Chapter 8 Echo #3
She stumbles up and Nabu drags her to the wide central pool.
They sit on the far side from the philosopher, Echo sandwiched between Nabu and an Egyptian potter she’s seen around the agora.
Nabu passes her a kylix of water, but it settles nastily in her stomach.
They copy Xenophanes’s followers, dangling their feet in the pool, and its cool rolls back the hul gil’s curtain.
The rain has eased and falls in a mist through the skylight, wetting her knees.
Occasional fatter drops trickle and plink like extra instruments in the music.
At Xenophanes’s left hand, ensconced with the philosopher’s younger followers, Kosmos smiles up at the clouds and exclaims, ‘As Thales says, there really are little gods in everything.’
Xenophanes chuckles, combing his beard with fingers calloused from long hours at the lyre, his robes rumpling around him on the only couch.
His own pipe is long and made of bronze, expelling twice as much smoke as anyone else’s.
He seems an old man, though he’s only in his fifties, and the Not Here whispers he’ll live for decades more.
It’s as if he emerged from the womb eighty years old.
‘Would you like some wine?’ Harmodios offers him a kylix.
Xenophanes waves a hand. ‘Can’t stand the stuff—more water. And pomegranates.’ Harmodios clicks his fingers at a serving boy, who scuttles to fulfil the order.
Xenophanes grumbles about the benefits of pomegranates on passing stools. ‘After a sea voyage, one’s bowel movements become so erratic.’
Echo disguises her giggles as a coughing fit.
The serving boy returns with a platter of freshly split pomegranates, which get passed all the way around—even to Echo, lowliest of them all.
The seeds burst in her mouth, bitter and underripe, as the musicians strike up a new tune and Leaina sings along, a hymn to Aphrodite that Echo’s heard somewhere in the Not Here, but which seems sweeter for the peal of raindrops and drumming thunder.
When Leaina’s finished, Xenophanes applauds. ‘A beautiful tune! A shame its subject is so unworthy.’
Leaina laughs, perching on the end of his couch and rubbing his bunions. ‘You don’t believe in the power of love?’
Sighing at the release of tension in his toes, Xenophanes lounges back with his eyes closed, gesticulating lazily.
‘I wouldn’t say this in front of any audience, naturally, but you—you’re fellow philosophers, from the highest aristokrat to the lowest artisan.
You’re here precisely because you’ll understand.
I believe in the power of love, of course—I’ve felt it. But in the goddess, I have no faith.’
Exchanging looks, the musicians put down their instruments and squeeze in around the pool with sloshes and whispers, those who can’t fit sitting on the floor behind and crowding in, until they all form one bated breath.
Lightning flashes, turning the raindrops momentarily diamond white. The poet is about to begin.
From the opposite side of the pool, Aristogeiton asks, ‘But how can love be inspired without the goddess?’
Above them, on his couch, Xenophanes smiles and opens his eyes, green as Scythian grasslands, the only bright thing in his prematurely ancient face.
‘In our myths, we’ve ascribed every shameful, blameworthy thing humans can do to the gods’ characters—theft, adultery, rapine, deception.
We have made divinities in the shape of ourselves—not just physically, but emotionally and intellectually.
In Ionia, where I live, we border empires that believe in gods quite unlike ours.
Though some men say these are just retellings of our gods, that’s not the case: Wherever one goes, the gods are different.
Yet always they’re made in the image of the men who imagined them. ’
Or women. Echo picks pomegranate seeds from their skin-like casing. Or women or women or wo—
‘It’s true,’ Nabu says, and Echo is conscious of eyes turning in their direction. ‘In Thrace, they believe in gods that are red haired and blue eyed like they are.’
‘And if the cows could talk, they’d tell us the gods were cow-shaped, with dozy brown eyes and dangling bellies!
’ Xenophanes agrees, laughing at his own joke, until he’s overcome by phlegm and coughs, dislodging Leaina’s foot rub.
When he’s settled, he carries on. ‘Therefore, doesn’t it make sense that all men are wrong and, rather than gods that look like us, it’s more likely any true gods must have no shape that we can imagine. ’
‘Haven’t the Egyptians achieved something like that with their animal-headed divinities?’ Aristogeiton interjects.
‘To a degree, but they still have human bodies and known forms. What if instead the divine was unimaginable, beyond our conception in both shape and thought? Like nothing we’ve ever seen.’
