John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

“That Snake!” he said, and shook his head slowly, smiling. He looked at the ceiling, grew serious. “He was the only religious man I ever knew,” he said. “He loved God with all his heart and soul, and he also loved man.” He let it sink in, something of a preacher. It was a language none of them understood, children of the revolution. “He would pray before he ate. Like this.” He pretended to hold a bowl in his hands, and he lowered his head. I was tempted to hide my head behind my arms and groan, but I decided to be a man about it. It wasn’t as embarrassing, from him, as it might have been. He said, moving himself very deeply, “Gentle Zeus, Father of all mankind, forgive us all our stupidity and hate. Tease us to kindness and forgiveness of our enemies and, hardest of all, ourselves. Teach us to live with contradiction, and lead us, by your cunning ways, away from the dark pits of meaninglessness and despair. As we feed our restless, willful bodies, teach us to learn to love them, and all their kind.”

The huge man sat like a boulder, still bent. His blind eyes were weeping, remembering his leader.

The bald-headed man at his side said gleefully, “He never forgave them Spartans, that’s for sure.”

The blind man’s throat kept working, furious and grieved, and he couldn’t answer. I moved away.

When the people were settling for sleep that night, I saw the thin blond girl who fought with the men. She was leaning on the wall in the darkest part of the room, alone, apparently at home neither with the men nor with the women. I sat against the wall opposite and watched her. It was amazing that she could stand in one position, not a muscle flickering, for so long. I thought of crossing to her, but I could think of no reason. And I was afraid of her, to tell the truth, though she couldn’t be over seventeen. I thought of the breasts I’d seen when they were bathing her, after our rescue, and my mind’s going back to it annoyed me. She had a beautiful face — only hard; harder than stone. Why had the woman who was bathing me turned my face away? To warn me?

I kept going over and over it, now wondering why they all kept clear of her, now wondering what I could say to excuse my breaking her isolation. Was it the girl who killed our jailer? I could come to no conclusion, and I didn’t cross to her. I was interrupted. The old woman, Iona, appeared at the doorway to her chamber and stood squinting through the room until she saw me. She came over.

“Demodokos.”

I nodded.

She peered at me, witchlike in the dimness. “Or should I say Peeker?” She smiled, and it was startling. A glimpse of Agathon’s old friend through the horrible mask.

“That’s what he calls me,” I said.

“I know.” She went on peering at me. At last she said, “Come.” An order. She turned away.

We went into her chamber and she closed the double- planked door. It was a crypt. Torch rests without torches in them. Pegged to the wall, a rusty iron trident. In the center of the room stood a giant coffin, with candles on it and rolls of parchment. She used it for a desk. I moved closer.

“Menelaos’s coffin?” I asked.

“Who knows?”

There was a stool beside the coffin. She motioned me to it. She herself never sat, apparently. She would have to stand to work at the high, makeshift desk, and anyway, she had some kind of demonic energy that gave her no chance to sit. She went around behind the coffin and leaned her elbows on it and again looked at me with her icy, drilling eyes. “We’re sending you away,” she said.

I said nothing, waiting.

“It’s not because you’re a nuisance,” she said, and again she freed from its chains, for an instant, the younger, softer smile. She said, “Agathon’s dead.”

I started.

“Sit still. He died this afternoon.”

I cast about the room for some sign of him, and at last, though it wasn’t part of her plan, she said, “All right, this way.”

I followed her to the dingy, pillared corner, once an altar niche, now a trash pile — torn canvas, old clothes, broken implements, worn-out sandals. She lifted a corner of the canvas, and Agathon’s dead face stared up at me. I bent down to close the eyes, but she touched my shoulder.

“Plague,” she said. She dropped the canvas.

“Then all of us—” I began. I felt nothing, yet, at his death. Only physical repulsion at the staring face.

“Not necessarily,” she said, and gave a strange smile. “We talked, before he died. He says we’re to die in blood. It’s all very clear to him. The Spartans are pulling the army back home from the north, he says. Who knows if Seers really see?”

“You should believe him,” I said.

Again the strange smile. “I do.” Then: “In any case, the plague’s reached Sparta. One way or the other…”

She showed no feeling — no fear, no anger, nothing. She touched my arm, gently for a half-cracked old witch, and guided me back to the stool. For a while she said nothing. Grieving? I wondered. When would I begin to grieve? She said, “We have something of his — and yours.” She handed me one of the parchment rolls from the coffin. It was the things we’d written in prison. I looked up, waiting.

“I’ve read it,” she said. “Take it to his wife.”

From hatred? I wondered. Was she sending the scroll to Tuka because it would hurt? Still no sign of feeling. Her face was dead.

She said, “Have you any idea, Demodokos, how much of all this is pure fiction?” I must have looked flustered, because she said at once, “No matter, don’t think about it. One could do worse than become a caricature in a senseless, complicated lie.”

“But it’s all so earnest,” I said. “He wrote as if he were driven.”

“Am I the liar, then?” she asked, and smiled.

I thought about it and felt a flash of anger. “I guess he really loved nobody but himself.”

“Nonsense. He loved us all — and wanted us all. Even you, Peeker. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been driven to make us up.”

She turned away and bent her head a little. Then, with no emotion in her gravelly voice, she said, “Take it. Tuka will want it.” And: “Go. Go to bed. When we’re ready to slip you out we’ll wake you.” Her right hand moved to the coffin; not for support, I had a feeling, though the fingers trembled. “Thank you for all you’ve done,” she said. “Good night.”

I left with the scroll and closed the door behind me. After I’d lain down I began to cry, purposely and crossly, conscious of my consciousness of crying.

A few hours before dawn we left. The blond girl was not one of the four who guided me down to the water and gave me to the boatman.

Sunlight, someone’s bed. I do not recognize the room.

Someone told me, or perhaps I dreamed, a strange tale. Lightning struck Lykourgos’s crypt and split it end to end. Perhaps I saw it. The image, at any rate, is very clear. I am looking across a valley at a hill, a group of half-dead trees, a crypt, with lesser crypts below it, and above the door on this main crypt the name LYKOURGOS. It’s night, but the moonlight makes it almost like day. There’s a weird wind, not fierce but oddly charged, as though it were not wind at all but something alive and sentient, Time itself, perhaps. The crypt, placed exactly at the crest of the hill, is separated from everything around it by a low fence but also by something more, a severe, defiant dignity that the trees, the blowing grass, the lower crypts cannot come near. It commands the hill like a fort. But above it huge dark clouds are forming, piling up like mountains rising out of the sea to obliterate the sky, and the earth goes dark in sympathy until the trees, the grass, the fences, the hill, the sky are all one thing converging on the crypt. A sudden flash — a terrible three-pronged lightning fork — that turns the landscape white; then darkness and a shudder and a deafening crack as if not the crypt but the world itself were splitting. When my eyes adjust, the crypt lies still in the rain like the moonlit rib cage of a horse destroyed by fire.