The Wreckage of Agathon by Gardner John

Author:Gardner, John [Gardner, John]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2010-09-21T04:00:00+00:00

20 Peeker:

Everything’s going from bad to worse. I begin to suspect that my master was right in abandoning hope long since. New divisions move out to the war every day—it’s broken out on all sides of us now, north, south, east, west. We watch them lumber past in the valley, riding along the river, caravans stretching out mile on mile, the hoplites in front riding four abreast, naked except for their armor, their plumes, their streaming hair, and then after them the foot soldiers, the archers, the company of runners, and then the mulecarts and handcarts, the cooks, weaponsmiths, carriers, the pack animals, the herders with their wide herds of sheep and goats. The caravan’s there when we look out in the morning, and it takes all day to pass. Who would have believed that the city could pull together such forces? Sometimes when a caravan’s moving out it meets with another one moving in, wagon on wagon of wounded and dead, sick men shuffling and limping behind them, gashed, limping horses, and lines of half-starved men in chains. The two armies pass without a word, as far as you can tell from here, as remote as living men and ghosts. Meanwhile in the city there are fires day and night, and sporadic noises of rioting. Some god must have gone mad. There was an earth tremor day before yesterday. Perhaps it’s Poseidon himself, master of all things that thunder and shake, who’s gone mad. But I haven’t told the worst of it. The Spartans have introduced a new horror: mass executions. According to Agathon, no man has ever been executed for a political crime in the whole history of Athens. Here in Sparta they herd a whole crowd of Helots, gray-faced, bruised, sickly—and there are women and children and old people among the crowd—herd them into a sloping field and shower them with arrows, and then when none of them are moving anymore, a few soldiers walk among the corpses with swords and finish off any they find still breathing. We can’t see it from here, and no one tells us about it, of course, but Agathon says it’s happening, and he seems to know. There’s a look he gets—as if his spirit has abandoned his body, leaving it old and indifferent as a mountain. He’s going to make me a Seer, he says. I’ve believed it sometimes, but not at those times when that thing comes over him, that deadly, heatless clarity of Apollo’s light. There’s some secret he’s forgotten, some trick to it, something maybe that he found in that book he used to have, or says he had: I never saw it, and it’s a hard thing to believe. Who would ever have lost such a thing if he had it? He stands at the door with his hands behind his back and his legs aspraddle, watching the guards lead another crowd of prisoners away—to their death, I finally understand; that much you can see in

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.