The Orpheus Descent (8 page)

Richard tucked in his shirt and wiped the sweat off his glasses.

‘It’ll all be fine tomorrow.’

A stranger who makes his way into the major cities, and persuades the best young men there to associate with him, must take extreme care. Jealousy is quickly aroused, and he can attract a lot of hostility and conspiracies against himself.

Plato,
Protagoras

I was drowning again. I thrashed for the surface, but the water was thick and my arms barely moved. I screamed. The sea rushed in, filling me up until I no longer felt it because I had
become
it.

I was breathing water. It flowed through me, calming my panic. Now when I looked up I could see the sun, a white orb shimmering through the waves. Even underwater, it burned my eyes. I had to reach it. I started to float upwards, but however fast I rose, the sun never came any closer.

Now I was on land. Black clouds plated the sky, scudding over the plain, and a forked mountain loomed in the distance. The goddess approached me across a flower-strewn meadow, barefoot. The wind blew her dress taut against her marble skin; the ivy in her hair rustled. Her face was solemn, beautiful but hard as stone. When I woke up, drenched in sweat, I knew she’d just told me something vital.

I wracked my brains, but I couldn’t remember what.

* * *

Eurytus was eager to get rid of us. After a quick breakfast, we set off for Taras. My first impression of Italy, beyond the beach and the forest, surprised me. I’d expected a primal wilderness: instead, neat lines of olive and citrus trees divided the holdings, with thick wheat growing green in between. The road was good, the houses well-kept – we could have been near Thebes. Except that a high plateau walled off the horizon, laying a sharp line across the limit of civilisation. And, when we reached Taras – across a causeway through a salt marsh – the walls were thick, the mortar still white. You couldn’t forget that this colony still clung to the fringes of a wild, unknown country.

The city stood on a neck of land between the sea and an inland lagoon, natural defences that also made a superb harbour (if only our ship had reached it). Eurytus led us through busy streets, with handsome temples and houses squeezed close together. He, too, was less wild than I’d first assumed: plenty of respectable-looking men greeted him in the streets and paused to talk business, more and more often as we entered the agora.

He steered us across the plaza to a fountain of Poseidon standing in a chariot drawn by four dolphins. Opposite him, almost as high, a man in a blue cloak stood on the steps of the Assembly house, deep in debate with a score of men around him. Some were dressed like soldiers, some like merchants and some like lawyers – but all of them looked important.

Eurytus pushed through the crowd to the man at the top and managed to get his attention. He whispered in his ear, pointing out me and Euphemus. A moment later, the man excused himself and came down. The others pretended to continue their conversation, though I saw every pair of eyes latch onto us.

‘These are the castaways,’ was the apologetic introduction Eurytus gave us. ‘This is Archytas.’

He was tall and civilised, with strong arms and the clipped stride you get from marching in formation with a hoplite shield banging against your knees. I found out later he was the same age as me, though he looked older. His hair was streaked a handsome grey, and the shrewd eyes that examined me seemed to have seen and understood more than I ever would.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Tell me your country, your nation and your city, and all the places you have wandered.’

Quoting Homer doesn’t impress me, though I’m sure it’s exactly the sort of thing Euphemus loves. Before he could reply in kind, I said, ‘We came from Athens. Our ship was wrecked.’

‘And what brought you to Italy?’

A simple enough question. But behind him, I could see twenty heads leaning forward to hear my answer.

‘I came to look for a friend.’

‘Agathon,’ Eurytus said. He and Archytas shared a look.

‘You know him?’

‘A mutual acquaintance introduced us,’ said Archytas. ‘He stayed with me.’

I didn’t understand the past tense. ‘
Stayed?
’

‘He had to leave suddenly.’

‘He’s supposed to meet me here.’

‘Why did he go?’ asked Euphemus, alert to scandal.

‘Where did he go?’ I wanted to know.

‘I imagine he went back to Thurii. He had a friend there.’

I have been staying with Dimos in Thurii.
‘My stepbrother, Dimos.’ My mind spun, thrown off by the unexpected news. ‘Is it far from here?’

