by John Gardner
Not the ephors. That’s become clear. They came yesterday, just the usual three, this time, with their usual retinue and pomp. My heart leaped when I saw the tall one striding across the field toward us, almost ahead of the guards who are supposed to precede him. When he arrived at the cell door he smiled at me, unmistakably friendly, his head high, as always, shoulders only slightly stooped, as if from politeness or kindly interest in our welfare. “How’ve you been?” he said, soft-voiced, very dignified. The others—the fat one and the square, mulish one—tipped their perspiring heads toward me to listen.
“I’m OK,” I said, “but Agathon’s awful.” I drew away from the bars so they could see. He was sprawled on his back in the bed, with his feet up on the wall because he felt faint.
“My goodness,” the tall ephor said, and frowned. He met my eyes in the penetrating, attentive way he has. “How long has he been like this?”
“For days,” I said. “He gets up sometimes and wanders around like he’s looking for something, and sometimes he sits down at the table and—” I was going to say writes, but something made me check myself. They would want to see what he’d written. He never gave them the stuff, himself; it would be wrong for me to do it for him. The ephor watched me. He caught the pause and read it, no doubt rightly. “I don’t know,” I said. “Just sits. Sometimes he comes over here by the door and sits leaning on it, trying to get air. The heat really gets terrible sometimes, and the smell in here…” The ephor nodded; he’d registered that already. I said, “His mind’s funny. Almost like he’s delirious, at times. He’s got a really bad fever. I have to keep washing his forehead with cold water the jailer brings. Sometimes Agathon doesn’t seem to know me, but then other times he’s as lucid as anything. A doctor gave him some medicine, but he’s still getting worse. It’s serious.”
“This is not a good atmosphere for a sick man,” the ephor said, looking the cell over, noting details.
“The rats bite his fingers and toes,” I said. “That’s where he got the disease, I think. A couple of the rats have died. The jailer can tell you.”
He turned his head and glanced at the jailer. The jailer nodded.
“Is he eating properly?” the ephor asked, watching me.
I shook my head, serious, though the question seemed odd—stupid. I said, “Hardly at all.” While he seemed to reflect on that, I said, “You said there’d be an investigation. Has it come to anything?”
He considered, watching me with his pale eyes. “Is an investigation what Agathon really wants, Demodokos?”
It reeled me. I thought it had been going on for weeks. “You haven’t started it?” I said. I hung onto the bars to give help to my knees.
“The question is whether Agathon really wants an investigation,” the ephor said gently.
I glanced at the jailer and he looked away. He too was amazed, I had a feeling.
“Let me understand this,” I said. “You said there would have to be an investigation—but you haven’t even started it?”
He cleared his throat and tipped his head slightly, meeting my eyes as if thinking out what would be best for me. “You realize what’s involved here, Demodokos. Before I can move an inch I have to have some reassurance that an investigation is what Agathon himself prefers.”
“But that’s crazy,” I said. “You’re an ephor and he’s just a sick old man. What’s the difference what he wants? Who knows what the crazy old bastard wants? He’s going to die in here. You think that’s what he wants?”
The tall ephor continued watching me, not moving at all except for the quiver of one eyelid. “I’ve assured Agathon that he’s perfectly safe as long as I’m around this place. I think he knows that.”
I shook my head, jerking the confusion away, and wiped the hair back out of my eyes. “OK,” I said, trying to penetrate the talk, the fatherly gentleness—trying to start over. “OK, never mind,” I said. “Start all over. Agathon will be dead in a week if he doesn’t get out of this stinking cell. Is it possible for you to get him loose?”
The ephor studied me, thinking. He really did have a kind face: I hadn’t been wrong about that; and you could see the speed of his thought: I’d been right about that too. And he was honest. Liars can mask their lies, but no man can put on the look of simple honesty. Then what was wrong?
“Is it possible to get him out?” I said again.
The ephor cleared his throat and pursed his lips. At last he said, “No.”
“No?” I whispered it.
