The Walled Orchard

by Tom Holt

He went scampering off, and I drew my sword and put it back over the lintel, where it belonged. It made quite an attractive ornament.

  Now I assume that you are all educated people and know your Odyssey, and your Thebaid and Little Iliad too; so I can’t describe this next scene as I would wish to, in the interests of dramatic effect, because you would object that I had stolen it from the classics. This business of not appearing to copy one’s predecessors is a very real problem for a writer, and when all the most obvious approaches to a particular scene have been blocked by the previous efforts of the great masters, he often finds himself reduced to describing what actually happened. The only form of literature that seems to be immune from this difficulty is Tragedy, of course, but the Tragedians’ minds are too lofty and elevated to worry about that sort of thing. At times, I feel, they live in a world of their own. But the poor, long-suffering historian has this concern as his constant companion, sitting by his elbow as he writes, and saying, ‘No, no, you can’t do that, it’s been done before; you must have them coming down the hill and turning left’; or ‘You must be crazy putting in a battle here; we had a battle in the last chapter that was exactly the same.’ Now your historian may start off with all manner of lofty ideals, such as recording for all time the clear essence of what actually happened, but he soon gets this beaten out of him by the people he reads his work to while he is writing it. Take the celebrated Herodotus, for example. Now when he was writing his histories, he spent years traipsing all round the world asking old men what their grandfathers remembered, and writing down their answers on wax, and when he got home he sorted through these facts and eliminated the inconsistencies and accounted for the errors in chronology arising from the fact that in some places a generation is reckoned at thirty-three years and in other places at forty years, and at last sat down and wrote his history. Then he read it to his wife.

  ‘Are you out of your mind?’ said she. ‘You can’t expect anyone to listen to that.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Herodotus.

  ‘Well,’ said his wife patiently, ‘it all sounds so… well, so true, if you see what I mean.’

  Herodotus thought for a while; then he saw what she was getting at. He went back to work with a vengeance. He increased all the distances he had so carefully measured, and doubled the numbers of Persian soldiers which he had so painstakingly recorded; he took out the account of how gold dust is refined in the desert by the use of sieves and running water, and replaced it with a ludicrous fairy-story about pygmies and giant ants; and he invented a whole new section about Scythia, which was the one part of the world he hadn’t been to, and claimed that he had travelled the length and breadth of the country and seen all these fictional wonders with his own eyes. Finally, he lodged his original draft in the temple of Athena, in case the Council should ever need accurate information on any of these places or subjects, and gave readings from the revised version which were, of course, a spectacular success.

  But I see, on looking back through what I have written up to this point, that I have given a factual and quite personal account of what happened to me in Sicily —written, it seems, on the assumption that my readers will be interested in the deeds of one single man who was not himself particularly important, which is of course a highly doubtful assumption to make. As a result, I have left myself no option but to describe what follows, including my meeting with Phaedra, as truthfully as I can after so many years, or else go back and rewrite what has gone before, putting in nice little snippets of geography and fable and scattering about gods and miracles, just as we interplant barley in the empty ground between the rows of vines in a vineyard. I would have no objection to doing this if it were up to me; but that tiresome man Dexitheus the bookseller was nagging me for a completed manuscript this morning when I went down to the Market Square to buy fish, and so I had better press on; and if what follows seems to you to be too realistic, you must blame him, not me.

  I was putting my sword back over the lintel, as I have told you, when the door to the inner room opened and there was Phaedra. I assumed it was Phaedra; but if I had been a witness in a trial and the prosecutor was asking me if I was absolutely sure I would have had to qualify my statement, because I couldn’t just then remember what Phaedra was supposed to look like. What I saw was a woman of average size in her middle to late twenties, with untidy hair and the clear signs of a badly set broken jaw. As I looked at her, I could find no memories, recollections, associations in my mind about her; neither love nor hate, nothing binding me to her or repelling me from her, and I had this extraordinary feeling that it was open to me either to accept her as mine or reject her as spurious, as if she was one of the stray goats that we round up on the hills from time to time and do our best to identify. If I accepted her now — it was almost like a second wedding-day — then I would be bound to her for life. If I rejected her, I could turn my back on her and be done with her for ever.

