The Orpheus Descent

by Tom Harper

  I unfolded the flattened scroll, though I’d read it so often I had it word perfect.

  I have learned many things which I cannot put in this letter: some would truly amaze you. But Italy is a strange place, full of wonders and dangers. There is no one here I trust with these secrets.

  For the thousandth time, I wondered: What secrets?

  Cargo was stowed and lines tightened. The sun traced its course around the world. An afternoon breeze came down off the mountains, snapping the halyards like whips, though the clouds didn’t lift. In the offing, the sea and sky were welded together without a join.

  A longboat pulled us out of the harbour, hidden from the deck so that the ship seemed to move of its own volition, without oars or sails. The white tower of Themistocles’ tomb watched from the headland as we passed.

  I surrendered myself to the sea.

  Two

  Berlin – Present Day

  It started slowly. A shuffle on the cymbal, like water trapped in your ear; a brushing sound that emerged imperceptibly from the noise in the club. It crept through the crowd, taking over conversations, leaving behind a wash of silence. The audience turned towards the darkened stage.

  The drum kicked in. Slow, forty beats a minute, the pulse of a sleeping heart. The crowded bodies pressed towards the stage, closer to the music. The whole room had become a single organ, breathing in and out with the throb of the drum.

  Jonah sucked the plectrum between his teeth and let the beat take a hold of him. His left-hand fingers slid up the neck of the guitar and settled on the chord. The music was a vector, channelling the crowd’s energy into him so that he could feed it through the strings and deliver it back to them.

  The bass joined in, matching the drum and then slowly pulling it forward. A freight train gathering pace, stretching the weight on its couplings. Jonah took the plectrum out of his mouth and held it above the strings. He closed his eyes. He didn’t have to count off the time: he knew what was coming.

  The beat was accelerating, the pulse drawn out of sleep into life. The keyboard sprinkled in notes that glittered like powdered glass. Spotlights chased over the crowd. Caught out in the moonbeam, he saw a willowy girl with a thin face, her long hair tied back with a circlet of cloth. Her head was tipped back, her mouth open, her body moving in perfect time with the music. In perfect time with him.

  He thought of Lily. One more day …

  He hit the first chord and the stage exploded in light.

  Sibari, Italy – 24 hours later

  The security lights exploded over the yard as Lily let herself in the gate. She crossed the lot quickly, painfully exposed to the surrounding darkness. She had every right to be there, though it didn’t feel that way. She pulled her hat lower over her face.

  She climbed the stairs and unlocked the lab. She’d thought about bringing a torch, but that would have looked suspicious. She flicked on the fluorescents and hoped the window shutters were thick enough to cover it.

  I’m the site director, she reminded herself. I’m in charge here. She unlocked the Finds room and dialled in the combination to the safe. The gold tablet lay on its cushion, bright where the conservator had cleaned off twenty-four centuries of mud. The tiny gold letters winked out at her.

  A creak behind her: she almost dropped the tablet. She stuffed it back in its drawer and peered back into the lab. No one was there. Next to a half-cleaned skull, the door swung loose on its hinges.

  She was getting paranoid.

  She closed the door firmly, checking it had latched, then retrieved the tablet. The writing was almost too small to read with the naked eye. She slid it under a microscope, pen and paper ready. It bulged and shrank as she fiddled with the dial, until suddenly the lettering leapt into focus.

  Her Greek was rough – she left that to others – but she knew the first line by heart.

  The words of Memory, carved in gold …

  It always made her think of Jonah.

  Berlin

  Jonah leaned back on the wicker couch and took a long drink from the bottle. He barely tasted the beer, but the cold felt good. Even at 2 a.m., the night was warm, and his T-shirt still stuck heavy with the sweat from the club.

  The world spun slowly – nothing to do with the beer, nor even the pot smoke drifting over from the next table. He was coming down, shrinking back. The music had stopped, the audience gone. The energy they’d poured into him had all drained out and he was himself again. Nothing more.

  That was the hardest thing about coming off stage. Some musicians tried to beat it with drugs, but he knew that didn’t solve anything. Just multiplied the falls. All you could do was ease the way down with a few beers and a few friends, hold on to the night as long as she’d let you.

