the Greeks,’ he said, as if revealing some great secret. ‘But we were fighting the Carthaginians. That was a long time ago,’ he added.
‘It must have been,’ I said.
‘It was a big battle,’ he said. ‘Don’t rightly know how we came to have any part of it. I was a slinger, and two of my broth
ers with me, and my father and my two elder brothers, they were archers. Good ones, too. We went out — oh, must have been two weeks from here, with that old king Hiero or Gelo, and you never saw anything like those Carthaginians. They were strange people, all black-skinned some of them, like olives. We won, too, but my father and my brothers, they got themselves killed and I got my back all messed up, when a chariot ran over me, and that was my fill of the wars right enough. But those Carthaginians — well, I wouldn’t have missed seeing them. Did you ever hear of that war?’
‘That was the Battle of Himera,’ I replied.
‘Himera,’ he repeated. ‘I never knew that before. Himera, you say?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well I’m damned. I never knew it had a name.’ He shrugged again. ‘Never too old to learn, hey?’ Then he nodded forward and fell asleep. I took another look at Aristophanes and then lay down beside him and closed my eyes.
When I woke up next morning, the old man was exactly where he had been the night before, and I realised that he had died in the night. I found a mattock under a pile of rags and dug a grave outside the door — it was terribly stony ground, and I blistered my hands. Then I laid his body in it and put the four-stater piece in his hand, for the ferryman; it was just as well, I thought, that I had come along when I did, or he would have been stranded on the wrong side of the river for ever. Then I closed up the grave and sprinkled a little flour on it. It was the first time I had ever conducted a burial all on my own, but I think I got it right. After I had done everything I could think of, I went into the house and let the she-goat out.
Aristophanes was sitting up and yawning. ‘What’s going on?’ he said sleepily. I turned on him angrily.
‘Now look what you’ve done,’ I said. ‘You’re nothing but bad luck.’
‘The hell with you,’ he said. ‘I’m starving. Where are we?’
I told him. ‘That’s a stroke of luck,’ he said.
