The Orpheus Descent

by Tom Harper

  My hand trembled. I was holding a book which men had died to read. I went on.

  In the beginning, the universe was chaos. And the Creator wanted to bring order out of disorder, because he was good, so he took the elements of the universe, poured them into his krater and mixed them together. He formed the soul from the elements and the physical universe in the soul, and brought the two together. The soul is eternal, and partakes of reason and harmony, and is the best of things created.

  A world with soul and intelligence. A world of harmony and reason to banish Heraclitus’ chaos for good. The skin on my arms began to tingle.

  God divided the mixture into as many souls as the stars, and implanted them in bodies so that they could feel sensation; and also love, in which pleasure and pain mingle; and fear and anger, and all the other emotions. And if they conquer these feelings, men live righteously, and eventually take their place among the stars. But if they are conquered by them, and live unrighteously, then they walk lame to the end of their lives, and are sent back to the world below.

  I felt a rush of clarity. For a moment, it seemed that all the things that Diotima had toyed in front of me were finally being handed to me in plain words.

  But the more I read, the less clear things got.

  Two things cannot be put together without a third, which is proportion. For in any three numbers, whether cube or square, there is a mean, which is to the last term what the first term is to it; and again, when the mean is to the first term as the last term is to the mean – then the mean becoming first and last, and the first and last both becoming means, they will all of them of necessity come to be the same, and having become the same with one another will be all one.

  What did I think of that? Honestly – I don’t know. I wanted to believe I was reading something profound: that the truth of the universe lay coiled up in that scroll. But the more I read, the less I was convinced. It was long on assertion and short on evidence. Stripped down, all you really had were more metaphors.

  Some things are too real to be put into language.

  Perhaps it was the circumstances. I couldn’t concentrate while my eyes kept glancing to the door; or while the back half of my mind wondered how I would ever get out. But the hope of an answer, some explanation for what Agathon had found in this manuscript, wouldn’t let me let go. I hurried on through it, skimming large sections. There was more about circles and harmony, some number theory that I didn’t understand, and a great deal about triangles.

  And then it ended. At the bottom of the last column, someone had added a diagram in different ink: two triangles with an arc swooping between them. No explanation. I wanted to throw the book into the sacred flame at the sheer waste of it all.

  But the book didn’t take up quite the whole length of the scroll: there were a few turns of blank papyrus left on the spindle. I unrolled it, just in case.

  The gold leaf was so thin, I didn’t even feel it. I pulled away the last few inches of papyrus, and there it was, curved flush against the spindle. Agathon’s golden tablet. It fell into my palm with a whisper. The tiny letters winked at me in the reflected firelight. I ran back to the chest where I’d got the book and rummaged around. Among the soft scrolls, the metal chain and locket found my hand almost at once. I rolled up the tablet and tucked it into the locket, then hung it around my neck under my tunic.

  Time to go, said the Voice of Reason. I tucked Timaeus’ scroll in my waistband and started replacing the other manuscripts. Even with the sacred flame still hissing away at my back, the room seemed darker. The gold around me gleamed less; I felt cold. It was like waking up from a particularly depraved dream, with nothing but memories and shame. All I wanted was to go home.

  But – too late. I heard shouts, muted footsteps coming up the stairs outside. I thought of hiding behind the statue, but that would have been undignified and futile, with treasures scattered across the floor and a box of manuscripts lying open.

  The great door opened. A figure stood on the threshold, framed between the moon and the fire inside.

  ‘I did warn you.’

  Thirty-two

  Jonah – Spetses

  All he remembered of leaving the house was a gravel drive and an iron gate slamming shut. Two lions on the gateposts watched them go. Then they were climbing a dusty track, towards the ridge that divided the island. The moon had set; they walked by starlight, guided by constellations he didn’t know. Ren slipped her hand in his and he took it gratefully. He needed the proof he wasn’t alone.

  He tried desperately to remember what Maroussis had said. The tyres turned in his mind, trying to gain traction, but the more they spun the more they destroyed the ground beneath them.

