A Traveler at the Gates of Wisdom

by John Boyne

  I had been crafting steles for almost two years by now, using the wood from local oak trees to fashion structures that could rise to twice the height of a man, if required, and a third of that size in width. Typically, I kept the edges straight, forming a pleasing curve across the top, but my great skill lay in fashioning the designs on the front that would act as testaments to lost souls. Before starting, I would spend some time with the bereaved family and images would form in my mind, as if summoned by a rare ghost, and once they took shape, I would begin my work.

  On the day that I first spoke to Lerato, she arrived in my workplace accompanied by her mistress, Sumin, who had recently lost one of her eleven sons in mysterious circumstances. Sumin, it must be said, was not grieving her loss with any great fervor. The boy had been an effeminate sort, much given to loud behavior and unrefined conversation. Once, a few years earlier, when we were still boys, he had come upon me in the bathing pool with his ting-ting hard and asked me to stroke it, and I did as he wished but later felt shame for my actions and hoped that Manu would not find out, as he would have surely whipped me for my vulgar behavior.

  The boy had been discovered in his bed a few mornings earlier with his head bashed in by a statue of the Roman goddess Minerva, and it was assumed that his father, Chuseok, had murdered him, but he claimed that no, a servant boy had committed the brutal act before escaping into the night. Still, even though their son had shamed them in life, the family would not allow him to disgrace them even further in death, so Sumin had come to my workshop to commission a stele that might properly reflect her family’s position.

  “I see your reputation is well earned,” she said, looking around at some of the work I had on display. “They say you are quite the craftsman. Who trained you in your art?”

  I bowed deeply to acknowledge the compliment. “No one, Mistress Sumin,” I replied. “These skills have been with me since childhood but, naturally, I have labored to improve them. I feel at my most content when working with wood and chisel.”

  She ran her fingers along a stele that was due to be collected later in the day for the grave of a young girl who had been mauled to death by a lion. In the design I had depicted her ascending to the heavens while all the animals of the world bowed in supplication toward her, begging forgiveness for what a single errant member of their kingdom had done.

  “I want it to be taller than these,” she said, walking around the workshop and examining the blocks of wood that would be stripped of their bark before I began to carve them. “Let us say fifteen feet tall.”

  “Fifteen?” I asked in surprise. “That is taller than any I have made before.”

  “Good. That’s what I want.”

  “You don’t think it might look a little—”

  “A little what?”

  I wanted to use the word ostentatious but could not bring myself to say it, for fear of insulting her.

  “You cannot do it, Craftsman?”

  “I can,” I said, bowing my head in supplication. “Indeed, it will be an interesting challenge.”

  “And I want a mask carved into the front that shows my son at his most fierce.”

  “And the skirts he enjoyed wearing?” I asked innocently. “Would you like these to be included, too?”

  She slapped me hard across the face, knocking me over, and I fell to the ground, my hand pressed against my cheek, trying to understand why my comment had offended her so deeply. After all, it was a simple fact that the boy had worn skirts and, sometimes, I had seen him crush beetles and the claws of lobsters into a wet paste so that he could create a rouge for his lips and cheeks. If I had observed all of this, then surely she had, too. I placed my left hand on a small table that held some of my brushes and into which I had carved the image of a hawk carrying twigs for the creation of a nest, and stood up.

  “You will depict my son engaged in his favorite pursuits,” she said as I rose. “Hunting, fishing, running. Throwing spears and javelins. Wrestling. Climbing mountains.”

  “Of course, Mistress Sumin,” I said, ignoring the fact that I had never once seen the boy participating in any of these activities. Chastened, I turned to glance in Lerato’s direction. She was standing before a stele I had completed only that morning and which was intended for the wife of a local sheep farmer. It was rather plain in its way but had a certain elegance in its beveled trim. At the center, I had carved the woman’s face in profile, surrounding her with images of needlework, as the woman had been known as an excellent seamstress. At the top, I had included an image of three candles, the middle one extinguished, for she had been the mother of three sons, one of whom had died after falling into a well.

  True, it was not the most original or inventive of my works, but it pleased me to see Lerato admiring it. When she reached out to run her hand along the furrows, I felt a stirring at the pit of my stomach and found myself unable to turn away from those long, thin fingers, envying the wood the intimacy of her touch.

  “What’s the matter with you?” asked Sumin, hitting me on the shoulder now, but this time I did not fall over. “Your face has gone quite red. Do you have a fever?”

  “No,” I said, shaking myself back to life. “My apologies, Mistress Sumin, my mind was elsewhere.” I looked around and walked to the other side of the room, where an enormous block of wood stood ready for use. It seemed to be around the size she wanted and I had intended to split it in half and use it for two steles. When I suggested using it, she nodded and asked how long it would take and the price. Both replies were met with her satisfaction, a date was set for the monument’s completion, and soon she was on her way.

  As they left, Lerato turned to me and smiled. Her teeth were dazzlingly white against her black skin. “Did you carve that?” she asked, pointing toward the stele that she had been examining earlier.

