The Orpheus Descent (5 page)

‘I come back.’

‘Wait,’ Jonah said. ‘Who asked you? Was it Lily – the woman who’s staying here? Is she here now?’

The man shrugged. He tossed the spanner and caught it easily, a bicep bulging under the short sleeve.

‘I come back.’

The door slammed loud behind him, echoing through the hotel until it faded into the sprinklers ticking around outside. What time was it?

Lily’s alarm clock had fallen over with the glass. He turned it over and winced. Twenty past two. How had he slept so long?

The man said he’d come to fix the shower, but Jonah tried it anyway. The water came out straight away, hot and strong. Jonah spun it down as cold as it would go and tried to force some adrenaline. All he got was a headache, but at least it had a certain clarity.

He could have waited for Lily – she’d be back soon, he was pretty sure – but the hotel was dead and he was impatient. He’d been boxed up for the last six weeks in clubs, hotels, vans; living away the summer by night. He missed daylight and fresh air. He missed
her
. So he decided to walk.

Down in the lobby, the handyman was sitting in a plastic chair, watching the TV that played twenty-four hours a day over the reception desk. His eyes followed Jonah out of the door, a smirk fixed on his face.

‘The shower’s fine,’ Jonah called to the receptionist as he passed. She gave him an uncomprehending smile.

For a few seconds, outside actually seemed cooler than in. Then he hit his stride, and the sweat began flooding out of him. At three o’clock on an August afternoon, most of Italy had sensibly retreated to its beds: the resort complex felt like a ghost town. Out in the fields, a few labourers shimmered in the distance. Otherwise, it was just the crunch of his footsteps on the sandy verge as he walked the road between twin rows of poplars.

He heard a car coming and stepped into the long grass by the roadside. Even from a distance, the car filled the road, growing to monstrous proportions as it sped towards him. A boxy black Mercedes, as big as a tank. He had a brief flash of tinted windows, shadows behind and a slap of air that almost knocked him into the ditch. Then it had passed. A cloud of dust chased it down the road, sticking to his skin as it settled.

Nice to know someone’s still got money.

A concrete slab bridged the ditch. On the other side, a pair of monumental iron gates stood in the field in splendid, pointless isolation. Whether they were the down payment on a house that never got built, or the last relic of a vanished estate, he didn’t know. The shadow of the gateposts blocked the sun for a moment as he crossed the arbitrary threshold: afterwards, he’d remember that fleeting chill, a ghostly breath, and wonder what exactly he’d crossed. A little way off, he could see cars parked in the field, circled around the trench. He quickened his pace.

The first time he met Lily he’d been ten feet down a hole. That he’d been there at all was so random, so unlikely, that afterwards he had to believe it was fate. He’d been dating another girl, Amy, an archaeology student from Preston whose course required her to volunteer on a dig over the summer. She’d picked somewhere in Greece. No experience was necessary, and Jonah figured he could get some sunshine and time with Amy on the cheap, so he’d signed up too. Three days before they were supposed to go out, Amy had had second thoughts. About the dig, about the course, and about Jonah. All she left him with was three hundred pounds paid in a non-refundable deposit, another broken heart, and a return ticket to Athens (also non-refundable). He didn’t have so much money he could afford to waste it – he hadn’t really had enough to pay it in the first place. So he went.

He quickly regretted it. The dig was in an out-of-the-way corner of Greece, led by an elderly professor more worried about his pension than the project. There were only four other volunteers, all undergraduates from Oxford, all good friends. In the afternoons, when it got too hot to dig, the rest of them decamped to the beach and worked their tans or read Evelyn Waugh. Jonah, never good at sitting still, had hiked into the mountains, or swum far down the beach. At supper together, he drank too much and baited the students, who took it in a strained, embarrassed silence that only made him try harder. If he could have changed his flight, he’d have quit.

And then Lily arrived. He didn’t see her come. He heard the stir, the others putting down their tools and going over to welcome her, but he stayed scraping away at the wall he was excavating. The first he saw of her was when a pair of creased hiking boots stepped into the trench opposite.

‘So you’re the rock star?’

The others called him that. A way of classifying him, an Oxford-minted insult that sounded like a compliment. But her voice wasn’t private-school pony-club like he’d expected: it had a flinty edge that reminded him of grey mountains, burnt heather and home in the north.

