The Orpheus Descent

by Tom Harper

  He put his thumbs and index fingers together, making a crude triangle. ‘You might see this as a triangle, but it isn’t really. My fingers aren’t straight, the angles aren’t exact. If you tried to generalise about triangles from this, you’d get gibberish. But there’s another way. When I think about a triangle, I’m not thinking about this one or that one. They’re just images of a prototype which isn’t defined physically, but logically. Not a triangle, but the triangle itself. Pythagoras’ genius was discovering that the world has an underlying order, a system which – and this is the really miraculous bit – we can understand through reason.’

  ‘I can see it works for triangles,’ I said doubtfully.

  Archytas reached into a chest and took out a handsome eight-string lyre, with a tortoiseshell sounding box and double-scrolled arms. He cupped it to his breast and plucked two strings in succession.

  ‘This is a note, and so is this.’ He plucked again, this time both strings simultaneously. ‘Together, you get harmony – a third thing that unites its component parts.’

  The chord rang with a kind of sad beauty. ‘But what does that have to do with mathematics?’

  ‘Music is mathematics.’ Archytas played the chord again. ‘Look at the strings. If you measure them, you’ll find that the first harmonious pair is made by making the second string four-thirds as long as the first. The next harmonious pair is on the ratio three to two, and the octave comes by doubling the length.

  He wrote the ratios on a wax tablet. 1:2 – 2:3 – 3:4.

  ‘I thought you weren’t interested in numbers.’

  He plucked a few more notes, improvising a short tune. It reminded me of the deathless music the wind chimes had made in the forest.

  ‘The universe is motion, and everything that moves makes a sound. If we could hear it all, and understand the formulas that govern it, there’d be a lot more harmony in the world.’

  ‘Is that what Agathon wanted to learn about?’

  The music died away. Archytas laid the lyre back in its box.

  ‘Agathon thought there was more, and I was hiding it from him.’

  ‘Were you?’

  A grave look. ‘The beauty of mathematics is that you can’t hide anything. There are no rituals or mysteries. Each step comes logically from the last. Anyone can see it if he takes the time to think it through.’

  ‘But you parted on bad terms.’

  ‘Not when he left. When I found out what he’d done—’

  Just then, the door banged open and Euphemus walked in.

  ‘Good news,’ he announced. ‘I’ve hired mules to take me as far as Rhegion.’

  Obviously, he expected me to make something of it. I just stared.

  ‘Thurii’s on the way.’ Another pause. ‘If you want to find your friend there, you’re welcome to come with me.’

  Everything I owned was fishbait – including my purse. ‘I can’t afford … How are you paying for it?’

  He showed me a palmful of gold coins, heavy archers minted in Persia.

  ‘Did you rob someone?’

  ‘I keep them sewn into my belt for when things go wrong. Which they usually do, in my experience.’

  ‘No wonder you were so heavy to drag out of the sea.’

  ‘And now I’m showing my gratitude. Do you want to come?’

  I hesitated. There was so much more I wanted to ask Archytas – and having to endure Euphemus’ company on the road was a dismal prospect. But …

  There are two ways, says Parmenides, and one is impossible.

  ‘I’ll come.’

  Archytas was out to dinner that night. Euphemus angled for an invitation, but Archytas artfully outmanoeuvred him. I spent the evening in my room with a lamp, trying to make sense of Parmenides. I couldn’t concentrate. I kept listening for Archytas’ return, but all I heard was an empty house: a slave singing, water splashing out of the well, a broom knocking the wall as it swept out some corner.

  The place I began is where I shall return.

  Somewhere in the house, the wooden duck quacked. I rubbed my eyes. I’d been staring at the same column for the last twenty minutes, thinking about Agathon. I rolled up the scroll and laid it on my chest.

  The goddess visited me again that night, holding my hand as we flew over the golden sea. She told me something, but the rushing wind snatched the words away and I didn’t hear. She wanted me to repeat it; when I couldn’t, she got angry. She let go of my wrist, and I was falling, falling, falling towards the water, until I hit the mattress and jerked up in the dark, silent house.

