The Orpheus Descent

by Tom Harper

  ‘A woman’s body is a dangerous thing.’

  I bit my lip, trying to put away the image of Diotima in her translucent dress the night before.

  ‘But I’ve heard a different version of the story,’ she said. ‘In this one, Gyges is a shepherd, not a bodyguard. One day, while he’s pasturing his sheep, an earthquake opens a cave in the mountain. He goes down. Inside, he finds a mechanical horse made entirely of bronze, and the skeleton of a giant man, with a gold ring on one of its fingers.’

  Her voice conjured the images in my mind. A deep defile where the earth had been torn apart; the sky nothing more than a jagged scar. The bronze horse lying on its side as if fallen in battle, gleaming dully. The giant bones, half sunk in the cave floor, and the shepherd’s rough hands snapping the knuckle in their haste to remove the ring.

  ‘He takes the ring and goes back up. Except, when he meets his fellow shepherds, they can’t see him. The ring has made him invisible, he realises, which puts an idea in his head. He goes to the palace. As soon as he’s inside, he uses the ring to get past the guards, seduce the queen and murder the king.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Just like that.’

  I considered it. ‘I prefer Herodotus’ story.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘In Herodotus, the king gets his comeuppance for betraying the queen. Gyges is executing a sort of justice, obeying his fate. In your version, Gyges simply kills the king because he can. He has no motive. So he must have been bad to start with.’

  ‘Really?’ Her dress swayed on her hips. ‘Do you think if there were a second ring, and a good man found it, he wouldn’t eventually do everything that Gyges does? He could take anything, sleep with anyone, even kill people – and never be caught. There’d be no limits on his power.’

  ‘Then he’d be a god.’

  ‘But if he had the power and didn’t use it, people would say he was an idiot. In their hearts, all men think that behaving badly will get them further than doing the right thing. Good men are just too frightened of getting caught.’

  ‘That’s what Euphemus would say,’ I said glumly.

  We walked another block in silence. Thurii’s civic grandeur was behind us: we were heading back to the edge of town. The forked mountain rose over me, until I could feel its weight pressing down on my shoulders.

  ‘Last night, you said that there was more to know about love than you’d revealed,’ I said. ‘Did you mean it? Or were you just teasing Dimos?’

  ‘I meant it.’

  ‘Can you tell me? Or is there some initiation rite I have to undergo?’

  She paused, turned, and studied my face until I thought it would burn.

  ‘You’ve already been born into those mysteries. You just haven’t opened your eyes yet.’

  I flushed scarlet: offended, tantalised, frustrated beyond reason. I was beginning to understand the dress she’d worn the night before. She could wear something that covered nothing because her mind remained perfectly opaque, like a city with no walls but an impregnable acropolis. You can have everything, she seemed to say, but it counts for nothing.

  ‘Socrates said that wisdom lives inside people; he was just the midwife bringing it into the world.’

  ‘Socrates understood the mysteries.’

  She said it so certainly, it reminded me of the way she talked about the Sybarite horses. As if she’d been there.

  ‘Did you ever meet Socrates?’

  Another one of her elusive, inward-looking smiles. ‘How old do you think I am?’

  There was no good answer to that question, and I was wise enough to know it. I suppose they must never have met, or Socrates would surely have mentioned her. Formally, they were opposites – a sphinx and a satyr, Aphrodite and Hephaestus. But the same divine intelligence burned in both of them. If they’d ever married, their children would have been immortal.

  ‘Did Socrates say how people came by the wisdom he delivered?’ she asked. ‘If he’s the midwife, who’s the father?’

  I shrugged. ‘The gods, I suppose.’

  We were back near her house again. The closer we came, the more my mood darkened. I couldn’t bear it to end. And I hadn’t asked about Agathon’s cloak yet. Honestly, I’d almost forgotten it.

  She paused outside her own front door. ‘Do you mind if I show you one more thing? It won’t take long.’

