The Orpheus Descent (3 page)

There was no time to get back to the safe. She whipped the tablet off the microscope, snapped it into an old sweets tin and stuck it in her shorts pocket, then grabbed the Field Journal from the table just as the door opened.

‘Working late?’

It was Richard, dressed in a white linen suit that made him look a million years old. She peered over his shoulder, but he seemed to have come alone.

She waved the journal at him. ‘Just wanted to make sure it’s up to date. You?’

‘I was driving back, saw the lights from the road and thought I’d better check.’ His eyes sidled towards the store-room, the door she’d left open. Her pulse raced.

‘How was Ari?’

‘Fine.’

‘Did you make him understand he can’t just take what he wants?’ That was rich, with the tablet burning a hole against her thigh.

‘You should have come. You can’t go picking fights with our sponsor and then sulk off.’

‘Should I have stuck around to fight some more?’ She crossed to the store-room and locked the door, feeling the weight of Richard’s gaze on her back. She bit her lip, and turned back with what she hoped was a complicit smile.

‘If I promise to be good, will you give me a ride back?’

The van was a white Ford Econoline, dented and filthy, with S
OUTH
P
ECKHAM
C
HURCH OF THE
R
EDEEMER
painted down the side. Jonah had never been to the church, but he reckoned he probably owed them a few prayers of thanks. In seven years covering almost every road in Europe, it had never been stolen or broken into.

‘You’re good to drive?’

Shadow had come to see him off, dressed in his boxers and still clutching a beer. The others were AWOL, though it didn’t matter. No one liked goodbyes at the end of a tour.

‘I’m fine.’ He threw his bag on the passenger seat, together with a thermos of coffee he’d filled from the breakfast bar. He’d need more. He’d had four hours of sleep, and had eighteen hours of driving ahead.

‘Did anyone go home with the girl from the club?’

‘She wasn’t interested in us.’ Shadow mock-pouted. ‘They never are – just want our boy-band reject. Shame you’re taken.’

‘Not really.’

‘You must be the only guy in the only band in the world who finishes a tour and goes back to his wife. Rock and roll.’

Jonah climbed into the cab, brushing aside the food wrappers and drinks cans carpeting the floor. He closed the door and opened the window. At ten a.m. it was already twenty-five degrees, and he was heading south in a van whose air-conditioning was strictly wind-down technology.

‘How long are you going to be down there?’ Shadow asked.

‘Two, three weeks. Lily’s got another few days on the dig, then we’ll head up. Take our time.’

‘Sounds nice. Give my regards to Yoko.’

‘You know the Beatles only split up because they couldn’t live with Zeppelin.’

They smiled, but there was a harder truth behind the jokes. Neither of them knew if there’d be another tour. The band had been together ten years, a minor miracle, but each time it got more difficult. Each new song was more of a struggle, each tour rougher than the last. The great shows, the ones where they walked off stage buzzing like gods, were fewer and further between, but the terrible hotels were there every night.

Now wasn’t the time. They bumped fists through the open window. Jonah said a prayer to the God of South Peckham, and started the engine.

‘So long.’

Shadow waved him away with the beer bottle. ‘Go to hell.’

Jonah had spent so long on the road, he thought he could swallow the distance without feeling a thing. But this was different. The end of the road wasn’t another sticky club and hasty soundcheck: it was Lily. Every time he thought of her, impatience raced away with him; the odometer couldn’t possibly keep up.

From the flat Prussian plain, the land gradually rose across hundreds of miles until he could see the snow-capped peaks of the Alps on the horizon. He crossed into Austria, deep in the shadow of the mountains, then into Italy. He wolfed down a sandwich and a Coke at a
Rasthof
just below the Brenner pass, took a lungful of mountain air and hurried back to the van. He had to get to the sole of the Italian boot, and he wasn’t yet halfway there.

His phone buzzed. He glanced down from the road to read the text message.

Drive safely, but don’t hang around. Need you here. {o} L

He wondered what she meant. Driving one-handed, he thumbed a reply:

On my way. Everything OK?

