Tyrant (25 page)

‘But why?’

‘That was the agreement: they would stay on until the winter solstice. They have to prepare their fields for sowing, and they don’t want to risk letting the bad weather get between them and their homes. In truth, the solstice is seven days off, but I don’t think that changes matters much.’

‘I just can’t believe it,’ said Tellias, shaking his head in consternation. ‘I can’t believe it . . .’

‘As you see,’ stepped in Dexippus, who seemed to have been just waiting for the chance, ‘I was right. It’s best that we evacuate the city. We’ll use our troops to escort the refugees.’

‘You can take them to Leontini,’ suggested Daphnaeus. ‘The city is still under construction. We’ll have them add new—’

‘This can’t be true . . . this can’t be happening. There must be another way,’ protested Tellias. ‘You’re a warrior, for the sake of Heracles! You must tell me why you don’t want to fight: why are you carrying those arms? What’s that sword of yours good for?’ His distress was growing, and his shrill voice sounded like the shriek of a wounded bird.

‘You have to resign yourself to the facts,’ replied Daphnaeus. ‘We can’t risk it. If I gamble everything I have in a pitched battle – where we will be greatly outnumbered – and I lose, that will leave Syracuse undefended. And if Syracuse falls, that’s the end. I just can’t risk it; you must understand.’

‘That’s the true reason then: you’re afraid of losing! But don’t you understand that by defending Acragas you’re defending Syracuse? Can’t you understand that? You’re committing the same error that Diocles made at Himera. Terrible . . . terrible and stupid.’

Daphnaeus lowered his head without saying a word, as the rain began to fall more heavily, wetting their helmets, their breastplates and their shields, making them gleam in the flashes of distant lightning.

Tellias, his face dripping with rain and with tears, drew himself up with great dignity and said to Dionysius: ‘Do you think he’s right? Tell me, are you with him?’

Dionysius shook his head in silence, then raised his eyes and looked straight at Daphnaeus and then at Dexippus with an expression of burning disdain.

‘They worked all this out between them, didn’t they,’ continued Tellias relentlessly. ‘It was all decided. Maybe they even let themselves be bribed. Yes, that’s certainly it. Otherwise why would they have told us that the Carthaginian fleet had been laid up, just as they were getting ready, in actuality, to assault the ships of Syracuse. Why else?’

‘You’re mad,’ said Daphnaeus. ‘You have no idea what you’re saying. I won’t kill you because you’re an old man and you’re raving mad. But I won’t listen to you for another moment.’ He turned to the Acragantine councillors, who were dumbstruck and appalled. ‘Follow Dexippus,’ he said to them. ‘Do what he says and at least you’ll save your lives. Farewell.’

He mounted his horse and vanished into the dark, his escort trailing off after him.

Tellias fell to his knees sobbing, indifferent to the falling rain.

Dionysius helped him up and clasped him to his chest. ‘Go back to the city,’ he said, trying to console him, ‘go home and take care of your wife. Get ready to leave. I’ll welcome you to my own house, I’ll love you as if you were my parents. Please, take heart, Tellias, do it for me . . .’

A flash of lightning lit up the desolate landscape of the necropolis, followed by a roll of thunder. Tellias wiped his face. ‘I’ll never leave my city, boy,’ he said. ‘Can you understand that? Never!’ And he rode off on his mule.

The next day, the authorities gave the order to evacuate and the entire city was filled with weeping and despair. The Council house was surrounded by an enraged crowd, but there was no one there to listen to them, nor to take any measures other than those which had already been announced. Panic spread like wildfire. The population started pouring out through the eastern gate as if the enemy were already inside the walls, and it took all the determination the soldiers could muster to restrain them and direct them as best they could along the road for Gela.

In the chaos of wails and screams, in the vortex of terror that swept through the city, the weak, the elderly and the sick were left behind; they would never have survived the hardships of a march hundreds of stadia long. Some took their own lives, others awaited their destiny, feeling that death was preferable to the loss of their homeland, of the places dearest to them, of the most beautiful city in the world.

Tellias and his wife, who refused to leave him on his own, were among them. In vain Dionysius scanned the lines of refugees anxiously; unanswered he shouted out their names, riding back and forth, up and down that straggling column, asking all those he met if anyone had seen them. He could not know that at that very instant, they were up at the highest point of the city, on the glorious Athenaean rock, tearlessly watching the long dark serpent as it wound through the plains: the hosts of refugees abandoning Acragas like a stream of blood flowing copiously from a body wounded to death.

Then the streets exploded with the howls of the rampant barbarians who sacked, destroyed, butchered everything in their way. They set fire to the grandiose Temple of Zeus down in the valley, still surrounded by wooden scaffolding, and the marvellous sculptures of the fall of Troy carved into the stone of the pediment came to life with tragic realism in the glow of the flames.

Tellias then took his wife by the hand and together they walked towards the temple of the city’s protector, whose divine mass dominated the acropolis. They strolled tranquilly, as though they wanted to enjoy a last walk along the city’s most sacred road. They stopped under the colonnade, and turned around to see the screaming horde flooding towards the ramp that led to the landing and the podium. Then they entered the temple and closed the door behind them. Tellias held his lifelong companion in a last embrace. They silently exchanged knowing glances, then Tellias took a torch and set the sanctuary aflame.

He burned with his bride, with his gods and with his memories.