Archytas’ shrewd eyes examined me. They seemed to be saying something, but I couldn’t work out what.

‘You can walk to Thurii in three days. By boat, it’s quicker.’

‘We’re not going in another boat,’ said Euphemus, emphatically.

I didn’t know where I was going. Just walking to town had exhausted me again. I didn’t have anything except the clothes on my back (and those were borrowed from Eurytus); I couldn’t afford lunch, let alone a passage to Thurii. And there were things about Agathon that Archytas seemed unwilling to say, that I was desperate to know.

Archytas must have read it all in my eyes. He took mercy on me.

‘It’s too late to set off now. You can stay in my house tonight.’

Archytas’ house, near the agora, dwarfed anything you’d see in Athens, big enough that Euphemus and I were given separate rooms. Archytas excused himself with business in town; Euphemus invited himself along, no doubt hoping to tout for business. I lay on the bed and stretched out, trying to unknot my battered muscles.

I flexed my fingers around the end of the mattress. To my surprise, instead of soft cloth, my hand felt something brittle and hard that crinkled under my touch. I pulled it out.

It was a scroll, battered and dented. I unrolled the first column’s worth to see what it was.

The Way of Truth
, by Parmenides.

Of course I’ve studied Parmenides, but never with much success. He writes his philosophy in such dense, elusive language it’s impossible to know what to think. Half of me – the Voice of Desire – is utterly seduced by the dark fantasies and vivid images. The other half – the Voice of Reason – insists that if he had anything worth saying, he’d just get it out.

I lay on the bed and turned through the scroll. I wondered who had left it there.

The path you came down is far from the well-trodden roads of mortals. But it was not cruel Fate who brought you here, but Truth and Justice, in order for you to learn everything there is to know.

There are two paths of enquiry – the way that
is
, and the way that
is not
. And one is impossible, for you cannot travel the way that
is not,
and nothing that goes down that road comes back.

Perhaps it was reading him on Italian soil, where his ideas germinated. Perhaps the shocks of the last two days had cracked my rational defences. Whatever it was, I found the Voice of Reason unusually submissive as I read it.

I was still looking at the manuscript, trying to see things that might or might not be there, when I heard commotion downstairs, and Archytas’ strong voice issuing orders to his slaves. I went down.

Archytas was in the
andron
, the men’s quarters. Like the man himself, the decoration was spare and masculine: black-and-white tiles tessellating triangles on the floor; a few fine pieces of dinnerware hanging from the whitewashed walls, and bronze armour displayed in an alcove.

I walked through the door and was almost bowled over as a small boy barrelled into my knees, bounced off, and wriggled through my legs. I stepped back, just in time to avoid another child hurling himself after the first. In the corner, by a chest, a naked baby sat on the floor, tugging at a wheeled wooden duck that quacked as it rolled.

‘Have I come into the nursery?’ I wondered aloud.

‘Children keep us young,’ Archytas said. ‘Sometimes they see things more clearly than grown-ups.’

He tickled the baby’s cheek as a slave woman bundled it away. I handed him the scroll. ‘I found this in my bedroom. I think it belongs in your library.’

Archytas checked the title. ‘I wondered where it had gone.’

‘It fell behind the bed.’ I paused. ‘Did Agathon have that room before me?’

‘Yes.’

Again, Agathon’s name was like sand on a fire. All the light went out of him and the warmth cooled. This time, I decided to poke around to see what I could stir up.

‘Tell me about Agathon. Is he well?’

‘The last time I saw him.’

‘You said he left in a hurry.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why did he go?’

‘He didn’t tell me.’

The bitterness in his answer practically invited the next question. ‘Had you argued?’

He picked up the duck and examined the underside, tightening one of the wheels. ‘Is Agathon a close friend of yours?’

‘The best friend I have.’

