The Orpheus Descent

by Tom Harper

  I only meant to sleep for a couple of hours, but when I woke, a soft sunset was glowing orange through the window. Fresh clothes had been left on a stool. Euphemus lay on the bed beside me, snoring like a marble saw.

  I dressed and went out. The main living room was empty, but I could hear a soft, irregular tapping, like loom weights, coming from outside.

  Eurytus sat on his knees in the courtyard. For a moment, I didn’t recognise him. He’d changed into a clean, white woollen tunic and combed his hair almost respectably straight. But it hadn’t made him normal. He scrabbled on the ground, kneeling over a sandpit and making patterns out of white pebbles, murmuring under his breath. Every so often, he’d lean over to the counting frame beside him and shuttle a counter from one side to the other with a sharp clack. Then he’d go back to the pebbles.

  There were plenty more important questions pending, but I couldn’t help asking: ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Experiments.’ He didn’t look up.

  ‘Some kind of art?’

  ‘Philosophy.’

  They looked like children’s pictures to me, stick men and stick animals standing outside stick houses, surrounded by other, more abstract figures. A lot of triangles.

  I remembered the figure on the beach. ‘Is this geometry?’

  ‘Geometry is the study of shapes. I’m concerned with number.’

  ‘I don’t see any numbers.’

  ‘You have to count them.’

  He swept up the pebbles and started laying them out again, heavy and deliberate. ‘The world is made of numbers. One is a point. Two make a line. Three points defines a surface, and the fourth’ – the pebble went down – ‘creates volume. Solid objects.’

  He drew lines in the sand with his finger to connect the stones. ‘You see? One, two, three, four. Do you think that’s a coincidence?’

  ‘Um …’

  ‘All things that exist have a number.’ He dealt out more pebbles, making another stick man. ‘If we can work out the number of each thing, we can understand how the world works.’

  ‘Who decided that?’ said Euphemus, from behind. He’d come down unnoticed and was peering over Eurytus’ shoulder at the picture in the sand.

  ‘The Philosopher. The first and greatest.’

  ‘Which philosopher?’

  Eurytus wouldn’t answer. But staring at the triangles he’d drawn, I suddenly realised the answer. And I remembered Agathon’s letter. A Pythagorean teacher has a book of wisdom he is willing to sell …

  ‘Was it Pythagoras? Are you a Pythagorean?’

  He made a strange twisting gesture with his hand, and touched the gold locket at his neck. ‘Only the enlightened should say his name.’

  ‘I’ve come to Italy to find a friend of mine. He said he was studying with a Pythagorean’ – Eurytus flinched as I said the name again – ‘teacher. Did you meet him? He’s called Agathon.’

  The question had an extraordinary effect. Eurytus looked as if he’d swallowed one of his own stones. He swept the pebbles up and rattled them into a small sack. ‘Truth is sacred,’ he muttered. ‘Not to be spoken.’

  ‘So many prohibitions,’ Euphemus observed. ‘Do you ever manage to say anything?’

  I waved him to shut up. ‘Did Agathon come here? Stay with you?’ Agathon is one of the gentlest souls I know, but he has a razor-sharp mind – and he isn’t afraid to draw blood. I could imagine how the conversation might have gone if Eurytus had started showing him his stones.

  The old man shook his head.

  ‘But you knew him?’

  ‘Archytas dealt with it. He can tell you.’

  ‘Dealt with what?’

  ‘Archytas can tell you,’ he repeated.

  ‘Who’s Archytas?’

  He shut the bag with a drawstring and stood up.

  ‘I’ll take you to him.’

  Six

  Jonah – Sibari

  The shadows spread across the trench, creeping over the drowned city. Volunteers gathered tools and stretched plastic sheeting over the remains. Lily still hadn’t come back.

  He should have walked – he’d have been there by now. Now, he worried he’d miss her if she drove back while he was walking over. He dialled her number: it rang and rang until he almost tuned out the sound, but she didn’t answer.

  He couldn’t wait any more. He jumped up and found Richard on the far side of the trench with two volunteers, examining a pot-handle embedded in the ground.

