This is a work of fiction. The incidents, dialogue and characters are products of the author’s imagination. Situations and conversations involving historical figures are not intended to depict actual events. Any resemblance to other persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Prologue:
THE SCHOOL OF ELEA
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The battle does not end well for the Army of Scribes.
Fresh corpses with ink-stained fingers litter the marketplace, warm blood slowly clotting into pools of mud, piss and shit below the bodies. Feral dogs fill the square and gnaw on the carcasses as the sun slips below the horizon, first concealing the grisly scene in shadows, then darkness. Buzzards will dine on the untouched cadavers in the morning. The scribes fought bravely, worthy of praise in song, but no one remains to write the history of the conflict or elegies for the dead; and unless the only two survivors of the carnage can escape the city alive the rest of the world will never hear a word of the Battle of Elea.
Melissus kicks open the door to the library, his injured friend and mentor Zeno stretched across his broad shoulders and places the elderly man on the surface of the first table he can find. The snarling baritone of a soldier echoes over the barking of tracking dogs in the distance. “I’ll give twenty obols of silver to the bastard that finds those two cunts and forty to the sonofabitch who sticks them with his spear!” the man yells to a chorus of blood-thirsty cheers. Melissus scurries back to the door and closes it quietly, slowly lowering a wooden plank across the width of the entrance to prevent the door from opening.
“They’re all dead, aren’t they?” Zeno asks through a pained grimace.
“Most likely,” Melissus replies, moving a lantern next to his friend’s leg to inspect the large wound running clear across Zeno’s hamstring. “And if we don’t keep moving, so will we soon be.”
The library is dark, but so familiar to Melissus that he only needs the faintest glow to efficiently maneuver through the labyrinth of tables and chairs that make up the building’s main reading room. The soft flicker of the flame illuminates tall cabinets with diagonal shelves lining the walls, each one bursting with more scrolls than they were designed to hold. From across the room Melissus sees Zeno’s show projected against the scrolls, almost dancing to the arrhythmic movements of the lantern’s lights.
“I knew it was him!” Zeno says, shaking his head.
“Knew what about whom?” Melissus asks, returning to the table with a panel of cotton cloth and crudely dressing his friend’s wound. The cut is deep and continues to bleed profusely. There’s little hope of Zeno regaining the use of his leg any time soon. “Can you walk? I don’t know if I can carry you across the other half town.”
“I knew it was him from the begin—” Zeno says, as he slides off the table and gingerly shifts the weight of his thin frame onto his injured leg before his knee buckles, only Melissus’ agile reflexes sparing him from collapsing to the ground.
“What are you talking about?” Melissus asks, lifting Zeno up and throwing his friend’s arm around his shoulder. “We have to get out of here before—”
Pounding at the door cuts Melissus off. “Open the door!” orders a deep voice on the other side. “Open the door and King Demylus will grant you clemency.”
Melissus turns his head away from the door and back to Zeno, who shakes his head doubtfully. The door jerks violently, individual planks slowly splintering with each new strike. “Upstairs!” Zeno whispers. Melissus nods, throws Zeno back over his shoulders, and sprints up the stairs to the scriptorium on the second floor, skipping every other step along the way, just as the entire library fills with the loud snap of the front door bursting open.
At the top of the stairs Melissus slams the scriptorium door shut and blockades it with every last piece of furniture in the room. “This will only buy us a few more minutes. There’s got to be some kind of weapon in here!” Melissus says, sifting through the ink wells and desks in hopes of finding something—a hammer, a crowbar, a fireplace tool, anything—to help him ward off his predators.
A heavy thump shakes the door to the scriptorium, followed by another, then another. There are no voices offering absolution this time, just brute force and blind rage. Zeno hobbles over to an unused chair and watches the hypnotic heave and warp of the door. “I knew it was him!” he says again. “I knew it was him all along!”
Melissus abandons his search for a weapon and starts looking for an escape route. He glances out room’s rear window and finds the alley below completely empty. The soldiers have forgotten to secure the library’s perimeter. “We can make it!” he says, waving Zeno over to the window, the thumping at the door growing louder and louder.