  There were stars in the water and lights in the sky. They’d come to a bar on the bank of a river, a laid-back haunt spilling over old industrial terraces under the road bridge. Fairy lights snaked through the trees, and Spartan techno drifted off the dance floor that they’d crammed into a brick bunker no bigger than a meat locker. A clutch of empty-eyed ravers stood outside like lost souls, their bodies jerking spasmodically to the music that still possessed them. It was a long time since they’d touched reality.

  Shadow pushed through the crowd with six bottles of beer in one arm and a girl on the other. He always said drummers needed good hands.

  ‘One more for the road?’

  Alex, who played bass, took two. ‘Isn’t this the end of the road?’

  ‘Not for me.’ Jonah leaned over and took another bottle. Shadow dropped himself onto a wicker cube-stool and balanced the rest of the beers on the table. The girl behind him squeezed onto the couch between Jonah and Alex.

  ‘This is Astrid,’ Shadow said. ‘She was at the show.’

  Jonah remembered her – the girl in the moonbeam. She wore a slim black T-shirt with short sleeves and a sharp V opening down to her breasts. Her hair fell in long ringlets almost down to her waist, bound back with a circlet so she looked like some ancient prophetess.

  ‘You’re in the band too, right?’ She had to put her mouth right up against him to be heard above the music. ‘You’re Jonah.’

  The couch was tight, no doubt about that. When she put her drink down, there was nowhere for her hand to rest except on his thigh.

  ‘You played a great show tonight,’ she said. The tip of her tongue grazed his ear. ‘Your songs … ’ She put her hand on her midriff. ‘I feel them so deep.’

  ‘Thanks.’ It sounded gruff. He never knew how to handle praise.

  ‘Are you playing any more here in Berlin? I would like to see you again.’

  ‘This was our last night. The tour’s over.’

  ‘Then we should celebrate. You want to party some more? I know some clubs in Kreuzberg I can get us inside. It’s near my apartment.’

  And it would have been so easy. The night made everything possible, and morning was just a rumour. The lights and the water and the music all whispered that he could have her, forget the dawn and everything that came with it. So easy to forget.

  The temptation must have shown on his face. Alex, who’d drunk more than the others, was nodding his head, perhaps in time with the music. Shadow, wise to the danger, was trying to catch Jonah’s eye.

  But some things were worth remembering. Jonah stood, leaving the unfinished beer on the table.

  ‘I need to get to bed. I’ve got a long drive tomorrow.’

  Astrid started to rise with him. ‘It’s no problem. We—’

  ‘I’m going to see my wife.’

  Sibari

  Jumping at shadows meant you often missed the real thing. Focussed on the golden letters, Lily didn’t hear the car pull up outside. The shutters hid the sudden flare of the security lights.

  She adjusted the tablet under the microscope to read the last two lines. They called it a tablet, but that implied solidity. In fact, every time she touched it she expected it to curl up like a flower petal. The gold was beat
en to a thin foil; the elusive letters shifted with every change of the light. The conservator had done an amazing job reclaiming it from the mud where it had rested so long.

  Until Adam sacked her.

  The door banged downstairs – she must not have shut it properly. She copied out the last few letters, squinting hard at the unfamiliar shapes. The person who originally wrote the text had made plenty of mistakes, and she didn’t want to add more. She tried to imagine the first scribe, pressing the words into the foil with the haste of a lover. Or a thief.

  She shivered, breaking her concentration. In the gap, she heard a sound from the stairs. It wasn’t her imagination. There were footsteps, nearly at the top.

  There was no time to get back to the safe. She whipped the tablet off the microscope, snapped it into an old sweets tin and stuck it in her shorts pocket, then grabbed the Field Journal from the table just as the door opened.

  ‘Working late?’

  It was Richard, dressed in a white linen suit that made him look a million years old. She peered over his shoulder, but he seemed to have come alone.

  She waved the journal at him. ‘Just wanted to make sure it’s up to date. You?’

  ‘I was driving back, saw the lights from the road and thought I’d better check.’ His eyes sidled towards the store-room, the door she’d left open. Her pulse raced.

