Unproven

Chris Gavaler

When after three days the long-haired boy had not eaten, drunk, slept or moved from his niche on the deck where he had sat upright since their sailing, the crew argued whether he was a god. Perhaps he dozed while they worked the tackle. The sea, which they knew would be churned from northern storms, rippled against their hull like pond waves, placid to the edge of the horizon’s mouth. Instead of curses and brothel rhymes, the harmonies of their chants rose above the thrum of the sails. Clearly some divinity moved with them. Perhaps they would not sell the boy after all.

Some decided their landing on the Syrian coast was ordained to provide him passage. They had harbored in the morning shadow of Carmel, an ugly and inaccessible mountain sacred only to its inland tribes, and while throwing nets for fish to ferry aboard, one of the crew had glimpsed the descent of a figure from the steepled summit, a speck of a man plunging precipice to precipice as the dark of his hair and the white of his robes fluttered. They watched until the young man placed his palm against their boat stern, his sandals braced against the splash of the reef. 

“You have dipped into a great shoal of fish,” he observed. Their net writhed as they heaved the catch aboard. “One hundred and fifty-three.”

The fish gasped and slapped scales against wood as the sailors straightened their backs and squinted. The stranger’s face was black from the shards of sun crowning the blacker face of Carmel behind him. They scoffed at his guess.

“Count them,” he asked. “If I am wrong, I will obey one of your orders.”

They jeered as they tallied the fish into gagging piles, losing count twice. The third total—after seizing each silver body in hand instead of shoving with sandal soles to spare a scale-cut through a well-callused joint—was indisputable. One hundred and fifty-three. Luck, one said, tonguing blood from his thumb. But they agreed to one command as wagered.

“Release them.”

Most of the fish had suffocated in the sun and lay still in the well of the boat. It would be simple to net them again, but when turned out, they quickened in the waves and darted between the sailors’ knees. Not one floated its belly to the surface. 

The youth returned the strap of his travel bag to his shoulder and eyed the harbored ship. “Are you bound back to Egypt?” 

The others welcomed him with appraising stares, guessing the price such a clean and well-formed Greek boy would earn at the Alexandrian market. Their holds were crammed with like goods. Only the dog, a yellowed greyhound that howled from its rope as the youth climbed the plank ropes, was too damaged for profit. Its fur stood tacky with blood. An old slave struck it with a bucket handle, cursing it, shoving it into the mast it was knotted to, but still it whimpered and rumbled, its jaws spun tight in bloody twine. 

“Why do you beat him?”

The slave raised his boney fist again, pointing and shouting into the animal’s face. “He never obeys!”

“You should stop.”

The slave unbent his back and turned, his beard as yellowed as the dog. “He’s already ruined.” 

The young man extended his fingers which the animal sniffed. It could not lick them. “In his body abides the soul of a friend.” 

The slave grunted but lowered his cudgel. He looked to the sailors, but the nearest only blinked back at him. “Souls of men live in Hell when they die. Not in beasts.”  

“I recognized his voice as he was crying.” 

The slave said nothing, and the boy waited until the bucket handle clacked against the deck wood before stepping around the mast. 

When the sailors pulled anchors and the ship lurched in the waves, the Egyptians stumbled and grabbed for handholds. The boy only dipped his knees. He settled himself behind the last mast, where he would not hinder the crew’s tasks, and draped his bag across his bare knees. Eyeing it while jerking gear against the traveler’s leg, a sailor asked if he had ever worked a ship. 

“I was once a fisherman in Delos,” he said. “My name was Pyrrhus.” 

Another crewman’s shadow fell across the leather bag. It was not large but its contents were curious in shape and its strings tightly drawn. When pressed, he raised his chin again and explained that he carried a letter of introduction to King Amasis of Egypt from Polycrates, the king of his island home of Samos. Having exhausted the knowledge of his mentors and the patience of his island’s tyrant, he was to devote himself to the Egyptian temples where he would sacrifice to their gods and learn all their mathematical sciences. The sailors exchanged grins at his lies.

“Your bag,” one observed, “is bulky.” 

“Silver,” said the boy. “Cups for the priests of Memphis.” 

The semicircle of men laughed at his audacity, until he removed three goblets from the mouth of the sack. Each glowed in the noon light like candle glass lit from its basin. He had forged them himself, at the advice of his last teacher, the aged philosopher Thales of Miletus. Other sailors approached, demanding his name and his claim to royal audiences. A gull perched on a sail knot, watching, listening, the sun at its back. The boy did not squint. 

“I was once Midas,” he said, “the King of Phrygia, whom Dionysus gave the touch of gold.” His raised finger hovered between them, then dropped as he smiled. “Then Apollo gave me ass’s ears.” 

One of them chuckled, and then another, and then another, before dispersing to their chores. The gods were indeed smiling upon them. A nobleman would pay threefold for so learned a pedagogue to lug his children’s scrolls.

The first night, in honor of their Greek passenger, the Egyptians told tales of Odysseus to the thump of the oar drum, lusting for the sea chambers of Kalypso, for the wine of the witch of Aiaia, before demanding meters from their passenger. The boy did not rise but spoke from his low seat. The water splayed a broken moon across his face. 