  Relief put a giddy smile all over my face. I followed her happily, out through the gates and onto a causeway that carried the road between green marshes full of lilies and weeds. Strange hummocks bulged uncomfortably out of the ground. Where the water ran clear, stone blocks lurked below the surface.

  ‘This was Sybaris,’ Diotima said.

  This one I knew. When the Pythagorean army from Croton decided that the Sybarites’ decadence offended them, they didn’t just try to defeat or enslave the city. They wiped it off the earth. They came here one night and diverted the river Crathis, turning it against the town and drowning it. The sleeping Sybarites had no chance. The site was a wilderness for seventy years, until Athens decided to resettle it. Even then, the colonists didn’t dare use the old name, and the new city occupied a shrunken plot compared to its predecessor. The long, lonely marshes gave silent proof of that.

  Out in the reeds, a heron stood perfectly still, head bowed, waiting. I wondered how something so bleak could also be so beautiful.

  ‘Have you ever been to Egypt?’

  I was getting used to Diotima’s sudden changes of subject. ‘No.’

  ‘They remember events there that were old when Homer wrote.’

  Someone had erected a fence on the edge of the marsh to keep animals from straying into it. She climbed over, scrambled down the bank and stepped onto a stone capital sunk into the earth. Water bubbled out of the grass around it.

  ‘The Egyptians tell the story of a sacred island that existed nine thousand years ago, beyond the Pillars of Hercules, larger than Libya and Asia put together. It belonged to Poseidon, who called it Atlantis.’

  I followed her down and stood on the edge of the marsh. Cold mud oozed around my sandals.

  ‘The city they built was a marvel for the ages. The walls were dressed with bronze, and the temples sheathed in gold and silver. The canals and harbours were full of ships and merchants from all over the world.’

  Again, her voice spun fabulous pictures before my eyes, as if she was charming the old stones out of the swamp and reassembling them into something even more magnificent than they’d been before.

  ‘For generations, the Atlanteans had sufficient wisdom to despise everything but virtue. They refused to succumb to luxury. But, over the centuries, they lost their divine spark. Human nature took over, and although to an external observer they seemed richer, happier and more powerful than ever, in fact they were leading themselves to disaster.

  ‘They provoked a terrible war with Athens, the worst the world had ever seen. And when they were defeated, Poseidon took his island back. After a day and a night of terror, there were great earthquakes and floods, and the island of Atlantis sank into the sea. Even today, the Egyptians say, ships can’t navigate that stretch of ocean because of the mud shallows near the surface.’

  A breeze blew off the marsh. She snapped off a piece of mortar and skimmed it over the stagnant water. It bounced twice, then sank.

  I wanted to say something – something profound or insightful, something to impress her. But I was tongue-tied. My mind had become a desert where no words grew.

  ‘Why did the others call you Pythagoras last night?’ she asked.

  ‘They were teasing me about my appetite.’ I paused, then told her a measure of truth. ‘I came to Italy looking for a friend who’d been studying with a Pythagorean teacher.’

  ‘Have you met any Pythagoreans?’

  ‘Only one who made any sense – and he wouldn’t call himself a Pythagorean.’

  ‘Archytas?’

  Again, I felt there was nothing I could say that she didn�
�t know already. It made me despair. ‘Have you met him?’

  ‘He’s a friend.’ Careless of the jealousy burning my face, she continued, ‘Did you learn anything from Archytas?’

  ‘He said the world is an instrument.’

  She stared into my eyes. I felt she was unscrolling my soul and reading it like a manuscript.

  ‘You liked his theory.’

  ‘When Socrates died, I felt that the world had broken.’ I’d rarely spoken so honestly to anyone, let alone a woman. ‘Archytas’ theory shows how the divided world can be united, like the harmony produced from two strings.’

  ‘But it’s only a metaphor.’

  ‘It isn’t. That’s what Pythagoras discovered. Music’s governed by mathematical ratios, made of the same numbers which underpin the whole universe. Mathematics explains everything. You probably know that,’ I realised.

