The Orpheus Descent (35 page)

‘Why did you bring me here?’

‘I wanted to see you.’

I reached down and risked stroking her cheek. She turned her head, nuzzling my fingers.

‘Did Dion tell you where we are?’ she asked.

I shook my head, enjoying the touch of her lips against my hand.

‘This is where Hades snatched Persephone.’

I stared at the deep blue water. It looked too beautiful for such a violent crime.

‘A friend was with her, the nymph Cyane. When Cyane tried to grab hold of Persephone, to save her, Hades turned her into this spring.’

The lake was clear and beautifully pure, just the place for girls to play. I tried to imagine the King of the Underworld creeping through the thicket, his red eyes smouldering with desire. Snatching the maiden while she braided flowers into a crown. The screams of frightened girls, then nothing except water bubbling out of the ground.

‘What happened last night?’ I asked.

She opened her eyes. ‘Was it that forgettable?’

I blushed. ‘Before that.’

‘We sent Agathon’s soul on a journey.’

‘Was it real?’

‘His soul?’

‘What I saw.’

She smiled her sphinx-smile. ‘Did it seem real?’

I sat up. The clear lake made a perfect reflection of the sky, but everything around it was thorns, knots and dark places.

‘How did you get to Sicily the same day we found Agathon?’ I said.

‘I’ve been here a few days. Just after you left Thurii, I had a dream. Agathon was in trouble: he told me to come to Syracuse. So I did.’

‘Do you always act on your dreams like that?’

‘I was right.’

I couldn’t deny that. ‘And the palace? How did you get in and out?’

‘The guards know me.’

I didn’t believe her. I understood that she was trying to help me, offering explanations I could accept.
This is not important
, her eyes said. But the Voice of Reason wouldn’t let go.

‘Are you a nymph?’

‘I’m a woman. As you well know.’

I played with one of the papyrus fronds, wrapping it around my finger. ‘Am I mad?’

‘Does it matter? Sometimes madness is a blessing, a divine gift. Haven’t you ever been in love?’

I took a leap. ‘I am now.’

Her deep eyes watched me solemnly, but her mouth twitched at the corners. Was she trying to stifle a laugh?

‘How does it feel?’

‘Agony.’

She rolled off me and lay on her back on the grass. ‘When we were created, our souls had wings and we soared with the gods in the aether. But when we came down to earth, the wings withered and fell away like leaves in autumn. The stumps scabbed over; hard scars formed, and the veins that had supplied them went cold. When we fall in love, the process reverses. Love warms our souls like spring sunshine. The flesh softens, the scabs melt and blood begins to flow. The feather-roots put out their shoots, and the wings start to grow again.’

‘It sounds painful.’

‘It is,’ she agreed. ‘The wings have to push through openings that have been closed for a long time, and it hurts. You feel like a child cutting her teeth, aching and itching and tingling all over. But when you’re away from your lover, it hurts even more. The pores dry up again, and the sprouting feathers are trapped halfway. The pain drives you wild. When you see your lover again, your soul opens up and it’s the sweetest release, even though the quills still hurt. And when you’re apart, you can hardly bear it. It drives you mad.’

I thought about that, even as the spikes tore open the holes in my soul.

‘Did you love Agathon?’

Was I so petty I could envy a dead man – my friend? Was the madness so irredeemable? Or was I really asking:
Do you love me?

She nodded. No apology, no embarrassment. The knots I’d tied inside me tightened, and suddenly I didn’t know what she meant. It was ridiculous to think that Diotima, as cool and mysterious as the spring, could feel the hot pains ripping me apart. I flushed, ashamed and confused.

‘Did he love you?’

A look that made me freeze. ‘Agathon understood that love is just a way to open up the soul. Love lets the wings grow, but Agathon wanted to fly.’

‘Is that why he died?’

No answer. She stared into the water as if waiting for something to sink.

‘Agathon was my best friend. If you know why he died …’

Instead of answering, she pointed to the pool, the blue water so lucid and calm. ‘Why do you suppose Hades turned Cyane into a spring? She couldn’t have stopped him taking Persephone – he was a god, after all, and she was just a nymph.’

‘I don’t know.’ I didn’t care.

‘He was worried she might tell someone. He didn’t want anyone to follow him down.’