  Then it was morning, and everything was forgotten in the rush to be ready. I had nothing to pack, but Euphemus seemed to have bought enough new clothes and provisions to outfit an army. Archytas said he would walk the first stretch with us.

  We took a ferry across the mouth of the lagoon. On the far side, we picked up a shady road leading south, through the ripe fields along the coastal plain. I wanted to ask Archytas about Agathon again – I could feel the time slipping away with every step – but somehow it never seemed like the right moment.

  We hadn’t gone far when I saw a cluster of low mounds, too small and isolated to be hills, bulging up on our right under a stand of poplars.

  Archytas stopped. ‘Let me show you something.’

  Tethering the mules, he led us off the road down a path through the grass. Asphodels and daisies licked at our feet; I could smell thyme and wild onions.

  Coming closer, we entered a sort of valley between the mounds. They rose above head height, each with a stone doorframe set into the side, sealed with a clay slab. Blackened lamps, long burned out, sat in niches cut into the lintels. Weeds grew from cracks in the stones, and grass had begun filling in the spaces between the doorposts.

  I supposed they must be tombs. I wondered why they were so far back from the road, on this isolated patch.

  One was different. A dark tongue of earth trailed from its door where something had been dug or dragged out of it. Fragments of a smashed clay slab lay on the ground; the opening had been blocked by a few planks hastily jammed across.

  Archytas paused in front of it, making sure I saw.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Someone broke in two weeks ago. They opened the coffin and stole some grave goods.’

  ‘That’s terrible.’

  It sounds like a platitude – but I meant it. Disrespecting the dead is about the worst thing you can do to provoke the gods: no Greek in his right mind would want to do it. If you’ve seen Antigone, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

  ‘Did they catch the person who did it?’

  Archytas picked up one of the clay shards, turning it in his hand.

  ‘Not yet.’

  He was trying to tell me something, but I couldn’t understand what. Perhaps I was naïve; perhaps I had too generous a view of my friend.

  Euphemus, with no illusions to confuse him, got it at once. He coughed, with the contrived sorrow of a doctor giving a diagnosis which will be immensely profitable to him.

  ‘I think what our friend is trying to tell us is: Agathon did it.’

  Eight

  Jonah – London

  He’d seen films where astronauts passed their journeys in hypersleep, dreaming away the light years in glass cocoons until they reached their distant star. There were no cocoons on Ryanair, but it felt the same. He was numb, oblivious, moving through space in suspended animation. Even when he arrived, he didn’t feel he’d woken up.

  He’d rung Lily’s mobile from the hotel phone before he went to bed, but her mobile was still switched off. No answer from their home number, either. The thought that she might have tried to call him on his dead phone ate away at him: without it, he felt as though he’d lost a limb. The moment he reached the terminal at Stansted, he found a phone shop and paid over the odds for a new handset, praying his old SIM card would work.

  The new phone switched on. A circle spun in infinite loops on screen as it looked for a netw
ork, twisting his hopes into knots.

  It’s only a phone, he reminded himself. But it was more than that. It was his lifeline.

  Network found.

  He checked the Contacts and saw all his old numbers had come with the SIM. The feeling of relief was embarrassing – but he didn’t care. He found Lily’s mother’s number and dialled.

  Julie, Lily’s sister, answered after three rings. It made sense she’d be there. She sounded surprised to hear him.

  ‘Is everything OK?’ she asked.

  That’s what I want to know. ‘How’s your mum doing?’

  ‘Not too bad.’

  ‘Is Lily there?’

  A pause. ‘Isn’t she with you?’

  ‘She flew back last night to be with your mum.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Your mum. The fall. Lily came back.’ He kept waiting for her to agree, some sort of affirmation, but none of his words were getting a response. ‘Didn’t she?’ he concluded lamely.

  ‘Mum’s here right now doing her crossword,’ Julie said definitively. ‘I just came over for a cup of tea. What’s all this about a fall?’