I could see him wondering how to interpret that. If I’m honest, I’m not sure myself. On one level, it’s entirely true that Agathon is my dearest friend, the one I love best. When I talk to him, it can feel as if my soul is on my lips. But it’s also true that he can be wilful, evasive, cruel, and often gives the impression he wouldn’t notice if you came or went. Like asking you to cross the sea to meet him, and then leaving before you get there.

‘I know Agathon’s sometimes difficult,’ I offered, trying to make an opening. ‘He gets impatient.’

Archytas nodded slowly.

‘Was he bored of waiting?’

‘He thought I could teach him something I wouldn’t tell him.’

I didn’t understand. Agathon had come to Taras to meet me off the boat, not to study.

So why isn’t he here?

I looked at the armour on the wall. It was nicely made, but not impractical. Light pooled in the hollows where dents had been hammered out, and the cuts scored into the leather greaves were too deep to have come from drills and sparring.

‘Was Agathon interested in warfare?’ Unlikely: he’s the most peaceful man I know. ‘Politics?’

‘Philosophy.’

He laughed at my obvious surprise. ‘Not all philosophers are shoeless loiterers haranguing strangers.’

I remembered the way the men in the agora had deferred to him – even the older ones. ‘I didn’t realise you were a philosopher. I thought you were somebody …’

‘Important?’

‘Respectable.’

‘I’m the captain of the city’s defences, if you count that as important.’ He smiled. ‘In Italy, philosophy isn’t incompatible with other occupations. You can even be respectable.’

That was a whole different conversation I would love to have had. But not now.

‘What did Agathon want from you?’

‘He’d become fascinated by Pythagoras.’

I stared at my host. In every pore of his being, he couldn’t have looked more different from Eurytus. ‘Are you a Pythagorean?’

‘I’m a mathematician.’

‘Like Eurytus?’

‘We both believe that the key to the world is numbers. But he thinks that the numbers themselves are what matters. He looks at the particulars and thinks he can make rules from them, some sort of meaning. I’m doing the opposite.’

He put his thumbs and index fingers together, making a crude triangle. ‘You might see this as a triangle, but it isn’t really. My fingers aren’t straight, the angles aren’t exact. If you tried to generalise about triangles from this, you’d get gibberish. But there’s another way. When I think about a triangle, I’m not thinking about this one or that one. They’re just images of a prototype which isn’t defined physically, but logically. Not
a
triangle, but
the
triangle
itself
. Pythagoras’ genius was discovering that the world has an underlying order, a system which – and this is the really miraculous bit – we can understand through reason.’

‘I can see it works for triangles,’ I said doubtfully.

Archytas reached into a chest and took out a handsome eight-string lyre, with a tortoiseshell sounding box and double-scrolled arms. He cupped it to his breast and plucked two strings in succession.

‘This is a note, and so is this.’ He plucked again, this time both strings simultaneously. ‘Together, you get harmony – a third thing that unites its component parts.’

The chord rang with a kind of sad beauty. ‘But what does that have to do with mathematics?’

‘Music
is
mathematics.’ Archytas played the chord again. ‘Look at the strings. If you measure them, you’ll find that the first harmonious pair is made by making the second string four-thirds as long as the first. The next harmonious pair is on the ratio three to two, and the octave comes by doubling the length.

He wrote the ratios on a wax tablet.
1
:
2
–
2
:
3
–
3
:
4
.

‘I thought you weren’t interested in numbers.’

He plucked a few more notes, improvising a short tune. It reminded me of the deathless music the wind chimes had made in the forest.

‘The universe is motion, and everything that moves makes a sound. If we could hear it all, and understand the formulas that govern it, there’d be a lot more harmony in the world.’

‘Is that what Agathon wanted to learn about?’

The music died away. Archytas laid the lyre back in its box.

‘Agathon thought there was more, and I was hiding it from him.’

‘Were you?’

A grave look. ‘The beauty of mathematics is that you can’t hide anything. There are no rituals or mysteries. Each step comes logically from the last. Anyone can see it if he takes the time to think it through.’

‘But you parted on bad terms.’

‘Not when he left. When I found out what he’d done—’