Halo

by Zizou Corder

  He laid her head down, folding her chiton beneath it, and covered her with her cloak. It was as if he could not control what he was doing. He should leave, but some strong little part of his heart said, Yes, yes, of course, but she’s all alone and bleeding in the wild. Wolves might come. I’ll just help her a little.

  Then his mind said, Don’t be so weak, so sentimental! She’s not even Spartan – with her gold necklace… Do your duty!

  And his heart said, Yes, of course, in a minute…

  He searched on the river bank until he found a clump of feverfew, the herb he wanted. He made a poultice out of it with some spider’s web from a tree stump, and after washing the wound again he carefully applied the poultice, tying it into place with a strip he ripped from the bottom of her other chiton.

  She was still shivering. The sun would move across soon to shine on her but in the meantime he pulled the cloak in around her.

  ‘Wake up,’ he said.

  Her eyes opened and she stared at him.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t go to sleep,’ he said.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Where’s Arko?’

  ‘I don’t know. Who is Arko?’

  ‘My brother. Who are you?’

  ‘Leonidas,’ he said, and then shut his eyes swiftly. A Spartan soldier doesn’t go round telling people his name! But then he had never met a stranger before… and she was only a girl. And likely to be eaten by wolves. But he didn’t want her to be eaten by wolves. It didn’t feel manly to leave a wounded girl to be eaten by wolves.

  ‘Are you the King of Sparta?’ she said.

  ‘No. Named after him.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, very quietly.

  ‘You already thanked me,’ he said. ‘Are you all right now?’

  ‘Mmm,’ she said.

  ‘Sit up,’ he said, and he propped her against a tree. His hands were strong. ‘Don’t go to sleep.’

  ‘All right,’ she said, and looked him straight in the eyes, to show him that she understood, that she was OK now. His eyes were very clear.

  ‘I have to go,’ he said.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he said.

  He looked at her, unsmiling.

  He was gone.

  She stared around. Nobody, nothing. Silence and calm all around, but for the rock doves still cooing. All was just as it was before he had come, as if he had never been.

  Xαπτερ 9

  Halo sat propped for a while before she felt able to stand. The boy had said she mustn’t sleep. She wouldn’t sleep. She wasn’t at all sure what had happened.

  After a while, she began to gather her things together, resting between movements. Her head was very, very painful. She couldn’t remember how she had hurt it. She only remembered the green-eyed unsmiling boy who had helped her. Filling her water jar, she caught sight of herself – her hair! She touched her head, patting her shorn scalp, and the poultice tied on, and she tried to remember.

  I mustn’t sleep.

  The best way not to sleep was to get moving.

  Halo walked for hours. She didn’t know where she was going. She finished her water, her head was aching and she was growing hungrier by the minute. She crested a low hill and saw farmland below her in the valley. The silver leaves of olive trees flashed and twinkled; a goatbell sounded, and in the distance was the red-tiled roof of a farm building. A mixed feeling of hope and fear twined in her empty belly.

  She couldn’t stop herself. Humans would have food.

  ‘Gods forgive me,’ she murmured. ‘When I can I will give it all back.’

  Circling and descending into the olive grove, she passed among the twisted and entangled trunks, and remembered the story of Baukis and Philemon, the old couple who loved each other so much that they asked the Gods to let them die at the same moment so they wouldn’t have to be apart, and how the Gods turned them into olive trees, to grow together in a woody embrace forever. I know someone like that, she thought. But she couldn’t think who it was. Her head felt light. She should look at her wound. How could she look at her own head? She would rest behind an olive tree until it was dark, and then she would go to the buildings and see what she could find. She wouldn’t sleep.

  She levered herself down on to the scrubby grass beneath the tree. The sun was warm. Insects buzzed. She spread her cloak beneath her, and curled up on it. She slept.

  She was woken by children’s voices.

  Two small boys and a girl stood around her, staring down at her with big dark eyes. They were scruffy but clean, sunburnt like her. They didn’t look unfriendly. They didn’t look particularly friendly either. They were talking about her and then one of them shrieked at the top of its voice. ‘Thanus! There’s a boy here! There’s a boy under one of the trees! He’s got blood all over his head!’

