The Albatross Book of Short Stories [antikvár]

martin armstrong THE WIDOW OF EPHESUS hundreds of years ago, outside the city of Ephesus, a young Soldier kept guard over five gibbets. The evening was very quiet: there was no wind. The sun had set an hour ago and all things on earth were slowly merging into the common darkness. But hoisted against the pale horizon the five gibbets showed black and skeletal with the five bodies hanging from them limply, droopingly, like the bodies of drowned men. The victims were five thieves and a guard had been set over them for fear that their friends or relatives should steal them away by night to give them burial. The young Soldier paced slowly to and fro, sometimes stamping his feet, sometimes striking the shaft of his spear against one of the gibbet-posts in order to break the unendurable silence which had closed down on the place since nightfall. Fifty yards from his station lay a burial-ground. If he stared intently in that direction, faint blurs of whiteness loomed through the dark. They were the marble monuments of the dead, and, though there was no moon that night, it was as if their substance were impregnated with the faint phosphorescence of moonlight. The summer was already over: the days were drawing in. The young Soldier knew that he had ten hours of darkness before him. It would be impossible to march to and fro all that time. At intervals he would have to rest, sitting on the ground and leaning his back against a gibbet-post: but when he did so he would have to be careful not to fall asleep, for if one of the corpses were stolen during his watch, his own body would replace the stolen one; since that, as he well knew, was the grim penalty. He had brought with him his supper and a flask of wine, and the thought of them comforted his heart. He decided