The Orpheus Descent (17 page)

I rubbed my eyes. One step further it appeared again. And again. A trail of words leading up the street, each a pace apart. Fainter, where the earth was dry and footsteps had scuffed the dust, but still legible.

I’ve seen marks like this before. Whores in the Kerameikos use them: little boots with words carved on the sole, advertising their bodies wherever they go, like cats putting down scent.

The ground was newly wet, and the footprint newer still. Whoever left the marks, she must have left the house recently – and by the men’s entrance. Had she stayed the night, after all?

Follow me.

I was in a susceptible state. I followed.

The prints avoided the main boulevards, sticking to the sidestreets and back alleys where fewer feet could overwrite them. The further I went, the more certain I was that they were a message – a message for
me
. What it might be, or why, I couldn’t think. That’s why I followed.

The trail ended at the door of a large house near the edge of town, where the streets began to unwind from their strict symmetry. Across marshy fields, the forked peak of Mount Apollion punctured the sky. Two columns supported a porch, one with a herm facing out of it and a bell hanging from his outstretched phallus. I rang it.

A slave answered, a stooped woman with grey hair tied up in a bun.

‘Whose house is this?’ I asked.

She held open the door with a mute smile, letting me in to a shady courtyard. A fruiting apricot tree grew in the centre, surrounded by a tiled floor which showed birds nesting among vines and ivy. On a table under the tree, a real bird sat silent in a wicker cage.

The air was sweet with the smell of apricots – and figs too. I looked for another tree, but didn’t see one. And it was too early in the season for figs, anyway.

‘Don’t trust your senses?’

Diotima slipped out from behind a pillar. I started, though only because the sound surprised me. The fact of her being there seemed entirely logical, as if I’d known it already.

Don’t trust your senses.
Was it a question?

‘I followed your footsteps.’

‘I thought you might.’ She took another step closer. ‘You look like a man looking for something to follow.’

I didn’t know what to say. I could have told her
no
, that I wasn’t looking for someone to follow but someone I’d lost, a friend whose cloak she’d worn last night. I could have asked how she came by it.

I wasn’t ready for the answers, so I studied her instead. She had a face that somehow escaped age, the character so strong that nothing could touch it. Her skin was smooth; her features firm; her eyes deep as time. She wore a simple linen dress, with a necklace of beads and dried figs at her throat. I thought that might be what I’d smelled, though the ripe scent didn’t belong with those shrivelled husks.

I have a weakness for figs. Socrates always used to tease me about it. He said it was the only time I was willing to get my hands sticky.

Her grey eyes caught me looking and I blushed. I’d seen her virtually naked the night before, but this felt more guiltily intimate. I took cover behind banality.

‘You have a beautiful house.’

‘Thank you.’

Even in Italy, it must have cost a small fortune. ‘Do you have estates in the country?’

‘No.’

‘Some kind of workshop?’

‘What are you trying to imply?’

I winced. The word I’d used,
ergasterion
, can mean any sort of workshop. It can also mean a more specific, intimate sort of commercial establishment.

‘I didn’t mean to imply …’

She wasn’t offended. ‘Men want to be friends with me.’

‘Naturally.’

‘Some of them choose to show their feelings with gifts.’

I looked around the room: the paintings on the wall; the expensive ceramics displayed in an alcove; a pair of gilded sandals put together under a chair.

‘You must have generous friends.’

‘When I let them get close.’

There was a name for her line of work, though even Socrates wouldn’t have used it to her face.
Hetaira
. Not bought like a prostitute, but far more expensive to maintain than a wife. Available, but not for sale. Respected, occasionally, but a long way from respectable.

‘Is Dimos a friend?’ I tried to sound casual. Inside, the Voice of Desire was screaming to know whether she’d spent the night with him.

‘He’s very attentive.’

‘You came to his dinner party.’

‘I heard he had a famous Athenian philosopher visiting. I wanted to see for myself.’

‘I hope Euphemus didn’t disappoint.’

She gave a small, private smile that didn’t seem meant for me. Behind its wicker bars, the caged bird preened itself. I wondered why she kept it.

‘Shall we take a walk?’

