The Orpheus Trail

by Maureen Duffy

  ‘This is fourth-century Roman.’

  ‘So, I suspect, is yours. An earlier coin that’s been reworked as a sort of lucky charm. The Christian symbol in the middle probably dates from later than the other motives.’

  ‘If Saebert’s sons were still pagan they might have wanted their dad to be sure of a happy afterlife. But wouldn’t they have been the sort of pagans Bede describes, believing in life as just an interlude in the darkness?’

  ‘As I said: no harm in hedging your bets with a good luck charm. Or maybe Saebert’s own faith was a bit shaky still. The ancient world was prepared to see the numinous under all sorts of names and disguises. It’s only the monotheisms, Christianity, Islam and their forerunner Judaism that said you had to restrict yourself to one story.’

  ‘So what we’ve got is an Anglo-Saxon prince, an early Christian buried with a lot of symbols of foreign gods, Mithras, and the other one I can’t pronounce…’

  ‘Ormuz.’

  ‘Ormuz and Orpheus, only he wasn’t a god but some sort of pagan prophet. But what does it all mean?’

  ‘Does it have to mean anything? Can’t it just be a bit of fascinating Dark Age history?’

  ‘It could have been,’ I said, ‘if the things hadn’t been stolen. Somehow that makes it all different. Sometimes I feel as if a ghost walks over my grave.’

  ‘I’ve felt that too, in old sites in Mesopotamia and Persia, as it used to be called, when we’ve suddenly come upon something that hasn’t been seen for three thousand years or so, as if the people who were there are still keeping watch.’

  ‘That’s it. That’s it exactly.’

  ‘I think a lot of people have felt that sensation, that’s why you get stories like the curse of Tutankhaman. Anyway I’ll keep looking to see if anything turns up on the internet.’

  Linden, I could see, wasn’t going to tell me his precise sources and I could understand that. It gave him a stake in our discovery. I sensed he was lonely and that every new contact was important to him, even if he had to buy his way in with his exclusive information. And it was one thing less for me to keep tabs on. I could afford to be grateful. Preparing my defence was taking up more time than I could have imagined possible a couple of months ago. I saw myself, with Linden’s help, recovering the finds in a blaze of glory, the chairman shaking my hand and offering me a pay rise and full reinstatement which I would decline because of a better offer from a more prestigious museum. Then reality stepped in and I saw myself dismissed and retraining as a teacher just to keep Caesar and me fed and a roof over our heads. I could teach history or art history, I thought gloomily after Linden had left, and while I waited for Hilary to join me for lunch.

  The news she brought did nothing to lighten my mood, even though it didn’t seem to affect me directly.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve been listening to the radio,’ she said while we waited for our food to be brought, a mushroom stroganoff for Hilary and spaghetti Bolognese for me.

  ‘I’ve been with Jack Linden most of the morning. He’s been showing me other artefacts like ours. I hope I can take what you’re going to tell me. There seems to have been rather a surplus of doom and gloom lately.’

  ‘Well,’ Hilary said, ‘it’s just that your pier has been damaged by fire.’

  ‘That’s a relief. I know it sounds strange but we’re used to it, rather like it must have been in the Blitz when people got used to bombs. Piers are very vulnerable to fire. Brighton’s always losing theirs; so’s Worthing. Ours goes up in smoke every decade or so it seems. When did it happen?’ I felt on familiar ground for once, in times I understood, not wandering around in the fog of the Dark Ages. ‘I take it no one was hurt.’

  ‘The early hours of this morning, I think. There was a night watchman but he seems to have suffered more from the shock of being rescued by helicopter rather than anything physical. But I’m glad you asked.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I know I’m being rather crass about this. I suppose I’m just relieved that no one can blame me.’

  ‘The suspension and all that is getting to you, Alex, isn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose it’s because I know I’m not above criticism. I should have reported the objects as soon as we found them. I shouldn’t have tried to hang on to them, then none of it would have happened. Has Linden told you what he thinks the inscriptions are?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He says they’re instructions for the soul after death on how to get into heaven, only of course they didn’t call it heaven.’