  ‘Lily said …’ He needed to get out of this conversation. ‘I think I must have had a crossed wire somewhere.’

  ‘Is something wrong with Lily?’

  That’s what I want to know. The whole conversation was backwards. ‘I don’t know.’ He told her what had happened.

  ‘I’ve no idea where she got that from. Mum’s fine.’

  ‘That’s good.’ But that wasn’t the question hammering in his mind. ‘So where’s Lily?’

  An uneasy silence as Julie weighed up the options. ‘Maybe she’s gone home.’

  He knew she wasn’t there the moment he saw the house.

  The curtains were half drawn to suggest the occupants might be in or out, the same way they’d been for the last six weeks. The lights were off, though on a rainy afternoon the basement flat would be dark as mud. And he could feel her absence, the same way you could pick up a CD case and tell if it was empty by the weight.

  He opened the door, sweeping back the pile of post that clogged the doormat. More post was stacked in neat piles on the table. Someone had been here, but not today and not Lily.

  He listened. All he could hear was the rumble of traffic heading towards Wandsworth Bridge, the drip of the kitchen tap. Had that been going on for six weeks?

  ‘Lily?’ he called.

  The flat had three rooms and Lily wasn’t in any of them. Nor was her luggage, nor any sign she’d passed through. When Jonah had checked all three, he went upstairs and rang the bell of the ground-floor flat.

  Alice answered the door, eventually, in bare feet and a painting smock. Her long grey hair was knotted into a bun that let go more than it held; she had a smudge of blue paint on her cheek. She looked puzzled.

  ‘I thought you weren’t back for another three weeks.’

  ‘Change of plan. Lily and I flew back separately. Have you seen her?’

  Alice pushed her glasses up onto her forehead and peered at him. ‘Is everything all right?’

  All right? Nothing was right. But how did you tell that to the upstairs neighbour who’d been watering your plants?

  ‘She’ll probably be here soon,’ he said. He felt her eyes on his back all the way down the steps.

  ‘Thanks for doing the plants,’ he remembered at the bottom.

  The flat was dark, cramped, and damp. It cost more than they could afford, and its only public transport links were the buses that rumbled past twenty-four hours a day, shaking the foundations and keeping them awake. Similar parts of London had been colonised with organic delis and shops that sold thousand-pound bathroom fittings. Here, gentrification was an estate agent’s myth.

  But at the back of the flat, double doors opened into a small paved yard that ended in three concrete steps down to the river. Not the Thames, but one of its tributaries: a forgotten stream that had once watered green hills, then washed the city’s industrial sprawl, and finally inconvenienced its middle-class suburbs. The moment Lily glimpsed it from the bedroom, she’d known this was the place.

  Jonah had thought about the cost, vaguely wondered about flood risks, and agreed. There was something in Lily that he recognised but didn’t understand, a kinship with water that responded to it, needed to be close. The night they moved in, she stripped off in the garden and waded in from the steps, careless of Jonah’s warnings and the neighbours’ windows. She splashed in the black water, swimming circles on her back and laughing with cold. When she came out, she huddled against Jonah under a blanket – even now, he shivered remembering the chill of her body against his – and sat on the steps, looking for the stars that the city hid with its false glow.

  ‘Will you marry me?’ he asked her.

  The stars were gone now. It was mid-afternoon on a cool late-August day. Jonah sat on the steps, sipping a beer. Trees covered the far bank, with a park beyond: if you focussed, you could imagine the city away. He watched the water and thought about Lily. The river flowed, but his thoughts just went in circles.

  Part of him still tried to argue that really it was fine. There’d been a crossed wire, a mixed message, and somehow they’d each ended up in the wrong place. If he stayed put, sooner or later the door would open or the phone would ring, and everything would be right again. That was how normal life worked.

  But he knew it wasn’t true. The theory had too many holes to even pretend it made sense.

  She’d been in Sibari yesterday morning. Richard said so; Jonah had seen the swimsuit dripping on the balcony, barely taken off before he got there. And, by mid-afternoon, she’d packed up her room and vanished.