She’d changed her shoes: these ones didn’t say anything. Nor was she wearing Agathon’s cloak. She led me back through the city, pointing out the temples, the public statues, the theatre. She chattered away about Hippodamus, the architect who designed the city; and Protagoras, the sophist who wrote its law code. I followed and listened. It felt strange, to be walking with a woman as companionably as if we were two men going to the gymnasium. But then, everything about Diotima was strange.

And, in truth, I didn’t have much idea what you say to women. Perhaps if I’d been born Spartan, it wouldn’t have been a problem. I’d have grown up side by side with them, fighting and wrestling them just like boys. In Athens, we bury women in our homes like treasure.

‘Are you from Thurii?’ I asked, when a pause seemed to demand I should say something.

‘Nobody’s from Thurii,’ she said tartly. ‘It’s a city of immigrants.’

‘Where do you come from, then?’

I knew she wasn’t Greek. She didn’t look or sound any different, but I could feel it, like listening to a foreigner playing a familiar song. The notes were pitch-perfect, the rhythm exact, but in the cadences – the spaces between – you heard something else.

She’d gone ahead and didn’t hear my question. We’d come into the agora, a wide square lined with matched porticoes and newly minted statues. Symmetry reigned: every building had its mirror, every column its twin. In their centre, the navel of the newborn city, a handsome tomb stood on a plinth.

‘The mausoleum of Herodotus,’ Diotima announced, like a tour guide on the Acropolis. And then, as if it mattered a great deal to her, ‘Do you like it?’

I considered the tomb. It was a pretty thing: pillars supporting a canopy, with scenes from the Persian wars carved on a frieze. I could see Leonidas and his three hundred Spartans; Xerxes carried on a litter; a Persian sailor screaming for help as his trireme sank under him at Salamis. The figures were lifelike, the colours vivid. The entire structure was dressed in marble and must have cost a fortune.

‘It’s not Herodotus’ monument,’ I said. ‘His monument is the
History.
’

‘His monument is history,’ she said.

I puzzled over what she’d said. Did she mean that the grand stone tomb was a historical artefact? Or that one day it would be nothing but dust? That his real legacy was the field of history, which he broke open for other men to plough? Or was she simply repeating what I’d said?

Words speak as if they had meaning, but when you question them they always say the same thing
, Socrates said. Diotima’s words always seemed to be saying three things at once.

‘Herodotus achieved a sort of immortality,’ I said, remembering what she’d said the night before.
Love craves immortality.
‘He wrote his history, he says,
“so that time will not bleach out the colours of men’s deeds.” But, in fact, it’s him that survives, more than Darius or Themistocles or the three hundred Spartans.’

I stared at the figures on the frieze – carved images not of reality, but of the image of reality that Herodotus had made with his words. Did they have any truth against the men whose hands blistered on the trireme oars, who kissed their wives when they left, and screamed as they drowned in the clear sea at Salamis?

‘Herodotus tells a story about Gyges the Lydian,’ Diotima said. ‘Do you know it?’

I nodded. She made a gesture with her eyes, inviting me to tell it.

‘Gyges was a bodyguard to the Lydian king.’ I’d lost my Herodotus in the wreck of the
Calliste
, but I remembered the story well enough. It’s almost the first thing you read in chapter one – as far as some people get. ‘The king wanted to show Gyges how beautiful his queen was, so he hid him in the bedroom where he could see her undress. But the queen saw Gyges watching, and realised what her husband had done.

‘The queen was mortified and offered Gyges a choice. To kill the king for his temerity, or be put to death himself. Gyges chose the first option. He murdered the king, married the queen and became ruler of Lydia. And all because he saw her naked.’

‘A woman’s body is a dangerous thing.’

I bit my lip, trying to put away the image of Diotima in her translucent dress the night before.

‘But I’ve heard a different version of the story,’ she said. ‘In this one, Gyges is a shepherd, not a bodyguard. One day, while he’s pasturing his sheep, an earthquake opens a cave in the mountain. He goes down. Inside, he finds a mechanical horse made entirely of bronze, and the skeleton of a giant man, with a gold ring on one of its fingers.’