  ‘But the mathematics isn’t perfect. Did he tell you that? If you tune a lyre to the mathematical ratios, the interval between each pair of strings sounds perfect. But they don’t add up. The more strings you add, the further they get from the base note. A good musician knows that you have to adjust each note a fraction so that the whole scale is in tune with itself.’

  I was no musician. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Perfect mathematical intervals create an imperfect scale. It’s as if you wanted to fill a jug that holds exactly eight cups. You pour in the water, one cup at a time, but with the eighth cup the jug overflows. The only way to stop it from overflowing is to make each cup slightly less than full.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘That’s the point. The world isn’t sensible. Either our senses aren’t made to appreciate perfection – or else the perfect world that mathematics describes isn’t our world.’

  I remembered Archytas’ paradox, the edge of the universe that can never be reached.

  ‘You sound like a sophist. Up is down, left is right, good is bad.’

  She parted her lips and held me with her eyes. ‘Haven’t you ever done a bad thing that made you feel good?’

  A warm feeling spread through me. I could feel myself getting hard. Worse, I could see she’d noticed.

  ‘It’s strange to talk about these things with a woman,’ I stammered.

  She gave me her sphinx smile. ‘Can’t women talk philosophy?’ Are there major differences between men’s and women’s natures, other than that one sows the seed and the other bears the fruit?’

  ‘Men tend to be stronger.’

  It was a feeble answer and her expression let me know it. ‘Is that difference relevant to philosophy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Aren’t a lot of women better than a lot of men at a lot of things?’

  It had never occurred to me. You don’t see women doing many things in Athens.

  ‘Do you think natural capacity is parcelled out differently between the sexes? That a woman is necessarily lazier, feebler, stupider and less able than a man?’

  I might not know women, but I know enough men. ‘I doubt it.’

  That wasn’t good enough for her. She looked away impatiently, back towards her house. I was losing her.

  ‘Why are you wearing Agathon’s cloak?’ I blurted out.

  She turned back, with a stare that went through me like sunlight through a curtain.

  ‘I wondered when you were going to ask me about that.’

  ‘How—?’

  ‘Agathon never stopped talking about you. He thinks you’re the wisest friend he has.’

  ‘Why are you wearing his cloak?’ I repeated.

  ‘He forgot it at my house, the night before he left Thurii.’

  ‘He was at your house?’

  ‘The night before he left,’ she answered evenly. You can think what you like, her eyes said. I’m not going to tell you.

  ‘I thought he was staying with Dimos.’

  ‘They’d quarrelled. When Agathon came back, he came to my house.’

  ‘What do you mean, When Agathon came back?’

  ‘Two weeks ago. He’d gone to Taras to meet you, but something bad happened.’

  I remembered the broken tomb. For a man so obsessed with virtue, a lot of bad things seemed to have been happening to Agathon. ‘Why didn’t he wait for me here, then?’

  ‘A letter had come, from Locris. The moment he read it, he said he had to go.’

  ‘Did he say what it said?’

  ‘No.’ A smile crossed her lips. ‘But I found out.’

  She reached into her shoe and pulled out a small fold of papyrus. I took it and read it.

  I have another customer. If you want the book, find me before the end of the month. I am on the porch of the Great Temple.

  The handwriting was a scattered mess, barely literate – as if it had been written by someone thrashing around in a nightmare. It wasn’t signed. ‘Do you know who sent it?’

  ‘There’s a man in Locris, a Pythagorean called Timaeus. Agathon had been trying to buy a book from him, but he wanted too much money.’

  A hundred drachmas – now scattered over the seabed in the Bay of Taras. I started to say something, but trailed off. A nasty thought had struck me. I saw the tomb again. They opened the coffin and stole some grave goods. Was there money in there? Gold?

  Diotima put me out of my misery. ‘He didn’t have the money.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Because he asked me for it. I said no.’

  ‘So what was he planning to do when he got to Locris?’

  ‘He wouldn’t tell me. He didn’t even say if he was coming back.’

  A cold tremor went up my leg. While I’d stood there, the wet ground had been slowly swallowing my feet. I pulled them out, almost losing a sandal, and retreated up the bank.

