The Orpheus Descent (40 page)

The Voice of Reason said it would never work. The Voice of Desire said I had to try. I turned around and manoeuvred my legs through the window, then slid through until I was dangling by my arms. My feet felt for the ledge and only touched air. I slid down a little more. Still nothing.

I lowered myself another couple of inches, as far as I possibly could. Now I was hanging by my fingertips, ten small pads of skin supporting the weight of a grown man. The weight of a life. And still there was nothing beneath me. The goddess watched from her plinth but did nothing to help. Her face said,
You’ve made your choice
. I hung there in perfect silence. Even the Voice of Desire had gone quiet.

Parmenides says that nothing can come from nothing. But sometimes, by stretching out your toe as far as it can reach, you might just find something after all. Resistance – the pushback of an object insisting,
I exist
.

I let go and slid down. The ledge rose against my foot, took my weight and held it. Pressing myself against the wall, flat as a fish, I tried to catch my breath so I could whisper a prayer of thanks to the goddess. Her cold face, almost level with mine, didn’t acknowledge me – except perhaps the slightest raised eyebrow to say,
Don’t thank me yet.

There were two tiers of paintings, each framed in marble. Getting down without losing my grip or my balance was an ordeal, and the lower level was still above head height. I dropped the last few feet – there was no alternative – and landed on a set of golden plates with a crash like cymbals that echoed around the closed room.

I looked back up at the way I’d come. From the floor, the window was almost impossible to pick out, high above the topmost ledge. I’d never haul myself back up that way.

As I dropped my gaze back down the wall, I couldn’t help noticing the extraordinary quality of the paintings. If I hadn’t touched the paint myself as I scrambled down, I’d have sworn some were sculptures. Three baby centaurs suckling their mother seemed to stick their bottoms out of the frame; Atlas’ face, as he held up the whole weight of the world, was so miserable I wanted to offer to share his burden. I remembered Dion telling me they were by the great Zeuxis himself.

There’s a story they tell about Zeuxis, I don’t know if it’s true. That he and his arch rival arranged a contest to see who was the better painter. Zeuxis painted a bunch of grapes so real that birds flew down from the trees to peck at them. Confident he’d won, he told his rival to unveil his own entry. The rival invited Zeuxis to do it himself. Zeuxis stood in front of the picture, reached for the curtain that covered it – and came away with paint on his hand. The curtain was the picture.

Never mind that
, said the Voice of Desire.
Find the book.

I turned and started digging through the treasure, trying to be as quiet as possible. It wasn’t easy: a million drachmas in gold makes quite a noise. Even old King Croesus would have felt poor in that room.

Think
, I told myself. You wouldn’t keep manuscripts with the dinner service. I worked my way towards the back. In the shadows behind the statue, a dozen or more heavy chests lined the walls. I opened one – not locked – and felt around inside. Thick fabrics, lumpy with the jewels sewn onto them. I tried another one and found more of the same. Unwanted gifts, I suppose. For all Dionysius’ faults, and his fabulous wealth, his personal tastes were commendably austere.

I opened the third chest and knew I was close. The sweet, grassy smell of manuscripts blew out of the open box. I reached in and heard a soft rustling as I moved the rolls, like the wind blowing through the papyrus at Cyane’s lake.

The statue blocked the light. I dragged the chest back to the sacred flame, making a horrible noise. I began pulling out scrolls, unwinding a few inches to check the contents, hoping the recent additions were near the top.

The fifth scroll I tried was it. No different to any of the others, nothing obvious to say why it should be worth a hundred drachmas and a man’s life. Not illustrated, or wound on a golden spindle. I held it up to the light, hardly able to breathe.

This is the testimony of Timaeus of Locris. He entered the crater which has neither bottom nor base; he went down to the furthest place, the inmost depths of the earth; he passed by the guardians and the sacred spring; and after years below, he returned to the land of the living.

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.’

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.

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.’