by John Gardner
It occurred to me—and I mentioned the fact to my dear apistill—that Lykourgos had it already planned before he left that I should rot for years in prison and finally die, sick, miserable, ugly, like Thaletes. I understand, of course, that he couldn’t very well leave me out on the streets, forever criticizing. My dear Peeker, however, saw more. He looked at me and at length nodded. “People make too much of hate,” he said. He’s growing up. I’m forced to confess it.
Also, I was startled. Peeker was right, of course. Lykourgos must have hated me all these years, hated me so devotedly that tyrannizing me in life was not enough. The discovery, or my sickness, or the two together, made me woozy. When I came to myself Peeker had gone away. (No, that’s not possible.)
Sickness, discovery. There it is again in a new disguise, the old opposition, or conspiracy, I’m not sure which, that’s plagued my life: brute adventure, the brutality of idea.
There’s an ancient theory—unless I myself made it up at some time—that the Earth and Moon are enormous balls that fall endlessly in the mind of God, turning around and around each other, as if at arm’s length, like Helot dancers using each other as pivots.
Very sick. Troubled by nightmares, visions. Unable to write.
32 Peeker:
How many years have I lived in this one deadly summer? I feel older than Akhilles’s ghost, and more filled with sorrow, despair. Agathon told me once, long ago, of a dream he had, or a vision; he couldn’t say. He stood on a dark and smoky island that had long ago suffered some mysterious storm—deracinated trees, wind-worn skeletons of birds and fish. The island had never recovered. On all sides, there were only rocks, fallen timber gradually disintegrating; and nowhere a trace of green. The heavy brume that lay over the island was motionless, like the surrounding sea. It was the island of Persephone, it came to him: the country of the dead. His heart jumped. He’d be brought, like Odysseus, Tieresias, and the rest, to be given conversation with shades. “There’s no other way to get the Answer, you know,” he told me. Carefully, feeling his way in the dimness, furtively glancing to left and right in case he’d been brought here by mistake, he inched with his crutch toward the center of the island. He came to a great black mountain, and in its side, like the stiffly open mouth of a drowned man, he found a cave. It was the entrance to the Underworld. With a prayer to Apollo, and one last shudder, he ducked in. Blackness and silence. He felt his way along the cave walls and came at last to a wide stone stairway curving down as if to the core of the earth. He descended. The stairway drew him down for hours, until he’d lost all track of time, all sense of direction. He came to a wide stone floor. “At last!” he thought, and rubbed his hands together. He couldn’t tell how far the floor stretched or what the room contained. There was a squeak of bats; nothing else.
Agathon scratched himself, cocked his eyebrow, and at last made his decision. He called out in a loud voice, trying not to sound too grandiose: “I am Agathon the Seer! I have come to the Underworld to learn from the dead!” Only echoes answered. He waited, biting his lip and feeling sheepish. Hours passed. Perhaps you have to do it three times, he thought; so he did it three times. No answer. A bat snarled in his hair and he caught it and broke its neck by way of sacrifice. Still no one came. There was only the darkness and stillness. There was no one there. Nothing. World without end. Agathon sat down to tighten his sandals, then started back up the stairs.
I will set down the details of our stupid escape.
It was midnight. The sky over the city was red with the glow of a dozen huge fires, distractions for the Spartans, to cover our escape. Agathon was in a deep, unhealthy sleep. I would have no trouble with him, I saw. I’d almost have welcomed the sound of his crabby, mocking voice or the noise he makes tasting his lips. I lay in front of the door, watching the open field for movement, ready to snap my eyes shut if I heard the guard. The rescue time was long gone, it seemed to me; but I had to judge by guess—I’ve never paid proper attention to the stars—and maybe anxiety hurried the clock inside me. I went through a thousand doubts. Maybe Iona had dropped the plan, because Agathon wanted her to and, old and ugly as they were, they were still lovers. Maybe the Spartans had caught some Helot at one of those fires they’d set as distractions, and had found out about the plot. Maybe they’d changed their mind about the night. There was a full moon—stupidest possible time for a rescue—and the fires from the city made night even more like day.
Then they appeared, out of nowhere. The old woman stood at the bars looking in with eyes like ice, her white hair knotted tight, her nose like an arrowhead. The ghastly face vanished the instant it appeared, and there were two men, one huge and slow, as silent as a whale coasting, the other wiry, bald as the moon and quick as a frenzied lunatic, also silent. The air was hot and still. The only sound was the crunch of the iron bar drilling in at the side of the doorframe, forced in not by hammer blows but by the steady drive and twist of the big man’s hands. The end of the rod came through, and I touched it. “It’s through,” I whispered. The rod was hot. The big man leaned on the rod, and others, four or five of them, arms, legs, and faces smudged with black earth, seized the bars at the bottom of the door and pulled, straining outward and upward. A little earth fell from the side of the door, and you could hear the grate of the hinge grinding on its pin. They kept pulling and suddenly, like a bone breaking, the hinge gave way and the bottom of the door swung out. Faster than a snake, the little bald-headed man was in. He went over me and around the table to Agathon.
