John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

“We’re old men, you and I,” Lykourgos said. “Let’s come to truce.”

“O deathless gods, hear what he asks of me!” Agathon said. “O motionless mild Apollo, behold this indignity done my old age!”

He was wrong. Any fool could see it. Even if Lykourgos was all he said, an enemy to the laws of earth and heaven, still Lykourgos was a man, had rights. He could burn cities with one word, but he couldn’t get justice from Agathon, yet was too just a man to destroy him. Alkander saw it too. I don’t know how I knew that, but I knew. The crease beside his mouth moved like a tingle in the back of your mind, but he did nothing. I wanted to talk to him, let him know I understood how it was between him and his master. People think Alkander’s a machine, a sort of walking weapon to protect the old man, but I knew better. I would have let him tell me whatever he wanted, and I would have kept all his secrets safe.

“Hate is bad for digestion,” Lykourgos said.

“Like murder,” Agathon said, and laughed a little wildly. “Like war. Like plague.”

Sudden as August heat lightning, Lykourgos lost his temper. “Go home, you sick, fat old fool. Go home before Alkander breaks his leash!”

Agathon laughed, but immediately backed away. “Rage on, old one-eyed maniac,” he said. “Your world is crashing down around your ears!”

Lykourgos raised his head a little and his one eye bored into Agathon. “My laws will survive,” he said. “Among my enemies, you alone know the future, and you alone rave. A sign of your despair.”

Agathon spit, not just in Lykourgos’s general direction but at him. Alkander’s hand gave a jerk, but the rest of him kept still, almost relaxed.

I sidled away, following my master. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. Alkander slid his eyes over and looked at me, angry at first, then thoughtful. A week later when I saw Alkander it seemed to me — though I couldn’t be sure — he nodded.

So anyway, this: I will never learn to be a Seer, but I’m learning things, with Agathon. It occurs to me that I have learned to be patient with everyone but Agathon himself. And with my own self, of course…For Agathon, and for myself, I have no forgiveness. Why is that?

But the walls of our cell are close, remember, close as the air we gasp to breathe, and Agathon makes no effort to hold back his farts. He snores and moans and grumbles in his sleep, and he talks talks talks incessantly, about nothing but himself, the most self-centered, self-pitying bastard I’ve ever seen. “Well, he’s seventy,” I tell myself. “An old man must have some privileges.” But when he wakes up he smacks his lips, and when he eats I hear his teeth cracking. And when he isn’t talking or cracking his teeth or sucking at his dry, loose, black-cracked mouth, he’s writing his endless, revolting life story, mile on mile of self-congratulation.

“Peeker, my good man, sharpen my pen.”

“You sharpen your own fucking pen,” I say.

“Ah, manners, dear boy! There is no pulchritude in swinish manners!” Pursing his lips as he says it. Squinting like a pig.

Why should I work up forgiveness for an ugly, sick- minded old man who scorns everything on earth but himself? Or maybe especially himself. And why should I resign myself to what I am — lackey for a madman, hungry maggot in a hole full of maggots, dreaming every night of soft-bosomed girls with light coming out of their pink pink skin like leaves in springtime, with eyes as lonely as graves?

I sat with Dorkis on a hillside, looking down on the lake where Iona, Tuka, and the children — our two and their three — were swimming. It was a fine, warm day, and we’d been drinking Helot wine all afternoon. The little stone aerie he’d borrowed for what he called his flight to meditation stood above and behind us on the hill. I kept watching Tuka and Iona, my chest full of pain. Dorkis talked. He was thinking of leaving Lakonia. It was against the law, but Helots managed it every day. The Spartans didn’t waste much time policing Helots in those days; they kept busy enough policing themselves and making incursions into the holdings of their neighbors — the ephors’ idea, not Lykourgos’s. Goats grazed to the right of the lake and beyond it. The boy who was watching them sat, just visible to us, on an outcropping of greenish rocks near the top of the hill to our right.

Dorkis talked of the hopelessness of the Helot situation. There had always been atrocities. The ephors formally declare war on the Helots every year, so that a Spartiate won’t be guilty of religious impurity if he kills a Helot out of hand. But it’s always worse in time of war. Because of the troubles in Messenia — in town after town, Spartan governors had been assassinated and public buildings burned — and also because of the increasing number of Helots openly talking rebellion — Lykourgos had recently revived the old institution of the Krypteia, whereby young Spartan warriors were sent out into the countryside with an iron ration and a dagger, to hide among the rocks by day and kill Helots by night. It gave the young fighters combat practice — but that was only part of it. Helots far outnumbered Spartiates throughout Lakonia, and Lykourgos was convinced that in unsettled times the Helots needed terrorizing to be kept in place.

At all events, a young man Dorkis knew had been murdered two days ago by Spartan boys, and Dorkis, as a physician, had assisted the old women in preparing the body for burial. It had shaken him. His voice had a new thinness, like that of a man recuperating from a loss of blood. There was a sense in which it was criminal, he said, for a Helot to bring up children in Sparta. It robbed them of self-respect, which was to say, freedom. On the other hand, he was a leader of a sort. Now, if ever, the Helots needed leaders. I acknowledged it with a nod. It was not a decision I cared to help him with. I myself would leave, probably. I’m easily scared off. I could have said that running away might also rob his children of self-respect, but I couldn’t advise him to do what I might not have the courage to do myself.

His sharp, black-eyed stare was fixed on something beyond the farthest of the hills, and his lower lip was pushed forward, making his cheek muscles taut, the slanted eyes little chinks, like slits for bowmen. “Agathon, have you any power left with him?”

I shook my head. “Not a drop.”

He grinned. “How’d you blow it?”

“I never had it to start with,” I said. “He keeps me around to tell him Solon’s theories, which I do — I have them all down in my book — and he listens like a stone.”

“Does he really?”

“No. He sort of half listens. But the contrast is somehow obscurely useful to him.”

He swung his gaze back to the hills. “Could he be killed, do you think?” He asked it as one would ask for predictions on the Olympic games — except that his voice was feeble.

I kept quiet. He had his elbows on his knees; his hands hung perfectly relaxed.

At last he said, “You haven’t answered. I take it he could, then.”

“Anything alive can be killed, one way or another.”

He said no more, merely smiled, abstracted, like a bullfighter watching the parade before a fight he’s unsure of.

After supper, when the last of the children were in bed and Dorkis and Tuka were cleaning up the mess and sipping wine and talking, he patting her fanny from time to time, sometimes laughing till he wept — Tuka was in top form — I sat at the edge of the lake with Iona. Except for the stars and the flickering fight from the hut behind us, the world seemed empty, abandoned, as if plague-struck. There might have been no Sparta, no Lykourgos, even no Athens, only the immense, studded sky, the hills, the water, the curve of Iona’s arm. The lake was perfectly still, as smooth as black marble. I felt safe, as if time had stopped forever. Also, I felt hungry for Iona, or for something more, a new life, peace.