A minute later:

All fine. Can’t wait to have you back to myself. {o} L

He ate again near Florence, slept a few hours in a truck stop near Rome, and breakfasted outside Naples as the breaking sun touched the summit of Vesuvius. Then it was through the mountains once more before the heady descent to Sibari. He could see the plain spread out before him, hemmed in by the mountains, and the blue sea shimmering through the distant haze. Just before nine o’clock, he rolled into the resort of Laghi di Sibari and cut the engine for the last time.

Once, Sybaris had been a byword for hedonism. Twenty-five hundred years later, the only trace was a white-elephant marina complex, with hotels and condominiums built on long fingers into an artificial lagoon. The ancient city had been washed away; the modern one was just falling victim to the traditional Italian fate of neglect. Plaster peeled off the whitewashed buildings; several were missing shutters. Rubbish overflowed the bins and littered the streets. The boats still looked nice enough, but they were just passing through.

Lily’s dig had block-booked rooms at a three-star hotel near the end of one of the quays: not somewhere you’d want to have a holiday, but better than a tent. From the receptionist, who spoke no English but smiled a lot, Jonah gathered the archaeologists had already left for the day.

He felt a stab of disappointment – the hope of catching Lily at breakfast had kept him going ever since Naples. And it got worse when the receptionist showed him up to the room. All Lily’s stuff was there: clothes laid over a chair, books lined up on the dresser next to a small perfume bottle, the laptop open on the desk. The bikini draped over the balcony rail was still dripping from her morning swim. Everything except her.

Not quite thinking, he sat down on the bed and kicked off his shoes. He wanted her so badly, but he’d slept six hours in forty-eight and his eyes felt like lead. He lay down, burrowing his face into the pillow to breathe in her scent.
So badly.

Half an hour. Then he’d go and find her.

If you were at sea, would you be up on deck wrestling with the helm? Or would you let the captain take care of all that, and relax?

Plato,
Alcibiades

The philosopher Heraclitus said, famously, that you can’t step into the same river twice. The world moves too much; everything’s in flow. The only constant is that nothing stands fast. The stream you dip your toe in is not the stream where you take the plunge. You’re not the same you, either.

Aboard ship is the wrong place to read Heraclitus, who makes me queasy at the best of times. Here, his river has flooded into the sea, and the sea’s become the whole world. Everything moves. The crew bustle about trying to tame the ship; sails flap and ropes flex; the deck rises and falls; words swim, and endless waves bend the horizon. Not a place to look for truth.

We were a day out from the Piraeus and making good speed. The purple mountains of the Peloponnese crawled by, the sun shone through the thin sail and made shadows of the ropes behind it. The lines and brails made a regular grid on the sail’s face, overwritten by the arcs and diagonals of stays, halyards, braces and shrouds. A mathematical beauty.

Checking that no one was watching, I pulled out Agathon’s letter and flattened it against the scroll in my hand.

Agathon. Of all Socrates’ pupils, his star burned brightest. After the execution, when we scattered, he and I lived together in Megara studying for a time. I had five years on him and still couldn’t keep up. I was a donkey, trudging the winding path; he was a sure-footed goat who bounded up the mountain in great leaps, never falling because he never looked down. For ten years, it was Agathon who led us from city to city and island to island in search of some teacher he’d heard of, and Agathon who got bored first when we found him. Agathon who wanted more, and Agathon who first caught the whispers that perhaps the answers we sought were in Italy.

A shadow fell over me, with a breath of narcissus perfume. I looked up and winced as the boat came around and the sun blazed over the edge of the sail. I’d avoided the sophist until then: he had a berth in the deckhouse with the officers and the syndicate merchants, while I slept on deck with the other passengers. Whenever I saw him moving forward, I went aft to the latrine; if he came aft, I went down to the galley to beg some bread off the ship’s cook. Even on a hundred-foot wooden prison, there are ways of avoiding people.

But nowhere to run once you’re cornered. I tucked the letter into my Heraclitus, not fast enough to escape notice.

‘What are you reading?’