Now the three ephors said it at once, the little fat one wringing his puffy white hands in dismay, the stern one gruffly, as if the decision was nobody’s but his. “No.” The tall one shook his head decisively. It was entirely out of the question.
I went over to the table and sat down. They talked with the jailer.
“Demodokos?” the tall ephor called. I refused to answer. Eventually they left.
I don’t get it. I’ve given up thinking about it.
But a little before dawn this morning my new hope came. I don’t know where the jailer was—sleeping in his hut, probably. Anyway, I woke up with a start when something bumped my arm. I looked down: a clod of dirt. I thought it fell from the ceiling, but then I heard the hiss from the door. It was the boy, the one that brought the letter to Agathon. He waved me toward him. He was scared as hell, his eyes rolling back and forth like a chased dog’s. The jailer hadn’t put up the planks the boy had hid under last time. Agathon was asleep, half off the bed, whimpering, very sick. I crawled over to the door, jerking my head, trying to shake away sleep.
“Three nights from now. Midnight,” the boy whispered. “Have the old man ready.”
“What?” I said. “Ready for what?”
But he was gone.
Three nights, then.
If only the perverse old bastard will stay alive. He may. He’s almost like normal today, feisty and impish, jabbering about the beautiful glitter of the snow.
28 Agathon:
The rest in haste. I have certain reasons for believing I am running out of time.
Late one night I was roughly awakened and summoned to Lykourgos’s chamber. I was given no time to dress but went in my nightgown. Lykourgos sat at his desk, solemn, as quiet and dangerous as quicksand. Six of his ephors were with him, some seated, some standing, all formal, dangerous. I moved toward his desk like a man on trial. On his desk he had an open scroll. I recognized it at once.
He was direct. “You know a Helot by the same of Dorkis?”
“I may,” I said. I pretended to cast about.
“You know him, all right,” he said. “Examine this.” He pushed the scroll toward me. “You’ve seen it before?”
I shook my head.
“It’s seditious,” he said. “It opposes us.”
I shrugged, though frightened, and ventured a joke. “All life opposes you, Lykourgos. You must learn to take it in stride.”
“Be still,” he whispered. I had never heard Lykourgos whisper. I felt myself trembling, the bones melting in my legs.
“I forgot my crutch,” I said, rather loudly. “I wonder if I might have a chair?”
“A chair,” Lykourgos commanded. One of the ephors brought one. I sat down. My leg had suddenly and unaccountably begun to give me pain, and I reached under my knee to clamp the place that hurt. Instantly Alkander appeared from somewhere in the shadows behind me and laid his dagger on my shoulder with the blade, light as a hair, along my throat. I glanced at Lykourgos, and he frowned. Alkander stepped back.
“I ask you whether you recognize this writing as that of your Helot friend Dorkis.” He tapped the scroll, hard, with two fingers.
“No,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen his writing.”
“That’s hard to believe.” His one-eyed gaze drilled into me, through me. But he changed his tack. “You have served as a professional scribe, have you not?”
I nodded.
“As a scribe, you’d know this writing if you�
�d seen it before?” He watched, not a muscle moving.
“That’s ridiculous,” I said, though it wasn’t. My whole body was shaking. “Why should I remember every hand I have ever come across?”
Lykourgos waited. He had three tall shadows, two flickering on the wall from the lamps on the desk in front of him, one stretching out on the floor from the lamp on the wall ledge. Below his two shadows on the wall I could see the many shadows of Alkander and the ephors hovering around me. I felt surrounded, the shadows at least as dangerous as the men.
“I have never seen this hand before,” I said.
He said, “You’re a liar.”
Again we waited. I concentrated on the point where the flames of the two desk lamps converged in Lykourgos’s eye. At last he said, “Read it.”
I read a few lines.
Of any revolution it may be said later that perhaps some atrocity might have been avoided. But few who raise the question are men of goodwill.
Lykourgos said, “You know the style of speech?”
I pretended to search my memory, then shook my head.
His eye still nailed me. Without raising his voice he said, “Bring in the prisoner.”
