The Orpheus Descent

by Tom Harper

  Once the poison had worn off, the doctors said, the symptoms should pass quickly. They discharged Lily the same afternoon. That night, he went to the room she shared with Charis. Charis answered his knock.

  ‘She’s sleeping. I was just going down to see if Adam wants a drink. He’s been pretty cut up about all this.’

  ‘I’ll keep her company.’

  The air-conditioner above the window was going full blast, so cold that Lily had pulled a blanket over herself. Jonah sat on Charis’s bed, feet on the floor, hands clasped like a prayer.

  ‘I love you,’ he said aloud.

  Lily opened her eyes. He didn’t know if she’d heard.

  ‘Can you open the window?’ she said. ‘It’s freezing in here.’

  ‘The doctors said to keep you cool.’

  ‘I need fresh air. Please.’

  Jonah pulled open the window. After so long in the sterile hospital, the taste of life in the air overwhelmed him. He turned off the air-conditioner. For long moments, they luxuriated in the silence.

  ‘How’s Adam?’

  ‘Glad you’re better.’ He didn’t want to think about Adam now, but he could see she expected more. ‘He wants to know what you felt, before you got to hospital. If you saw shining lights, met God, anything like that.’

  She pulled him down onto the bed. He lay beside her, outside the blanket, feeling her body rise and fall against him as she breathed.

  ‘It was dark and frightening – no stars or shining lights. I didn’t see God, I’m afraid, or any big revelation. All I could think was, there’s so much more I want to do in life. With you.’

  She pushed back the blanket. Underneath, she was wearing a T-shirt, one of his, though he hadn’t lent it to her. She must have taken it when he wasn’t looking. She raised her arms and he tugged it off, so that she lay perfectly naked beside him.

  ‘Is it safe?’ he whispered.

  ‘I’m not going to poison you.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘Life’s too short.’ She hugged her arms to herself. ‘Unless you don’t want …’

  Gently, carefully, Jonah manoeuvred himself over her and kissed the nape of her neck.

  ‘I do.’

  London

  The glass room seemed to turn inside out. The wall behind him throbbed with the sound of a ball being thrown against it.

  ‘I’ve told Yolanda not to let them – not inside the house,’ Charis fretted. She looked back at the paper, mouthing words to herself.

  ‘Why did she send this?’ Jonah asked aloud.

  ‘Something to work on over the winter? The Italians would never have let her take the original out of the country.’

  ‘She could have stuck the copy in her bag and brought it with us. Why send it?’

  He caught Charis giving him a funny look. Her chest shone with sweat; the strap of her top had fallen off her shoulder.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Listen to yourself, darling. Do you really think an ancient Greek tablet is going to tell you where Lily is?’

  ‘She put it in the post the day she vanished. There has to be a connection.’

  You’ve got nothing else, said a voice inside him.

  ‘So what do you want me to do?’

  ‘Can you translate it? See if there’s anything unusual about it?’

  ‘It’ll take time – it’s a tricky text. Can I keep it for a bit?’

  ‘It’s all I’ve got.’

  ‘I’ll take a copy.’ She jumped up, pulled him to his feet and led him upstairs. In another room, a child screamed as though its world had ended. A second child joined in, punctuated by the nanny’s exasperated shouts. Charis didn’t seem to notice.

  The study was cool after the oven-heat of the conservatory. A white computer stood on a white desk; white bookshelves lined the room. There was a white bed with white sheets, presumably in case the guests overflowed the other five bedrooms. A black bare-breasted goddess stood on a side table, head tipped back and arms offering two snakes to the heavens.

  The printer-copier hummed as Charis ran the paper through it. Jonah stood by the window, staring down at the lawn. The crying had stopped. All he could hear was the drone of the city on an August day.

  Her naked feet made no sound on the white carpet, but suddenly her voice was very close behind him.

  ‘Can you stay for supper?’

  ‘I should get back.’

  ‘We can have the place to ourselves. I’ll have Yolanda take the kids to the cinema. Bill’s in Frankfurt,’ she added.