“I was once the Trojan Euphorbus of whom Homer sings. The Spartan king slew me and dedicated my shield to Hera of Argive on his voyage home. All but the ivory face remains upon it now. It rests in the territory of the Branchidae now, in a temple of Apollo.”

An easy lie, most thought, rapt by the youth’s recitation of the war lord Menelaus’ sundering of the Trojan’s neck and the plundering of his armor. Like a lion, said the traveler, gorging on the entrails of a chosen heifer while the herd dogs and shepherds tremble at a distance. Afterwards, someone nudged his foot and opened a fist of food, the salted meat of an ewe, which he declined. Others ladled sweet wine from the lidded cask above his shoulder, at first dripping and then splashing drops across the weave of his bright tunic. Bladders of spring water swung from a hook at the far mast. He would not rise for those either.

The next morning when he refused even the good fish, and the night crew reported that he had not once closed his eyes or even stood to piss over the rail, they debated his schooling. Perhaps he was a prophet of Moschus, a descendant of the physiologist whom the Hebrews call Moses. Or he might be a hierophant of Byblos or Tyre, a priest of the Phoenician mysteries, born under a star. He must have a private temple at the peak of Mount Carmel. Had they not seen him descend upon invisible wings? When his fasting continued past the noon meal and still their sails steered full and fat, the captain asked his parents’ names. 

“My mother was renamed Pythia after the prophet of the Pythian Apollo who foretold my birth to my father while he was in Delphi.”

“Your father is Apollo?”

“He’s a gem engraver.”

“And a cuckold,” declared the captain. “Your mother did more than pray to her sun god.” He turned to his men and chuckled, but few echoed him. The boy’s face was as still as the blue above them. 

“My parents,” he continued, “are descended from Ancaeus, who was a child of Zeus and founded Samos on the bidding of the oracle.”

“Two gods!” cried the captain. “Is that all?”

“I was once Aethalides,” added the boy, “a son of Hermes.”

The captain forced a last solitary laugh and then coughed. “And what have you to show for all this pedigree? Is it your father smoothing these waves?”

“I remember all that my soul has suffered in Hades,” he answered. “Hermotimus lingered there longest.” The youth’s face did not darken, but his eyes deepened in their shadowed sockets. The deck groaned under the Egyptians’ feet. “I saw the soul Hesiod bound to a pillar. Homer hung from a tree atop a hill of vipers. The gods punish all those who speak of them.”

The slave stepped nearer. “And you?” he asked. “What did you do to deserve their wrath?”

“Hermes,” he answered, “offered me a gift, one of my own choosing—any wish but immortality. I chose the memories of my soul. I know all of my lives.” 

“Were you ever a dog—pissing and rutting in your own mud?”

“I was,” he answered. “And also a weed that grew from that mud.”

When the boy bowed his head again, the crew moved off. None interrupted his meditation, until the look-out sighted a smaller cargo ship sailing into their path. The captain ordered the armory crates opened and his men readied spear and arrow. He exhorted them, promising they would make their own all the goods the vessel held. The crew roared and clacked swords and shields and metal spear points, and none met eyes with the boy.

“You will have corpses then,” he said.

When the Greek ship drifted nearer, they saw its unmanned sails. Ropes dangled from the masts like entrails, their ratty tails twisting between the swollen bodies blackening the planks. A wind blew across the decks, and the Egyptians’ weapons clattered again as they bent at the railings and emptied their stomachs into the waves. 

“We are lost,” one said. “The pestilence has us.”

But then a wind parted the ships and sent the dead men north again. The Egyptians looked to the boy, but he had not stirred from his place. He controls the air, some said. Others gathered meat from the stores to burn on a crude altar and appease their own gods.

“Not with flesh,” said the boy. 

He told them to unseal the jars of frankincense, the finest ones the captain knew Alexandrian merchants would double in price. These they set aflame, as the youth sung hymns in a voice that set the hull and their bones vibrating. The jars darkened and then shattered, and none moved to sweep them away until the shards were as cool as the sea spray.

That night, after recounting the deeds and speeches of the breathless dead to Odysseus in the underworld, they asked the boy the secrets of the lower realm. Instead, he told a trick he played on his brothers when they were children. He had descended into a basement cavern after instructing his mother to record the day’s events on a tablet to be lowered to him each sunset. This she did, unobserved by her other sons, for a moon’s cycle. She provided him loaves and cheeses, too, but the boy ate little, and when he emerged in their courtyard he was wasted to his skeleton. He told his brothers that he had sojourned in Hades, which they did not believe, until he recounted their daily actions and conversations, all being known to the god who calculates punishments below. At this, they trembled and called him divine. 

“Only my slave wasn’t fooled,” he added. “He said the gods would punish me for my audacity someday.”

“He’s lying,” one of the sailors whispered. “He doesn’t want us to know he is Horus.”

“Who are these brothers of yours?” another asked. “What oracles were they born under?”

“None,” he said. “Though Astraeus, my adoptive brother, was an infant when my father found him in a forest. He was suckling dew drops from a reed and gazing at the sun.”

“And your slave? What is he?”