Zeno ignores him. “I just knew it!” he says.
“C’mon, you old fucking fool!” he flares, marching across the room and pulling his friend from the chair by the collar of Zeno’s tunic. “We can make it!”
“No,” Zeno says, “we can’t, but you can.”
“What are you talking about?” Melissus demands, just as he finds the answer in the vacant stare of Zeno’s glassy eyes. “No! They’ll kill you if stay!” Melissus pleads.
“I shouldn’t have led those boys into battle,” Zeno says, shaking his head mournfully.
“They were doing their what needed to be done!” Melissus protests.
“They were scribes, not soldiers!” whispers Zeno.
“They were doing their duty as Eleans and men!”
“It was the griffin,” Zeno says in a daze. “I should have ordered the retreat the instant I saw the Griffin.” His words trail off into silence just before his shoulders shutter and he turns his head back to Melissus. “Carry me and they’ll catch up to us, but I can delay them if I stay.”
“No! I won’t let you!” Melissus objects.
The thumping grows louder. “No,” Zeno insists. “Don’t you understand? They’re here for me—they’re here for the books!”
Melissus feels the blood leave his face instantly as he slowly releases his grip on Zeno’s robe and drops to his knees. Zeno pats him on the cheek, leans forward and whispers into his ear.
When he finishes, Zeno sinks back into his chair while a stream of tears runs down Melissus’ face. “Go,” the old man says quietly, giving one last instruction to his friend. “You know what needs to be done.”
Melissus only nods his head and silently mouths the word yes in response. He rises to his feet, kisses Zeno on the forehead and embraces him one final time, letting go only as the hinges of the door finally fail and soldiers spill into the room, violently tossing aside the furniture blocking the doorway. The soldiers swarm Zeno and pin him to the floor beneath a flurry of thrashing arms and stomping feet, as Melissus leaps out the window and escapes into the empty alley below.
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Only a day earlier the city of Elea was little more than a small coastal colony like most others in Magna Graecia: a quiet hamlet of little importance or fame nestled on the Tyrrhenian Sea just a few hundred leagues north of Sicily. Elea was not a trading city of any commercial significance, nor did it have any military value. The village hosted no religious festivals, dramatic contests or athletic competitions of any renown. Outsiders were greeted with warm hospitality and treated with fairness at market, but no more so than in the thousands of other towns scattered throughout the Mediterranean. Since its founding over a century earlier Elea’s principle commodity had been solitude and few of her native sons appreciated this resource more than a pair of itinerant philosophers named Parmenides and Zeno.
Parmenides, son of Pyres, was a tall man, athletic, handsome and, above all else, outgoing. He was a whirlwind of conversation that practiced his philo
sophy through discussion, defending his ideas adamantly, eloquently and tirelessly. He was so fond of discourse that he was known to travel clear across the breath of the known world simply for the sake of finding a robust debate. Parmenides was also a natural politician who came from a noble and wealthy Eleatic family, which put him in a perfect position to influence and write the city’s laws during the years following Elea’s founding.
Consequently, he was greeted with skepticism among many of his colleagues who worried that creating such a dialogue would poison philosophical argument by conducting it like a political debate. Philosophy was practiced much differently in Parmenides’ day when the profession was still only separated by a few decades from the man considered the first philosopher, Thales of Miletus. Men shared their ideas through long uninterrupted lectures and speeches, often given in secret to evade public scrutiny. Students were expected to accept whatever claim their teachers made as inerrant truth. Philosophers often cloistered themselves in secret societies to both protect adherents from the harmful influences of the outside world and their own teachings from clever adversaries. The most celebrated of these was the Pythagorean Brotherhood, followers of the late mathematician who interpreted the universe through the application of numbers and mysticism.
Parmenides sought to change all of this. He believed Truth was eternal and immutable and existed beyond the human senses, which changed with age, health and even the weather. One single person relying on limited perceptions would never find answers, but perhaps two people could come closer, he believed.