  I spoke to him – the man whose son took Lily – and now I can’t remember a thing he said. A hole opened inside him and he crumbled into it.

  The track became a road, tarmac warm under his feet, climbing back and forth across the face of the hill. Back and forth, back and forth, like a vibrating string. He was glad of the slope. It gave him purpose.

  They reached the ridge. The other half of the island unfolded below them, sketched in shadows; he realised there was light in the sky. He glanced back to see Maroussis’ villa, but the trees made it invisible.

  The world felt too heavy. He stepped onto a rock at the roadside, teetering off-balance. He felt giddy; he felt free; he felt if he slipped off the rock he could fly all the way to the sun.

  ‘Where do we go now?’

  Ren looked down towards the distant cluster of lights around the harbour. ‘He told you.’

  With the lightest tug of the string, the knot comes apart and you are back where you began. Except now, for the first time, you understand where you are.

  ‘Italy?’

  Over in the east, where Homer’s sea lapped the horizon, the sun began to show its face.

  Near Aegion, Greece

  A bus. A road, winding between the mountains and the sea. That was all this country was, Jonah thought: mountains and sea. He leaned against the window, watching the Gulf of Corinth slide by. Not far from here was the site where he’d met Lily, the hospital where he’d held her hand, the hotel bed where they’d first made love. It disturbed him to be back here now. As if the story had finished.

  The knot comes apart and you are back where you began.

  Except the trench didn’t exist any more. He’d watched the diggers pour in the backfill at the end of the season, piling up the earth like a grave. Two months’ work undone in two days, and nothing to show for it but photographs and a few artefacts.

  An arrow pointed down a sliproad labelled Helike. Curled up on the seat beside him, Ren stirred.

  ‘You know Helike?’

  How had she seen the sign? The last time he’d checked, her eyes had been closed, her cheek resting on his shoulder.

  ‘No.’

  ‘In ancient times, it was a great trading city. Then, in twenty-four hours, it was destroyed completely. An earthquake knocked down the buildings, the ground subsided, the sea poured in and the whole city drowned. Some people think it was the model for Plato’s legend of Atlantis.’

  ‘OK.’

  The bus swerved across the divide into a contraflow. It seemed that half the road was still under construction, miles at a time, but all you saw were cones and signs. The workmen had vanished like a lost civilisation.

  ‘Helike was the mother city to Sybaris. It was colonists from here who founded Sybaris, back in the seventh century BC. You know what happened to Sybaris?’

  ‘Wiped out.’

  ‘Flooded and lost. The same destiny for the mother and the daughter cities, two hundred years apart and for very different reasons. The pattern repeats.’

  You are back where you began.

  It hasn’t finished, Jonah insisted. I won’t let it. Out of the window, the flat water of the gulf gave no hint of the lives it had swallowed.

  ‘Why did Maroussis say he was sorry about your sister?’

 
; Ren twisted in her seat and put her head against the headrest, turning her back to him. ‘He was being cruel.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s not relevant.’

  ‘If what happened to her was like what happened to Lily, it might be.’

  ‘It wasn’t.’ A dark voice, sharp with a warning.

  ‘Tell me anyway.’

  She still wouldn’t look at him. She might almost have been talking to herself. ‘Valerie was a dreamer, always looking over the horizon. She saw this black-and-white world and wanted colour. When she was a teenager, it was crystals and incense; before she dropped out of college, it was drugs and Eastern philosophies. And sex,’ she added drily. ‘After that, she tried meditation, reiki, kabbala … the whole menu. Anything that offered a path out of this world.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  Ren looked him straight in the eye. ‘She fell in with the Maroussis family. She didn’t survive. Whether that took her to another world, a better place …’ She shrugged.

  Jonah didn’t know what to say. ‘Lily was nothing like that.’

  ‘I told you it wasn’t relevant.’

  ‘Did Ari Maroussis—?’