The two guards at the door went out and returned not with Iona but with a man. He’d been whipped badly. His head and torso were a mass of blood and torn flesh. One eye was swollen shut, the other only partly shut. It snapped into focus on something far in the distance.
I glanced back at Lykourgos. “You fool.”
“Perhaps.” He watched me, thinking. He knew me too well to doubt that I had some reason for calling him a fool when I saw his prisoner. But he showed no emotion. When he signaled, the guards brought Dorkis close to the desk. He looked down at me and faintly smiled. They’d broken his teeth and smashed the powerful cheek muscles, but they hadn’t changed him, hadn’t even touched him. The wounds were mere facticity. Thaletes was right.
“Agathon,” he said, moving his mouth with difficulty. “Bless you.” Again the ghostly smile.
“Who wrote this?” Lykourgos said, pointing to the scroll.
Dorkis ducked his head a little, like a boxer moving in, and cocked his brows. “I did.”
“Who taught you to write?” Lykourgos said.
“A friend.”
Lykourgos looked at me.
“I never taught Dorkis anything,” I said. “If I did teach him, which I didn’t, I know of no law against it.”
“No law against…writing,” Dorkis said. He tried to talk without touching his swollen and broken lips together.
“This writing is against the law,” Lykourgos said.
Dorkis actually grinned. “He didn’t teach me this writing.”
I was impressed; in fact, awed. Shackled, beaten, Dorkis seemed more powerful than all of them. It seemed to me for an instant that he had learned something of unspeakable importance, but the next instant I doubted that—it was my silly philosopher’s prejudice, that power comes from knowledge. It struck me (God knows what I meant by it) that Something had learned Dorkis. It was as if one of his gods had gotten inside him, had taken over.
But I had no time for abstract speculations. I too could hardly want the real writer of the scroll discovered, but I couldn’t let Dorkis throw himself to the Spartans if I could save him without involving her. I said, “Lykourgos, you know this man. He’s been absolutely faithful, completely dependable, for years. Why should he suddenly turn to sedition now? And if he’s turned to sedition, why doesn’t he make use of the actual power he’s got, because of his position? Why doesn’t he, say, organize an army of saboteurs—burn the storehouses, plug the sewage ditches, destroy the herds?”
Lykourgos rubbed his jaw. “Curious that you’ve hit the details so well.”
I looked at Dorkis. Obviously I had not been keeping up. He smiled.
“It’s impossible,” I said. But my mind had quit. A minute passed.
“The plan was of course discovered,” Lykourgos said. “It was a stupid plan. Unworthy of our friend. As for you—” He reflected. “Though I know you to be a liar, I am inclined to doubt that you involved yourself in the plot. It was too bold, too direct, and I believe you to be…more timid.” He showed his horse’s teeth. It was meant to be a smile. He told the guards, “Take the prisoner away.”
The guards approached Dorkis but did not touch him, wishing to give him no more pain. He turned to go with them. He reached toward my arm with one shackled hand, but he was too far away to touch me. “Agathon, look after them, if you can.”
I nodded.
He was executed in the public square. He wore only a loincloth, the usual garb of the condemned. He knelt, as directed, and the priest he had chosen put water on his forehead, then backed away, head bowed, and stood looking religious. The two executioners came up to stand beside Dorkis, each of them holding his iron bar in two hands. They waited for the iren’s signal. As for Dorkis, he seemed to be beyond waiting for anything judgeable by our kind of time. He knelt with what seemed infinite patience and something I’m almost embarrassed to give its name: tenderness. He was separate—totally, absolutely—separate from everything around him. It was as if he had at last, without thinking about it, accepted something, and the choice had transmuted him. I tried to think, snatching at straws to keep my feelings dead, what it was that made his kneeling different from that of a condemned Spartan, but I couldn’t get hold of it. Then the iren went to him and asked him something, and Dorkis nodded, gently, as if to a child. And suddenly I knew. He had accepted evil. Not any specific evil, such as hatred, or suffering, or death, but evil as a necessary principle of the world—time as a perpetual perishing, space as creation and wreckage.
