The Orpheus Descent

by Tom Harper

  She stood in front of me wearing a long white dress. It clung to her body so tightly that she seemed to be naked, except for a piece of ivy around her middle like a belt.

  She reached down and pulled me to my feet. Even on that warm night, her hand was cool to the touch. She looked at the bed. Her marble face trembled.

  ‘We have to move him. There isn’t much time.’

  ‘What about the guards?’ I’d lain awake for hours on the stone floor, listening to the march of their footsteps, regular as a heartbeat, and the shouts as they changed watch every hour. The last change only seemed five minutes ago.

  ‘Help me,’ she said.

  I didn’t ask how she’d got there. In the dream, it didn’t matter. I took Agathon’s shoulders, Diotima his feet. He felt much lighter than when I’d carried him back from the well.

  ‘Where are we taking him?’

  ‘To rest.’

  A handcart was waiting in the courtyard outside. A tall, bare-chested slave helped us lay Agathon down in the back, then took the handles. He moved quickly, a graceful half-run that made me think of a centaur. Diotima and I followed.

  ‘What about the guards? What about the gates?’

  She moved like moonlight, flitting across the courtyards and through the porches unchallenged. Past the temples, past the lions and the arsenals where Dionysius’ power slept. The cart’s wheels had cloth tied over their rims and didn’t make a sound.

  We reached the first gate. The massive doors seemed to rise all the way to the stars, but Diotima whispered something to the guards and they pushed back the bolts without question. The bronze pegs spun, the doors swung open and a gaping chasm opened in front of us.

  Three times that happened; then we were off the island and in the town. A lonely dog bounded across the road, perhaps chasing a rat. An owl hooted from the plane trees in the agora. Apart from that, the streets were empty.

  We carried on through the vast and dark unknown. The axle squeaked, the wheels grumbled softly. Syracuse passed behind us. The starlit landscape opened around me: looming shadows suggested hills, fields, trees. A primitive world.

  Then fire came into it. I saw it from some way off, like a candle through an open door. As we approached, it separated into a constellation of tiny lights. A group of people stood in a circle inside a poplar grove. They wore long white robes, and veils over their faces. Each of them cupped a lamp in his hands, holding it chest high like a glowing heart. They made me think of the Odyssey, of Homer’s ‘thin, airy shoals of visionary ghosts’. But they didn’t frighten me. They seemed reverent, not bloodthirsty; at peace with the world, not jealous of it.

  Agathon’s cart stopped in the centre of the circle. The slave had vanished. I stepped into a gap in the circle and realised I’d closed it. Hands put a cloak over my shoulders and a lamp in my palm, though they left my face uncovered.

  Diotima raised her arms and chanted an incantation to the goddess. Someone had put a jewelled wreath on her head, golden leaves bearing fruits of garnets and pearls.

  Maiden who anchors the eternal world in our own,

  Immortal, Blessed, crowned with every grace,

  Deep breasted Earth, sweet plains and fields, fragrant grasses in the nurturing rains,

  Around you fly the beauteous stars, eternal and divine,

  Come, Blessed Goddess, and hear the prayers of Your children.

  A piece of gold flickered in her hands. She reached down and laid it on Agathon’s tongue. It caught light from the lamps, glowing in his mouth like the last ember of life. I thought of the broken tomb at Taras, and the gold tablet he’d stolen. Now the tomb had claimed him back.

  Had he found what he was looking for at last?

  Only those who’ve paid Persephone the price

  For the pain, for the grief, of long ago –

  Theirs are the souls that she sends,

  When the ninth year comes,

  Back to the sun-lit world above.

  And from those souls, proud-hearted kings will rise,

  And the swift and the strong, the wisest of the wise.

  And people, for the rest of time,

  Will hail them as heroes, to be held in awe.

  She put a myrtle crown on his head. Six men came through the circle, carrying a clay coffin. They put it down next to the cart and lifted the body into the coffin. I stepped forward to help, but Diotima gave me a glance that said stay where you are. A soft wind blew through the trees.