A line of pomegranate juice dribbles down Echo’s wrist and she abandons the fruit skin in her lap to lick it away. A goddess would certainly have found a cleaner means to eat her fruit.
Catching candlelit raindrops in his outstretched palm, Xenophanes continues.
‘Look at the world—the ordered falling of the rain, the wanderers’ persistent paths in the sky, the pattern of birth and death, birth and death.
This world is the product of an ordered, clear, conscientious mind.
A good mind. A mind unlike a man’s, that never turns to rage or impatience.
A mind that is unified. One great mind, beyond our reckoning.
’ Thunder rumbles, as if applauding. ‘One Demiurge.’ The gilded droplets fall from his hand, racing to the pool in a miniature waterfall.
‘One mind that made the world, by forming the world from itself.’
‘Like Thales’s little gods,’ Kosmos says, entranced.
‘Except this is Xenophanes’s big god!’ Harmodios replies, toasting his kylix. The company grins and giggles. Extraordinary that even in Xenophanes’s presence, Harmodios loses none of his confidence.
Leaina tilts her head coquettishly. ‘But if everything’s made from one sole God, then it must follow that everything is divine.
Yet, if we suppose everything’s divine, how can it also be set to a purpose?
If I look at a wheat field, how can I at once acknowledge that it’s part of the Demiurge and be prepared to cut the wheat to eat? ’
‘Clever girl,’ Xenophanes agrees, and Echo catches Leaina cover a wince at the pet name. ‘Does anyone have an answer to our delightful friend’s problem?’
‘Well, to me, it’s not a problem,’ says Nabu, drawing eyes their way again.
Echo lowers her face, attending to her pomegranate.
‘In Sardis, before the Achaemenids took our land, there was a terrible war. It lasted six years and during the final battle, my grandfather told me, the moon blotted out the sun, offering the commanders on both sides the omen of a shining crown that held only darkness. Whoever won the war would have found their rule dogged by that darkness, so they came together and formed a truce. By my time it had fallen apart, of course, but it lasted many decades.’
As he speaks, the Not Here rustles with the sound from Echo’s dreams, a hundred million trees stoked by a breeze. Above the hul gil, she smells compost—though it’s impossible that Harmodios would keep rotting leaves in such a grand house.
Harmodios leans forward. ‘How does that relate to Leaina’s problem?’
‘Like this,’ Nabu replies. ‘The Achaemenid empire has long been able to predict celestial events, like that eclipse in Sardis. Yet the assembled soldiers—from illiterate spearmen to educated generals—were still able to see the wanderers as sacred and interpret the eclipse as an omen. The celestial bodies are physical, predictable, mundane things, but they are also still divine. To the Achaemenids, despite their predictability, Anahita still inhabits the morning and evening stars, just as we Lydians can still feel the presence of Pldans in the sun.’
The pool sparkles, each reflective surface throwing a world back to Echo that has nothing to do with the present—a horizon of geometric shapes lit by infinite fireflies. Euston and Kings Cross and Islington and all of it so, so empty—
‘Isn’t there an Ode to Salt you once translated that has a similar bent?’ Kosmos says to Nabu. ‘The salt’s worshipped in the first stanza for its divine nature and in the second for its mundane applications.’
‘I’d forgotten about that.’ Nabu smiles, tucking secrets in the corners of his mouth. ‘It was a prayer rather than a poem—though sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference.’
The Not Here bubbles and froths, boiling over in the space behind Echo’s eyes, until she’s blind to everything except the page she read in another place, with the presence of mind only to translate into Hellenic as she goes: ‘You are salt, the one made in a pure place. Without you, the royal banquet is not set in the Ekur temple. Without you, god, king, noble, and prince do not smell incense. As for me, whom magical intrigues afflict—release my spell, O salt! Take from me the magical intrigues and, just as I will continue to praise the god who made me, I will continue to praise you.’
Echo barely realises she’s speaking out loud until the Not Here diminishes and she reawakens to the symposium, its inhabitants staring as if only seeing her for the first time. She bites her lip.
Nabu gives her a warning glance. ‘Not bad, though your recital was a little abridged.’ He recovers and continues.
‘As you see, this prayer demonstrates that salt is at once mundane—used for incense and food—and a sacred being whose divine power can be called on to instil purity. The idea is far older than the Achaemenid empire though. Way, way back, the Babylonians got around using reeds for thatching in the same way. So, this idea of divinity being in everything, it’s not a problem at all. ’