Thus, the old Elean thought an ongoing dialogue better suited philosophy than a disconnected series of lectures. Parmenides used his family’s fortune to build a humble library in the center of Elea and opened its door to any student with the desire to learn. Many of the young men he taught later took work in the scriptorium that evolved on the building’s second story. This is how Parmenides discovered Zeno, son of Teleutagoras, a lean and frequently gaunt young man with a proclivity for mathematics.
Unlike his master, Zeno was introverted, congenitally lame and oblivious to social graces. He was also broad-minded, combative and exceedingly precocious. Parmenides singled the boy out for special instruction and in no time the two developed a unique report that they subsequently shared with others in cities around the Mediterranean basin during frequent travels abroad.
When they returned to Elea, and when he was not conversing with his mentor, Zeno could be found sequestered in his study puzzling over various mathematical questions. He had a knack for disproving suspiciously clever propositions by accepting a claim, then extending its consequences out until the entire arguments collapsed in on themselves. This led him to ask a question whose answer was seemingly so obvious the very question itself seemed absurd: How is it possible for an object to move through a finite space, say an arrow between an archer to his target, when that object must first pass through infinitely many midpoints before it reaches its destination?
This small observation, so easy to describe and yet so difficult to explain, shook mathematicians and philosophers to their very cores. It was a perfectly logical construction entirely contrary to the universal perception of an event. The paradox suggested that human minds were able to apprehend phenomenon in ways human senses could not. This led to the distinct possibility that what was thought to be reality was, in fact, nothing more than an interpretation corrupted by our senses.
The ensuing controversy kept philosophers occupied for decades, but it also instigated a bloodletting among lesser thinkers. Zeno challenged the principles of the absolutist cults, most of which could not adapt there tenants and dissolved completely. Others, like the Pythagoreans, maintained an uneasy truce with Zeno and the Eleatics. Some secret societies fled even further underground and only spoke to the outside world through rumors and gossip.
Worst of all these detractors were the stragglers, the former followers of now disbanded cults who had devoted so much of their previous lives to now dead faiths that they simply could not adopt a new one. These men were angry, vengeful and, worst of all, literate. Zeno received countless letters from spiteful souls cursing him and his paradox for shattering their beliefs. Some even threatened his life, but the mathematician paid them all little care.
Many men, on the other hand, were delighted by the endless possibilities Zeno’s paradox created. They traveled to Elea from all quarters to learn from Zeno and argued passionately, sometimes letting their tempers get the best of them. Voices rose, insults were hurled and sometimes even fists; but each nightfall Zeno and his guests retired to his hearth with wine as friends. Over time Zeno’s reputation among his fellow philosophers grew to stand without peer, even surpassing that of his proud mentor.
When Parmenides died Zeno inherited the library and scriptorium. By this point his fame had grown beyond the small diaspora of philosophers and he was now well-regarded by wealthy and powerful men who saw practical value in Zeno’s otherwise abstract adventures. These men wanted Zeno to teach their sons and heirs to make that which appeared true to be not true, and vice versa, and they were willing to pay handsomely for the privilege. Each potential disciple came bearing gifts of treasure, land, connections and even women—gifts no reasonable man would decline—without knowing that Zeno was, at heart, a completely unreasonable man. He refused them all.
Zeno was never as open as Parmenides, nor did he ever pretend to be. He did, however, feel an obligation to take on some students who might some day take his lessons abroad and even hoped to find his own apprentice. Most of the students he did take in were poor and hungry and many of them worked hard and displayed great promise, but the now aging mathematician could never manage to bond with this younger generation of philosophers in the same way that Parmenides did with him. He was almost fifty years old when he buried his master. Zeno had given Parmenides every last measure of his patience and had nothing left for a novice of his own. He needed an equal, not a protégé.
Then one day a peculiar character arrived at Zeno’s door. He was portly, but still strong and athletic; cleanly-shaven with the kind of weathered face that belonged carved onto the bow of a ship. He spoke with a loud, commanding voice, but was jovial and good-natured. His tunic was worn thin and smelled of fish. “My name is Melissus, son Ithagenes,” he said by way of introduction, “and Parmenides was wrong about everything.” It was the beginning of a conversation, and friendship, which lasted the next ten years.