  When Agathon was in the casket, a girl brought a wide krater that seemed to be filled with ashes. Diotima took a handful and scattered them over the coffin. As they fluttered down, I saw they were leaves, olive and poplar, mixed with barley grains that rattled on the coffin floor.

  The six men closed the coffin and lifted it onto their shoulders. The circle broke open to let them through, then flowed in behind the coffin. The procession moved off, until I was left alone with Diotima.

  ‘Should I follow?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  She held my hand. We stood side by side in the centre of where the circle had been and watched the lamps recede. They faded, then vanished suddenly, as if some deeper hole in the darkness had swallowed them.

  All I remember of the journey back is rushing wind and the sound of doors slamming. Then I was in my room and Diotima was with me, standing close.

  ‘Do you understand what you saw tonight? Where you went?’

  I didn’t understand a thing. ‘The thing you put in his mouth. Was that the gold tablet?’

  ‘He needs it for his journey.’

  ‘But Dionysius took it. Did you—?’

  ‘There are others.’

  The full moon shone over the sea and through the open window, trapping us both in its beam. She examined me like a tailor measuring out cloth for cutting.

  ‘You found Agathon,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now what are you looking for?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Perhaps that was the wrong thing to say. She stepped back into the shadows, almost invisible. Her hands flashed in the moonlight as they moved to her throat; I heard something flutter to the floor. Had she vanished?

  She moved forward again into the shaft of moonlight. She was naked. I thought I’d seen everything at Dimos’ house, but now I realised how much her transparent dress had managed to conceal. It had blurred the lines, softening reality like smoke. Now every inch of her body was stark and clear. If you could walk up to a statue of the goddess and rip off her Olympian robes, this is what you might see. Though you wouldn’t live to tell of it.

  She untied my belt. I lifted my tunic over my head and threw it away. She put her hands on my shoulders and pressed me down onto my knees. I kissed her stomach, her hips, the inside of her thighs. She twined her fingers in my hair, moving me where she wanted me, and I obeyed.

  She slid down onto her knees so that she straddled me. With one hand, she fed her breast into my mouth. I bit down and she gasped. She pushed me back onto the floor. Staring up at her in the moonlight, her body was flawless, the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

  I slid into her. She moved against me, and the whole earth shifted. The world peeled away and I stood on a sea-less beach of endless sand, under a cloudless sky. I looked for shade but there was none, not even my own shadow. The sky was perfect blue, but I couldn’t see the sun. Only light.

  Diotima leaned back, her arms on the floor. She hooked her knees around me and pulled, squeezing herself into me and rocking back. Sweat ran down my chest. Lines of light raced through me. I gazed down at her: head tipped back, teeth bared, hair flowing down her back, eyes closed in a trance.

  She laid me back onto the floor. She leaned forward, letting her nipples brush my chest, dappling my face with kisses. Dazzling colours swam through my head as if she’d painted them straight onto my eyes. My skin stretched so tight I became an instrument, resonating like a lyre. Every sound in the world rang through me, the mad mountai
n music that the bacchantes dance to. I writhed and twisted, pinned between her thighs; I kicked my feet against the stone floor. I raked my nails down her sides until I drew blood and still she wouldn’t let me go. She smiled at me, and it was as if I suddenly understood everything I’d ever wanted to know.

  My soul swelled inside me until my body couldn’t contain it. I emptied myself into her, shuddering, and the convulsions split me open like a clay mould struck by a hammer. The halves of my body fell apart. Nestled inside, released, I saw a figure like a sleeping child, burning with the brilliant white light of pure gold. Beauty Itself.

  Diotima rocked forward with a moan that seemed to come from the depths of the earth. She grabbed my hair and pulled me up and buried my face in her breasts. I wrapped my arms around her back and clung on. My body was an empty husk. She cradled my head against her and I was lost in darkness. Her breast pressed into my mouth and I tasted the sticky, milky flavour of figs on my tongue.

  By my ear, I heard a sigh that sounded almost like laughter.