Deep in the shade of the chaste tree, a nightingale began to sing. I listened for a moment, following the flow of the song up and down its register.

‘Agathon found something out,’ I tried. ‘Something he was killed for.’

I took her silence for consent.

‘What was it?’ Still silence. I thought back through my own long journey across Italy, from the day the sea spat me out at Taras. ‘Agathon was looking for something. The tablet was part of it. The book in Locris was too, and Empedocles, and the Pythagoreans. And so were you. Then Dionysius got involved.’

I’d followed his path like a dog sniffing through the forest – and, at the end of it, all I’d found was a corpse. Suddenly, I hated Agathon for dragging me here.

‘What was Agathon trying to find?’

‘The same as you.’

‘I was looking for him.’

‘Is that all?’

‘Until I found you.’

Diotima frowned; she didn’t like the compliment. ‘What does love crave more than anything?’

I remembered her at Dimos’ party, almost naked in the middle of those hungry men. The memory answered the question. ‘Beauty.’

‘And?’

‘Immortality.’

‘Love draws you to Beauty. Beauty leads you to Truth. And Truth is immortal,’ she said. I wasn’t really listening. Jealousy had planted a thought that set my mind on fire. I tried to resist, then blurted out, ‘Are you pregnant?’

She gave me a look that would have made a gorgon think twice. ‘No.’

I reached out and felt the hard, triangular stalk of the papyrus plant. I remembered Dion’s riddle.
Some day this could make you immortal
. I rubbed it between my fingers and imagined the farmer coming to harvest it, the curved blade peeling away the fibres and laying them down, pressing and drying the woven page. Whose book would be written on the plant I was holding? Whose hands would hold it after mine?

‘Was Agathon writing something?’

‘No.’

‘What, then?’

I wasn’t sure she’d answer me. A slow knife turned inside me as I wondered if she’d lost patience with my fumbling answers. When she spoke, I still couldn’t tell.

‘What do you believe about the soul?’

Talking to her was like chasing butterflies. Each time I thought I had her, she danced away. All I could do was run after her.

‘According to Homer, the soul is the impression we leave when we die – smoke lingering in the air when the fire’s burned out.’ I tried to think of something more original, and failed. ‘Even Socrates didn’t know.’

His trial, the closing speech after he’d been condemned: Either death is oblivion, or it’s a migration of the soul from this world to another.

I tried again. ‘The soul’s a metaphor, a way we talk about the “self” we feel inside us. The Voice of Reason – the rational, intelligent part of us. We know it exists because it’s always talking to us. But really, we’re just talking to ourselves.’

‘You think the soul is
reasonable
?’ Her eyebrows arched up, as if I’d proposed some outrageous act.

‘Reason is what we are.’

‘Isn’t love what we are too?’

I stroked her hair. ‘Yes.’

‘But we just said love is a form of madness. And madness is the opposite of reason.’

‘I suppose that’s why we try to control our appetites.’

She grabbed my hand and pulled it away, mock offended. ‘Are you saying you want to control love? That you want to love less than you possibly could?’

She’d trapped me like a sophist. I felt betrayed. ‘Does it matter? Whatever we say about the soul, we can never prove it. We’ll never even see it, until it’s too late and we’re all shades moaning in the underworld.’

If you can’t win the argument, rubbish it.

Again, the gorgon look. I wanted to take back what I’d said, but she wouldn’t let me. She leaned over and snapped a reed off its stalk. Holding it like a pen, she pricked a small hole in the damp earth, then drew a circle around it.

‘What do you see?’

‘A wheel? An eye?’

‘Geometrically.’

‘A circle with a point at its centre.’

‘Or it could be a cone, seen from directly overhead.’

‘If you’re trying to tell me the world is deceptive and our senses are inadequate, Heraclitus got there first.’

She gave a small nod, as if something had been established to her satisfaction.

‘There are walls around us that box us in to our world. We can’t see beyond them – and so we assume there
is
nothing beyond them. In the end, we stare at the walls so long we don’t even see them. We forget they’re there.’

I tried to understand the connection. ‘Is that what your picture represents? An individual surrounded by a wall?’