  “Yes,” I said, my voice catching slightly in my throat. “I carved all of them.”

  “You lean a little too heavily on the base of your chisel,” she said. “Try holding it up more and trusting your thumb and forefinger to do the work for you. You might find you have more success that way.”

  I said nothing, feeling astonished and outraged that a slave girl would dare to tell me my business. Afterward, I looked at the stele in question and realized that she was right. This was something I could work on.

  * * *

  • • •

  A few days later, and struggling with my design for the boy’s memorial, I began to worry that I might be forced to abandon the entire thing and start over, which was most unusual for me. Typically, once I began a project, I became completely immersed in it to the exclusion of all other matters. But the truth was, I was so distracted that I simply could not concentrate on my work.

  I had fallen in love.

  There were many girls who I had liked before but none who had affected me quite so deeply and, no matter how hard I tried to concentrate on the task in hand, my mind would turn to this girl, to this captured slave, and I would abandon my workshop and wander the streets in the hope that we might meet unexpectedly at the marketplace or the fish traders’ stalls by the sea. Before I conceded defeat on Sumin’s request, however, I recalled Lerato’s advice and held my chisel higher as I worked and, to my surprise, the images started to form before me, false images, yes, but the images that the dead boy’s mother had insisted upon. Soon, much sooner than I could have expected, it was ready, and I felt proud of my achievement, certain that my beloved had inspired me at a crucial moment. I longed for her to return to my workshop so that I could show her what I had created in her honor.

  * * *

  • • •

  My father, Manu, had always wanted me to become a warrior like him and play my part in the interminable wars that raged around the Aksumite kingdom, but it seemed that he had finally abandoned hope that I would ever live up to his expectations. His greatest wish, I
think, was that I would be brutally killed on the field of battle so that he could carry me home in triumph to my mother, around his shoulders like a slaughtered lamb. He called me lazy, a coward, a half-man, but I was none of these things; I was simply more interested in the act of creation than destruction. Manu was embarrassed by my inclinations, but I could not be other than I was and, awake or asleep, images stole into my mind and I sought ways to reproduce them, in chalk or stone or wood or metal. I was happy to draw pictures in the sand with my toes if that was all that I had to work with. People I had never known, places I had never visited, all of which seemed entirely real to me. And when they appeared, I knew that I had no choice but to reproduce them before they disappeared like sugar in water.

  Naturally, this led Manu to bemoan constantly the disappearance of his first son. While I often wondered what had become of my older brother, I also found myself occasionally cursing his name. He had treated me poorly when we were children, but he remained my brother and my mind turned to him more often than I might have expected. Now that we were both adults, I wondered whether we might be able to honor that bond, were he to return.

  A few months before I met Lerato, I chanced upon a hidden cave on the banks of the Dahlak river and found myself crawling through its narrow entrance, where I discovered a long, flat wall, stretching perhaps one hundred feet from one side to the other. Its virgin innocence affected me greatly and, in the silence of the fissure, I felt as if it were whispering to me, breathing unheard words that had been waiting many centuries for me to arrive. I placed my hand flat against the stone and a shock ran through my body. Unexpected images formed in my mind and I knew that if I wanted to pull them from my imagination into the real world, then here was the place to do so. I sat on the ground and stared at the granite blankness for a long time, my arms occasionally stretching out and drawing designs in the air or conducting the birds in the sky. That night, when I returned home, I gathered up all my chalks, as many different colors and textures as I could find, and set them aside to take with me the next morning.

  I woke early, the cave calling out my name. When I arrived and stepped inside, I found it a cool and welcoming place. I felt embraced by its isolated longing and wasted no time, simply taking the first piece of chalk that came to hand and standing at the very center of the stone, where I drew a great vertical line, then another in parallel to it. I sketched a series of statues, beginning with the plinths before moving to the bodies, and when I reached the heads, I felt a curious urge to create confusion, as if the heads and torsos came from different works and had been pressed together by undisciplined hands. And even though the finished effect appeared strange and disordered to my eyes, it also felt right.

  At the far left of the wall I drew a marketplace, chalking small stick figures to represent the people of an unknown village as they went about their business. From nowhere, an elephant appeared, and then a great bear. I drew without thinking, my hands allowing the images to pour through my fingers, as if they had been waiting for this moment to be released into the world.

  When I arrived that morning, I knew I wouldn’t leave until my task was completed and had brought provisions with me to last a week, sleeping in the cave at night, and waking early each morning, my body bristling with energy. Every day, I moved across my stone canvas, connecting images and stories together, lost in the creation of a world that was as unfamiliar to me as it was exciting. Later, I would learn that I had spent twelve days in the cave and might have stayed even longer had I not finally been interrupted by voices from outside. I turned toward the entrance in fright as the shadows appeared and soon revealed themselves to be a group of men, led by my father, Manu.

