He stood there, feeling disheartened; without eating he could not travel; and he realised again that a slave’s life, though full of humiliation and, in the power of anyone like the Lady, pain, was a sheltered one; he had been used to eating regularly. Even in Edessa, when the Lady was angry or needlessly economical and the quality and quantity of the food had been reduced, there had always been something, served up at regular times.
Resolutely he cast his mind back to the days of his youth, particularly to the brief period between his initiation and his capture when he had been allowed to go with the men on their hunting expeditions. They
never went out until the food supplyof the village was almost exhausted, and what little there was left in store stayed there for the support of the women and children. In the morning they would say, “Tonight we eat full.” But often enough there were days when they had no success and lay down with empty bellies. They’d thought nothing of it; nor had he, then. The forty-year-old “Balthazar thought—I am not the man my father was. Then he thought—Naturally not; I am not a man at all. And he wondered whether the Lady had been right when she said that eunuchs thought of nothing but eating.
Next day, still moving west and travelling across country he was fortunate and fell in with a woman more brave, or more charitable, than the first. She sold him some wheat porridge, cold and set almost as firm as bread, two small onions and a cup of goats’ milk. He carried the onions with him, and ate them just before he lay down under a wall and went to sleep.
On the third day, after a long laborious climb up a ridge or rising ground, planted on its lower slope with olive trees, above that bare and rocky and very damaging to his poor shoes, he found himself looking down upon a road, carrying considerable traffic and running—he took his bearing by the sun—slightly south-west-north-east. He scrambled down the ridge and joined the traffic that was going, so far as he could judge, away from the direction of Edessa. There were trains of pack ponies and donkeys, trotting along in a haze of dust; camels swayed under their loads. There were mounted men and ladies being carried in litters, and so many people on foot that Balthazar felt himself to be reasonably inconspicuous.
Hunger bothered him again and presently he had proved that he had no skill as a beggar; nothing came his way that day, and the situation was made worse by the fact that all along the road people were eating, and there were places where food could be bought. Bread freshly baked in a village shop smelt delicious and brought the water into his mouth; so did the sight of a pedlar resting against his pack and eating the leg of a chicken.
Towards evening he came to an inn. Poor travellers who were prudent and determined to get good places for themselves on the covered platform that ran around the yard, and good places for their beasts in the enclosure, were already settled and eating the food they had brought with them; from the doors and windows in the inn itself came the odours of the meal being cooked for wealthier people who could afford to eat indoors, in comfort. Balthazar paused. There must be a great deal of work to be done in an inn at such a moment; animals to be fed and watered, dung to be swept up, dishes and pots to be washed. He turned in and at the door asked, most meekly, whether there was anything he could do in return for a meal.
“I don’t encourage beggars,” the innkeeper said.
“Puts people off if they think they’re going to be accosted and bothered.”
“I wouldn’t accost or bother anyone. I’d just do anything you gave me to do, whatever it was, in return for something to eat.”
To that the innkeeper did not even bother to reply; he pursed his lips and whistled, and from somewhere a dog appeared, and without a bark or a snarl or any evidence of hostility, sank his teeth into Balthazar’s wrist, and held him.
“That’ll do,” the innkeeper said; the dog loosed its hold,and backed away.
“Now you be off,” the innkeeper said, ‘unless you want another dose.”
Outside the place he was obliged to stop and tear a piece from his tunic to make a bandage for his wrist which was bleeding profusely. It dawned upon him—and-this hurt more than the dog-bite, or the blisters, just beginning to break on his feet, or the hunger-gnaw in his belly—that he had come out on a ridiculous errand, hunting for two men he did not know, who might even now be travelling in exactly the opposite direction. Even at this low moment he did not doubt their existence; they were as real to him as the surly innkeeper, but he was beginning to fear that he might die of hunger, and never find them.
Miserably he wandered on, and in a short time heard, from the side of the road where there was a clump of myrtle trees, the sound of several men’s voices, laughing and cursing; the scent of charred flesh reached him. He ventured cautiously around the trees and saw that he had stumbled upon a group of soldiers, Roman soldiers, who had bought, or
commandeered,a sucking pig, and made a fire and were now endeavouring, clumsily, to cook it by using their swords as toasting forks. Even as he watched, it slipped and fell into the fire which spat and sizzled.
“Jupiter give you a pig for a first-born,” one of the soldiers said.
“We want it for eating, not for a burnt-offering.” He reached out and, taking the pig by its hindleg, retrieved it.
Balthazar moved forward, a shadow emerging from the shadows and said in the faultless Latin he had learned from Metellus:
“I could cook it, if you would permit me.” At least they .were not frightened and did not turn upon him eyes of fear or any of the emotions that fear engendered.
“See,” one of them said, ‘didn’t I tell you that this was enchanted country. We need a cook, and one walks in.”
“In disguise!” another said.
“As unlike a cook as any I ever saw—and I’ve seen a few. Can you cook, fellow?”
Balthazar had never cooked anything in his life, but he had seen cooking done, “I can cook that pig,” he said.
“Then cook it,” said the man who held it by the leg, ‘and shout when it is ready for eating.” He gave the greasy, half-charred little body to Balthazar and turned away. The others turned away too, towards a dim lantern that stood on the ground. They were Romans, the dominant race, and to them it did not seem strange that out of the dusk service should come and offer itself. One of them, just beginning to throw the dice, was annoyed when Balthazar came behind him and asked could he borrow his knife. No slave of the Lady’s was allowed to carry a knife or anything capable in the most far-fetched circumstances of being used as a weapon of offence or defence.
Handed the knife, Balthazar cut two forked branches and planted them firmly in the ground, one at each side of the fire. Then he cut a long, stout stick and forced it through the body of the sucking pig; the protruding ends he lodged in the forks of the branches and the pig hung there, near enough the heat to cook, far enough from it not to char. He sat down by it, now and then replenishing the fire, now and then giving the long stick a turn so that another portion of the pig was brought in contact with the heat. A mouth-watering smell overpowered the scent of charring and spread about the little camp. One of the men turned and called:
“How long will it be?”
“Not long now, sir,” Balthazar called back. He thought how tender the white flesh would be, the crackling how crisp, the fat how sweet, and was obliged to wipe his mouth on his sleeve.
For the first time in many years he remembered Eliezer, who would have starved before he would eat pig-meat, or hare, or venison. At the time he had respected Eliezer’s respect for his Law and admired him for it; now it seemed ridiculous. Though no more ridiculous, he thought, than casting yourself into a hostile world on account of a dream, a waking dream. Then, because every man must attempt to justify his own form of madness, he thought that after all his action might not have been so ridiculous, even if he never found the men he was looking for. If he could keep alive and stayed on this road while the Lady hunted for him around Babila, he might come to a city large enough to hide in and set himself up as a street-corner scribe. In that there’d be none of the wonder and glory he’d come out to find but one thing he’d dreamed would have come true. No more slavery. He’d thought that that had applied to the whole world, but maybe he had been mistaken; maybe it applied only to him.