  An older boy’s voice shouted back – a voice of alarm. ‘Come away! Come away! Kids!’ Its owner came pounding up: a strong stocky boy, sweaty from work, brown-faced, dark-eyed. Halo stood up as he approached. She didn’t want to be down here while they were all up there. She was still half asleep and her head ached from the sun and her wound.

  The boy grabbed at the children, and pulled them away from her. ‘Who are you?’ he said.

  Be a boy, thought Halo. They think you’re a boy. Be a boy. She put her weight on to one leg, as she thought a boy might, lifted her chin, and spoke in a low part of her voice.

  ‘A traveller,’ she said. ‘Just travelling.’

  The stocky boy looked reassured somehow by the sight of her – as if he had feared something, and she wasn’t it.

  ‘Where are you from?’ he asked.

  She had to think for a moment.

  ‘Zakynthos,’ she said.

  Thanus exclaimed. ‘I wouldn’t go telling people that around here,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’ said Halo.

  ‘How long have you been travelling?’

  She didn’t know the answer to that either. A week? Two weeks? She had meant to count the days, but…‘Since after the harvest moon,’ she said. She knew it was coming to full in the next night or two.

  ‘So you don’t know what’s happening?’ Thanus said.

  ‘What’s happening?’ she asked, but then she started to feel woozy again, and Thanus said, ‘You’re bleeding!’ and then he was helping her along, and she was inside a house, low and dark and cool, and sitting on a stool, and a woman was unwrapping her bandage and saying, ‘Oh dear’ at what she saw beneath it.

  ‘I –’ said Halo, but the woman said, ‘Hush, let me tend to this.’ As she peeled away the poultice the boy had put there, she gave a little frown. ‘Thanus,’ she called, and the boy came back. ‘Look,’ she said.

  Thanus looked at the strips of torn chiton, the clump of spider’s web and bloodied herbs that she held out.

  ‘Someone has tended this wound before,’ he said. ‘Did you do it yourself?’ he asked Halo.

  ‘I –’ said Halo, but the woman interrupted.

  ‘Not just someone,’ she said. ‘The way it’s tied. The fever-few. It’s done the way they do it.’

  Thanus turned fiercely to Halo. ‘Who tied your wound?’ he demanded. ‘How were you wounded? Who are you?’

  Halo closed her eyes. ‘I don’t know,’ she murmured.

  ‘I don’t think he can answer anything now,’ said the woman. ‘Let me get him cleaned up. He’s only a child –’

  ‘And what does that mean, Mother, when their seven-year-olds are already training for the army?’ Thanus said with a snort.

  ‘He’s not one of them,’ the woman said. ‘Look at him – he’s too soft to be a Spartan. He doesn’t speak like a Spartan. And look at that marking. God only knows what he is, but he’s not one of them.’

  She was dabbing at Halo’s cut with a wet cloth. Halo winced with pain. The children were still just standing around, staring.

  ‘You hungry?’ the woman said, and Halo nodded.

 
‘Thought so,’ said the woman, and soon some black bread and a bowl of broth appeared.

  Halo ate quickly.

  ‘When you’re a bit better you can work for that,’ the woman said.

  ‘Glad to,’ said Halo.

  Thanus and the children went back outside. The woman, once she had finished with Halo and washed and hung up her old bandages, sat down with a spindle in the little courtyard outside. Halo came too, and sat in the shade, resting.

  The woman, whose name was Thalia, sang a little as she spun her thread. Outside, the sheep made low, comfortable noises.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Halo.

  Thalia shrugged.

  ‘When your son said things were happening… What is happening?’

  ‘Ask him,’ said the woman. ‘He’s the one who goes to market and hears the news.’

  So later, after Thanus had locked the gates carefully and his mother had led the prayers at their little hearth, when the family gathered in the courtyard and sat down to eat, Halo asked.

  ‘You say you are from Zakynthos,’ he said.

  Halo nodded.

  ‘Zakynthos is allied with Athens, I believe,’ he said, ‘who the Corinthians have just denounced at the Spartan Assembly.’

  Halo didn’t know what he was talking about.