Melissus arrived in Elea that very morning, having traveled all the way from Samos. Just a few years younger than Zeno, Melissus had recently resigned his commission as commander of the Samian navy. He had fought in many wars, won many battles, and killed many men; and yet earlier that year he had returned to Samos to a hero’s triumph following a victory to find two philosophers arguing an esoteric point in the agora with more passion than he had felt fighting for his very life at sea. The admiral was captivated by the scene, and even though the nuances of the argument completely escaped him, the energy and intensity of the participants appealed to his combative nature. He resolved right then and there to become a philosopher.
The two men were perfect complements to each other. Melissus learned mathematics, logic and law from Zeno, while Zeno learned politics, strategy and poetry from Melissus. They wrote books and keep correspondences with colleagues abroad in the mornings. Their afternoons were spent taking long walks through Elea, debating matters incomprehensible to eavesdroppers. At night they retired with a cask of wine by a warm fireplace to trade stories of the cities they visited and people they had each known.
It was an idyllic, and well-deserved, existence for both men, but one that could not last forever.
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One day, Zeno receives a letter from an acquaintance in Libya asking if the scriptorium would copy a well-known text, recently discovered missing from the Cytheran library, by the late Hippasus of Metapontium. Zeno agrees, in exchange for a copy an obscure manuscript he remembers r
eading during his days traveling in North Africa with Parmenides. A few weeks later the new scrolls arrive at their respective destinations and Zeno would have never thought any further of the matter if a similar request does not arrive shortly thereafter, this time from a colleague in Tyre. Then another, followed by another, and on and on—each request coming from a librarian in a new city missing a copy of Hippasus’ work. The requests become so numerous that Zeno orders copies of the scroll to be made in anticipation of future inquiries and several scribes became capable of transcribing the entire work from memory.
It’s a phenomenon that troubles the mathematician profoundly. It appears to Zeno that someone is trying to remove copies of Hippasus’ works from every library in Greece and enjoying a certain measure of success in so doing. At first he dismisses this conclusion as absurd, but the absurd is something of Zeno specialty and the more he thinks about the matter the more he simply cannot completely reject his hypothesis. Finally, he explains his concerns to Melissus one night as the two men drink wine by the library hearth.
“You think they’re being stolen?” Melissus responds. “Why would anyone bother?”
“I think someone doesn’t want Hippasus’ book read,” says Zeno.
“I wasn’t aware anyone was still reading them in the first place,” Melissus jests.
“Fewer today than yesterday, at any rate,” Zeno says. “But what would anyone have against Hippasus? He’s been dead for seventy-five years.”
“Perhaps, whoever is responsible for these disappearances is angry at someone else?” Melissus suggests.
“Like whom?” Zeno asks.
“Like you.”
Zeno laughs. “And what, by the gods, makes you say such a thing?”
Melissus takes a long look into the fireplace and rubs his furrowed brow. “I’m no stranger to messages and codes and people trying to kill me, Zeno. Those were all just part of everyday life in the navy.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Melissus. I haven’t received any messages, to say nothing of coded ones.”
“Of course, you have!” Melissus booms. “You’ve received dozens of letters from all over the world telling you that the works of Hippasus have slowly gone missing.”
“But that doesn’t mean—”
“Don’t be so dismissive, Zeno.”
“Good gods, Melissus! Hippasus was a renegade member of the Pythagoreans who was excommunicated for heresy—what does that have to do with me?”
“He was also a mathematician, not unlike you.”
“And a very good one, at that,” Zeno appends.
“And a mathematician that was drowned to death by the Brotherhood.”
“An apocracphyl story!”
“Not in Samos, it’s not; and I shouldn’t have to remind you that Pythagoras was from Samos.”
“Since when does sharing a birthpalce make you an authority on another man’s life?”
“It—” Melissus begins before swallowing his thought. “Never mind, I’ll concede your point, but for the sake of argument, let’s say Hippasus was drowned to death by the Brotherhood: would that make you any more concerned for your safety?”