A
LL OF THE
roads and paths that led to Gela were fraught with an enormous throng of desperate and terrified refugees. They were women, children, the elderly. All of the able-bodied men were armed and escorting the column. The old and the infirm had been abandoned because they would never have been able to withstand the long and difficult exodus. Many of the young women, even those from the richest and most noble families, journeyed on foot, carrying their younger brothers and sisters in their arms, showing great strength of character and courage as their delicate feet, used to wearing elegant sandals, became covered with blisters and wounds. They bit their lower lips like warriors in battle and swallowed their tears so as not to foster the fears of the little ones while their parents stumbled on, oppressed by the infinite grief of forsaking their homeland, the houses they had always lived in and the tombs of their ancestors. The refugees were like trees uprooted by the winds of a storm and dragged towards an unknown and inhospitable destination. Their pain was compounded by bewilderment, because many of them did not understand the reason for such a sudden and frightening calamity. The fragments of information that reached them as they trudged along were often absurd and conflicting.

They had no shelter from the harsh winter weather, nor against the hardships of such an arduous trek; few had taken food with them, and even fewer had water. They pushed on down the muddy road, but every now and then they would turn around as if insistent voices were calling them back – the regrets and the memories of the lives that they were leaving behind them.

Among the many torments that afflicted them, besides hunger and fatigue, were the cold wind, the drizzling rain, the leaden, hostile sky.

Their only consolation was the presence of their loved ones; although the men had formed ranks, they tried to march as close as they could to their families so the sight of them would give them the strength to continue.

Dionysius had ridden down the length of the long column time and time again searching for Tellias and his wife, and had asked anyone he knew or thought he recognized about them, with no success until a man finally gave him the news that he was afraid of hearing: ‘Tellias stayed behind. I saw him together with his wife. As all of us were fleeing towards the eastern gate, he was walking up towards the acropolis, holding her hand. Headstrong old man! He always had to do things his way.’

Upon hearing these words, Dionysius spurred on his horse, caught up with Daphnaeus at the head of the column, and asked for leave to turn back.

‘You’re mad! What for?’ replied Daphnaeus.

‘Some friends of mine remained behind. I want to try to help them.’

‘There’s no one left to help, I’m afraid. You know the barbarians will have cleaned out the city. The able men they take as slaves to sell them off, the others they kill. Who were your friends?’

Dionysius shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He turned back down the column. He was struck by the sight of a shivering, mud-splattered young woman who was holding a little boy and girl by the hand, perhaps her younger siblings. She reminded him somehow of Arete and of the similar situation in which he had met her; he suddenly felt that the gods had given him another chance to help her, to soothe the pain that must still afflict her in Hades.

He approached the young woman, got off his horse and handed her his cloak. ‘Take this,’ he said, ‘I don’t need it.’

The girl replied with a wan smile, and continued walking under the rain.

The Carthaginian army was installed in Acragas after having amassed the huge amount of booty taken from a city which in the two hundred years since its founding had never been defeated or sacked. They had been careful not to damage the houses so they could occupy them for the rest of the winter. In doing so they showed their manifest intention of continuing their campaign of conquest. They would not stop as long as a single Greek city remained in Sicily.

The new frontier was Gela, the city where Aeschylus, the great tragedian, had died. The epigraph on his tomb in the necropolis said not a word about his glory as a poet, but commemorated him as a warrior, fighting at Marathon against the Persians, words that sounded now like a warning of imminent grief. The Acragantine refugees were settled in Leontini, where they would stay until the situation allowed their return.

Daphnaeus held council in Gela with his officers, including Spartan commander Dexippus, and the Geloan generals. ‘What do you think should be done?’ he asked the Geloans. ‘What are your intentions?’

‘We want to stay,’ replied their chief commander, a man of about fifty named Nicandrus. He was an aristocrat, old-fashioned and inflexible, and he seemed absolutely determined, even though every feature of his face and every wrinkle of his brow betrayed his distress.

‘If this is your decision,’ replied Daphnaeus, ‘we shall help you. We will do everything in our power to drive away the barbarians and prevent another catastrophe. What happened at Acragas will not repeat itself. Events somehow took an unforeseeable turn there, I suspect as the result of betrayal. We were taken by surprise when we were already sure of victory.’

‘Never say the word victory until the enemy is annihilated,’

retorted Nicandrus dryly. ‘I thank you, nonetheless, in the name of my city for your willingness to draw up at our side.’

‘Dexippus will remain here,’ said Daphnaeus, ‘together with his mercenaries, until operations resume.’

‘Dexippus is an idiot,’ thought Dionysius, ‘if not a traitor.’ But he didn’t say a word. He stood at the back of the Council room, leaning against the door jamb, with his arms folded like a caryatid’s; his face showed no emotion, as if it were made of marble. He thought of Tellias and his wife, who he had loved deeply and would never see again, and of the suffering they must have borne before dying. He thought of Acragas, lost and violated, of the girl he had given his cloak to; perhaps by now she’d fallen exhausted into the mud, leaving the two little ones to weep under the lashing rain. He too wanted to weep, to yell, to curse.

He left instead, after fulfilling all his duties, along a dark road that led to the western gate. Absorbed in thought, he was sure deep down that Gela would fall, as Selinus, Himera and Acragas had fallen, because of the incompetence of the commanders, the cowardice of Daphnaeus, the stupidity of Dexippus.

The Geloan authorities had arranged for the command to be hosted in the prytaneum, but Dionysius had preferred to rent an anonymous little house for himself near the walls. He had no esteem for the other officers, and no desire to stay with them. He entered the house and went up to the terrace to contemplate the view of the city and the sea.