John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

And then one day as I was working my way around the edge of the crowd selling apples with Mother, the old man pointed his horrible shaking finger at me and yelled, “You, you miserable misbegotten wretch! Why such sorrow on this day of joyous festival?” I could feel the whole crowd’s eyes on me, and my heart was like a hot coal at the root of my throat. I tried to be smart-aleck: “Because of girls,” I said. “Oh, master, all because of girls! He he he!” The whole crowd laughed, but the Seer’s eyes were solemn as the plague. He said nothing. The crowd grew still. Then he said, “The gods are in that boy!” Everyone was scared. The old man said, “Come with me!” Everyone was looking at me. My feet started moving toward him: I couldn’t do a thing about it, even when my mother started screaming. I sank down on my knees when I got to him, because my legs had gone weak. He got down on his knees too, so he could look me in the eye. He was breathing hard, excited. “I’m going to make you a Seer,” he said, and smiled. The holes in his teeth were like craters.

You’ve got no choice, when a Seer says a thing like that to you — even if you know for a fact he’s a crazy old drunk. Which I didn’t, for that matter. You never know anything about a Seer, unless you happen to have such bad luck as to become a disciple. I mean, they’re special, mysterious. A little like the ephors used to seem to me, or the revolutionists when someone would whisper, pointing them out in a crowd. I remember the first time I saw one. Someone said, “Look! That’s Wolf.” That was what people called him, not his name. I followed the furtive, pointing finger and couldn’t tell which man they meant. “The one with the gray sash,” someone said. He turned, just that instant, and I saw his face. He looked like anyone, mouse-colored curly hair, quiet, friendly eyes. You couldn’t believe he had killed people, gutted buildings with midnight fire. He nodded, seeing me staring at him. Maybe he thought I was someone he ought to know. I nodded back. — But all that’s not the point. I might have passed him a hundred times and never given him a second thought; but now, now that I knew he was a famous revolutionist, he was a riddle, unfathomable, no longer Helot, no longer even human, some baffling and terrible alien. I saw one die once, an execution. Snake, they called him. He’d been blinded and beaten horribly, but he was awesome. He died like a god, almost laughing at us, holding back only from gentleness and pity. Even the Spartans felt it.

And that’s how it was with Agathon. He might stink like a man, he might share certain features with ordinary men — two eyes, a nose, a beard, a paunch — but he was special, set apart. His mind was different from a merely human mind. Augurers, now — the people who pretend to read the future from bones or goats’ intestines or the flight of birds — they’re not special; they know it themselves. Either there really are things in bones or guts or patterns of flight that have readable meaning, and they know how to read it, or there aren’t, and the augurers are fakes. Either way, it’s no stranger than reading from a parchment, or pretending to read when you can’t. But Agathon, he can run his hands over a cane and say, “The man who owns this cane once murdered a chicken farmer.” Or he can become very still, standing in a field as if listening to the wind, and it will come to him that war has broken out in Amyklai. He knows.

He’s crazy, of course, to think he can teach me that. It’s a gift, for better or worse. And because it’s natural, easy for him, he thinks if I learn to relax or something, zonk! I’ll get a vision. I used to try. I’d practically pass out, trying. He’d stare and stare, trying to figure out what the hell I was doing wrong. His face, his whole body would become a mirror of mine, trying to feel out in himself where my mistake was. He’d say, “You haven’t suffered enough, boy. That’s the trouble!” His eyes would be glittering like sunlit pits of ice, and I knew as sure as day what he was thinking. He was going to get me beat up, or kicked by a mule or something. I’d keep clear of him. It was for my sake, he said, that he started us prowling the streets at night, getting us pounded on as peeping toms. It was a he. He’d been doing it for years and the only difference now was that he didn’t have to drag his own jug. I should have left him as soon as I knew for sure I would never be a Seer. I thought of it. Time after time. But then I’d find him in the road, knocked down by a cart or something, and I’d see that his moustache was all gucky with blood, and I’d be scared. He’d do it on purpose, I think, to keep me with him. Or else one day he’d pause, looking puzzled, in front of some house, and after a while he’d go in and we’d find some woman crying, and tears would be streaming from his eyes too, and there’d be a young man sitting in the corner, dead. And so I stayed on — a victim of Destiny. It was sickening, but I was trapped. The same way Alkander is trapped with Lykourgos, I guess.

I saw him once. I was close enough that I could have reached out and touched him. Lykourgos had been walking in the square in front of the Hall of Justice, and Agathon had caught sight of him and had run up to him, wringing his hands and making faces and God knows what — and Lykourgos stopped, looking sad, tragic even.

“Agathon, for the love of God,” Lykourgos said, very low, so no one would hear. He stood with his arms slightly bent, his hands hanging limp, as though Agathon were a terrible torment to him.

“Have I offended thee? Have I offended thee?” Agathon squealed.

“Agathon,” he said. It was like a plea but also like the warning growl of a dog.

I watched Alkander. He stood two feet behind Lykourgos, towering over him, naked except for his sandals, the sword and dagger harness, the wide iron bracelets on his wrists — they too were weapons. He looked casual, limp, but I saw that he was balanced on the balls of his feet, and his eyes were closed to slits. His mind closed out everything in the world but Agathon. Should the old man so much as spit in the direction of Lykourgos’s feet, he’d be dead before the spittle hit the pavement.

I tried to say “Let’s go home,” but my throat was dried up with fear.

“The revolution’s upon you, Lykourgos,” Agathon said. “I warned you! I warned you! As long as time lasts, you’ll be known as the murderer of a thousand thousand men. And all for blind ego!” He cringed, leering and winking, but I saw that he made no move to touch Lykourgos. “I haven’t offended thee, I hope? You see how it is, sir. The god says ‘Speak!’ and I speak.”

“The god indeed!” Lykourgos said. He tried to turn away, but Agathon was around him, quick as a rabbit Lykourgos gave up, simply stood, one hand closed over his beard, his one eye patiently staring at the pavement “You tell me of pride,” he said. “Shame, Agathon. Shame!”

Agathon grabbed hold of his belly and laughed. “Brilliant!” he yelled. “O philosopher!” He laughed and laughed, but he was furious. Alkander watched him. “I’ve given up Athens, my wife, my children, even poetry, to cry out a warning in the savage Spartan wilderness, and you say it’s from pride!” He was drooling in his rage, but still faking laughter. I too, like Alkander, watched him. He was wrong: the anger proved it. But Lykourgos was incapable of answering his scorn. The old Lawgiver’s mind and heart were as simple and rural as a barn: I could see in his patient, mulish stance all the country generations that led up to him — fierce men plowing straight furrows behind oxen; farm owners rising to bless the food in a big spare dining room of thrashers; country politicians, red- faced and laconic, campaigning not with clever appeals but with facts drawn up like wagons.