  I am and have always been indecisive. I prefer to be forced into decisions rather than to make them freely and calmly; this makes it possible for me to blame the Gods when things go wrong. So I did not take either of the two initiatives open to me then; to throw my arms around her and kiss her, or to ignore her completely. I waited for her to say something.

  ‘Eupolis?’ she said. ‘Is that you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’ve come home.’

  Neither of us moved, and it suddenly occurred to me that I had no idea how long I had been away. Perhaps it was less than a month since we had left Athens, or perhaps it was two years. I had no idea. I had no idea what season of the year it was — ploughing, harvesting, vintage — or how long it was since we had been together last, in this room, when I still had all that expensive armour of mine which by now must have been auctioned off in some dusty square in Sicily.

  ‘You’ve come home?’ she said. ‘What’s happened? Nobody said the fleet was back…’

  Then she ran across and put her arms around me, somewhat clumsily; rather as an enthusiastically friendly dog jumps up at you and knocks the breath out of you. ‘Oh, you’re back,’ she said, and pulled my head down and kissed me. But contrary to my expectations, that kiss was not decisive; I still did not feel committed, one way or another.

  ‘So what happened?’ she demanded. ‘Did you desert? I’ll bet you did, you coward. At the first sight of the enemy, you said to yourself, “That’ll do me,” and you didn’t stop running till you reached the ships. And now everyone’ll point to me in the street and say “There goes the coward’s wife.” Do you want something to eat?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I expect you’re still full of Sicilian wheat. And what were the girls like there? Were they cheap? Of course you spent so much on them you haven’t brought me back a present, not so much as a pair of bronze earrings. Your beard needs trimming. And what have you done with your armour? You can’t have thrown it all away.’

  ‘I have, actually,’ I said.

  ‘Eupolis,’ she said, ‘what’s wrong?’

  I wanted to tell her, but I couldn’t. Now that I was home I didn’t know what to do, like a seasonal worker after the vintage is over.

  ‘There is something wrong, isn’t there?’ she said. ‘You look just like you do when one of your stupid plays flops. And then you’re hell to live with for a fortnight, and I daren’t buy myself anything. What’s happened? Where’s everyone else? Did we win?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t say you’ve abandoned the War and come home empty-handed. I knew that Demosthenes was nothing but a crook. They’ll put him to death for this, you mark my words. And high time too.’

  ‘They won’t get the chance,’ I said. It was as if what had happened, to the army and to me, was a sort of secret which Phaedra would have to prise out of me. If she managed it, she had won.

  ‘I wish you’d tell me what’s going on,’ she said. ‘Have you really deserted? Or have you been injured and sent ho
me? Eupolis, are you hurt?’

  ‘No,’ I said, and I looked at her, dispassionately, for the first time since we met.

  I remember the first time I realised what I looked like. I was playing out on the hillside at Pallene with some other boys, and there was a little stream that ran into a pool during the season, before the sun dries up all the water there. We were sitting round this pool throwing stones at the frogs, and one of the boys was telling a story he had heard from his grandmother. It was the story of Narcissus, and I couldn’t understand the point of it. The prince looked into the water, they said, and saw this beautiful youth and fell in love with him. I couldn’t bear not getting the point and interrupted.

  ‘Amyntas,’ I said, ‘who was the beautiful youth? And how could he breathe underwater?’

  Everyone laughed and called me names, but I didn’t care. ‘You don’t know, do you?’ I jeered. ‘This is a silly story and you’ve just made it up.’

  Everyone laughed again, and Amyntas explained that if you looked at calm water, you could see your reflection.

  ‘What’s a reflection?’

  ‘It’s a picture of you.’

