by AM Kirkby
***
"Come quickly!" Kallirhoe whispered. Egerius was about to answer, but she laid a finger on his lips, taking his hand with her other hand and drawing him with her, out of the house and down towards the river. It was nearly midday; his skin felt hot and raw where the high sun fell on it. The water shimmered; the hills were hazy. She pulled him along, down to a tumble of rocks, where she fell to her hands and knees, crawling up to the crest of the little ridge, peering over it. He crawled up behind her, till his head was at her shoulder.
"What it is?" he kept his voice low, but even so she frowned, before she whispered back; "Simonides. Look. Careful. Don't let him see you."
He drew himself up, pulling on his arms as if swimming on the rock, and looked over, his head in the angle between a boulder and the rock face.
Down below, Simonides was standing, very still.
"What's so interesting about that?"
"Wait." Her voice seemed strange, denuded of all resonance or pitch, just a dry hiss like wind. "Wait; you'll see."
Simonides moved a leg up into the air, extended almost straight. He began to sway, windmilled an arm, regained his balance. He bent his knee, slowly. He stood there a long time, before leaning forward very slowly, carefully, starting to fall; and as he did so he bent the other leg, but the motion of his fall pulled him on to his front leg, and he fell sideways. He got up, stood again, quite still. He repeated the actions, but this time didn't bend the leg, so that when he began to fall forwards, he came to rest on his outstretched foot, his entire body sloped forwards; but then he stood still for a long time, not seeming to know quite what to do. When at last he began to bring the other leg up, he unbalanced, and though he didn't let himself fall, he drew himself up again, and stood still.
Egerius' face was taut with the effort of not laughing at this strange ritual. He let his body drop back behind the stones; Kallirhoe raised an eyebrow – he nearly laughed out loud, then remembered, and swallowed heavily.
"What's he doing?"
"How would I know?"
He wondered for a moment whether Simonides had gone mad, or been drinking Melkart's poppy wine; another problem he didn't need. But Simonides wasn't the sort; or at least, he'd never thought so before.
Once Egerius was back in the city, though, he had no time to think about that odd display; there was too much to do. They had a new recruit that day, who had to be shown around and found lodgings, and introduced to people he should know. And Gaius needed to round up a few workers to help get the stoa roof finished; "It's already starting to come apart," he'd said, "where the edges of the tiling were left unfinished." (It was just as well Anicius had turned up when he had; instead of being diverted to either of the philosophy groups or Melkart's 'school of experience', he could be directed to help with the building works. Not every new arrival would have Egerius greet him, of course; but Anicius had been sent by Manius, who had hinted that the man was 'useful', and that was a word that for Manius, as for Tarquinius, held potent multiplicities of meaning.
It wasn't till much later in the day, or rather the evening – the air already dim and chill with coming night – that Egerius had completed those tasks he could, and definitely deferred those he couldn't to a later date, and was able to pick his way down the track towards the grove. He could hear voices raised as he approached; but there were only two or three students remaining in the dark shadows, Karite herself, and Kallirhoe, and a Collatian girl he didn't recognise, but knew to be local by the yellow stripe of her dress, still vivid against the twilight.
"So the gods are not real," the girl was saying; "they are just our way of referring to things. A simile, a poetry, an image. If I carve a tree trunk into Juno, it is an image, not a god."
"But then we bring them alive," Kallirhoe said, "by behaving as if they were real. Or by devoting ourselves to them."
"How so?"
"If I devote myself to Athene, then I become the maiden; I am chaste, I am a weaver, I learn to spin the threads of discourse, and I create myself in Athene's image, and so because I become Athene, she lives in what I have made of myself."
"I see. The gods are only real when we behave as if they exist."
"No, they're real." Karite's voice was firm.
"I remember your saying that once before," Kallirhoe said. "What convinced you?"
Karite looked down, her eyes sliding away from Kallirhoe's. "It's a long story. I'm not sure..."
"Let's hear it." The girl's enthusiasm was sweet; Karite looked up, smiled, nodded. Catching sight of Egerius, she beckoned him to sit with them; "You're just in time," she said, "so you don't miss the start of the story." Once he was settled, and the quiet of the evening returned, she began, her voice low.
"I was brought up in Athens; but my mother's family had lands in Thessaly, out along the Pinios river. You have no idea, Egerius, what Greece is like; here, the landscape is on a human scale, but our plains are scoured by the wind, bleached by the sun. You feel the presence of gods, of demons.
"Our entire lives were lived within the great meanders of the river, on the vast plain of Attica. It's a slow and secret river; every year it changes its course, throwing up sandbanks in the middle of its channel, or wearing away those that were there. You can never really know the river; it is always changing, you never see it quite the same twice. But in winter, it flows in spate; it tumbles boulders across the plain, trails gravel, undermines its banks.