  ‘Last year the Athenians sent their fleet – many triremes – to the north, to help the Kerkyrans.’ He looked at her. She said nothing – what could she say? – so he continued. ‘The Kerkyrans who are quarrelling with Corinth? Corinth which is allied to Sparta…?’

  Halo knew the names of these human cities, but she had no idea who was allied with who, or why.

  ‘The Athenians won the battle at Sybota,’ said Thanus. ‘Now the Megarans are up in arms about the decree and the Potidaeans won’t take it lying down either. The Corinthians are the angriest. They will involve the Spartans…’ Her head was aching. ‘… The Spartans and the Athenians will be at war. The Spartans have already tried to have Pericles banished under the old law, because they know he’s the most able leader the Athenians have… Anyway, they all love to go to war…’

  Thanus glanced at her. ‘All right, I’ll keep it simple,’ he said. ‘Don’t go wandering around the Spartan lands of Lace-daemonia telling people you are from Zakynthos. You might as well say I am an enemy spy.’

  ‘I am not an enemy spy,’ said Halo.

  ‘Good,’ said Thanus.

  ‘But if everyone will think I am the enemy,’ she said, ‘why don’t you?’

  Thanus gave a big grin, showing all his teeth. ‘I don’t care about their wars,’ he said. ‘I am not a Spartan. I am not even a Lacedaemonian. I am not a Messenian…’

  Halo was getting confused again. They were in Lacedaemonia, of which Sparta was the main city – who was he then? If she knew more about humans, she would know.

  ‘Oh – what are you then?’ asked Halo, as politely as she could. ‘Are you Athenian? Or Corinthian?’

  He laughed again, and the children grinned behind their hands, and the woman smiled too.

  What’s so funny, Halo thought, about the fact that I can’t tell which city they belong to just by looking at them? Why should I know all the details about who wears what or talks how or lives where or is enemies with who?

  ‘No,’ said Thanus. ‘We’re Helots. We’re slaves, didn’t you know?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Halo. She thought to herself: Better be careful what I say here. People are touchy… ‘Whose slaves?’

  ‘We “belong”,’ said Thanus, in a way which made Halo think he didn’t accept it, ‘to Sparta itself. To all the citizens of Sparta. We grow all Sparta’s food and in return Sparta lets us keep some. We work the land that Sparta stole from our ancestors –’ at this his mother looked nervous, and seemed to want to shush him, but she didn’t – ‘and in return Sparta lets us live on a little bit of it. Spartan citizens are soldiers. They are too good to work the fields and make the wine and feed the pigs and pick the olives. They’re not allowed to. By law. Didn’t you know?’ He said it in a blank but bitter way. Halo couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not.

  ‘Thanus,’ his mother said quietly, but he ignored her.

  ‘They’ve got more important things to do,’ he continued. ‘What do they do all day? They have to train all the time, for war. Umm – yes, that’s it. They train for war.’Then he stopped himself. ‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘So who are you?’

  ‘Halosydnus from Zakynthos, trying to get home,’ she said. She’d nearly said Halosydne, not the male version. ‘Need to earn some money to get passage on a boat home.’ That was close.

  He smiled again.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ she said.

  ‘There’s no money here,’ said Thanus. ‘Spartans don’t need money. They don’t need things. They’re so tough, they don’t buy anything. Anyway – tell us your story.’

  ‘I was taken by slave traders,’ she said, ‘from Zakynthos. I am not a slave, and I won’t be made into one.’

  Thanus snorted again at that. ‘Good luck!’ he said bitterly.

  ‘I’ve been trying to get home,’ Halo continued.

  ‘No chance now,’ said Thanus. ‘No one will be sending boats across to Zakynthos. Not after last week. You’d have to try from Athenian lands, or from some Athenian ally. There’s nowhere round here, and the season’s drawing in. Too cold to travel soon. Where did you come from now?’

  ‘I jumped off the boat – I don’t know where. Somewhere off the Mani. I swam, and then I walked.’

  ‘You walked, from the Mani?’

  ‘Yes. I only wanted to get back to the coast… I lost my way in the forest. Then – circumstances overtook me.’

  ‘Circumstances?’

  ‘More slave traders…’ she said.