  ‘My father has a picture of my mother,’ I said. ‘He had a vase painted with her as Penelope, though it doesn’t look a bit like her. But no one’s ever painted me.’

  ‘It doesn’t have to be painted,’ said Amyntas. ‘It just happens. Look in the pool there.’

  I knew better than that, of course; this was just a trick, and they would push me in and hold me under until I started gurgling. But on my way home my curiosity got the better of me, and I stopped and looked at the water in the watering-trough in our yard. There, sure enough, was a picture. It was a horrible little boy, with a squashed-up face and big ears, and I hated him, because he frightened me. I burst into tears and ran home, and my father asked what had upset me. I told him, and he laughed.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing you can do about it, is there? You’re stuck with that face, whether you like it or not.’

  ‘Can’t you make it better?’ I asked.

  ‘Only Zeus can do that,’ he replied.

  So every night I prayed to Zeus to make me look better, and every morning I went and looked in the watering-trough, and I was still the same. For a long time I couldn’t understand why Zeus hadn’t answered my prayers, for I had prayed very hard and even sacrificed my pet grasshopper to him. Then it came to me in a blinding flash of inspiration that he must be away visiting the Scythians or the Ethiopians and couldn’t hear me, and so I would have to wait until he got back. I must have forgotten to pray to him after that, for my face stayed as it was, or perhaps got worse.

  Anyway; as I looked at Phaedra then I had that same feeling; that she was as much a part of me as my face, and that only Zeus could do anything about it.

  ‘How’s my son?’ I asked, and that was honestly the first thought I had given him since I left Athens. Even now that I had remembered him, I felt no great interest in him. He was like some unsightly present that a friend has given you, and you only remember to get it out and put it on display when the friend is knocking on the door.

  ‘He’s fine,’ Phaedra replied. ‘He’s with the nurse at the moment. Shall I send for him?’

  ‘No, that’s all right,’ I said. ‘So long as he’s well.’

  ‘There is something wrong, isn’t there?’ said Phaedra.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Let me take my boots off first.’

  ‘The hell with your boots,’ she said irritably, and I smiled.

  ‘But my feet are hot,’ I said. ‘I want to take my boots off.’

  ‘Then take your wretched boots off, if it means so much to you,’ she said. ‘Only tell me what’s the matter. I want to know if you’re going to be arrested or not.’

  I put my arms round her. She felt familiar, as if she belonged. She pushed me away.

  ‘Not now,’ she said. ‘Tell me what’s going on. You can be really irritating at times.’

  I sat down and pulled off my boots. ‘Thrax,’ I called out, ‘bring me my sandals, would you? And I wouldn’t mind a bit of bread and some cheese, if there is any.’

  ‘Honestly,’ Phaedra said, ‘I don’t understand you.’

  ‘I know,’ I replied.

  She scowled. ‘I don’t know why I put up with you, really. I mean, this is ludicrous. Tell me what’s going on.’

  I wished that I could; but there was no way that I could tell her now. I had handled the business very badly, but that was nothing new. Thrax brought me the bread and cheese and I ate it.

  ‘Are you going to tell me?’ said Phaedra. ‘Or do I have to go to the Market Square and ask?’

  I put down the plate and brushed away the crumbs. ‘Phaedra,’ I said, ‘how would it be if…’ I couldn’t finish the sentence; it wasn’t necessary, and it would sound ridiculous. I had meant to say something like’.., if we start again from scratch’, or something like that, but of course we wouldn’t be doing that. Impossible.

  ‘If what?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. I knew I was home, then. ‘Phaedra, the army’s been wiped out.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘The army, Phaedra,’ I said. ‘It’s been wiped out. They’re all dead.’

  She stared at me. ‘Are you mad?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ I replied, ‘but I don’t know why. Phaedra, it was horrible. Nicias and Demosthenes too, all dead, every one of them. There’s just a handful of us left.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘For God’s sake try and talk sense.’