  Twenty-six

  Jonah – Athens

  He was standing in a wasteland, a red desert filled with scrap metal and rubbish. Tottering towers of rusted cars rose impossibly high around him, further than he could see, scraping the clouds. A light, powdery ash rained down on him.

  Engines screamed from above. A burning plane crashed out of the sky, smoke billowing behind it. Lily was on board – he had to stop it before it hit the ground.

  He started to climb one of the car towers, but it swayed so much he couldn’t go fast enough. And the plane kept falling: down, down, down, spinning like a sycamore seed in a high wind …

  When he opened his eyes, the sun was up and Adam was gone. A white business card lay on the granite counter with a note scrawled on the back.

  Come to the office at two. Ari will see you.

  The address was on the front of the card, underneath the Eikasia Foundation logo and Adam’s name. Program Director.

  Under the title, Adam had written, ‘I exercise oversight.’ It was the first joke Jonah could remember him making.

  Did you oversee Lily being kidnapped? It was a crazy thought. He said it out loud to see if it made any more sense. All he could think of was the hospital in Aegion, Lily’s face white as death, Adam sitting beside her bed. He saved her life. He loved her.

  Ten years ago.

  He tried to think about Ren, though it was like trying to describe music you’d never heard. He thought of the story she’d told him, how Zeus had betrayed his own daughter (who was also his niece) to his brother Hades.

  It’s all a bit incestuous.

  The address on the card was on another long street that spilled out towards a big square, not far from the flat. Even before he got there, Jonah could tell something wasn’t right. There was smoke in the air, black and chemical, a haze that made the sun glow red and his nose run. The Eikasia Foundation office windows were shuttered up to the third floor; so was every other building around it. The entire street, a major boulevard that cut a straight line through a good mile of Athens, was empty. Not empty as in ‘quiet’, empty as in ‘deserted’. In the distance, he heard a roar like a wall of water gathering pace down a mountain.

  What’s that sound? In his head, he heard Buffalo Springfield warning him away, two haunting notes cycling ominously back and forth. He buzzed the entryphone, but no one answered. He rattled the door. In desperation, he picked up an empty Coke can from a pile of uncollected rubbish on the kerb and threw it against the shutters. It bounced off with a hollow clang, but no one answered.

  He got out his phone – no missed calls, no messages – and rang Adam.

  ‘Where are you?’ said Adam.

  ‘I’m at your office. Where’s Ari Maroussis?’

  ‘Are you joking? If he went down there today, the mob would string him up from the nearest lamppost.’

  ‘The mob?’

  ‘The demonstration.’ A click of the tongue as something fell into place. ‘Didn’t you get my message? You need to get out of there now. It’s going to be ugly.’

  The wave that had been building out of sight suddenly came around the corner. A wall of people, with a red banner stretched in front of them like the scoop of a bulldozer. More banners waved overhead, hand-painted with angry slogans, hammers and sickles, clenched fists.

  Jonah shoved the phone in his pocket. Individually, you could have picked anyone out of the crowd and seen nothing threatening at all. Many looked like pensioners out for a Sunday stroll: men with neat white moustaches and tweed suits; widows wearing black dresses and headscarves. They didn’t look like a revolution.

  But Jonah had seen crowd trouble once before, at a big festival in the Netherlands that had got out of hand. He knew what thousands of people moving in one direction did if someone got in their way. They filled the street like water in a pipe. No way for Jonah to squeeze past, not even a doorway in the shuttered shops to shelter in. All he could do was run.

  A block away, the street opened into a wide square. It looked like a battlefield. Rubble lay scattered across the broken pavement like blast debris, and the plane trees that grew over it cast no shade because their leaves and branches had burned away. Further up, a crowd massed in front of the Parliament building: more shouts, more banners, while megaphones distorted and amplified the anger. A line of white-helmeted policemen stared them down from the steps, shields locked in a Perspex wall.