“It would seem inappropriate to be so,” Zeno declares. The thought, however, visibly troubles him. He nods silently and stares into the fire, chewing nervously on his thumbnail for a moment before speaking again. “Who would want to murder an elderly philosopher?”
“The fathers whose useless seeds you denied instruction, for one,” Melissus answers. “I’d include the useless bastards themselves, if I felt for a moment they possessed a fraction of the motivation required. Then there are the Pythagoreans—”
“Wait—you think another philosopher might want to kill me?”
“Were we not just speaking of poor Hippasus?”
“That was a crime of passion,” Zeno says, “if it was even a crime at all. What you’re suggesting would be something different, something methodical that requires planning, travel, money and considerable resources.”
“Which would seem to rule out another philosopher,” Melissus declares.
“What makes you say that?”
“Because the only thing philosophers have in considerable quantities is poverty!” Melissus replies through deep basso laughter. The jest brings a smile to Zeno’s face.
Once the admiral finally stops laughing, Melissus pats his belly and takes another sip of wine. The room falls silent with only the snapping of the fire to break the quiet. Zeno takes a deep breath and exhales into the hearth. “How did he die?” he asks, a hint of trepidation in each syllable of his words.
“How did who die?” Melissus asks.
“Pythagoras—what do the Samians say of his death?”
“I thought a common birthpla—”
“Just answer the question.”
“He offended people he shouldn’t have offended,” Melissus replies.
“Then what?”
“Those people chased Pythagoras from his city, burned the barn he sought refuge in, and then slit his throat when he tried to escape the fire.”
Zeno’s eyebrows rise as his lips curl into an uncomfortable grimace. “Who knew philosophy was more suited for the fleet of foot than the faint of heart?”
Melissus laughs. “It could all just be a coincidence,” he says, hoping to ease his friend’s distress. “I wouldn’t bother yourself too much over it.”
Simply ignoring a mystery, however, goes against the very nature of a philosopher. Zeno begins an informal inquiry into the matter. At first he treats the investigation as little more than a hobby, sending letters to friends and colleagues across Greek, but as replies slowly trickle back to Elea a strange and, at times, sinister picture emerges that Zeno cannot ignore.
“It’s not just Hipassus,” he tells Melissus by the fireside a few months later.
“Who else is missing?”
“Epimenedes, Anaximander, Theagenes, Cleostratus—”
“All of them?”
“And dozens more—all just disappearing from what must be every library in Greece.”
Melissus sits silently for a moment, unsure how to respond. “Well,” he finally says with a shrug, “at least you know that no one’s trying to kill you.”
“Be serious for moment,” Zeno orders.
Melissus nods apologetically.
“I want the scribes to start making copies of every volume we keep at the library,” Zeno says, the words flipping off his tongue amid a gale of spittle as he paces furiously around the room. “No one is to have access to the master copies unless we discover a volume to be missing. And we’ll need to find a safe pl—”
“Ease yourself, old friend! I’ll take care of it first thing in the morning.” Melissus advises, as he waits for Zeno to retake his seat. “Have you found out who’s been stealing the scrolls?”
“Not definitively, but I have my guesses.”
“Then I suggest you keep your assumptions to yourself until you know better,” Melissus advises. “Besides, there are more pressing concerns to worry about these days.”
“Like the exorbitant price of papyrus these days?” Zeno smirks.
“Something like that,” says Melissus, finishing the remaining wine in his cup.
The spike in the cost of scrolls certainly vexes Melissus, but not nearly as deeply as the concurrent rise in the price of timber, iron and bronze. As a young purser aboard a Samian cargo ship, Melissus discovered the relationship between increases in the price of certain commodities to specific events. An increase in the cost of wine usually preceded the Bacchanalia. Spices, like cinnamon, became more expensive just before winter when mountain snows closed off the highways to the Orient. Timber, iron and bronze, however, were so ubiquitous that not even the largest mercantile cartels could horde enough raw resources to cause a surge in price. Only cities had treasuries large enough to significantly raise the price of all three commodities at once and they only did so when they needed to build ships, cast swords and fo
rge armor.