The iren gave the signal. They killed him with the first swing.
29 Peeker:
The old bastard’s impossible! I may strangle him yet! I told him the Helots were going to rescue us, and his eyes got big as oven lids.
The hell!” he said. “That’s dangerous!”
I told him we had no choice, the place was killing him, but he wouldn’t listen. He whooped to cover up my voice.
“It’s rape!” he yelled. “It’s a violation of my civil rights!”
“You have no civil rights,” I said.
He thought about it. “That’s true.” He thought some more. “Rape!” he yelled. “Rape! Rape!” You could hear him twenty miles away. I tried to cover his mouth to keep the jailer from coming, but he bit me. “Rape! Rape! Rape!” I hit him over the head with the lamp. He passed out.
But what am I to do when the Helots come to rescue us? If I keep on hitting him on the head I’m liable to kill him. I might not be exactly sorry, in fact, but how the hell would I explain it?
The Helots are setting it up even now, if I’m not mistaken. Breakfast was two hours late this morning—it was a real shit two hours, with Agathon growling and grumphing around, saying the whole damn thing was my fault—and when the jailer came he said it was because the prison was shorthanded. Somebody blew away the palace guards last night, and the ephors transferred a group of the prison guards to the palace. Standard procedure, our jailer says. I suppose they must have known that, or else it was a clever guess. The palace guards and the prison guards are supposed to be the two toughest outfits. While I was talking to the jailer, Agathon ate my food. I am going to kill him.
The guard left without waiting for our plates, and we haven’t seen him since. Someone has been watching us all day, across the field. A girl, I think. I only catch a glimpse of her now and then, sticking her head up over the bushes. Whitish blonde hair tight to her head, dirty face, maybe purposely smudged. You’d never see her if you didn’t sit staring at the hedge, watching. It occurs to me that a good bowman could pick off our guard with no trouble at all as he stands looking in at us, talking. I’m tempted to warn him, but how can I?
The palace guards. God. Maybe the rebellion really will succeed. The bastards are nervy, anyway. At least the rescue will succeed, I think. I’ve go
t a plan. I’ll tear up my clothes in strips and then I’ll gag the old man and tie his hands and feet.
No. Fuck it. I’ll tear up Agathon’s clothes.
Will the girl come when they rescue us?
Why in hell did I never ask them their names when they smiled at me, swiping my apples? What if I get killed or something, and I never even touched a girl’s hand?
30 Agathon:
I have whatever the rats have. I can no longer deny it. Ah well, these pages convince me that I deserve it. The sickness works slowly, as plagues go—a point I mention merely for its facticity, as Thaletes would say. I’ve seen the seaport plague before. And so I am a dead man. Reflection tells me that death must certainly be one of two things: either a wonderfully sound sleep, in which eternity passes like a single night, or else the soul’s journey to another place. Either way, clearly, death is a gain. What private man—indeed, what king—ever passed a more pleasant day or night than the night passed in dreamless slumber? On the other hand, what would a man not give if he might converse with Orpheus and Musaeus and Hesiod and Homer? Should a wise man fear death, then? Emphatically not! A further proof of my foolishness. I am scared to the soles of my shoes.
Luckily, I haven’t the energy to concentrate on fear. I can hardly stand up. I haven’t even the energy to tease my jailer.
Her grandson came again last night. Talked mostly with Peeker, plotting my rescue. Hah! I stayed at the table, exceedingly unwell, sometimes passing out momentarily—but never mind that. How long has it been since the first time he came? A week? A month? How long have I been out of touch with ordinary time?
The revolution drags on. Very close to us now. All around us. Bah. The boy gave us the latest news with childish pride. I merely looked at him from my table, leaning on my fists. He must have been hardly more than a baby at the time of his grandfather’s abortive revolution—the one that killed him. I might, another time, have worked up mock enthusiasm, my only answer to the optimistic excitement of lunatics.