  He knew why he wanted to believe it was just an honest mistake: because the alternatives were too bizarre and terrifying to contemplate.

  But that was where he had to go.

  He picked up his new phone and called Richard in Sibari. It rang a long time – any other time, he’d have given up – before Richard answered.

  ‘Is everything all right?’ he said. ‘Did Lily get back safely?’

  Jonah let the pause run so long Richard must have thought he’d hung up. He was staring over the edge of a precipice and couldn’t see bottom.

  ‘She’s not here. She never came back.’

  He blanked out the predictable exclamations and questions, answering with his eyes closed. I’m sure. Not at all. Nothing. All he could feel was falling.

  ‘You haven’t seen her either?’

  ‘Not a thing.’

  ‘Can you find out what time she checked out of the hotel? Did the receptionist see her?’

  ‘I’ll ask. I’m at the site at the moment.’

  ‘Ask the others, too. See if she told them anything.’

  ‘I will.’ He sounded impatient, eager to be off the phone. Jonah didn’t let him go.

  ‘Do you know if she was worried about anything?’

  ‘Only dig stuff.’

  He remembered the yacht and the big car on the dock, the certainty he’d felt that it had something to do with Lily. At the time, he thought he’d just embarrassed himself.

  ‘There was a car there that day – a big black Mercedes. And the yacht. Can you find out if anyone saw them around, anything suspicious?’

  ‘I’ll look into it,’ Richard promised. ‘I’ve got to go now.’

  Jonah finished the beer and went to the kitchen for another. He needed the sedation: without it, his thoughts would have been too much to live with. A thousand hideous images, dredged from every film and news report he’d ever watched, played around him. He had to find a way through.

  As he opened the fridge, a Post-it note on the door caught his eye. It had been there since before they left for the summer and had started to curl around the edges. Another artefact of Lily.

  Buy: Milk, Spaghetti, Ham, Beer. {o} L

  The {o} was her ideogram – a stylised lily-flower, if you looked at it right. Whatever she
wrote to him – notes, e-mails, texts – she always signed off with it.

  But not those last two texts she’d sent him in Sibari. He’d noticed it, though at the time it had been the least of his worries. He’d assumed she was too upset about her mum to bother.

  Except her mum was fine, and there was no family emergency. That was a lie.

  Lily would never lie to him.

  He went back to the river but didn’t open the beer. He needed to think. Someone could have stolen her phone and sent the messages as a sick prank. In the circumstances, that was almost the best he could hope for. But it didn’t account for the one fact that mattered.

  She’s missing.

  He said it aloud, letting the river take the words and spin them away on the current. Then he started to think what he could do about it.

  Greece

  The moment he saw Lily, he felt he must have known her forever. He just needed to find out who she was.

  Lily made it six of them on the dig: her, Richard and Julian, Charis, Adam and Jonah. Jonah hadn’t realised how much the others had been waiting for her until she arrived. Those first three days, they looked like a closed circle, sufficient with each other, not much interested in him. It was only when she got there that he saw the change. As if they’d all been holding something back. Lily was the one who made sense of the group, the hub at the centre. Much later, he wondered if they even liked each other much without her.

  Because picking broken pots out of the ground didn’t tax his concentration, he had plenty of time to think about the others. Even the way they dressed was totally different, to each other or anyone else he knew back home. Richard wore long-sleeved shirts and a ridiculous Panama hat to keep the sun off; Charis exposed every inch of her golden body that she could get away with. Julian, twenty going on forty, dressed like a banker on casual Friday. Adam wore nothing but black, even shovelling soil in the Greek midday heat. Jonah would have said good riddance to all of them – if Lily hadn’t shown up.

  It was hard to prise them apart at first. Always in and out of each other’s rooms, rubbing sunscreen on each other’s backs, clambering over each other in the sea. The first day, he thought Lily and Adam were an item; the next, perhaps Lily and Julian. Richard, he assumed, was gay. Through all of it, Jonah sat apart with his headphones on, watching and wondering.