  ‘I’m going,’ Jonah said. ‘If Lily comes, tell her to call me.’

  Richard’s head jerked up. ‘Sorry.’ He flapped a hand. ‘It’s all mad today. I’ll just be another minute.’

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘OK, OK.’ Richard tossed his notebook to one of the volunteers and took a bunch of keys out of his pocket. ‘We’ll go now.’

  Jonah followed him out of the trench and strapped himself into one of the pickups. The headache was back. The warmth of anticipation had cooled to a lump in his stomach, disappointed and uncertain. He took out his mobile. Still nothing.

  Richard piloted the car along the dirt track and onto the coastal highway. Jonah stared out the window as they drove half a mile down the road, then turned in at a stonemason’s. Beyond it, along a track, a two-storey farmhouse stood on the edge of a field circled by citrus trees and shiny barbed wire. The drive had taken three minutes.

  He could have walked it in ten, fifteen tops. Instead, he’d wasted almost three-quarters of an hour waiting for Richard. He stamped against the footwell in frustration as Richard opened the gate.

  The house had a porch, where half a dozen volunteers sat cross-legged with buckets of muddy water, scrubbing pink pot fragments with toothbrushes. Clean pieces lay out on mesh racks in the sun: they reminded Jonah of the pictures you saw after air crashes, warehouses where investigators tried to reverse-engineer a catastrophe out of its debris.

  ‘Is Lily here?’

  A muscled boy in a green vest looked up. ‘Haven’t seen her.’

  ‘We just got here a half-hour ago,’ added the girl beside him, in an American accent. ‘She could be upstairs.’

  Jonah took the steps two at a time. The lab was a plain room with a few wooden tables pushed together in the middle that reminded him of a school science lab. There was a dirty sink, a microscope, a computer, and plastic bags filled with pottery. A half-assembled black vase stood on the table, next to a grinning skull.

  Lily wasn’t there.

  ‘She must have gone back to the hotel.’ Richard had come up behind him. ‘She said she’d been feeling the heat.’

  Jonah stared around the room, as if Lily might emerge from under the table, or step out of one of the pictures on the wall. The sweat on his face felt ice cold.

  Richard was in a different world. ‘I’ll run you back to the hotel,’ he offered. ‘She’s probably in the pool.’

  Lily was a waterbaby. That first dig in Greece, she’d paced him stroke for stroke as they swam out to the little islet just off shore, hauling themselves up on the rocks, careful to avoid the sea urchins that could stab your feet like needles. He told her she was a dolphin in a past life; the first present he ever bought her was a dolphin pendant.

  A door opened, an office beyond. A girl popped her head out. She was young, like the rest of them, with long brown hair and minimal clothing. She noticed Jonah, and her eyes seemed to stay on him a moment longer than necessary.

  ‘Can I help?’

  ‘I’m looking for Lily.’

  Unselfconsciously, the girl put a hand to her shoulder and straightened her bra strap. ‘You’re Jonah, right? She said you were coming today.’

  ‘Is she here?’

  ‘Um, I’m not really sure.’ She looked back to Richard. ‘There’s something you need to look at in here.’

  ‘Won’t be a minute.’

  Without apology, Richard went in and closed the door behind him. Jonah almost knocked it down to take his car keys so he could get back to t
he hotel. After hanging around at the dig, now this, he thought something would explode inside him.

  Richard always was a prick, he thought. He flopped onto one of the battered chairs and closed his eyes. Ever since he woke up he’d been feeling he’d come into a different world, that someone had rearranged the furniture on him while he slept.

  You’re not thinking straight, he told himself. The heat, the tiredness, the end-of-tour emptiness. Of course Lily was back at the hotel. If he hadn’t stopped for that last coffee at the Autogrill, he’d have caught her at breakfast.

  He opened his eyes. On the table, the incomplete skull stared back at him. It had one eye socket, and a hard ball of earth filling the space where the brain used to be.

  I know how you feel.