  ‘Do you believe in an afterlife, Alex?’

  ‘I wish I could but I can’t help thinking this is all we’ve got. After Lucy died I wanted to believe, as people do.’ I hadn’t spoken of Lucy before but Hilary didn’t ask who I meant. She seemed to know or just to accept without question. But her silence wasn’t awkward. ‘I’d better start thinking about a train,’ I said. ‘Caesar will be complaining.’

  This time she said: ‘Who’s Caesar?’

  ‘My familiar or my alter ego. After Lucy I thought of finding a new home for him but somehow he wouldn’t let me. Maybe it’s time you two met.’

  ‘He might resent me. After all he’s had you to himself all this time. Is he a dog or a cat? “Caesar” doesn’t give much away.’

  ‘He thinks he’s human of course but he’s cat-shaped. Will you come?’

  ‘If Caesar approves.’

  As the train rattled through east London along the line of the Thames towards the sea, I felt a sudden wave of inexplicable happiness wash over me that even survived the emptiness of the house until I heard Caesar’s flick-flap of the cat door. ‘You’ll have to be good if she comes. No sulking.’ I ran my hand, as he liked, the length of his arching black back to the very tip of his tail.

  The lightened mood perished in the morning. I was due to meet the union’s solicitor to discuss my case so I had an incentive to get up early as if I was going to work as usual, and listen to the news while I showered and made toast. Once a week Doris, Mrs Shepherd, widow, came in to clean and restore order. She preferred to have the house to herself and the next day I would find my portable radio tuned to strange stations it never got from me.

  This morning when I switched on it was Radio Essex that came at me out of the little chrome Roberts. The fire at the end of our pier was hot news still. It had consumed a length of one hundred and thirty feet a mile out to sea, destroying the pier railway station, a pub, a restaurant, a souvenir shop and the lavatory block. One of our brave fire fighters was explaining how the tide being out had made it much harder to get the blaze under control. The flames had leapt forty feet into the air, melting the plastic pipe that runs the length of the pier, carrying water against such an emergency. My chairman had managed to get himself quoted as saying that the pier would rise like a phoenix from the ashes but not for at least two years.

  Then the newscaster broke into the flow of the recording. ‘A statement just issued by the police and fire service confirms that firemen sifting through the charred remains of the pier to try to discover the cause of the fire, have found a body.’ The chief fire officer was put on from a radio car. The badly burned corpse had been hidden under fallen timbers. It appeared to be that of a child between the age of nine and twelve. Police were appealing for information about missing children. Suddenly the fire wasn’t just an accident or a piece of history that could be restored. Someone, a child, was dead.

  Pressed for more details, the officer said it was early days, too soon to judge whether the child had started the fire, died in it or was dead already. He appealed to the public to help and gave a telephone number for information. Then the station switched without a hiccup to the start of the Christmas sales.

  What had a child been doing there alone in the dark? Runaway? For a dare? Some people liked to believe the pier was haunted. Sometimes, it was said, drug dealers used it when the tide was in to drop off supplies by boat. Had the child, a boy I was sure, been cold and lit a fire? Or scared and tryi
ng to make a light? Why hadn’t he just run away, back down the untouched length of the pier, three quarters of a mile of safety that hadn’t burnt? Was he scared to meet the firemen and police hurrying out to the blaze? If it was his fault, was he afraid he would be forced to admit it and charged with arson? Maybe no one would ever know. But suddenly what had been no more than a passing end of the pier son et lumière had become a titbit for the national tabloids, another nine days’ excuse for a ritual outpouring of righteous indignation, for an airing of our blame culture. I put on my jacket and went out to discuss my own mistakes with the union lawyer.