  ‘Yes.’ She turned back, fixing him with an uncomfortable stare. ‘There was a ship moored in the Piraeus, a decommissioned cruise liner waiting for the breakers. One night, a fire broke out. When the fire crews went aboard, they found her body in an abandoned cabin. Naked, no marks of violence, nothing to identify her at all. Just a gold tablet placed inside her mouth. A replica. They wouldn’t waste the real thing on her.’

  The bus went dark as it plunged into a tunnel. Jonah tried to kill the image in his head: the rusting cabin, the damp-stained mattress and the perfect corpse laid out, hair splayed around the face. In his imagination, it was Lily’s face.

  ‘Didn’t the police—?’

  ‘The ship belonged to Maroussis, so they went straight to him. The press never heard. There was no investigation.’

  ‘So how do you know?’

  ‘Persistence.’

  The bus rumbled on. Jonah waited for the tunnel to end.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I want to find Lily and bring her back. What are you in this for?’

  A mask of light struck her face as the bus came out of the tunnel.

  ‘I want to hurt them.’

  Italy

  They caught the overnight ferry from Patras across the Ionian sea, and landed in Bari at dawn. From there, they took a train. Jonah dozed, slipping between dreams and memories. He had no idea how Ren passed the time. When he woke up, they were there.

  In the ten days Jonah had been away, the season had started to turn. Persephone had begun the long retreat back to her subterranean husband: fields had been cut to stubble, smoke flavoured the air, and daylight already felt precious. There was no sign of a taxi at the station, so they walked. By the time they reached the lab, the evening had come on enough for them to see the lights inside.

  They stepped through the open gate. Two cars sat parked in the lot: Richard’s pickup, and the white Ford van with SOUTH PECKHAM CHURCH OF THE REDEEMER written down the side. Jonah had never been so happy to see it. He patted its flank as he went past, leaving a smudge in its dirt coat.

  He tried the door and found it unlocked. He climbed the dark stairwell, trying to avoid the echo. At the top, light and the sound of piano music spilled through the lab doorway. It sounded like Bach.

  Do you like Bach?

  He stood in the shadow beside the door, straining to hear beyond the music. The antique heating system popped and clattered as it flexed pipes that had lain cold all summer. A loose shutter squeaked on its hinge. Anything else was hard to distinguish from the murmur of his imagination.

  On the other side of the doorway, Ren nodded her head. Go on. Belatedly, Jonah wondered if he should have brought some sort of weapon.

  The music stopped. A woman’s voice came on the radio, murmuring something in Italian. Jonah went in.

  The season had finished. The samples and instruments that had cluttered it two weeks ago now sat packaged in crates and boxes, ready to go into hibernation. The walls and pinboards had shed their paperwork. The skull still grinned on the table beside the sink, waiting to be put away; and a laptop trailed wires across a trestle table. Otherwise, the job was almost finished.

  Richard stood at the table, squinting at the laptop. He didn’t look up straight away – perhaps he was expecting someone, or lost in his work. When he did, he grabbed the table so hard he almost knocked it over.

  ‘What—?’

  Jonah didn’t give him a chance. He crossed the room with two strides, pulled the table aside and swung a fist that connected hard with Richard’s face. He collapsed; Jonah picked him up and hit him again, then dropped him on the floor.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘I’ve spoken to Adam. I’ve spoken to Maroussis. I know they took her.’

  Richard rubbed his mouth. Blood came away on the sleeve of his shirt. ‘You saw Adam?’ He glanced at the door. Ren stood there, arms folded, cutting off his escape.

  ‘In Athens.’

  Richard mumbled something pained and indecipherable. Jonah lifted him up by the collar of his shirt and put his face close. ‘What?’

  ‘Why didn’t he stop you?’

  ‘Stop me?’

  ‘Adam.’

  ‘He tried. He sent me into a war zone. Now I’m here.’

  Richard pulled himself up and slumped on a stool beside the table.

  ‘Can I have some water?’

  Ren ran the tap and filled an empty coffee cup. Richard watched her warily, like a dog he didn’t trust.