  ‘Is that how you got that bash on your head?’ Thanus asked.

  Thalia was clearing away the remains of the meal now, but she was listening.

  Halo thought about it. How had she hurt her head?

  ‘I…’ she said, puzzled – and it came back to her. ‘I dived into a pool and hit a rock,’ she said.

  ‘And who bandaged you up?’

  ‘A boy,’ she said. She remembered his clear eyes. ‘His name was Leonidas.’

  The effect of these words was quite extraordinary.

  Thalia went white. Thanus went rigid. Thalia glanced at him.

  ‘Children, go to bed,’ he said.

  ‘But…’ ventured one.

  ‘Now!’ he thundered.

  The children shuffled up the wooden steps to the upper room. Thalia went after them and carefully closed the door before coming back down and rejoining Halo and Thanus.

  ‘Go up, Mother,’ said Thanus.

  ‘When your father returns I will leave you men alone,’ she murmured. ‘Until then I am at least an adult.’

  Thanus humphed, but let her sit.

  Thanus looked squarely at Halo and said, ‘Was he alone?’

  ‘Yes – I don’t know,’ she said. ‘He said he had to go. He might have been meeting someone… Why?’

  ‘Sweet Hera,’ murmured Thalia.

  ‘How old was he?’ said Thanus.

  ‘Older than me,’ Halo said, ‘but not a grown man. He had no beard.’

  Thanus swallowed.

  ‘What was he doing? Did he say?’

  ‘We didn’t really talk,’ she said. ‘He did have a knife. He was probably hunting or something.’

  ‘Hunting,’ said Thalia.

  ‘Hunting,’ said Thanus.

  They both looked sick. Thalia’s breathing grew short.

  ‘The full moon is tomorrow,’ she said. ‘It won’t be till full moon.’

  ‘The pumpkins can stand another day in the field,’ said Thanus. ‘If we lock up everything now and stay inside tomorrow…’

  ‘But Enus is travelling!’ she wailed.

  Thanus stood up.

  ‘Don’t go outside,’ cried Thalia. ‘Full moon is tomorrow…’


  ‘They might have changed the rules,’ said Thanus.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ asked Halo, full of dread.

  ‘He’s too young,’ said Thalia.

  ‘There’s no such thing as too young with these people,’ said Thanus forcefully.

  ‘Hush,’ said Thalia, but he took no notice of her. Then she murmured, ‘And Enus out travelling…’ and her eyes went panicky and hard. ‘And what about Diomedes and his family? And Sattartes? Thanus, we must warn them…’

  ‘Without going outside?’ he said, with a bitter laugh.

  ‘Warn them about what?’ asked Halo, but they weren’t listening to her.

  ‘I’ll make a fire,’ said Thalia quickly. ‘Outside. They’ll see the smoke, and your father will see it…’

  ‘They’ll think you’re burning leaves.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ demanded Halo. They were so scared it was making her feel a little sick at her stomach.

  Thanus turned on her. ‘You know we were talking about war? About Sparta? Well, let me tell you something about this land you have wandered into.’ He breathed deeply, angrily, as if he were trying to control himself, as if he wanted to be sick. ‘Every year, every single year, they declare war on us again. Formally. Do you want to know why?’

  Halo watched him.

  ‘So that they can kill us,’ he said. ‘Without blood guilt. They like to kill us. And if they call it war, they can kill us as much as they like!’

  She breathed out, slowly. Hunting, she thought. Hunting.

  Thanus gave her a weary, bitter look. ‘It’s part of their training,’ he said. ‘They call them the Krypteia. It makes a man out of a boy. Each year, they send their best boys out into the countryside to live off the land and toughen up and become men. By killing us.’

  Hunting.

  ‘And this year,’ whispered Thalia, ‘they have come here.’

  Xαπτερ 10

  Halo had heard the phrase ‘his blood ran cold’. Never before had she felt it in her own veins.

  Surely the green-eyed boy was not going to come and kill these people? He had saved her life. Why would he save a life one moment and kill someone the next?

  She didn’t believe it. She had looked him in the eye.

  But he was in the agoge with the other boys. They were all part of that harsh Spartan training. What did she know about what they could do?