  He looked around, trying to find Lily in the lab’s clutter. Minor artefacts covered the table in ziplocked bags, each one with a slip of paper noting where it had been found. Some of the writing looked like Lily’s. A photocopied cartoon had been pinned to the wall, an old Far Side he recognised from her office in London. A pitchfork-toting Satan prodding a hapless nerd towards two doors marked ‘Damned if you do’ and ‘Damned if you don’t’. ‘You’ve got to choose,’ said the caption. A black-and-white exercise book lay on the cupboard underneath it.

  Richard was still in the office. Jonah went over and picked up the exercise book. The cover said Field Journal, printed in Lily’s plain handwriting. He flicked through page after page of Lily’s meticulous observations, her neat line drawings of the artefacts they’d found. Coins, pots, a comb with a handle like a centaur.

  One drawing filled almost the entire page, a thin cylinder, dented and bent like a cigarette that had been dropped on the ground. Two loops fastened it to a chain, which Lily had also drawn. Underneath she’d labelled it R27: tablet/pendant/case, and drawn a scale, showing it was about four centi-metres long.

  He was about to turn over when he noticed a gap, a rough edge where the facing page had been torn out. It surprised him. Archaeologists obsessed about preserving everything they did: they had to. It was a one-shot discipline – the moment the spade hit the ground, they were destroying the very thing they wanted to study. If it wasn’t documented, it didn’t exist.

  ‘Trying to put yourself to sleep?’ Richard stood in the office doorway. ‘That’s confidential, you know.’

  ‘Just seeing what Lily’s been up to.’ Jonah closed the book and pushed it away. ‘There’s a page missing.’

  Richard’s face froze. ‘Really?’

  ‘Just so you don’t think I stole it.’

  ‘Too paranoid.’ Richard jangled the car keys at him. ‘Let’s go and find Lily.’

  Back at the hotel, the marina was coming to life as the shadows lengthened. Children kicked a football in the road using dumpsters for goals; nut-brown men in Speedos hosed off their yachts. Jonah went straight up to the room. He wanted the day to end, the day that had begun in Berlin and ended on the shore of the Mediterranean. He wanted to see Lily, to touch her and fall asleep and wake up with her beside him. It wasn’t complicated.

  The room was unlocked. The tension inside him began to dissolve. ‘Lily?’ he called. He pushed open the door.

  The room was empty, so empty it took him a moment to really process it. No Lily – no anything. The clothes on the chair, the alarm clock, the shoes and the laptop – all gone. New towels lay folded on the freshly made bed. As if she’d never existed.

  He checked the number on the door to make sure it was the right room. He slid open the cupboards. Empty. Ditto the bedside drawers, ditto the bathroom. When he pulled open the shutters, the red towel and bikini had gone from the balcony rail.

  He swivelled around slowly. Or perhaps the room turned, and he simply took it in. His legs had turned to wax. In the pool, a girl shrieked. He sat down on the bed.

  Water gleamed on the tile floor next to the bedside table. The water from the glass he’d knocked over while he slept. This was definitely the room.

  The phone vibrated against his thigh as if he’d been stabbed in the leg. He snatched it out of his pocket and read the message that had arrived.

  Family emergency – had to dash home. So sorry I missed you. Will explain later.

  He read through it again, trying to understand. But that wasn’t possible – it made no sense. Why hadn’t she called? He dialled her number, his sweaty fingers fumbling the phone.

  Once again, it rang into infinity. The flat monotone of the continental phone system, not the homely ring-ring of home. At least she was still in the country. Perhaps she was driving, or couldn’t answer.

  He hung up and punched out an urgent message.

  Are you OK? Where are you? What’s going on?

  The ten minutes that passed were some of the longest of his life. Then:

  Mum had another fall. I need to be with her. Low on battery. Will call when I get to London.

  He fell back on the bed and watched the ceiling fan spin. When I get to London? He’d driven almost twenty-four hours to reach her, and now she was flying to London? Without seeing him.

  ‘So why the hell am I in Italy?’ he said to the room.

  He sat up and went out onto the balcony. Below, children were splashing and fighting in the pool, while their parents lay on their sunloungers with their phones and cigarettes. And among the tanned bodies, a pair of hideously white legs in beige shorts, sticking out from the shade of a sun umbrella.