Her voice conjured the images in my mind. A deep defile where the earth had been torn apart; the sky nothing more than a jagged scar. The bronze horse lying on its side as if fallen in battle, gleaming dully. The giant bones, half sunk in the cave floor, and the shepherd’s rough hands snapping the knuckle in their haste to remove the ring.

‘He takes the ring and goes back up. Except, when he meets his fellow shepherds, they can’t see him. The ring has made him invisible, he realises, which puts an idea in his head. He goes to the palace. As soon as he’s inside, he uses the ring to get past the guards, seduce the queen and murder the king.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Just like that.’

I considered it. ‘I prefer Herodotus’ story.’

‘Why?’

‘In Herodotus, the king gets his comeuppance for betraying the queen. Gyges is executing a sort of justice, obeying his fate. In your version, Gyges simply kills the king because he can. He has no motive. So he must have been bad to start with.’

‘Really?’ Her dress swayed on her hips. ‘Do you think if there were a second ring, and a good man found it, he wouldn’t eventually do everything that Gyges does? He could take anything, sleep with anyone, even kill people – and never be caught. There’d be no limits on his power.’

‘Then he’d be a god.’

‘But if he had the power and didn’t use it, people would say he was an idiot. In their hearts, all men think that behaving badly will get them further than doing the right thing. Good men are just too frightened of getting caught.’

‘That’s what Euphemus would say,’ I said glumly.

We walked another block in silence. Thurii’s civic grandeur was behind us: we were heading back to the edge of town. The forked mountain rose over me, until I could feel its weight pressing down on my shoulders.

‘Last night, you said that there was more to know about love than you’d revealed,’ I said. ‘Did you mean it? Or were you just teasing Dimos?’

‘I meant it.’

‘Can you tell me? Or is there some initiation rite I have to undergo?’

She paused, turned, and studied my face until I thought it would burn.

‘You’ve already been born into those mysteries. You just haven’t opened your eyes yet.’

I flushed scarlet: offended, tantalised, frustrated beyond reason. I was beginning to understand the dress she’d worn the night before. She could wear something that covered nothing because her mind remained perfectly opaque, like a city with no walls but an impregnable acropolis.
You can have everything
, she seemed to say,
but it counts for nothing.

‘Socrates said that wisdom lives inside people; he was just the midwife bringing it into the world.’

‘Socrates understood the mysteries.’

She said it so certainly, it reminded me of the way she talked about the Sybarite horses. As if she’d been there.

‘Did you ever meet Socrates?’

Another one of her elusive, inward-looking smiles. ‘How old do you think I am?’

There was no good answer to that question, and I was wise enough to know it. I suppose they must never have met, or Socrates would surely have mentioned her. Formally, they were opposites – a sphinx and a satyr, Aphrodite and Hephaestus. But the same divine intelligence burned in both of them. If they’d ever married, their children would have been immortal.

‘Did Socrates say how people came by the wisdom he delivered?’ she asked. ‘If he’s the midwife, who’s the father?’

I shrugged. ‘The gods, I suppose.’

We were back near her house again. The closer we came, the more my mood darkened. I couldn’t bear it to end. And I hadn’t asked about Agathon’s cloak yet. Honestly, I’d almost forgotten it.

She paused outside her own front door. ‘Do you mind if I show you one more thing? It won’t take long.’

Relief put a giddy smile all over my face. I followed her happily, out through the gates and onto a causeway that carried the road between green marshes full of lilies and weeds. Strange hummocks bulged uncomfortably out of the ground. Where the water ran clear, stone blocks lurked below the surface.

‘This was Sybaris,’ Diotima said.

This one I knew. When the Pythagorean army from Croton decided that the Sybarites’ decadence offended them, they didn’t just try to defeat or enslave the city. They wiped it off the earth. They came here one night and diverted the river Crathis, turning it against the town and drowning it. The sleeping Sybarites had no chance. The site was a wilderness for seventy years, until Athens decided to resettle it. Even then, the colonists didn’t dare use the old name, and the new city occupied a shrunken plot compared to its predecessor. The long, lonely marshes gave silent proof of that.

Out in the reeds, a heron stood perfectly still, head bowed, waiting. I wondered how something so bleak could also be so beautiful.