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Fifty years has passed since the Persian invasion under King Xerxes was repelled by the united armies of Greece. To be sure, there has always been some in-fighting between a few nations, but for most cities the era is marked by an uncommonly long period of peace and prosperity. It is an age of diplomacy when alliances are built to facilitate the free flow of trade between states; and with it the wealth, people and ideas that make possible the lives of the Eleatic philosophers.
Now this Golden Age, as many newly rich merchants called it, is coming to an end. Five decades of affluence has tilted the balance of power in favor of some states and inspired fear in the others. Cities no longer sign treaties for the sake of commercial benefits, but for military advantage. Relations between almost every state in Greece is needlessly entangled and complicated. Cities with no reasonable interest in one another are now sworn to defend each other and nations who share ancient animosities are now begrudging allies. All of this is done in the name of strengthening a delicate peace, but it only accomplishes to make it more fragile.
Melissus sees the peace about to break, not that this matters to anyone else in Elea. The city is situated over a thousand leagues west of the Aegean Sea. Eleans have grown to distrust news from the eastern corners of the Mediterranean as outdated upon arrival or corrupted by the succession of messengers. One of the simple pleasures of living in Elea is the peace of mind that comes with its remote locale, which offers security from even the most horrifying news abroad. If reports of dragons laying waste to the city of Byzantium ever arrived in the Eleatic agora, they would sure to be greeted with little more than a shrug.
And with good reason. While it is not beyond the realm of possibility that fighting will extend as far west as Syracuse, Melissus sees few reasons for the conflict to reach further north than Sicily. Yes, some men from the city would be conscripted into one army or another, but there was little reason to covet Elea as a military prize.
Physical security, however, is only a small part of a much larger problem. Melissus understands that life in Greece is about to change dramatically, even in the quarters fortunate enough to escape the coming violence, prolonged sieges, mass illnesses, and starvation. Communication with the rest of the world will soon slow. Letters will be delayed, censored or “lost” altogether. Travel will be restricted, foreigners turned away at the gates of cities leery of spies roaming their streets unrestrained. The longer hostilities wear on, the worse conditions will get. Philosophy will become an even more solitary and isolated venture, especially for elderly men practicing it at the edge of civilization—which was why, the thought eventually occurs to Melissus, Elea is the perfect place to preserve the collective work of 150 years of philosophy until the war’s end.
Since he began replacing the missing works of Hippasus in libraries across the world, Zeno’s library has nearly tripled the number of items in its collection. Almost 900 scrolls line the shelves of the first floor, but there’s still plenty room for more. Melissus suggests he and Zeno write to their colleagues abroad and ask them to send copies of rare manuscripts to Elea for safe-keeping, lest they become casualties of the imminent war. It’s an idea that Zeno embraces with an enthusiasm he has never displayed for anything before.
During the six months that follow, Melissus helps Zeno transform his once humble library into the great Archive at Elea, the largest repository of knowledge in the known world. Scribes work day and night to copy philosophical, mathematical and scientific treatises; poetry; tragedies and comedies; histories; legal documents and political speeches from throughout the world. Even the letters that accompanied the manuscripts were treated with the same solemnity and reverence the curators give to the works of Homer.
The Archive transforms Elea from a tiny backwater at the end of the world to a center of learning, an outpost where students could unburden themselves of earthly cares. The city’s reputation slowly spreads across the Mediterranean as men and women come seeking educations. In fact, so many of the young students stay in the city and complete the mandatory military training required of all citizens that the local militia is affectionately dubbed the stratean bibliografoi—the Army of Scribes—by neighboring villages.
Elea adopts the ink well and reed pen as its standard, painting the symbol of the shields of the young men responsible for protecting the city. It’s a fighting force that looks and drills like an army, but there isn’t a true soldier among them. So when 500 heavily armed and armored mercenaries carrying black standards storm the gates of the city, the battle ends quickly and King Demylus is installed as the first tyrant of Elea.