  ‘How was Ari?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Did you make him understand he can’t just take what he wants?’ That was rich, with the tablet burning a hole against her thigh.

  ‘You should have come. You can’t go picking fights with our sponsor and then sulk off.’

  ‘Should I have stuck around to fight some more?’ She crossed to the store-room and locked the door, feeling the weight of Richard’s gaze on her back. She bit her lip, and turned back with what she hoped was a complicit smile.

  ‘If I promise to be good, will you give me a ride back?’

  Berlin

  The van was a white Ford Econoline, dented and filthy, with SOUTH PECKHAM CHURCH OF THE REDEEMER painted down the side. Jonah had never been to the church, but he reckoned he probably owed them a few prayers of thanks. In seven years covering almost every road in Europe, it had never been stolen or broken into.

  ‘You’re good to drive?’

  Shadow had come to see him off, dressed in his boxers and still clutching a beer. The others were AWOL, though it didn’t matter. No one liked goodbyes at the end of a tour.

  ‘I’m fine.’ He threw his bag on the passenger seat, together with a thermos of coffee he’d filled from the breakfast bar. He’d need more. He’d had four hours of sleep, and had eighteen hours of driving ahead.

  ‘Did anyone go home with the girl from the club?’

  ‘She wasn’t interested in us.’ Shadow mock-pouted. ‘They never are – just want our boy-band reject. Shame you’re taken.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘You must be the only guy in the only band in the world who finishes a tour and goes back to his wife. Rock and roll.’

  Jonah climbed into the cab, brushing aside the food wrappers and drinks cans carpeting the floor. He closed the door and opened the window. At ten a.m. it was already twenty-five degrees, and he was heading south in a van whose air-conditioning was strictly wind-down technology.

  ‘How long are you going to be down there?’ Shadow asked.

  ‘Two, three weeks. Lily’s got another few days on the dig, then we’ll head up. Take our time.’

  ‘Sounds nice. Give my regards to Yoko.’

  ‘You know the Beatles only split up because they couldn’t live with Zeppelin.’

  They smiled, but there was a harder truth behind the jokes. Neither of them knew if there’d be another tour. The band had been together ten years, a minor miracle, but each time it got more difficult. Each new song was more of a struggle, each tour rougher than the last. The great shows, the ones where they walked off stage buzzing like gods, were fewer and further between, but the terrible hotels were there every night.

  Now wasn’t the time. They bumped fists through the open window. Jonah said a prayer to the God of South Peckham, and started the engine.

  ‘So long.’

  Shadow waved him away with the beer bottle. ‘Go to hell.’

  Jonah had spent so long on the road, he thought he could swallow the distance without feeling a thing. But this was different. The end of the road wasn’t another sticky club and hasty soundcheck: it was Lily. Every time he thought of her, impatience raced away with him; the odometer couldn’t possibly keep up.

  From the flat Prussian plain, the land gradually rose across hundreds of miles until he could see the snow-capped peaks of the Alps on the horizon. He crossed into Austria, deep in the shadow of the mountains, then into Italy. He wolfed down a sandwich and a Coke at a Rasthof just below the Brenner pass, took a lungful of mountain air and hurried back to the van. He had to get to the sole of the Italian boot, and he wasn’t yet halfway there.

  His phone buzzed. He glanced down from the road to read the text message.

  Drive safely, but don’t hang around. Need you here. {o} L

  He wondered what she meant. Driving one-handed, he thumbed a reply:

  On my way. Everything OK?

  A minute later:

  All fine. Can’t wait to have you back to myself. {o} L

  He ate again near Florence, slept a few hours in a truck stop near Rome, and breakfasted outside Naples as the breaking sun touched the summit of Vesuvius. Then it was through the mountains once more before the heady descent to Sibari. He could see the plain spread out before him, hemmed in by the mountains, and the blue sea shimmering through the distant haze. Just before nine o’clock, he rolled into the resort of Laghi di Sibari and cut the engine for the last time.