“He’s dead,” he whispered.
“No he’s not,” I said. I wasn’t sure.
The little man grabbed Agathon’s feet and pulled him off the bed like a corpse of no value and dragged him across to the door.
“Move, God damn it,” he whispered.
I jerked out of his way. He crammed Agathon’s feet through the space they’d opened up.
“It’s not wide enough,” I said.
The men on the outside began pulling at his feet, the little man pushing at his shoulders and head. Agathon looked dead as hell. His eyes were open. His belly caught on the underside of the door, and in a second he was wedged solid. The big man leaned all his weight on the rod but the door wouldn’t lift. The old woman bent to help pull. “Kneel on his stomach,” she said. It horrified me. I was sure he was dead. But I was afraid of them and I did it. When I pressed my knee close to the edge of the door base and shoved down hard, his body jerked loose and he slid out. He groaned when I jabbed my knee in, whether the groan of a live man or some sound left over I couldn’t tell, but the old woman said, “He’s alive.”
While the bald man snatched our possessions from the cell, the big man set the rod down and, slowly, the way a mountain would move if it decided to, knelt down beside Agathon. He slid his hands under and picked the old man up the way you’d lift a child. “This way, Ox,” the old woman hissed. I glanced at his face, guessing from her tone. He was blind. We started across the open field, all of us crouching except the big man who was carrying Agathon. I turned to look back along the prison walls, one last fleeting look at home—old stone walls gray as pottery shards from a refuse heap, pitted with windows and doors—and I saw the body of our jailer. He sat against the wall as if he’d fallen asleep. I looked at the boy beside me, the one who’d brought the messages. He grinned and nodded. He looked crazy.
And so we made it across the field and down a thousand wandering alleys where in the days of our innocence Agathon snatched food from garbage tubs or giggled, peeking in at elderly lovers, and so by devious paths of sorrow we arrived at the shrine of Menelaos, where we hid. In the wide, cool vault below the shrine—the whole space lit by only two dim lamps—there were pallets waiting, and a physician for Agathon (and for others as well, because more than a few were sick here), and women with tubs of green water and oil to give us baths. I sank into the water half asleep, my mind littered with images, and a middle-aged woman bent over me to massage my shoulders and back. One of the men who
had saved us was not a man after all but a girl, maybe the one I’d seen watching that day across the field. She glanced at me, unself-conscious as a Spartan girl. The woman bathing me turned my head away, gently, firmly, like a barber. They must have carried me to my pallet, because in the morning that’s where I awakened.
We had breakfast. Cold mutton and beef and goat. They couldn’t risk using fires here, except sometimes to burn sulfur over in the corner where the sick were, to cleanse it. No one could go outside the vault but the guards. There must have been fifty or sixty people, sealed up high on the bluff across from Mount Taygetos, under the ground. The old woman moved through the camp, as they called it, like a queen—giving orders to the women, talking softly with this man or that, at times withdrawing to a small room opening off from the vault, apparently her private chamber. One knew it was morning or afternoon or midnight only because people said it was. (Often they disagreed.) Day and night had the same dimness, the same light fog of lamp smoke. The people talked quietly or not at all, laughing occasionally at nothing.
I slept, most of the first day, and when I finally came out of it I was not refreshed, merely sore from lying on the pallet. Seeing me stir, an old man with no teeth came over to me. There were very few old people in the camp. He must have had some useful skill, but I never found out what.
“Hungry?” he said, and smiled.
“I had breakfast,” I said. It still lay on my stomach cold as sea fog.
“That was hours ago. The rest of us have had lunch since then. I’ll get you something.”
He left, soundlessly, as all of them move, crouched over. He came back immediately with a bowl of cold greasy soup. I made a show of drinking it.
“You’ve been in prison a long time?” he said.
“Couple months,” I said.
He shook his head, disappointed. “A nasty place.”
I nodded. I sipped at the soup again. It was awful, worse than the prison food. I said, “Is Agathon alive?”
He looked blank.
“The fat old man,” I said. “The Seer.”
“Ah!” He didn’t know. No one knew except “her.” He pointed toward the old woman’s chamber. “He’s in there.”
“Can I see him?” I asked.
He smiled. “No one goes in there.” Then: “Well, the doctor goes in.”
“He still goes in?” I said.
He nodded.
“Then Agathon must be alive.”
“Maybe so,” he said. He looked doubtful.
But I was convinced. You couldn’t kill the old bastard as easy as that. He’d promised to dance on my grave. I was going to hold him to it.
The relief his news gave me made me sociable, I guess. I said, “Is she the leader—Iona?”
He shot me a look. No doubt she had some stupid code name, like the others. The whole world is this crazy children’s game.
“One of the leaders,” he said at last.
“I imagine she’s really something,” I said. “My master used to tell me about her.”