I don’t think she heard me. ‘The wall isn’t as solid as it seems. There are hidden doors you can get through. Pythagoras found one, so did Empedocles and Parmenides.’

I didn’t know if we were talking about a real place, or some sort of metaphor. For safety’s sake, I decided to stick with the metaphor.

‘Agathon wanted to find this gateway?’

Her face said:
almost
.

Hades was worried the nymph might tell someone.

‘He found it.’

Two blocks away, the battle was just distant noise, like a television in another room. The loudest sound was the ringing in his ears. Had he dreamed it? A part of him almost wanted to go back to the square and have a look. He wondered what had happened to the woman he’d rescued, if she’d made it. But the blood on his face was real, and so was the pain in his knee every time he put his foot down. He kept going.

It was only when he felt the phone vibrating in his pocket that he realised how little he could hear. He pulled it out and answered, shouting as loudly as he could. All he heard was a tiny voice, his own, coming from the end of a long, dark tunnel. He turned the phone volume all the way up, but couldn’t make out any words.

Whoever it was hung up. Almost before he had time to despair, a text message appeared on screen.

Where are you?

He glanced up and saw the street signs on the side of the buildings. His hand was shaking so badly he could hardly tap out the message.

Corner of Perikleous and Voulis

Almost at once:

I’m coming

Five minutes after that, a motorbike pulled up.

Ren drove him down to the Piraeus and stopped outside a fish restaurant by the harbour. Jonah was bloodied, bruised and topless, but the owner, reading a newspaper at a table out at the front, didn’t register an expression. Perhaps he was just glad of the business.

Jonah found the bathroom and stuck his head in the basin. He ran cold water over his eyes until he couldn’t feel the pain. Ren brought a two-litre bottle of mineral water: Jonah gargled half of it and drank the rest. He looked at himself in the mirror. His hair was wild, and he had a wide cut across his forehead. Ren dabbed it with a towel and bought hydrogen peroxide from the pharmacy next door. It stung, but at least it felt clean. She’d also managed to get Jonah a new T-shirt from the Piraeus’ last souvenir shop. I ♥ ATHENS.

Across the road from the restaurant, a few tables sat under a plastic awning overlooking the water. They sat down, the only customers.

‘Adam told me to go to his office but it was shut. I got caught in the riot instead.’

She nodded. He could hear things now, but still from a great distance. Bad feedback screeched in his ears.

‘I told him I knew about Ari Maroussis. I suppose he wanted to warn me off.’ He remembered the yawning mouth of the Metro station, the dead souls flooding down. ‘Or get rid of me.’

She nodded again. The waiter brought them menus and stale bread. Jonah chewed over the crust and didn’t say anything. He was in a place beyond words. If he tried to think about Adam, he felt so much fury he wanted to break something. Thinking about Lily was worse.

‘Do you want to go home?’ Ren asked.

He knew what home was. An empty flat, a silent phone and a river whispering Lily’s name every minute of the day.

‘I want to find Lily.’ He remembered what she’d said. ‘I want to bring her back.’

The waiter returned. Ren ordered for both of them, a list of Greek dishes Jonah didn’t catch.

‘Do you have a plan for where we go next?’ he asked.

‘Spetses.’

‘Maroussis’ villa.’ As the adrenaline faded, a killer headache had begun to rack his skull. ‘You said he’s one of the richest men in Greece.’

‘
The
richest.’

‘He must have guards. Fences.’ He held a bottle of water against his forehead and added unnecessarily, ‘I’m a musician.’

‘I can get us in.’

The waiter brought their food. Bubblegum pink taramasalata, fat peppers bursting with rice, and a plate of tiny fish you ate with the heads on. Jonah glanced over the railing into the harbour, wondering how local the fish were. A scum of Styrofoam and effluent bobbed around the concrete pilings.

‘Do you need anything from Adam’s apartment?’ Ren asked.

A part of him would have loved to go back to the flat, to get his bag and dangle Adam off his Acropolis-view balcony until he told him everything. Another part – some vestigial organ left over from a world view that had become extinct – thought about calling the police. He tasted the gas on his tongue, remembered the demon with his head on fire, and shook his head.

He had nothing but the clothes he was wearing, his phone, his wallet and the passport in his pocket. Seven summers touring Europe had taught him you never knew when you’d need it.