‘Heraclitus.’

‘What does he say?’

‘He says the sea is a paradox: both good and bad.’

‘Good for fish, bad for people.’ Euphemus peered over the side. ‘I do hope we don’t end up with the fish. I have my doubts about the captain, you know.’

I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to talk to him. Euphemus folded himself carefully and sat cross-legged on the deck beside me. The narcissus smell blossomed.

‘If you need anything else to read, I’d be happy to lend you something. I’ve written a little book myself – you probably know it –
On Virtue
.’

‘Didn’t you ever hear the expression, “Write what you know”?’

He laughed and smiled, though the two didn’t quite connect. ‘Very quick. You know, I saw you at the Isthmian games when you won the wrestling title. You were quick then, too.’

I accepted the compliment with a nod.

‘And they tell me you knew Socrates.’

They
tell me.
They
always do: men like Philebus who snipe and gossip and mistake it for knowledge.

‘A long time ago.’

‘What was he like?’

I shifted my weight on the deck. ‘The wisest man who ever lived.’

‘Everyone says that.’

‘Now that he’s safely dead.’

‘I mean, what was he really
like
?’

I didn’t answer. I can no more describe Socrates than I can the surface of the sun. Even if I squint, it hurts too much to look.

‘What takes you to Italy?’ I asked.

Changing the subject got me another smile. He had one for every occasion. ‘I’m bored with Athens. I’ve had a better offer.’

He waited for me to take the bait. When I stayed silent, he carried on anyway.

‘I’m going to Sicily. The tyrant of Syracuse fancies himself as a patron of the arts. He’ll pay top price for anyone who’ll come to his court. Particularly someone with my skills.’

‘Which are … ?’

‘I’m a teacher of virtue – like your Socrates. As I’m sure you know perfectly well.’ He eyed me suspiciously, a dog wary of having his tail tweaked.

‘Are you any good?’

No hesitation. ‘The best. Virtue is my trade, and I teach it better and faster than any man in the business. If you attend my lectures, the very first day you’ll go home a better man than when you came; and better on the second day than on the first; and better every day after that than the one before.’

I pretended to be impressed, though it was obviously a well-rehearsed patter. ‘Can virtue really be taught? I always thought it was inherent in a man’s character?’

‘Of course it’s inherent. But it’s no good trapped inside. It needs a teacher like me to draw it out, buff it up a bit.’

‘And do you think,’ I concluded, ‘that prostituting yourself to a tyrant is the best thing for a self-styled teacher of virtue to do?’

It was clumsy, but I’ve seen his type preening in the agora or the gymnasiums so often that I have no patience. I wanted to make him go away. But Euphemus had another smile ready: indulgent, and just a little disappointed.

‘I’d say that a sophist who only taught good men to be better would be wasting his talents. Much better to try and make a bad man good. Your uncle, for example, could have used a dose of my teaching.’

My uncle. Fifteen years ago, he led the coup which overthrew a democratic government and sold out Athens to our arch-enemies, the Spartans. His junta barely lasted a year – but long enough for the blood of all the people he murdered and tortured to leave an indelible stain. For a family which traces itself back to Solon the Lawgiver, it wasn’t our proudest moment.

I rolled up my scroll, got to my feet and stalked off. Which is to say I lurched across the heaving deck, managed not to fall over, and dropped in a heap next to a coiled rope about ten feet away.

It’s always a mistake to argue with a sophist.

A red sky bled the horizon that evening, and the wind freshened. I took Glaucon’s shipwreck stone out of its pouch and turned it in my fingers as I stared out across the wine-dark sea. In the distance, a hazy shape broke the line of the waves.

‘Is that a sail?’ Euphemus’ voice, pitched high with anxiety. ‘I heard there are pirates near here. Should we perhaps keep a little more distance?’

The Master stepped up to the rail beside me.

‘Not pirates,’ he declared.

‘That’s a relief.’

‘It’s the mouth of Hell.’

He cackled, and took a swig from the bottle in his hand. When a loose rope snapped in the breeze, Euphemus actually jumped.