In the south-west tower a sentry sits on his high stool staring vacantly into the desert. I am within a pace of him before he notices me and starts.
"Get down," he says in a flat voice, "you are not allowed up here." I have never seen him before. Since I left my cell, I realize, I have not seen one of the soldiers who made up the old garrison. Why are there only strangers around?
"Don't you know me?" I say.
"Get down."
"I will, but first I have a very important question to ask you. You see, there is no one to ask but you-everyone else seems to be asleep or away. What I want to ask is: Who are you? Where is everyone I used to know? What has happened out there in die fields? It looks as though there has been a washaway. But why should there be a wash-away?" His eyes narrow as I gabble on. "I am sorry to ask such stupid questions, but I have had a fever, I have been confined to bed"-the quaint phrase comes unbidden-"and today is the first day I have been allowed to get up. That is why…"
"You must be careful of the midday sun, father," he says. His ears stick out under a cap that is too large for him. "You would be better off resting at this time of day."
"Yes… Do you mind if I have some water?" He passes me his flask and I drink the lukewarm water, trying not to betray how savage my thirst is. "But tell me, what has happened?"
"Barbarians. They cut away part of the embankment over there and flooded the fields. No one saw them. They came in the night. The next morning it was like a second lake." He has stuffed his pipe, now he offers it to me. Courteously I decline ("I will only begin coughing, and that is bad for me"). "Yes, the farmers are very unhappy. They say the crop is ruined and it is too late to plant again."
"That's bad. It means a hard winter ahead. We will have to draw our belts very tight."
"Yes, I don't envy you people. They could do it again, couldn't they, the barbarians. They could flood these fields any time they chose to."
We discuss the barbarians and their treachery. They never stand up and fight, he says: their way is to creep up behind you and stick a knife in your back. "Why can't they leave us alone? They have their own territories, haven't they?" I turn the conversation to the old days when everything used to be quiet on the frontier. He calls me "father", which is his peasant's way of showing respect, and listens to me as one listens to mad old folk, anything being better, I suppose, than staring out into emptiness all day.
"Tell me," I say: "two nights ago I heard horsemen and thought the big expedition had returned."
"No," he laughs, "those were just a few men they sent back. They sent them in one of the big carts. That must have been what you heard. They fell sick from the water-bad water out there, I hear-so they sent them back."
"I see! I couldn't understand what it was. But when do you expect the main force back?"
"Soon, it must be soon. You can't live on the fruit of the land out here, can you? I've never seen such dead country."
I climb down the steps. Our conversation has left me feeling almost venerable. Strange that no one warned him to watch out for a fat old man in ragged clothes! Or has he perhaps been perched up there since last night with no one to speak to? Who would have thought I could lie so blandly! It is mid-afternoon. My shadow glides beside me like a pool of ink. I seem to be the only creature within these four walls that moves. I am so elated that I want to sing. Even my sore back has ceased to matter.
I open the small side gate and pass out. My friend in the watch-tower looks down at me. I wave, and he waves back. "You will need a hat!" he calls. I pat my bare skull, shrug, smile. The sun beats down.
The spring wheat is indeed ruined. Warm ochre mud squelches between my toes. In places there are still puddles. Many of the young plants have been washed right out of the ground. All show a yellowish discoloration of leaf. The area nearest the lake is the worst hit. Nothing is left standing, indeed the farmers have already begun to stack the dead plants for burning. In the far fields a rise of a few inches in elevation has made all the difference. So perhaps a quarter of the planting can be saved.
The earthwork itself, the low mud wall that runs for nearly two miles and keeps the lake-water in check when it rises to its summer limit, has been repaired, but almost the whole of the intricate system of channels and gates that distributes the water around the fields has been washed away. The dam and waterwheel by the lakeshore are unharmed, though there is no sign of the horse that usually turns the wheel. I can see that weeks of hard work await the farmers. And at any moment their work can be brought to nothing by a few men armed with spades! How can we win such a war? What is the use of textbook military operations, sweeps and punitive raids into the enemy's heartland, when we can be bled to death at home?
I take the old road that curves behind the west wall before petering out into a track that leads nowhere but to the sand-filled ruins. Are the children still allowed to play there, I wonder, or do their parents keep them at home with stories of barbarians lurking in the hollows? I glance up at the wall; but my friend in the tower seems to have gone to sleep.
All the excavation we did last year has been undone by driftsand. Only corner-posts stand out here and there in the desolation where, one must believe, people once lived. I scour a hollow for myself and sit down to rest. I doubt that anyone would come looking for me here. I could lean against this ancient post with its faded carvings of dolphins and waves and be blistered by the sun and dried by the wind and eventually frozen by the frost, and not be found until in some distant era of peace the children of the oasis come back to their playground and find the skeleton, uncovered by the wind, of an archaic desert-dweller clad in unidentifiable rags.
I wake up chilled. The sun rests huge and red upon the western horizon. The wind is rising: already flying sand has banked up against my side. I am conscious above all of thirst. The plan I have toyed with, of spending the night here among the ghosts, shivering with cold, waiting for the familiar walls and treetops to materialize again out of the dark, is insupportable. There is nothing for me outside the walls but to starve. Scuttling from hole to hole like a mouse I forfeit even the appearance of innocence. Why should I do my enemies' work for them? If they want to spill my blood, let them at least bear the guilt of it. The gloomy fear of the past day has lost its force. Perhaps this escapade has not been futile if I can recover, however dimly, a spirit of outrage.
I rattle the gate of the barracks yard. "Don't you know who is here? I've had my holiday, now let me back in!"
Someone comes running up: in the dim light we peer at each other through the bars: it is the man assigned as my warder. "Be quiet!" he whispers through his teeth, and tugs at the bolts. Behind him voices murmur, people gather.
Gripping my arm he takes me at a trot across the yard. "Who is it?" someone calls. It is on the tip of my tongue to reply, to take the key out and wave it, when it strikes me that this act might be imprudent. So I wait at my old door till my warder unlocks it, pushes me inside, and closes it on the two of us. His voice comes to me out of the darkness tight with anger: "Listen: you talk to anyone about getting out and I'll make your life a misery! You understand? I'll make you pay! You say nothing! If anyone asks you about this evening, say I took you out for a walk, for exercise, nothing more. Do you understand me?"
I unpick his fingers from my arm and slide away from him. "You see how easy it would be for me to run away and seek shelter with the barbarians," I murmur. "Why do you think I came back? You are only a common soldier, you can only obey orders. Stilclass="underline" think about it." He clutches my wrist, and again I loosen his fingers. "Think about why I came back and what it would have meant if I had not. You can't expect sympathy from the men in blue, I'm sure you know that. Think what might happen if I got out again." Now I grip his hand. "But don't fret, I won't talk: make up any story you like and I will support you. I know what it is like to be frightened." There is a long suspicious silence, "Do you know what I want most of all?" I say. "I want something to eat and something to drink. I am starved, I have had nothing all day." So all is as it was before. This absurd incarceration continues. I lie on my back watching the block of light above me growing stronger and then weaker day after day. I listen to the remote sounds of the bricklayer's trowel, the carpenter's hammer coming through the wall. I eat and drink and, like everyone else, I wait.