  Diotima was watching me.

  ‘There was something else.’ She reached up and unclasped a gold chain from around her neck. The necklace of figs had hidden it, though I remembered seeing it the night before. Along with so much else.

  ‘He said if you got here before he came back, I should give you this.’

  The chain ended in a cylindrical gold locket. She fished it out from where it had hung between her breasts and tossed it to me. It smelled of figs.

  I undid the locket. A slim piece of gold fell into my palm – a golden leaf rolled delicately into a scroll.

  ‘Open it.’

  I unravelled the gold until it made a sheet about the size of my thumb. Tiny incised letters covered almost every grain of it, squeezed into the space with almost desperate urgency.

  The words of Memory, carved in gold …

  Fourteen

  Jonah – London

  He stared at the tablet in its Perspex coffin and pressed the phone to his ear. Richard answered unusually quickly.

  ‘You’ve heard the news about Lily? The police? Apparently they found her.’

  Jonah didn’t bother to answer. ‘Tell me about …’ He read it off the museum label. ‘ … The Orphic gold tablet.’

  From the corner of his eye, he saw a guard staring at him from the doorway. Just then, it didn’t make any difference. Richard had gone as quiet as the museum.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said at last.

  ‘I saw the picture in the Field Journal.’ He was about to mention Lily’s copy of the text, but suddenly decided not to. There was too much he didn’t understand yet.

  ‘We signed non-disclosure agreements,’ Richard pleaded. ‘Lily shouldn’t have said anything.’

  ‘She didn’t.’ The guard gave him a warning stare. Jonah ignored him. ‘I think it’s got something to do with her disappearing.’

  ‘But they’ve found her. Haven’t they?’

  ‘Have you heard from her?’

  Richard hesitated. ‘No.’

  ‘Neither have I. So I need to know about the tablet.’

  The line hissed. Jonah glanced over at the guard, but he’d been distracted by a Japanese woman wh
o’d taken a flash photograph of one of the exhibits.

  ‘You need to ask the funding body.’

  ‘Don’t give me that. You’re her friend, aren’t you?’

  ‘Of course,’ Richard protested. ‘And I want to help. But I’m not the one who says she’s missing.’

  ‘If you can’t tell me, I’ll go to the press. They’re sniffing around this story already.’ He could hardly get the lie out as he remembered the press conference that morning. But Richard swallowed it.

  ‘I’ll call the foundation. They’ll explain.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Eikasia Foundation – the people funding the dig. There’s an office in London.’

  The Japanese woman had gone; the guard was advancing towards him, gesturing towards the phone. But he knew the answer wasn’t in London. ‘What was going on in Sibari before I got there?’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said the guard, far more loudly than anything Jonah had said.

  ‘OK, OK.’ Back to Richard. ‘Arrange a time and tell me when. Soon.’

  He put the phone away, and rode out the guard’s stare until the man retreated back to his stool. He didn’t give a damn.

  He gazed at the tablet, trapped in its case. He felt its anguish: alive and dead, visible to the world but unable to touch it.

  I am the words of Memory, the tablet told him, carved in gold, ready for the hour of your death.

  ‘Is Lily dead?’ he asked.

  No. He’d have known if she was, would have felt it. Instead, he felt nothing. She was far away, perhaps trapped behind her own invisible wall like the tablet. But alive.

  How can I find her?

  Two words seemed to swell out at him from the translation on the card in the case. Stay away.

  A beat filled Jonah’s ears, rhythmic and relentless. With a shock, he realised it was the tick of his watch. He glanced around, but no one else in the gallery seemed to have heard it.

  Am I going mad?

  He glanced at the watch. His hearing reset itself; all he heard now was the hiss of air-conditioning and voices in the distance.

  Jonah sat at the table in his flat with the pile of torn-open post, his laptop and a beer. Lily watched him from a photograph on the screen. She was sitting inside a giant pithos vase that would have been almost taller than her if it hadn’t been buried up to its neck. She smiled up at the camera, glowing with delight and breaking Jonah’s heart.