John Gardner - The Wreckage of 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.