  He turned. Charis stood almost touching him, back arched, head tipped back. Her musky perfume filled the room.

  Jonah put his hand on her bare shoulder. The wine turned his thoughts to haze: he felt drunk.

  He pushed her away. She took two steps back and sat down on the bed. She started to unbutton her top.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  She paused, surprised. ‘Darling …’

  She reached out for his belt. A wave of fury crackled through him: he slapped her hand away. To be doing this when Lily needed him – to be doing it at all – was wrong wrong wrong. Like …

  Like dancing on Lily’s grave, his brain supplied.

  Charis stood and straightened her top. Her face had gone hard and grey.

  ‘You don’t have to play Sir Galahad. What do you think Lily’s doing right now?’

  ‘She’s missing.’

  ‘She isn’t missing, darling. She’s left you.’

  The wine had softened him up, but the words still hit him like a punch in the gut.

  ‘She’s missing,’ he repeated, hiding behind the phrase like a wall. Charis’s laugh knocked it down again.

  ‘Be a grown-up. You said the police spoke to her this morning. Listen to what they’re saying, what she’s saying. Do you have any idea what she was getting up to in Italy?’

  He shook his head. He wanted to make her understand, but all the things he could say – She would have called; she wouldn’t leave me – didn’t scratch the surface of what he felt. He just knew.

  Charis hugged her arms across her chest. ‘Believe what you want. I just felt sorry for you.’

  Jonah took the paper from the printer and left the copy in the tray.

  ‘If you want to help, tell me what that says.’

  He walked out the door. He heard her coming after him on the stairs but didn’t look back. In the kitchen, the ball had started bouncing again. He fumbled with the front door latch.

  ‘Jonah?’

  He looked, despite himself. Charis stood halfway down the stairs, her face in shadow. She looked as if she’d started to cry, though it was probably just sweat.

  ‘I hope you find her.’

  He walked and walked, meandering through the sticky city. It was easier than thinking.

  He drifted south, like a raindrop trickling down to the river without ever understanding the gravity that pulls it. He’d have to go back to the flat, but he couldn’t bear even thinking about the emptiness there.

  Eventually, he found himself on the Tottenham Court Road. A black sign with gold lettering pointed left to the British Museum.

  There’s one down the road in the British Museum, I think.

  He followed the sign, climbed the steps between the soaring Ionic columns, and got directions to a distant gallery far removed from the noise of the Great Court.

  The gold lay sandwiched between cloudy Perspex, locked in a display case in a corner of the room. It was even smaller than Charis had said, not much bigger than a large postage stamp. He had to stoop and shade the glare with his hands to see the tiny writing. Next to it, a cylindrical gold case hung on a gold chain. A card carried a typed translation of the text.

  Gold tablet with an Orphic inscription and the pendant case that contained it, the label informed him.

  He looked at it for a long time. No one disturbed him or asked him to move: this part of the museum was too far from the gift shops and cafés f
or most people to bother with. Even if they’d asked, he wouldn’t have heard them. His gaze was fixed – not on the tablet, but on the case beside it.

  He’d seen it before – or one just like it. Three days ago, sketched in Lily’s drawing in the Field Journal at Sibari.

  He took out his phone.

  Thirteen

  Perhaps it would be easiest if I recounted a conversation I once had with Diotima, and the questions she asked me.

  Plato, Symposium

  Akolouthei.

  A single word printed in the mud outside the doorstep, wet where the slaves had tipped out their washing water. Follow me.

  In the andron behind me, Euphemus, Dimos and the doctor were still snoring on their couches where they’d passed out, naked. One of the dancers – Aphrodite, I think – lay curled up against Euphemus’ chest. For a moment, when I saw her, I thought she might be Diotima. I would have killed him.

  I’d made it to bed the night before, but it hadn’t helped. My head hurt; my stomach felt as if I’d swallowed a stone. I wanted to vomit. Judging by the smell, I wouldn’t have been the first. I tottered to the door, threw it open – and saw the word in the mud.