  After the meeting at which I’d been promised at least reinstatement (‘How could you have known? You acted in good faith in putting the objects on display for the public benefit.’), I walked down through the town to take a look at the pier. The famous gardens were in their winter dress of bright polyanthus and pansies and I remembered how Lucy had disliked the lack of subtlety. ‘Institutional planting’ she had called it. And all at once I wanted to howl the tears of a frustrated toddler, the tears I hadn’t shed before. I cuffed them away trying to pretend it was the salt wind off the sea. The tide was in today but dull and muddied under a dismal sky and the waves sucked at the legs of the pier with a cold swirl that seemed to come from the brine-filled lungs of the drowned.

  The entrance to the pier was roped off, with a policeman on duty and a notice stating the obvious. I flashed him my official pass and ducked under the ropes. As I made my way forward to the pier head I could see that the hoses had caused more damage than the fire. If anyone asked me I could say I was making a preliminary assessment of the cost of restoration. After all I was the town’s paid expert on Victoriana. The chances were I’d be asked about the refurbishment. It wouldn’t hurt to be able to tell the inquiry that I’d gone on doing my job, showing concern, even while suspended.

  There were more barriers cordoning off the charred end of the pier and a couple of firemen carefully moving blackened timbers aside and pausing to make notes. The smell of smoke and burnt wood still hung heavy in the air. I produced my pass again. ‘Alex Kish,’ I said. ‘I’m responsible for the museum. I thought I’d just take a look, get some idea of the size of the problem before someone asks me about period restoration. Do you know what started it?’

  ‘We know now it was deliberate,’ the one who seemed to be the senior said. ‘There was a sort of iron fire basket on a tripod that could have set it off. That’s our thinking at the moment.’

  ‘A tramp trying to keep warm,’ I suggested.

  ‘More like an addict cooking up a fix,’ said the younger one, ‘with a portable grate.’

  I stared out over the wet slate sea and felt again the strange sensation of being watched, but it was probably only the cold breeze that had sprung up and was fingering my collar, starting the ghost of a shudder down my spine. ‘Where was the body found?’

  ‘With the fire basket over there. Part of the roof had collapsed onto him.’

  ‘It was a boy then?’

  ‘Oh yes. Well you wouldn’t expect a girl to be out here on her own at that time of night. That was a lad’s trick. Anyway forensics have confirmed it.’

  ‘It’s certainly a mess,’ I said looking around. ‘I’d better come back another day with a camera. See if anything can be salvaged. What about the structure itself?’

  ‘That seems to be sound. All steel, you see, and we got the fire under control before it could generate enough heat to start melting the supports. The track’s buckled of course.’ I could see the twisted rails that had writhed out of their beds and snaked across the deck. I turned and picked my way back towards the beach where the tide was beginning to turn, inching back to expose the famous mudflats whose exhalations had once been thought a cure for whooping cough and croup.

  Back home I switched on my computer to check my emails. There was one from Hilary. ‘Thought this might interest you. How did your meeting go? My best to Caesar. Hilary.’

  I filed it away to attachments and opened it up. There were two parts: text and picture. Carefully working away at a block of sandy soil taken from the king’s grave, the conservation team had uncovered something they had identified as an iron lamp. I turned to the picture. It showed a deeply encrusted but just recognisable shape: a bowl on three or four legs.

  Just then the phone rang. It was an excited Jack Linden. ‘Have you seen Hilary’s latest find?’

  ‘I’m just looking at it now. They seem to think it’s a lamp, about ad 600, like the king.’

  ‘To me it looks like a descendant of the Zoroastrian fire holder, the one the king is standing before in the carving on the tomb of Darius a few miles from Persepolis.’

  ‘Do they have three or four legs, these fire holders?’

  ‘They stand on a solid base with a slender shaft topped by a hollowed out stone, which forms a bowl to hold the fire that’s never allowed to go out.’

  I felt a curious sense of relief. ‘But the lamp or whatever it is is quite different: a bowl on a legged stand.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But there was a version that the king took with him when travelling. Obviously he couldn’t take his stone hearth but he had to pray to it, or rather the fire, five times a day.’

  ‘Is that where Muhammad got his five prayers a day?’