He looked up. Honey-blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, short shorts and a straw cowboy hat tipped back. Her eyes were pale blue and smiling.

‘Richard said you’re a moody bastard.’ She knelt down opposite him and began probing the stones with the point of her trowel. ‘I’m Lily.’

That was all she said, but somehow it was enough. So he stayed, to see what happened.

* * *

One thing Jonah learned that first week with Lily: any time an archaeologist sticks a spade in the ground, it’s called a trench. If he’d ever heard the term before, he’d imagined something like you saw in First World War films, a narrow cut shored up with planks. But an archaeologist’s trench could be anything from a few inches to dozens of yards long, and as wide as they could make it. Holes, in other words.

He could see the edge of the latest trench now, the steps dug into the earth leading down. The hum of generators displaced the summer silence, but he’d forgotten his headache. Any moment now, she’d be there.

He looked down. It was a busy dig, almost twenty people working in twos and threes, brushing and scraping and skimming off the centuries five centimetres at a time. Most were on their hands and knees; a few stood around a table under a green awning stretched on guy ropes.

None of them was wearing a straw cowboy hat.

Jonah went down the steps. It was hotter in the trench, no shade except at the very edge and under the awning. A few of the volunteers looked up with blank half-smiles. They were mostly students, none of them familiar. He still couldn’t see Lily.

‘The rock star returns. Did you play Wembley?’

A man in a pink shirt and a white panama hat had come out from under the awning. He walked briskly towards Jonah, hand right-angled in greeting. He’d spent six weeks in the Italian summer and his face was still pale as death, with a sweaty sheen that made him look like a waxwork. The only colour in his face came from his lips, flushed permanent and vivid red.

‘Welcome to the lost city of Sybaris,’ he said. ‘Good trip?’

‘Hi Richard.’ Jonah shook his hand and looked past him. ‘Is Lily here?’

‘She had to go to the lab – bad day; she’ll be back any minute. Can I get you something to drink?’

Jonah realised he was thirsty as hell. A student handed him a bottle of water from a cooler, and Jonah rubbed it against his forehead before draining it. It went through him like a rod of ice.

Above ground, the earth was baked solid; down in the pit it was damp underfoot. He remembered Lily telling him how the ancient city had been washed away in a man-made flood. He wondered if this was that same water, locked underground for twenty-five hundred years.

‘Has it been raining?’

‘Fat chance. We’re under the water table.’ Richard pointed to the yellow plastic pipes that fed out of the trench, linked by a series of humming electric pumps. ‘Those run twenty-four hours a day. If they fail, we’ll all go the way of the original inhabitants.’

‘Looks like it’s happening already.’ A pool of black water had filled a corner of the trench, lapping over the ruins of an excavated wall.

‘One of the pumps failed this morning. Water was up to our knees before we got it mended.’ Richard lifted his hat to wipe his brow, revealing a sweaty mess of hair underneath. ‘Really, it’s been one thing after another today.’

A tall girl in an Edmonton Oilers baseball cap came up and cut in, ignoring Jonah. ‘Can you look at something for me, Richard?’

‘Of course. If you give me a minute …’

Jonah looked up at the top of the trench, but there was still no sign of Lily. ‘I’ll go to the lab.’

‘Have you got a car?’

‘Is it far?’

‘In this bloody heat? I’ll drive you over as soon as I’ve got this sorted out. Won’t be a minute.’

Jonah almost walked anyway. It couldn’t be that far, and he was desperate to see Lily. And something felt wrong. Even in the burning sunshine, a black aura seemed to hang over the trench. No one looked as if they were working very hard, and none of the supervisors were trying to encourage them. The volunteers clustered together in small groups, looking over their shoulders, as if afraid of being overheard. As if they were talking about him.

He was too tired and too hot: it was easy to get paranoid. They probably
were
talking about him. After six weeks’ digging, anyone new was bound to be more interesting than another shovelful of dust.

Impatience won out: it would be faster to drive. He sat down on a flat column base in the shade of the trench wall and took out his phone.

I’m here! Richard’s giving me lift to the lab in a minute. Hold on to your hat.