  Akolouthei. Follow me.

  I rubbed my eyes. One step further it appeared again. And again. A trail of words leading up the street, each a pace apart. Fainter, where the earth was dry and footsteps had scuffed the dust, but still legible.

  I’ve seen marks like this before. Whores in the Kerameikos use them: little boots with words carved on the sole, advertising their bodies wherever they go, like cats putting down scent.

  The ground was newly wet, and the footprint newer still. Whoever left the marks, she must have left the house recently – and by the men’s entrance. Had she stayed the night, after all?

  Follow me.

  I was in a susceptible state. I followed.

  The prints avoided the main boulevards, sticking to the sidestreets and back alleys where fewer feet could overwrite them. The further I went, the more certain I was that they were a message – a message for me. What it might be, or why, I couldn’t think. That’s why I followed.

  The trail ended at the door of a large house near the edge of town, where the streets began to unwind from their strict symmetry. Across marshy fields, the forked peak of Mount Apollion punctured the sky. Two columns supported a porch, one with a herm facing out of it and a bell hanging from his outstretched phallus. I rang it.

  A slave answered, a stooped woman with grey hair tied up in a bun.

  ‘Whose house is this?’ I asked.

  She held open the door with a mute smile, letting me in to a shady courtyard. A fruiting apricot tree grew in the centre, surrounded by a tiled floor which showed birds nesting among vines and ivy. On a table under the tree, a real bird sat silent in a wicker cage.

  The air was sweet with the smell of apricots – and figs too. I looked for another tree, but didn’t see one. And it was too early in the season for figs, anyway.

  ‘Don’t trust your senses?’

  Diotima slipped out from behind a pillar. I started, though only because the sound surprised me. The fact of her being there seemed entirely logical, as if I’d known it already.

  Don’t trust your senses. Was it a question?

  ‘I followed your footsteps.’

  ‘I thought you might.’ She took another step closer. ‘You look like a man looking for something to follow.’

  I didn’t know what to say. I could have told her no, that I wasn’t looking for someone to follow but someone I’d lost, a friend whose cloak she’d worn last night. I could have asked how she came by it.

  I wasn’t ready for the answers, so I studied her instead. She had a face that somehow escaped age, the character so strong that nothing could touch it. Her skin was smooth; her features firm; her eyes deep as time. She wore a simple linen dress, with a necklace of beads and dried figs at her throat. I thought that might be what I’d smelled, though the ripe scent didn’t belong with those shrivelled husks.

  I have a weakness for figs. Socrates always used to tease me about it. He said it was the only time I was willing to get my hands sticky.

  Her grey eyes caught me looking and I blushed. I’d seen her virtually naked the night before, but this felt more guiltily intimate. I took cover behind banality.

  ‘You have a beautiful house.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Even in Italy, it must have cost a small fortune. ‘Do you have estates in the country?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Some kind of workshop?’

  ‘What are you trying to imply?’

  I winced. The word I’d used, ergasterion, can mean any sort of workshop. It can also mean a more specific, intimate sort of commercial establishment.

  ‘I didn’t mean to imply …’

  She wasn’t offended. ‘Men want to be friends with me.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘Some of them choose to show their feelings with gifts.’

  I looked around the room: the paintings on the wall; the expensive ceramics displayed in an alcove; a pair of gilded sandals put together under a chair.

  ‘You must have generous friends.’

  ‘When I let them get close.’

  There was a name for her line of work, though even Socrates wouldn’t have used it to her face. Hetaira. Not bought like a prostitute, but far more expensive to maintain than a wife. Available, but not for sale. Respected, occasionally, but a long way from respectable.

  ‘Is Dimos a friend?’ I tried to sound casual. Inside, the Voice of Desire was screaming to know whether she’d spent the night with him.

  ‘He’s very attentive.’

  ‘You came to his dinner party.’