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Following his arrest, Zeno is carried down from the scriptorium to the library on the first floor of the Archive building. A tall, sturdy young man wearing a long black robe and golden diadem rifles though the scrolls kept in shelf reserved for engineering manuscripts. Each one he opens roughly, devotes little more than a cursory glances, then discards on the ground like table scraps of food left for a pet. The inconsiderate way in which he treats the scrolls causes Zeno as much pain as the injury to his leg.
“Let him sit,” the man tells the soldiers, who immediately situate Zeno at a nearby table. “There’s a recipe I’m looking for and was hoping you could help me find it.
“We keep the scrolls on food preparation are in another building,” Zeno replies, getting out of his seat. “I’d be happy to fetch it for you, if you’d like.” The soldiers standing behind him each apply a hand to his shoulders and push Zeno back into his chair.
“Oh, I’m not interested in a cook book,” the man says, tossing another scroll to the ground. He reaches into the cabinet and withdraws another scroll and unrolls it carelessly. Suddenly, his eyes grow wide and a devious grin curls in the corner of his mouth. “Here it is!” he says walking toward the table, still closely looking at the content of the scroll. “A History of the Uses and Applications of the Polemikon Pur; Complete with Accounts of the Necessary Elements and Proportions therein Required for Production by one Timon of Abydus, son of Acessemenus—not a very catchy title now, is it?” he asks.
“Then I’m sure you’ll also be disappointed in the book,” Zeno notes.
The man shakes his head as he rolls the scroll into a tight cylinder and slips it into an interior pocket of his cape. “I think I’ll enjoy it very much!” he replies. The man takes a seat at the table and looks up at the soldiers standing over Zeno. “Where is the other one?”
The soldiers look at each other with confusion. “He was the only one in the room when we entered, sire,” one answers hesitantly, nodding in Zeno’s direction.
“Only one?’ the man repeats, briefly burying his head in his hands. “Are you fucking ingrates too stupid to realize you were tracking two men?” the he yells, slamming his hand against the surface of the table. “His name is Melissus! I want the gates to the city closed, the harbor sealed and every last soldier not already standing a post searching for that sonofabitch!”
The soldiers in the room rush for the door. “But, sir, what about the prisoner?” asks one private lingering behind.
“This one’s not going anywhere, not with that injury,” the man says. He leans back in his chair and waits for the room to clear until all is quiet except for the faint sound of horses galloping off into the distance. “Do you know who I am?” he asks Zeno.
“I can only assume you’re the one they call Demylus,” Zeno replies.
“Then you must also know why I’m here,” Demylus replies, the expression on his face growing more stern. “Unfortunately, I wasn’t anticipating having this discussion without your friend Melissus, so why don’t you tell me where he’s run off to and perhaps we will both be able to walk out of this library will all of our limbs still attached to our bodies.”
Zeno laughs politely. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
Demylus smiles and shakes his head. “I didn’t expect you would, but
it’s not important,” he says, throwing his hands up over his head and looking around the library. “All of these books and letters must have come from some place and Melissus is probably on his way there as we speak. I’ll find him sooner or later.”
“Then you have come for the library,” Zeno says.
“In a manner of speaking,” Demylus replies. He rises from his chair, walks around the table and sits on the surface next to Zeno. “The only volume in this building that is of any value to me is the one I already have,” he says, patting the exterior of his cape just above his breast. “The rest means more to my clients.”
“And how is that?”
“Why, they want to know who else to kill?” Demylus smirks. “For a group of people so revered for your intelligence and wisdom, you philosophers can be an astonishing stupid lot! So let’s try this one more time: where is your friend Melissus going?”
Zeno remains silently motionless in his chair.
Demylus smiles, pats Zeno on the shoulder and slides off the surface of the table. “Pity, and I hoped we would become such good friends too!” he says, as he makes his way to the door. “There are men in my command who read, Zeno, enough men to catalogue the authors of all of these books in a day or so. I’ll find him, though you shouldn’t expect to be alive long enough to be there when I do.”
Zeno glares at Demylus over his shoulder. “So it was you holding the shield with the griffin painted on it, wasn’t it?”