  “He’s here!” he cried, holding up a hand to stop the other men from entering. “I’ve found him.” He was carrying a torch of fire and only when he crawled through the entrance and held it to my face, almost scorching my skin, did I realize that I had been working in near-darkness since my arrival. I did not understand how I could have seen my drawings but, somehow, they had been entirely clear to me. As surprised as I was to see Manu there, I was also frightened by the furious expression on his face. He grabbed me by the shoulders. “Your mother is in torment. We thought you had left us, like your brother did. Or that you were dead.”

  “No, Father,” I said, dropping to my knees in humility. “I was drawing, that’s all.”

  He held the torch out toward the wall and walked around the cave slowly, examining my work. More images appeared in the new light, some that I could not even remember creating. A boy lying sick in his bed while another tended to him. A mountaintop where a group of men were gathered. A marketplace where a group of slaves were lined up next to each other, shackled together by chains. I stared as he did, feeling both curiously distant from my work and inexorably connected to it. I was both witness and participant.

  “You did all of this? This is how you have spent this time?” he asked me in a low voice, and I nodded, uncertain how he would respond to this.

  “Yes, Father,” I said, placing my hand against the stone, as I had done when I first discovered the cave. Giving in to neither pride nor violence, Manu simply shook his head and looked at me with an expression on his face that I could not decipher. Saying nothing, he turned around and left the cave.

  Once he was gone, I turned back to the wall, wanting to examine my work in more detail, but the spell had been broken. He had taken his torch with him and I was now plunged back into darkness, a darkness that had not mattered to me before but that now made all my efforts invisible to my eyes. I reached my hand out once again and had to believe that the art I had created still existed beneath the gloom, and that someone, someday, would discover it again.

  CYPRUS

  A.D. 365

  LARISSA DID INDEED RETURN to my workshop as I had hoped and, some months later, we were married in a ceremony of great joy on the banks of Chrysochou Bay. The most revered elder from our village laid his hands upon our heads as we knelt before him, chanting the prayers and oaths that committed our lives to each other. My mother, Flania, sprinkled us with the petals of bozea plants while my aunt, Nula, offered the fruit of the eastern strawberry trees to those who had gathered to celebrate with us. I received the tattoo of the married man, a small black mark upon my right wrist. There were many tears of happiness, including, to my father’s embarrassment, my own.

  I barely slept the night before, so exultant was I to join my spirit with one whose intelligence, grace and beauty overwhelmed me. To be in Larissa’s company was to feel at peace with the world; until we met, I had never felt such a deep sense of harmony. Her very presence brought me to be at one with the ground beneath my feet and the sky above my head. On the morning of the ceremony, I looked up and observed the flight of a hawk carrying twigs for the creation of a nest and smiled, believing this to be a portent for our future.

  My mother was a fine artisan of jewelry and had taught me many of the skills that had served as the foundation to what I hoped would be my life’s work and, unknown to Larissa, I had spent weeks crafting a necklace of iron to present her with on the morning of our wedding. My reputation as a skilled metalworker had grown in recent years, to the point where wealthy women sought me out to create bespoke jewelry for their ears, necks and wrists. Some flirted with me, for like my father I had grown handsome, with a head of golden curls. One, in fact, had been so determined in her efforts to seduce me that by the time she finally abandoned hope I had crafted a dozen or more pieces for her, enriching me considerably. But I had remained an innocent in physical matters until my first romantic encounter with Larissa and it pleased me to know that we had reserved the pleasures of the flesh for each other.

  For many months we had been spending time together, walking the hills around Akamas, eating at the marketplace, and swimming in the bay, after which we would make our way in lustful excitement toward a cave we had discovered at the foot of the mountai
ns where we made love and explored the astonishing terrain of each other’s bodies. It was a quiet place, where only the sounds of the waves lapping against the shore provided a serenade for our desire, and when we were spent, Larissa liked to examine the carvings on the wall, running her hands along these strange images from the past, wondering who had created them and why.

  Larissa did not have a family of her own—her parents had both died when she was a girl—but was employed as a cook in the villa of a wealthy trader of spices. She was, perhaps, more ambitious than I for our future together, seeing something in my work that she felt could prove successful outside the island. I was not rich, nor did I expect to grow rich, but my status had risen and my neighbors respected my artistry. Even my father, who had always hoped that I would join him as a builder of boats for the fishermen on the banks of Morphou Bay, had made his peace with my decision and had turned his attentions to a young man from our village, who some said was his illegitimate son and who showed much more interest in following in his steps than I.

  “Everything you create is so beautiful,” Larissa told me, examining different pieces of jewelry in my workshop—necklaces, pretty hooks to hang from the ears, gold-studded bars that could be placed through the eyebrow—“and they should be seen more widely. You could trade, not just here in the villages around Akamas, but further east, too, on the far side of the island. We could hire someone to bring your wares there or go together to establish your reputation. Perhaps in time, we could even speak to the captains of the trading ships that sail to the lands across the sea.”

  I admired her ambition and, although I had no great wish to set myself up as some materialistic merchant, I found myself won over by her enthusiasm. In truth, my needs were simple. I wanted a wife, some children, and to be allowed to practice my art without interference. If my business grew bigger, I might need to take on apprentices, and would the work be truly mine if I did so?