  Jonah felt giddy, as if he were standing on the rim of a vast bowl. Warm petrol fumes blew over him. If anyone lit a match …

  The marchers were coming up behind him. He turned left, looking for a way out, and for a moment he thought he’d lost his bearings completely. There were the marchers again, a wall across the street pushing forward into the square. He rubbed his eyes and pain flared as if he’d been stung. He turned again. The marchers were still coming. Turned again. There they were. Through the tears, a part of him noticed that these protesters had a yellow banner. Wasn’t the other one red?

  He had no time to think. His eyes itched like mad, but he knew if he touched them it would be ten times worse. Smoke and tears cut off the world. If he stayed where he was, he’d be crushed.

  On the side of a building, he noticed a street sign, printed in Greek and English for the benefit of tourists. Syntagma Square.

  Stay away from the Parliament building in Syntagma Square, Adam had told him. But he’d sent him there anyway – and now he didn’t have a choice.

  Five lanes of road ringed the square, but the only evidence of cars was burning tyres. Jonah ran across, trying not to trip on the stone blocks littering the way, and found himself at the foot of a tree beside an empty fountain. Perhaps it had boiled dry. Behind him, the red banners and the yellow banners poured in to add their weight to the crowd in front of the Parliament. The roar doubled, tripled. More megaphones joined in, cranking up the volume in blaring competition.

  But some sounds cut through everything – like the sound of breaking glass. Jonah heard it and followed the sound. A hundred feet away, a cloud of flame roared up from a broken bottle on the ground, as though a gas vent had opened in the earth.

  Molotov cocktail, his brain said. But it couldn’t pass the information to his legs. All he could do was watch as a gaggle of young men in jeans, balaclavas and gas masks ran across the square to join the crowd. Who brings their own gas mask to a demonstration? Some of the protestors tried to push them away, but the men in hoods forced themselves through to the front. Sparks flared; burning bottles flew through the air and smashed on the Parliament steps. More flames. From his right, Jonah heard a flat pop, like a cork coming out of a wine bottle.

  Everything changed. The police line came to life and advanced down the steps towards the protestors. Batons swung; clouds of yellow smoke blossomed in mid-air as the tear gas fell. The shouts turned to screams, though one or two of the megaphones kept going, shouting resistance even as the crowd disintegrated. In an instant, the wall of peop
le shattered into thousands of panicked fragments.

  Perhaps this was how drowning felt – except that in the sea, the currents were vast and constant. Here, he was part of the chaos: one among thousands going wherever terror took them.

  Another word swam from his memory: kettling. The currents ripping him weren’t random. Somewhere, some intelligence was closing down possibilities, directing the crowd with sticks and rubber bullets. Herding them. Through the smoke ahead, he saw the dark mouth of a Metro entrance leading underground. Hundreds of protesters jammed the stairs, so thick they were no longer people, just bodies and limbs and heads. He wondered if they could even breathe. Some tried to get away but the police beat them back, funnelling them into the hole like rabbits in a sack. More police lined the railings around the steps, watching the chaos. Their gas masks gave them bulging eyes and strange rubbery snouts, as if demons from the underworld had come up to enjoy the sport.

  Terror gripped him. He knew, with irrational but absolute certainty, that if he went down that hole he’d never come up. A white-helmeted policeman leaned over the rail, aimed his gun down and fired a gas grenade straight into the hole. Smoke fumed out; the crowd convulsed, but the pressure was too great. They couldn’t go anywhere but down.

  He tried to turn. He knew he was going the right way when every other face was against him. Bloodied, weeping, contorted faces: the legions of the dead pouring past. He lashed out, flailing his arms like a swimmer, but for every step forward the crowd pushed him back two.

  The tear gas was so thick he could hardly breathe. His throat had closed up, his nose ran, his eyes burned. He forced them open to see where he was going: if he closed them, even for a second, he’d be sucked into the hole. His lungs felt as if they’d burst. He ripped off his T-shirt and held it over his face like he’d seen other people do.

  A gap opened in the crowd where someone had fallen. A woman, long brown hair trailing down her back. She tried to push herself up, but the crowd knocked her down again. If he was quick, he might get over her and build up some momentum against the crowd.