“You mean this afternoon? My shield has always been black, old man—blacker than the depths of Death’s cunt!” Demylus says with a laugh. “There are a dozen soldiers guarding the library and they all have orders to kill if you so much as step outside,” his voices echoes as the door slams closed behind him.
Zeno sits quietly at the table for some time after Demylus leaves, staring at his own shadow spread across the cabinets of scrolls, quaking in the flicking light of the lantern. Demylus is right: even though Zeno has no idea where Melissus is running to, the answer was almost certainly found in the scrolls kept in the Archive. He sighs, lets his head fall to the table and closes his eyes.
Parmenides would have never dreamed his library would serve as a prison, let alone one confining his finest pupil. He built it to bring the light of knowledge into the world and now it will be by this very light that wicked, cruel and avaricious men will hunt down Melissus. Even to the man who understands paradoxes more profoundly than any other person on earth, the irony is tormenting.
Zeno rises from his chair and hobbles across the room. He picks up the lantern from the table with one hand and glides his other hands across the scrolls protruding from the cabinets, the sum of the world’s knowledge at his fingertips. Many of the books are the only copies that remain of works by authors long since dead.
His arrogance had blinded him. Privately, Zeno had always nurtured the hope that the Archive would one day rival the gardens in Babylon or the temple in Ephesus as one of the crowning monuments of human achievement. Instead, he has given the enemies of philosophy a convenient target through which to destroy the profession before it ever gets started.
He now knows what he has to do. Zeno pulls a scroll from one of the shelves and dips it into the lantern. There is still hope, he thinks, but not without a significant cost. Zeno watches intently as the orange and crimson blaze slowly dance across the volume, transforming it into a crumbling cylinder of ash. Zeno unleashes a quiet sigh, tosses the burning scroll into a cabinet and feels the searing heat on his skin as a wall of fire rapidly consumes the Archive of Elea.
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Melissus’ escape has been impeded by patrols of soldiers, a poor knowledge of Elea’s alleys and the kind of impenetrable darkness only found on moonless nights.
Since his leap from the scriptorium window an impenetrable darkness has served Melissus well by covering him from patrols of soldiers, but the midnight pitch is now complicating an already poor knowledge of Elea’s backstreets. He knows he’s close, the salty air of the Tyrrhenian Sea fills his nostrils, but the closer he gets to the water the more he worries that the dusk now shrouds his pursuers from him. Finally, he reaches the courtyard of an old friend’s villa that sits atop a bluff not far from the harbor. He hears the waves crashing against the shore mingle with the galloping of horses and the barking of tracking dogs in the distance as he frantically rustles through the bushes, struggling to find the concealed path which leads to the strand below.
Suddenly, a dim glow from behind reveals a narrow gap in the thicket. He glances over his should just long enough to discover a towering bonfire flittering across the city’s skyline. Melissus recoils into the divide in the shrubs and slips on a layer of loose gravel, sliding down the footpath on his tailbone until he arrives on the soggy sand of the beach.
Melissus pulls the razor-sharp stones and craggy debris embedded in his hips, waist and thighs; then places a small branch between his teeth and bites down as he rises to his feet and stumbles across the beach and dives into the sea, screaming under the incoming tide as the salt water fills his fresh wounds. He swims out to the harbor and finds a small fishing boat with a single mast tied by a lonely rope to a pier. The admiral uncoils the rope from the dock, pulls an oar from the craft’s hull and quietly paddles out to open water unseen from shore. There are still a few hours of darkness left in the night, which is all an experienced sailor needs to create an insurmountable lead between himself and his trackers.
Once the jib is hoisted and rigging tied, Melissus looks over his shoulder for signs of pursuit, but only finds a large pillar of thick, black smoke billowing to the heavens. By dawn Elea will have vanished below the horizon. The admiral finds the pole star in the clear night sky and makes his way south with the current. The boat’s gentle oscillating between the waves starts to rock him to sleep like an infant. Melissus fights off a yawn so large it threatens to turn his head inside just as a warm breeze skips across the surface of the waters, filling his sails of the small fishing boat taking the last student of the School of Elea to the great city of Athens.
SCHOOL OF ATHENS
School of Athens Page 1