He sent the message and waited. Two minutes passed, then five. Across the trench, Richard was now deep in conversation on his mobile, frowning hard. Jonah looked back at his own phone, waiting for Lily to reply.

The minutes stretched on.

Sailor, beware! At sea, or by land,
The castaway’s grave is ever at hand.

Plato,
Epigram
15

Two orbs like black stars eyeballed me from their stalks. They swivelled slowly side to side, taking me in. Judging me.

‘What do you want?’ I asked the monster.

A pink arm reached out for me. There was no hand: instead, it ended in a vast, serrated claw. I stayed very still. If I moved, it would probably snap me in two.

The claw touched my nose and I twitched. The eyes blinked. The crab yanked back its claw and scuttled away across the sand. It wasn’t as big as I’d thought.

I was so thirsty I was sure I must have died. My whole body ached. I felt like sand that’s been left in the sun too long, that a gust of wind might blow me to atoms.

I looked around and saw colours: green trees, blue sky, white sand. Foamy waves lapped at the edges of my vision. The crab had vanished.

I pulled myself to my feet. A coil of seaweed slithered off my head. The sky was clear, the trees still, the waves chattering gently. The only evidence of the storm was the jetsam strewn across the shore. Among the weed and shells and driftwood I saw a length of rope, a curved plank that looked like part of the hull. And, at my feet, Euphemus, sprawled on the sand, snoring like a drunkard.

I remembered everything like a dream. The voice in the sea. My arm around his chest, fighting the water until I was sure I’d die. Sand under my feet. I couldn’t believe how heavy he was.

I turned a full circle, taking in the compass of our new world. The beach curved out into a long bay, hemmed by pines and cypresses. A little way off,
Calliste
’s hulk lay cockeyed on a sandbar lapped by the waves. Her mast had gone; a jagged gash ran through her hull. A brown oil slick stained the water around her. In terms of survivors, there was only Euphemus. And me.

I opened my fist, still clenched in a ball. The green shipwreck stone gleamed smooth and wet in my palm. I squinted at it, wondering. Had I really clung on to it through all the storm and drowning?

I knelt and shook Euphemus awake. He sat up.

‘Where are we?’

‘Italy.’ It hurt to say it.

He rubbed his eyes. Dry salt streaked his face. ‘I thought I was dead.’

‘We need water.’

The forest pressed close against the beach, but a little way along I thought I saw a break in the trees. I hauled Euphemus up, leaning on him for balance. After so long at sea, the sand lurched under me. My stomach was bruised, as if I’d just fought a wrestling bout. Twice, I nearly fell as we made our way towards the treeline.

‘What’s that?’

I looked down at my feet and stopped. Storm waves had washed the beach smooth, but here – just beyond the tidemark – someone had disturbed it. Or, rather, rearranged it. Rows of white pebbles marked out a square, and in the centre someone had drawn a series of geometric figures. Three squares, two identical and one slightly larger, arranged so that their edges met in a triangle.

Euphemus shied away with a dark murmur that sounded like ‘witchcraft’. I almost managed a smile.

‘Not magic,’ I croaked. ‘Maths. We must be near civilisation.’

A path took us off the beach into the trees. The pine-needle carpet stifled our footsteps; the forest swallowed the noise of the sea so that all we heard was the breeze hissing in the branches. An enchanted quiet hung in the air. I wondered who had cut the path we were following. The same men who drew the figures on the beach?

A gust of wind made the forest sigh – and brought something else. Strange music, meandering notes that had no melody, but seemed to move according to some hidden pattern. Not a flute or a lyre, but the low ripple of bells.

We hurried on. Soon the path opened onto a clearing, where a round stone wall held back the forest. Inside the enclosure, a gravel path wound in spirals to a small circular temple. In front of it was an altar and, in front of that – in the very centre of the circle – a spring welling up into a stone basin.

We went through the gate, ignored the spiral path and cut straight across to the basin. My hands were inches from the water when Euphemus stopped me.

‘Do you think it’s safe?’

I paused. I wanted to ignore him, to plunge headfirst into that pool and drink until I’d forgotten there was ever such a thing as thirst. But he was right. We were in a strange country with strange gods. What if there was some prohibition?