  ‘The Syracusans won,’ I said. ‘They destroyed our army. Destroyed, killed, wiped out, massacred, put to death, eliminated, decimated, there isn’t a word for it. I escaped and got away to Catana. Me and Aristophanes, son of Philip. I think there are a few hundred other survivors too. But the rest of them are all dead. I got us to Catana and we came back on a cargo ship. The others aren’t coming back.’

  For a moment I felt the whole weight of it pressing on me; you know how it is when you get the toothache very badly, and you think that you just can’t bear the pain of it any more. It was as if having Phaedra there was thawing me out, and in a moment I would melt and fall to pieces, and everything would come out in a rush, like being sick. My soul within me was demanding that I tell her everything, now, just as it came into my mind, so that I could get rid of the poison under the abscess and be well again.

  You fool, said my soul, unless you get rid of it all now, with tears and the comfort of her arms holding you, you will never be clear of it. But I held myself together for that little time, and turned back the words from the gate of my teeth; and then I was outside it all again, someone who saw it happen rather than a participant. And in that time I grabbed hold of Phaedra’s hand, but I didn’t do more than that, although I was tempted to bury my head in her and hide under her arms. I realised that I didn’t want to get rid of this unique possession, this great secret that the God had entrusted to me. Like a miser with a pot of coins I wanted to hide it away where no one could get at it.

  ‘Oh, Phaedra,’ I said, lifting my head and looking into her eyes. ‘I’ve seen the most extraordinary things while I’ve been away.’

  Phaedra was marvellous, just then. She wanted passionately to make me tell her exactly what had happened — how would you have felt, in her position? But she sat there and waited while I fought it out with my soul, even though I was closing the gate on her as well as the world. If I had melted then, as I almost did, if I had lost my balance and she had caught me, our whole lives would have been different after that. It was then that I knew that she did understand me, in some indefinable way beyond communication by words or gestures.

  ‘Is there anything you’ve got to do?’ she asked. ‘Like notifying somebody or something?’

  ‘I’ve done that,’ I said. ‘You don’t mind just keeping me company for a minute or so, do you?’

  She di
dn’t smile, or hug me or anything. ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘If you’re sure it’s me you want.’

  ‘There isn’t anyone else,’ I said. ‘They’re all dead.’

  ‘Callicrates?’

  I nodded. She said nothing. She knew that if he was still alive I would have talked to him, told him everything. But there was no one left alive I could tell it to; not until my mind had broken it down and digested it, and made something out of it.

  ‘Promise me you won’t ask me about it,’ I said. She smiled.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘You’re back safe, that’s the main thing.’

  ‘I’m glad you think so,’ I replied.

  ‘Oh, it would have been an awful nuisance if you hadn’t,’ she said, getting up and pushing her hair back behind her shoulders. ‘Lawsuits and inheritance problems and who gets what. All your money would have been tied up for ages, and I would have had to marry your nearest male relative. Of all the laws Solon ever passed, that must be the silliest.’ She paused for a moment. ‘Who is your nearest male relative, by the way?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I confessed. ‘I think they’re all dead.’

  ‘So long as it’s not that horrible cousin of yours, Nicomedes, the one with the big hairy arms and no neck. I couldn’t fancy him at all.’

  ‘He wouldn’t exactly be overjoyed,’ I retorted. ‘I believe he’s quite fond of his wife, and he’d have to divorce her.’

  ‘Isn’t she that skinny woman with those enormous elbows?’

  ‘Habrosyne,’ I replied, dredging the name out of the silt at the bottom of my mind. ‘She isn’t a thing of beauty, I’ll grant you. But at least she doesn’t spend all her husband’s money on carpets.’

  Phaedra looked down quickly. ‘Oh, that,’ she said. ‘And that’s all the thanks I get for getting you the best bargain you’ll ever make. Just look at the weave.’

  ‘What was wrong with the old one, for God’s sake? It had years left in it.’

  ‘I don’t know why I bother,’ said Phaedra. ‘I should just put rushes down on the floor, like they do in Pallene.’