"The sky is huge. You always feel exposed. The huge clouds threaten lightningflash and rain so heavy it slaps your skin and blinds you. Heat rolls like a wave across the plain in summer; when the wind blows it's as if an oven has been opened.
"They used to tell stories about Pentheus and the maenads, how he denied the god, how the women ripped him apart. My father said it was just a story, but it made me shiver; sometimes, out on the plain, when I heard the thunder rolling and the rain hissing down, I'd imagine it, the figures of the women blurred by the sheeting rain, the fresh blood washing away in the deluge. Never deny the gods, the women said; give all the gods their due.
"There was a mound on a bluff by the river where the women used to take flowers and cakes, and sometimes chickens. No one knew who was buried there; some ancestor of mother's house, but his name was lost in darkness.
"They told stories from the old times, full of blood and fear. One of the old kings had slaughtered his daughter; he cut her throat, like a goat or a cow. Some said it was for faithlessness, she'd betrayed the city to an invader; some said she'd slept with one of her brothers; others said he'd sacrificed her to the vengeful gods. I wondered if he'd done it from behind, so that she never realised what was happening till her blood was already pooling in the dust, and perhaps not even then; or whether she'd seen the knife, and died in fear, her heart thudding hard, pulsing out her blood all around her.
"My brother told me great Achilas, when he knew he was dying of a gangrened wound, had taken his prisoners out to the flat lands by the river and killed them, one after another, in their chains. I shivered, imagining what it would have been like to stand there, chained to the man in front and the man behind, seeing the men in line, ahead of you, being killed. Dead bodies ahead of you; some of them would drag the chain as they fell; and yet a moment before, they'd been as alive as you were... and you'd know your turn was coming closer, would inevitably come, and you couldn't run, couldn't fight, couldn't do anything. Would I have struggled, uselessly, I wondered, or would I have stood numb and still to wait for the knife, the spear, the club?
"But my brother was a great oaf who loved to terrorise the younger children, so perhaps after all the story wasn't true."
"You were an imaginative child," Kallirhoe said, smiling.
"But I thought you were going to demonstrate that the gods were real," the Collatian girl said. "All you've done is tell us stories. And stories, as you keep telling us, might not be true."
Karite squirmed. "Oh... I got carried away. But Thessaly is a very different pla
ce... this is a sweet place, this Italy of yours, sweet and gentle. In Thessaly, the rocks thrust their heads up to the heavens, and the rivers whip and swerve in their gravelly plains below a leaden sky. In winter, the land freezes till the trees shatter with the cold; in summer, it bakes, and the dust devils scourge the earth. In Thessaly, snakes are still worshipped, and sloughed skins hung up on stakes at the edge of the road, and when the wolves come down from the mountains men dress in wolfskins and dance till the gods take them."
"Get on with it," the Collatian girl said.
"I was out with my father one day - women ride out in Thessaly, it's not like Athens or the south - tracking a stag across the rough land. It picked its way across the great river, from gravel bank to gravel bank, staying to the shallows of the ford; and then, after running along the valley for some way, it sought shelter, at the end, in a narrow gully, where we were about to follow it when my father held his hand up to stop me. What I had thought was a thin stream of water lying across the path was the body of a large black snake.
"We stood very still then; I was so close I could see its tongue flickering, and I thought if I moved it would see me, and strike. The snake never moved, except for its tongue questing delicately in the air, but I seemed to hear a voice that said "Slowly, child, slowly, take a step back, take a step back, and come to me;" and it was not my father's, nor was it audible, it was like a golden shimmer inside my head, but I did as it said, stepping slowly back and away from the serpent.
"We turned back then, realising the stag was not for us, and as we reached the wider path we saw a young man standing on the rocks above the path. He was handsome, one of the blond-haired, tall youths you occasionally see in the north, but his eyes were grey and cold; I was frightened, and I had no idea why.
"He spoke. 'Go the other way,' he said, 'and when you get home, offer a libation to Apollo.'
"Father said, 'We offer to Dionysos in my house'. But he said, 'Even so, you will offer to Apollo,' and turned, and went on his way; and though the plain is wide and open there, we never caught sight of him again.
"It was not much later when my father saw the storm clouds coming in from the east, and the waters began to rise; by the time we got back to the river crossing, the water was running fast, and even in the shallows, the water was up past my waist, and we had to hold on to each other to stay upright. Twice I nearly missed my footing, and fell into one of the holes the current had scoured in the bed of the river, or into a gap between two rocks. If we had pursued the stag further, we would have been caught by the storm.
"We were wet and cold, and the only thing we could do was go as fast as possible. We were nearly home when we heard the roaring of water behind us, and looked back to see a huge wave, white foam and muddy water, rushing down the river.
"My father made the libation to Apollo when he got home. We knew who we had seen; we knew we owed our lives to his intervention, and the snake who is his creature and his conquest.
I know that gods exist. I make my thank-offerings to Apollo. But I hope I never see a god again."