  Once, Sybaris had been a byword for hedonism. Twenty-five hundred years later, the only trace was a white-elephant marina complex, with hotels and condominiums built on long fingers into an artificial lagoon. The ancient city had been washed away; the modern one was just falling victim to the traditional Italian fate of neglect. Plaster peeled off the whitewashed buildings; several were missing shutters. Rubbish overflowed the bins and littered the streets. The boats still looked nice enough, but they were just passing through.

  Lily’s dig had block-booked rooms at a three-star hotel near the end of one of the quays: not somewhere you’d want to have a holiday, but better than a tent. From the receptionist, who spoke no English but smiled a lot, Jonah gathered the archaeologists had already left for the day.

  He felt a stab of disappointment – the hope of catching Lily at breakfast had kept him going ever since Naples. And it got worse when the receptionist showed him up to the room. All Lily’s stuff was there: clothes laid over a chair, books lined up on the dresser next to a small perfume bottle, the laptop open on the desk. The bikini draped over the balcony rail was still dripping from her morning swim. Everything except her.

  Not quite thinking, he sat down on the bed and kicked off his shoes. He wanted her so badly, but he’d slept six hours in forty-eight and his eyes felt like lead. He lay down, burrowing his face into the pillow to breathe in her scent. So badly.

  Half an hour. Then he’d go and find her.

  Three

  If you were at sea, would you be up on deck wrestling with the helm? Or would you let the captain take care of all that, and relax?

  Plato, Alcibiades

  The philosopher Heraclitus said, famously, that you can’t step into the same river twice. The world moves too much; everything’s in flow. The only constant is that nothing stands fast. The stream you dip your toe in is not the stream where you take the plunge. You’re not the same you, either.

  Aboard ship is the wrong place to read Heraclitus, who makes me queasy at the best of times. Here, his river has flooded into the sea, and the sea’s become the whole world. Everything moves. The crew bustle about trying to tame the ship; sails flap and ropes flex; the deck
rises and falls; words swim, and endless waves bend the horizon. Not a place to look for truth.

  We were a day out from the Piraeus and making good speed. The purple mountains of the Peloponnese crawled by, the sun shone through the thin sail and made shadows of the ropes behind it. The lines and brails made a regular grid on the sail’s face, overwritten by the arcs and diagonals of stays, halyards, braces and shrouds. A mathematical beauty.

  Checking that no one was watching, I pulled out Agathon’s letter and flattened it against the scroll in my hand.

  A PYTHAGOREAN TEACHER HAS A BOOK OF WISDOM HE IS WILLING TO SELL, BUT HE WANTS ONE HUNDRED DRACHMAS FOR IT. CAN YOU SEND THE MONEY – OR, BETTER YET, BRING IT YOURSELF?

  I PRAY YOU WILL COME. I HAVE LEARNED MANY THINGS WHICH I CANNOT PUT IN THIS LETTER: SOME WOULD TRULY AMAZE YOU. BUT ITALY IS A STRANGE PLACE, FULL OF WONDERS AND DANGERS. THERE IS NO ONE HERE I TRUST WITH THESE SECRETS.

  I HAVE BEEN STAYING WITH DIMOS IN THURII, BUT WILL WAIT FOR YOU IN TARAS. I HAVE MADE CERTAIN FRIENDS I WOULD LIKE YOU TO MEET.

  Agathon. Of all Socrates’ pupils, his star burned brightest. After the execution, when we scattered, he and I lived together in Megara studying for a time. I had five years on him and still couldn’t keep up. I was a donkey, trudging the winding path; he was a sure-footed goat who bounded up the mountain in great leaps, never falling because he never looked down. For ten years, it was Agathon who led us from city to city and island to island in search of some teacher he’d heard of, and Agathon who got bored first when we found him. Agathon who wanted more, and Agathon who first caught the whispers that perhaps the answers we sought were in Italy.

  A shadow fell over me, with a breath of narcissus perfume. I looked up and winced as the boat came around and the sun blazed over the edge of the sail. I’d avoided the sophist until then: he had a berth in the deckhouse with the officers and the syndicate merchants, while I slept on deck with the other passengers. Whenever I saw him moving forward, I went aft to the latrine; if he came aft, I went down to the galley to beg some bread off the ship’s cook. Even on a hundred-foot wooden prison, there are ways of avoiding people.