He nodded, and went on nodding for a long time. I knew his kind. One of those people that make you think they’re very deep because they always keep you waiting. My own suspicion is they’re counting seconds, like actors. “Takes after her dad,” he said at last, and nodded. I nodded too. “Man of stone, he was. Whole world was his war.” He smiled, crafty, as if what he said was code. He raised his finger slowly, counting seconds, then wagged it slyly. “They tell how he had a foot race once with his ten-year-old son. Kid thought he was big enough to beat the old man. So they raced barefoot half a mile, sharp rocks all the way, and the old man had the poor kid whipped from the start. But you think he’d let up, let the little fellow beat him? No, sir! Whipped him by every inch he could, and afterward, when the little boy’s feet were all tore up, the old man carried him home.” He smiled and nodded.
“A real statue of a man,” I said politely.
He nodded. “Lived up in the mountains.”
I was ready to drop the thing. Knowing looks sicken me. But the old man hung around, so I asked, “Was he really a fighter—in wars and things?”
“Wasn’t nobody in the world he agreed with enough to fight on the same side with. He was still living under the laws they had in the mountains nine hundred years ago, every man an equal.” He shook his head. “Yes, sir, that man was his own one-man rebellion.”
She had come from her room while he was talking and was moving among the groups, telling them something. He saw her now—he’d had his back to her—and became silent. She looked a little like a statue herself. After a minute the man took my bowl and went away. When the old woman had talked with the last group—the sick ones—she turned again—you could almost hear the grind of stone—and moved back to her room.
I lay on my elbow and watched the people. They sat doing nothing, merely talking a little. They’d been living this way for a long time, and no end of it was in sight, unless it was the sickness. Their dejection filled the vault like the smoke of the lamps. Those who went out on the expeditions—the younger, crazier-looking ones—kept to themselves. The others wanted stories, tales of murder or near-capture, and they would say as one of the fighters went past, “How was it, Spider, that night at the bins?” The man would smile, shake his head, keep moving. That too was like a game: I had an evil temptation to mimic them. Only the huge blind man would talk, and it wasn’t tales of war. He would sit on his crude low wooden bench, his hands on his knees and his shaggy head tipped, looming over those around him like a bear, and he would talk about his childhood. The people would sit on the stone floor, smiling thoughtfully, nodding. I only half listened, thinking of my own ridiculous childhood, running along behind my mother, stumbling sometimes, sending my basket of apples rolling, my heart mourning after Spartan girls’ convexities. Someone said, “Tell about Snake.” The code name for Dorkis. People in the group to my right were talking softly, so that I couldn’t quite catch what the giant was saying. I got up and moved closer to his group.
“That Snake!” he said, and shook his head slowly, smiling. He looked at the ceiling, grew serious. “He was the only religious man I ever knew,” he said. “He loved God with all his heart and soul, and he also loved man.” He let it sink in, something of a preacher. It was a language none of them understood, children of the revolution. “He would pray before he ate. Like this.” He pretended to hold a bowl in his hands, and he lowered his head. I was tempted to hide my head behind my arms and groan, but I decided to be a man about it. It wasn’t as embarrassing, from him, as it might have been. He said, moving himself very deeply, “Gentle Zeus, Father of all mankind, forgive us all our stupidity and hate. Tease us to kindness and forgiveness of our enemies and, hardest of all, ourselves. Teach us to live with contradiction, and lead us, by your cunning ways, away from the dark pits of meaninglessness and despair. As we feed our restless, willful bodies, teach us to learn to love them, and all their kind.”
The huge man sat like a boulder, still bent. His blind eyes were weeping, remembering his leader.
The bald-headed man at his side said gleefully, “He never forgave them Spartans, that’s for sure.”
The blind man’s throat kept working, furious and grieved, and he couldn’t answer. I moved away.
When the people were settling for sleep that night, I saw the thin blond girl who fought with the men. She was leaning on the wall in the darkest part of the room, alone, apparently at home neither with the men nor with the women. I sat against the wall opposite and watched her. It was amazing that she could stand in one position, not a muscle flickering, for so long. I thought of crossing to her, but I could think of no reason. And I was afraid of her, to tell the truth, though she couldn’t be over seventeen. I thought of the breasts I’d seen when they were bathing her, after our rescue, and my mind’s going back to it annoyed me. She had a beautiful face—only hard; harder than stone. Why had the woman who was bathing me turned my face away? To warn me?
&
nbsp; I kept going over and over it, now wondering why they all kept clear of her, now wondering what I could say to excuse my breaking her isolation. Was it the girl who killed our jailer? I could come to no conclusion, and I didn’t cross to her. I was interrupted. The old woman, Iona, appeared at the doorway to her chamber and stood squinting through the room until she saw me. She came over.
“Demodokos.”
I nodded.
She peered at me, witchlike in the dimness. “Or should I say Peeker?” She smiled, and it was startling. A glimpse of Agathon’s old friend through the horrible mask.
“That’s what he calls me,” I said.
“I know.” She went on peering at me. At last she said, “Come.” An order. She turned away.
We went into her chamber and she closed the double- planked door. It was a crypt. Torch rests without torches in them. Pegged to the wall, a rusty iron trident. In the center of the room stood a giant coffin, with candles on it and rolls of parchment. She used it for a desk. I moved closer.
“Menelaos’s coffin?” I asked.
“Who knows?”