John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

“It’s not wide enough,” I said.

The men on the outside began pulling at his feet, the little man pushing at his shoulders and head. Agathon looked dead as hell. His eyes were open. His belly caught on the underside of the door, and in a second he was wedged solid. The big man leaned all his weight on the rod but the door wouldn’t lift. The old woman bent to help pull. “Kneel on his stomach,” she said. It horrified me. I was sure he was dead. But I was afraid of them and I did it. When I pressed my knee close to the edge of the door base and shoved down hard, his body jerked loose and he slid out. He groaned when I jabbed my knee in, whether the groan of a live man or some sound left over I couldn’t tell, but the old woman said, “He’s alive.”

While the bald man snatched our possessions from the cell, the big man set the rod down and, slowly, the way a mountain would move if it decided to, knelt down beside Agathon. He slid his hands under and picked the old man up the way you’d lift a child. “This way, Ox,” the old woman hissed. I glanced at his face, guessing from her tone. He was blind. We started across the open field, all of us crouching except the big man who was carrying Agathon. I turned to look back along the prison walls, one last fleeting look at home — old stone walls gray as pottery shards from a refuse heap, pitted with windows and doors — and I saw the body of our jailer. He sat against the wall as if he’d fallen asleep. I looked at the boy beside me, the one who’d brought the messages. He grinned and nodded. He looked crazy.

And so we made it across the field and down a thousand wandering alleys where in the days of our innocence Agathon snatched food from garbage tubs or giggled, peeking in at elderly lovers, and so by devious paths of sorrow we arrived at the shrine of Menelaos, where we hid. In the wide, cool vault below the shrine — the whole space lit by only two dim lamps — there were pallets waiting, and a physician for Agathon (and for others as well, because more than a few were sick here), and women with tubs of green water and oil to give us baths. I sank into the water half asleep, my mind littered with images, and a middle-aged woman bent over me to massage my shoulders and back. One of the men who had saved us was not a man after all but a girl, maybe the one I’d seen watching that day across the field. She glanced at me, unself-conscious as a Spartan girl. The woman bathing me turned my head away, gently, firmly, like a barber. They must have carried me to my pallet, because in the morning that’s where I awakened.

We had breakfast. Cold mutton and beef and goat. They couldn’t risk using fires here, except sometimes to burn sulfur over in the corner where the sick were, to cleanse it. No one could go outside the vault but the guards. There must have been fifty or sixty people, sealed up high on the bluff across from Mount Taygetos, under the ground. The old woman moved through the camp, as they called it, like a queen — giving orders to the women, talking softly with this man or that, at times withdrawing to a small room opening off from the vault, apparently her private chamber. One knew it was morning or afternoon or midnight only because people said it was. (Often they disagreed.) Day and night had the same dimness, the same light fog of lamp smoke. The people talked quietly or not at all, laughing occasionally at nothing.

I slept, most of the first day, and when I finally came out of it I was not refreshed, merely sore from lying on the pallet. Seeing me stir, an old man with no teeth came over to me. There were very few old people in the camp. He must have had some useful skill, but I never found out what.

“Hungry?” he said, and smiled.

“I had breakfast,” I said. It still lay on my stomach cold as sea fog.

“That was hours ago. The rest of us have had lunch since then. I’ll get you something.”

He left, soundlessly, as all of them move, crouched over. He came back immediately with a bowl of cold greasy soup. I made a show of drinking it.

“You’ve been in prison a long time?” he said.

“Couple months,” I said.

He shook his head, disappointed. “A nasty place.”

I nodded. I sipped at the soup again. It was awful, worse than the prison food. I said, “Is Agathon alive?”

He looked blank.

“The fat old man,” I said. “The Seer.”

“Ah!” He didn’t know. No one knew except “her.” He pointed toward the old woman’s chamber. “He’s in there.”

“Can I see him?” I asked.

He smiled. “No one goes in there.” Then: “Well, the doctor goes in.”

“He still goes in?” I said.

He nodded.

“Then Agathon must be alive.”

“Maybe so,” he said. He looked doubtful.

But I was convinced. You couldn’t kill the old bastard as easy as that. He’d promised to dance on my grave. I was going to hold him to it.

The relief his news gave me made me sociable, I guess. I said, “Is she the leader — Iona?”

He shot me a look. No doubt she had some stupid code name, like the others. The whole world is this crazy children’s game.

“One of the leaders,” he said at last.

“I imagine she’s really something,” I said. “My master used to tell me about her.”

He nodded, and went on nodding for a long time. I knew his kind. One of those people that make you think they’re very deep because they always keep you waiting. My own suspicion is they’re counting seconds, like actors. “Takes after her dad,” he said at last, and nodded. I nodded too. “Man of stone, he was. Whole world was his war.” He smiled, crafty, as if what he said was code. He raised his finger slowly, counting seconds, then wagged it slyly. “They tell how he had a foot race once with his ten-year-old son. Kid thought he was big enough to beat the old man. So they raced barefoot half a mile, sharp rocks all the way, and the old man had the poor kid whipped from the start. But you think he’d let up, let the little fellow beat him? No, sir! Whipped him by every inch he could, and afterward, when the little boy’s feet were all tore up, the old man carried him home.” He smiled and nodded.

“A real statue of a man,” I said politely.

He nodded. “Lived up in the mountains.”

I was ready to drop the thing. Knowing looks sicken me. But the old man hung around, so I asked, “Was he really a fighter — in wars and things?”

“Wasn’t nobody in the world he agreed with enough to fight on the same side with. He was still living under the laws they had in the mountains nine hundred years ago, every man an equal.” He shook his head. “Yes, sir, that man was his own one-man rebellion.”

She had come from her room while he was talking and was moving among the groups, telling them something. He saw her now — he’d had his back to her — and became silent. She looked a little like a statue herself. After a minute the man took my bowl and went away. When the old woman had talked with the last group —the sick ones — she turned again — you could almost hear the grind of stone — and moved back to her room.

I lay on my elbow and watched the people. They sat doing nothing, merely talking a little. They’d been living this way for a long time, and no end of it was in sight, unless it was the sickness. Their dejection filled the vault like the smoke of the lamps. Those who went out on the expeditions — the younger, crazier-looking ones — kept to themselves. The others wanted stories, tales of murder or near-capture, and they would say as one of the fighters went past, “How was it, Spider, that night at the bins?” The man would smile, shake his head, keep moving. That too was like a game: I had an evil temptation to mimic them. Only the huge blind man would talk, and it wasn’t tales of war. He would sit on his crude low wooden bench, his hands on his knees and his shaggy head tipped, looming over those around him like a bear, and he would talk about his childhood. The people would sit on the stone floor, smiling thoughtfully, nodding. I only half listened, thinking of my own ridiculous childhood, running along behind my mother, stumbling sometimes, sending my basket of apples rolling, my heart mourning after Spartan girls’ convexities. Someone said, “Tell about Snake.” The code name for Dorkis. People in the group to my right were talking softly, so that I couldn’t quite catch what the giant was saying. I got up and moved closer to his group.