Chapter 17 Echo #2
From every wise mouth comes a different world theory and Echo’s head spins to the Not Here’s delight.
So many rites and rituals and lore and isn’t it all nonsense really?
God has fallen, God is capitalism, God is money and power and sex and patriarchy; you agnostic, atheist, academic hypocrite, you belong to oblivion with your parents; must’ve been a blur of raindrops on the windscreen for them to miss that red light because they were good drivers; it’s what you said when you finally turned up, they’re good drivers they wouldn’t do this to me, wouldn’t leave me like this, all alone to look after—
Enough. There’s a freedom to sliding out of herself into other people’s ideas.
At the bidding of guests and guides, Kosmos and his fellows imbibe the blood of their horses and goats, sacrificial rabbits and fresh-caught eels, and even open their own veins under a full moon to sample the humours that drip out.
They stare into flames and rivers and each other’s eyes; follow healers and occultists and the perceived voices of gods on Earth; walk blindfolded and barefoot and in shoes made from in-turned nails; smoke seeds and weeds and crushed lion’s marrow; drink gentle-fingered poisons that make them see rainbows in their palms; suck coins and bark and the bodies of other worshippers; whip and shave; dress and undress; create chatter and embrace silence.
Echo goes on enough of the journeys with them to think she’s seen things beyond and behind the realm of existence, but they are shadows of thoughts and she, like the other philosophers, has the growing sensation they are looking for something that doesn’t want to be found.
Kosmos is bent on the hunt, trying any and every ritual he comes across, as if, without the daily resistance of his father’s anger, and under the prohibition of his own, he has no sense of self.
The frictions maintaining his ego’s boundaries have been stripped and objects he should interact with instead pass through him, as if ‘Kosmos’ no longer exists.
Echo can only see it so clearly because, though for different reasons, that was her state on arrival here.
Why that tattoo though; you wouldn’t understand; I feel like just an echo—
In only one moon, the season turns, bringing needed downpours which Echo runs out to dance in with Winji and her siblings, competing to see who can catch the most raindrops on their tongue.
Kosmos finally notices the children’s ragged clothing, and gives Unatti the money to buy them whatever they need for the winter.
His braid lengthens and his beard thickens enough to comb with perfumed oil.
News comes across the stormy iron seas that Pythagoras’s cult has been set aflame, his followers transfigured to ash on the wind, the man himself perhaps dead, perhaps alive—but whichever way, nowhere to be found.
Kosmos gives Echo a strange look, as if he’s never before really believed she can see the future. ‘You were right.’
She laughs, hysterically, in the warm cloak Nabu gave her. ‘Of all the travellers you have received here, Kosmos, I am the strangest. Yet I am the one you listen to least.’
He gazes around the old farm, the mosses growing in the atrium and the ivy taking over the courtyard. Frogs croak under benches and tables, and a gecko has taken up residence amongst the household gods. It should be beautiful. ‘We’re lost, aren’t we?’
‘Only because you are lost, and everyone follows you.’
Their antics have paled and thinned him, like a plant without sunlight. He looks at her and repeats the questions from so many weeks ago: ‘What should I do?’
‘You know what you should do.’
Wind and raindrops hiss through the skylight. A couple of late-rising revellers stagger from the andron, closely followed by Unatti with her ferocious broom.
Kosmos sighs, staring into space like a spirit. ‘I don’t think he’ll let me fix it, you know.’
‘Try anyway.’ She says, playing with Hazel’s favourite phrase. ‘It is the trying that is imperative.’
Though its citizens are proud of Athens’s size and growth, to Echo with her Not Here sensibilities it’s little more than a village. It’s small enough, certainly, that if she’s looking for someone, it never takes long to find them when she asks around.
Thus, they discover Nabu visiting a friend at the construction site for the new temple of Olympian Zeus, eating tripe spiced so pungently with cumin, vinegar, and silphium that it carries to Echo on the wind.
She keeps her distance as Kosmos approaches, but stays close enough that she can hear what happens.
The temple is nowhere near completion—it won’t be finished for hundreds of years—but the base with its three waist-high steps is almost done.
Sitting on the first step with his back against the second, Nabu is the same height as Kosmos standing, and he starts with recognition as Kosmos nears.
‘Hi.’ Kosmos swallows, darting glances to either side, his braid and beard not enough to give him an adult’s confidence.
Echo doesn’t blame him: This construction is famously a Peisistratid project, started by his grandfather and continued by Hippias and Hipparchos.
The tyrannos’s people are everywhere, extensions of his eyes and ears.
Nabu nods. ‘Hello.’
Kosmos flexes his fingers. He’s run over what he’s going to say several times with Echo, but now he’s standing in front of Nabu it looks like he’s clammed up.
His mouth works but nothing comes out. Nabu raises a sardonic brow.
Kosmos shakes his head, looks at the ground, then goes totally off-script.
Holding his breath, he puts his hands on the marble step, at either side of Nabu’s feet, then bends at the waist, leans forward, and kisses Nabu’s toes.
A small gasp escapes Nabu’s friend, who looks like he might be Persian, and knows as well as Echo what this means: In Nabu’s homeland, kissing someone’s feet identifies them as a king among men.
Rising again, but keeping his head bowed, Kosmos apologises.
It’s not the apology Echo would make, because Kosmos’s concept of his wrongdoing exists on a fundamentally different axis: In this language, at this time, he cannot ask for ‘forgiveness’ because his deeds are chiselled into history’s rock and cannot be wiped away.
All he can ask for is ‘forgivingness.’ The cultural differences mean that for each of his few Hellenic words, Echo has to translate into ten English ones.
What his words mean is, ‘Too late, I’ve come to understood how I hurt you.
Since then, my mind has altered, and my spirit has permanently turned in another direction.
I trust-hope-believe that you know I did not willingly do wrong, but was ignorant and imbibed the ideas of those around me without thinking about them fully.
Please consider this a public expiation, in return for which I ask you for your kindness and grace. ’
But all he says, literally translated, is: ‘Nabu, I’ve been a terrible fool, but I’m not that kind of fool anymore. Please, talk to me.’
Nabu tilts his head to one side but says nothing for so long that Echo is convinced he’s not going to accept Kosmos’s words.
Kosmos clearly has the same fear, because he looks up, flicking his hair from his eyes, giving it a last attempt. ‘You were wrong about one thing though.’
Echo cringes: This is not how you apologise.
Nabu blinks in surprise. ‘Oh?’
‘That you are, first and foremost, a man.’
Nabu’s face turns stormy, and Echo almost groans aloud, but Kosmos carries on.
‘You’re too intelligent, kind, and humorous to be only another man.’ He swallows, blinking rapidly. ‘You are Amel-Nabu, first and foremost and always. There is no other word for you.’
Nabu’s face breaks like ice on a water bucket. He moves forward, so his legs are dangling off the step, and, on the same height with Kosmos, cups his cheek in a hand. He says something too softly for Echo to catch, but the words are immaterial because their content is clearly kindness and grace.
Yet beyond the circle of two and the bubble of victory bursting in Echo, Hippias’s people are noting every movement and word. Behind the temple’s cranes and scaffolding, the Acropolis rises, and Hippias’s house is somewhere on its slopes.
There will be consequences to this. It’s only a matter of time.