  ‘Who’s she?’

  ‘A friend.’

  Richard couldn’t keep back the smirk from his bloodied lips. ‘That didn’t take long.’

  Jonah thought about hitting him again, but decided not to waste the effort. ‘Tell me everything. From the beginning.’

  ‘From the beginning?’ The word seemed to puzzle him.

  ‘Why did you bring Lily here in the first place?’

  ‘It was Adam. He came to me last November and told me his foundation was funding this dig. He said I should apply. Funding’s rare as unicorns these days, so I jumped. Then I talked Lily into it.’

  ‘Did you tell her what she was getting into?’

  ‘Getting into? I didn’t know myself. I mean, we weren’t getting into anything. If we hadn’t found that tablet, nothing would have happened. Just another season.’

  ‘Did she know about Adam?’

  ‘He told me not to tell her. He said it would be awkward if she knew he was funding her.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Then we dug up the tablet. Word came down that they wanted it over in Athens. Obviously, that’s completely illegal. Easy enough to do, with a piece that size – you could pop it in the post, for heaven’s sake – but you’d be putting yourself out of bounds. No report, no publication. The conservator went ballistic and threatened to spill the beans; Lily wanted to quit.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I didn’t like it either.’

  ‘But you let her take the heat while you hid behind her.’

  ‘I thought it would all fizzle out. Lily flew to Athens to see Adam. They came back together with Maroussis fils. Next thing, the conservator was off the dig. Then the tablet vanished.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘The night before you came. We didn’t notice until the next morning.’ A wounded note crept into his voice. ‘Everything I told you in London is true. The tablet was in the safe, and only three people knew the combination. Me, Sandi and Lily. She must have stolen it. Christ, I probably helped her do it. I came to the lab that night to get some things and found her here by herself. I gave her a lift back to the hotel, for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘And the next morning?’

  ‘It was one
of those days. One of the volunteers fell ill. The osteologist turned up complaining that some of the finds had been mislabelled, and we spent half the morning sorting it out. Then the pump broke and flooded the trench. We started making jokes about King Tut’s curse.’

  ‘What about Lily?’

  ‘She was on edge – but we all were. She’d been trying to get to the lab all morning, and she wanted to be ready for when you arrived. I assumed that was why she reacted so badly when Ari turned up.’

  ‘He came to the trench?’

  ‘To the lab. Lily was still at the trench. When she heard, she looked as if she could spit blood. She set off straight away, didn’t wait for him to come down to the dig. Obviously she never made it.’

  Another wave of anger rolled through him. Jonah rode it out and counted to ten. ‘When did you find out? Were you in on it from the beginning?’

  ‘Of course not.’ The indignation of a guilty man clinging to fragments of pride. ‘If I’d had any inkling, I’d have warned her.’

  ‘And Adam?’

  ‘I don’t know. I still don’t know what happened, exactly. Ari discovered the tablet was missing and hit the roof. Have you met him?’ Jonah shook his head; Richard’s eyes dropped. ‘He’s pretty wild. He must have guessed Lily stole it. He headed over for the dig just as she was coming here. When he saw her on the road, he grabbed her.’

  ‘Grabbed her,’ Jonah repeated. The phrase stuck in his mouth, alien and ugly. ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Ari’s used to getting what he wants. I suppose he can afford to.’

  All the pleasures of his dissolute life only make him mad for more.

  ‘So when I got there – did you know?’

  Richard looked genuinely miserable. ‘I thought she’d gone to the lab. Honestly. No one told me anything until after you’d come.’

  ‘And the text messages? Her mother’s fall?’

  A long, agonised silence. Richard stared at the table and fiddled with his hands. ‘I sent them.’

  More silence – more than Richard could bear. ‘They gave me her phone and told me to do it. They thought I could make it convincing.’ His cheeks flushed as if he’d been hit again. ‘I promise you, I had no idea what it was about. Adam told me to get you away.’ He glanced up, terrified of Jonah’s reaction. ‘For God’s sake, I didn’t want to.’