  ‘I heard he had a famous Athenian philosopher visiting. I wanted to see for myself.’

  ‘I hope Euphemus didn’t disappoint.’

  She gave a small, private smile that didn’t seem meant for me. Behind its wicker bars, the caged bird preened itself. I wondered why she kept it.

  ‘Shall we take a walk?’

  She’d changed her shoes: these ones didn’t say anything. Nor was she wearing Agathon’s cloak. She led me back through the city, pointing out the temples, the public statues, the theatre. She chattered away about Hippodamus, the architect who designed the city; and Protagoras, the sophist who wrote its law code. I followed and listened. It felt strange, to be walking with a woman as companionably as if we were two men going to the gymnasium. But then, everything about Diotima was strange.

  And, in truth, I didn’t have much idea what you say to women. Perhaps if I’d been born Spartan, it wouldn’t have been a problem. I’d have grown up side by side with them, fighting and wrestling them just like boys. In Athens, we bury women in our homes like treasure.

  ‘Are you from Thurii?’ I asked, when a pause seemed to demand I should say something.

  ‘Nobody’s from Thurii,’ she said tartly. ‘It’s a city of immigrants.’

  ‘Where do you come from, then?’

  I knew she wasn’t Greek. She didn’t look or sound any different, but I could feel it, like listening to a foreigner playing a familiar song. The notes were pitch-perfect, the rhythm exact, but in the cadences – the spaces between – you heard something else.

  She’d gone ahead and didn’t hear my question. We’d come into the agora, a wide square lined with matched porticoes and newly minted statues. Symmetry reigned: every building had its mirror, every column its twin. In their centre, the navel of the newborn city, a handsome tomb stood on a plinth.

  ‘The mausoleum of Herodotus,’ Diotima announced, like a tour guide on the Acropolis. And then, as if it mattered a great deal to her, ‘Do you like it?’

  I considered the tomb. It was a pretty thing: pillars supporting a canopy, with scenes from the Persian wars carved on a frieze. I could see Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans; Xerxes carried on a litter; a Persian sailor screaming for help as his trireme sank under him at Sa
lamis. The figures were lifelike, the colours vivid. The entire structure was dressed in marble and must have cost a fortune.

  ‘It’s not Herodotus’ monument,’ I said. ‘His monument is the History.’

  ‘His monument is history,’ she said.

  I puzzled over what she’d said. Did she mean that the grand stone tomb was a historical artefact? Or that one day it would be nothing but dust? That his real legacy was the field of history, which he broke open for other men to plough? Or was she simply repeating what I’d said?

  Words speak as if they had meaning, but when you question them they always say the same thing, Socrates said. Diotima’s words always seemed to be saying three things at once.

  ‘Herodotus achieved a sort of immortality,’ I said, remembering what she’d said the night before. Love craves immortality. ‘He wrote his history, he says, “so that time will not bleach out the colours of men’s deeds.” But, in fact, it’s him that survives, more than Darius or Themistocles or the three hundred Spartans.’

  I stared at the figures on the frieze – carved images not of reality, but of the image of reality that Herodotus had made with his words. Did they have any truth against the men whose hands blistered on the trireme oars, who kissed their wives when they left, and screamed as they drowned in the clear sea at Salamis?

  ‘Herodotus tells a story about Gyges the Lydian,’ Diotima said. ‘Do you know it?’

  I nodded. She made a gesture with her eyes, inviting me to tell it.

  ‘Gyges was a bodyguard to the Lydian king.’ I’d lost my Herodotus in the wreck of the Calliste, but I remembered the story well enough. It’s almost the first thing you read in chapter one – as far as some people get. ‘The king wanted to show Gyges how beautiful his queen was, so he hid him in the bedroom where he could see her undress. But the queen saw Gyges watching, and realised what her husband had done.

  ‘The queen was mortified and offered Gyges a choice. To kill the king for his temerity, or be put to death himself. Gyges chose the first option. He murdered the king, married the queen and became ruler of Lydia. And all because he saw her naked.’