  Jonah ran downstairs and out to the pool. Richard was sitting up, a novel tented open on his lap and a phone in his hand. He slipped the phone in his pocket and looked at Jonah from behind a pair of oversize sunglasses.

  ‘I was just coming to find you. I got a message from Lily.’

  ‘So did I,’ said Jonah. ‘She’s gone.’

  ‘Rather short notice.’

  Short notice? She knew he was coming today. She must have known he’d arrived: she couldn’t have missed the van parked outside. So why didn’t she find him before she left? All she had to do was call.

  ‘Did she say what it was? Richard asked.

  ‘Her mum had another fall.’ Two years earlier, Lily’s mother had fallen on the stairs and broken her hip. The leg had recovered, but not her confidence: she lived in terror that it would happen again.

  But Lily’s sister lived virtually next door. Couldn’t she have looked after her mother? Why the race to be home?

  He should call her family and find out what was going on. But first …

  ‘Where’s the nearest airport?’

  ‘We usually use Bari. Naples and Brindisi are a similar distance.’

  The hotel’s wi-fi reached the pool terrace. Jonah used his phone to connect and started searching for flights. Precious minutes passed: the internet crawled along as if somewhere down the line, someone was laboriously hand-writing every word.

  ‘What time is it now?’ he asked Richard, not looking up.

  ‘Nearly five thirty.’

  The last flight was at ten to nine. ‘How far to the airports?’

  ‘They’re all about three hours away.’

  Jonah swore. Richard took the phone from him and read the flight times off the screen.

  ‘You’ll never make it – not on a Friday night. Looks like you’re stuck with us. Unless you’re thinking of driving back?’

  Jonah put his hand in his pocket and felt the van keys. For a moment, he really considered it. If it would have got him to Lily sooner, he’d have been behind the wheel that instant, even though the thought of twenty-four hours more driving made him sick.

  But it wouldn’t gain him any time. There was an early flight next morning: he could be in London for lunch, about the time the van would be crossing the Alps if he drove.

  ‘I’m sure it’ll all work out,’ Richard said. ‘Just one of those things. We meet for supper on the terrace at eight – you’re welcome to join us.’

  He stood up, then remembered he was still holding Jonah’s phone. He stretched out his hand to g
ive it back.

  With a slap of wet feet, a small girl in a frilly swimsuit came racing around the pool, chased by her big brother. Richard jerked out of the way, slipped on the wet stones and threw out his arms to balance.

  ‘Shit.’

  Jonah’s phone flew out of Richard’s hand. Jonah lunged towards it, but it was too far and he was too late. It dropped into the water with a splash. Tiny bubbles popped out of the case as it sank towards the pool floor.

  Jonah grabbed Richard’s arm. ‘What the—?’

  ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Behind sunglasses and newspapers, every pair of eyes around the pool was watching them. A boy duck-dived to the bottom and surfaced with the phone. He handed it up to Jonah, then kicked away in a plume of spray. Jonah stared at the dead slab of metal and glass in his palm.

  ‘Don’t try turning it on,’ Richard warned. ‘You need to let it dry out.’

  Jonah’s look would have turned Richard to stone, if he’d had the power.

  At five to eight there was a knock on his door. Jonah groaned and didn’t answer. He didn’t want to go to dinner. He didn’t want to see anyone. He hadn’t moved since he came back from the pool, his thoughts racing the same circles until they blurred into static. Not thinking or feeling, not asleep and not awake, just being. The only sensation was a vague nausea, like the hum of a light that was about to pop.

  His arms were cramped from so much driving. He stretched out to the end of the bed, curling his fingers around the end of the mattress.

  And felt something. A book, fallen between the mattress and the wall. She must have missed it when she packed. He could imagine her reading it in bed, up too late, slipping it under the pillow and then pushing it down the back of the bed in her sleep. He tugged it out.

  The book fell open at the first page. His eye read it automatically.

  I went down to the Piraeus, yesterday, with Glaucon …