  ‘Maybe. Anyway the fire would be transferred to a metal bowl and carried with him. It must have been stood on something which made it the same height as the fire back home. The king prayed standing up. So a stand was the obvious solution. Three legs makes the most stable holder, and the Zoroastrians were very keen on things in threes.’

  ‘Trinities?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘Have you ever seen one of these standing fires, in an inscription for instance?’

  I heard him hesitate. ‘No. But it’s a workable hypothesis.’

  All this talk of correspondences had set my mind running, a dog after a bone, and maybe it was just harebrained but I heard the senior fire officer saying: ‘There was a sort of iron fire basket on a tripod that might have set it off.’

  And then I heard myself asking aloud: ‘But why fire? Was it seen as a sort of domestic god like the Roman “lares and penates,” hearth and home?’

  ‘For the Persians it was the symbol of righteousness, of ultimate purity, and fire permeates all of creation, giving it warmth and life.’

  But I could only see charred timbers and heat-twisted rails and somewhere beneath them a boy’s soot-blackened body and smoke-shrivelled skin.

  512 BC After Herodotus

  Then Darius, King of Kings, by the will of Ahura Mazda, God of Gods, commanded a bridge to be built over the Bosphorus at its narrowest point, halfway to Byzantium, so that he might cross from Asia into Europe to the lands of the Thracians and the Scythians as far as to the Danube. And this bridge was designed by Mandrocles of Samos, an Ionian, who took boats and placed them side by side until the bridge reached the far shore, for which he was loaded with many presents by King Darius. He had the bridge painted in all the stages of its construction, which picture he presented to the temple of the goddess Hera. Then Darius commanded the Ionian fleet, which people were his subjects, to sail into the Black Sea and up the Danube to where the river divides and there build another bridge for the army.

  The king having viewed the Black Sea caused two marble columns to be erected at the bridge with inscriptions in Greek and Assyrian showing all the peoples who were with him in that army of 700,000 men.

  The Thracians are the most numerous people in the world but they are divided into many tribes. If they were united they could overcome any army for they are fierce warriors who value this class above all others, and live by war and plunder. They worship Ares, Artemis and most of all Dionysus who some say went down into the underworld to restore his mother Semele to life. Here too, men say, Orpheus was born who sang of the mysteries of Dionysus the god who drives his followers mad, and in that frenzy, it is said, the Bacchantes, th
e women of Thrace, tore Orpheus limb from limb because he would not leave grieving for his wife and join in their rites.

  Then leaving his genereal, Megabazus, to subdue Thrace and guard the Hellespont, King Darius set sail again for Asia. And this Megabazus was of all the generals the one most valued by Darius. And always with the Persian armies their magi went too and discoursed with the priests and philosophers of the conquered peoples, and, with the magicians among the Scythians from the north, who profess to foretell the future and work miracles such as raising the dead.

  Jack Linden was on the phone to me early next morning. ‘What’s this in the newspapers, Alex?’

  ‘I haven’t had a chance to read them yet, Jack.’

  ‘Sorry. I got used to getting up early in the Middle East before the sun was too hot. It’s about this fire of yours and the dead boy.’

  That woke me up. ‘Old news Jack. I was down there yesterday. I don’t see what there is new to say.’

  ‘You didn’t see the toys then?’

  ‘What toys?’

  ‘According to the paper they found some toys with the kid.’

  ‘I’ll read the article and call you back. It must be something that happened after I’d left.’

  I was thinking of the two fire officers continuing their meticulous sift through the ashes. I picked up the paper from the doormat, unfolded it and there it was: front-page news now. Fire Officer Weston giving his story of the strange finds: an old-fashioned, cone-shaped spinning top, a set of five jacks and a ball, a jointed action man doll and other objects too charred to be recognised. It conjured up a sad image of a lonely child hiding out at the end of the pier with his favourite toys for company. I dialled Jack.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘Poor kid. He must have had a hellhole of a home to be living rough like that.’

  ‘But don’t you see?’ His voice was growing increasingly irritated. Whatever the exam was, I was failing this viva miserably.