“Zalmoxis of Thrace. He was born wrapped in a bear’s skin.”

“Like the Hercules you barbarians worship?”

“What of the real Hades? Have you dined with your death god and his bride?”

He laced his fingers across his lap before answering. He still had not risen from his niche, and his face was gaunt now, his hair a dark pillar against each cheek. “He said he knew me and the souls of my followers, pious but lice-plagued men who alone shared his table. I recognized none of them. In their next lives, the god told me, they will learn all the mysteries of heaven from me before my enemies burn them alive.” The stars flashed in the moisture of his eyes, rising and dipping with the sea’s beat. “I was only a fisherman then,” he said.

“And what are you now, sir?” 

“A student.”

When the Egyptians rested upon their mats to sleep, whispers swarmed between them. He is the Pythian. No, the Paeon, physician of the gods. Did you glimpse his thigh—it is made of gold and flickers in the glow of the torches. He is a traveler from the moon. No, one of their Olympians made flesh. He has come to redeem them. Not them, us, all men.

The last day, when they arrived at the Egyptian shore, at a river’s inlet far from the markets, they assisted the stranger, whose limbs trembled from fasting, to the fishing boat and then onto the beach. They secured him safely inland and then constructed an altar from the wood of their freight and heaped it with the fruits and nuts and honeycombs that the captain had planned to exchange for gold. They offered it all to him and departed hastily. Some claimed they heard the river greet the young demigod, his name rumbling through its froth: 

Hail, Pythagoras.

After replenishing his strength, he would walk to the palace of Amasis where he would be greeted and escorted first to Heliopolis and then Memphis and then Diospolis, once called Thebes. He would visit all the Egyptian priests and sages, enter the holiest parts of their temples, and be initiated into their most secret mysteries. He would study for twenty-two years, and then a further twelve with the Magi in Babylon, where Zoroaster would purify him from the pollutions of his past life. From the Chaldeans and Arabians he would learn theorems of the celestial orbs; from the Phoenicians and Hebrews numbers and computation; from the Egyptians divine geometry. After learning every truth made manifest by God and contemplating all the beauties of the earth and heavens, he would return north. Here he would overthrow tyrants, found cities, cure the sick through song, establish schools, convert followers by the thousands, and bring peace to nations for many ages. In his line of succession, Plato will be the ninth, and Aristotle tenth. Pythagoras will die at the age of one hundred and four at the hands of hypocrites found unfit to join his students’ ranks, but his wisdom will abide in all philosophers of whom he is the first and holiest, an avatar of Apollo.

Or so the oracle had told him. He had not necessarily believed her. Nor disbelieved. The truth required neither from him. He recalled the woman’s wet eyes, and the sway of her breasts beneath the fabric of her robes as she jabbered, the columns of the temple rising, the fissure descending beneath her three-legged stool. He wondered how deep it went, whether Hades really sat at his banquet table far below, listening to the urgent lullaby of her ranting. He wondered whether the bodies of his dead selves paused from their plates to listen too. They must go somewhere. Maybe that was the death god’s tongue twitching in the peasant woman’s mouth. All the priestesses were peasants. The shape of the future is just its past and its present squared. Might not anyone calculate it?  

She said the corpse of the snake that Apollo slew lay in the chasm below, the fumes of its rot intoxicating her. Or was that the oleander leaves? Green spittle foamed on her lips and the lip of the overturned bowl at her foot. She was called “Womb,” they all were, the Pythia, like his mother, or their temple was, or the temple before it, and what was the point of keeping it all straight? He studied the angle of the sun scaling the chiseled letters, until her voice ebbed and she slumped and blinked. 

“Did he?” she asked. “Did your father speak to you?”

Tomorrow will be a day’s march under a heavy sun. He knows that much of his future. For now, he rests at the water’s edge. Tiny waves lap at the mud and reeds. The shadow of a cloud climbs the bank toward his naked foot. The shrine of wood and jars and silken bags slumps beside him. When the wind shifts, he inhales the tang of a spice he cannot name. It’s a waste really, all the offerings. He couldn’t possibly eat or carry them all. Oleander, he wonders, is it bitter or sweet?

He reaches for the closest jar, studies the purple glass glowing between his fingers, and snaps the wax lid. He can’t name this scent either, or the dark moist husk he fingers loose from the sticky mass. He nibbles at the tip, before angling it deeper into his mouth, his jaw constricting. He licks his thumb and finger and then plunges them back in. This could be his last meal, and my god is he hungry.

The ship has not sunk into the horizon yet. The dark of its mast and the white of its sails flutter wave to wave. He could still call them back. He could scatter oil from the lamp and set fire to the shrine, uncoil a black snake of smoke high into the empty air. They would probably see it. They would probably return for him. He swallows tangy spit and remembers the raw flaps of the slave dog’s mouth. He pictures the Egyptian captain’s strong ropey arms and then the Pythia’s not-so-ancient breasts breathing inside her robe. 

The wind shifts again. He yawns. 

The cups inside his satchel rattle as he wedges them between a tree root and his head. He should find shelter, or shade at least, but the heft of his eyelids is too much, their darkness too delicious. He could lay here for hours, for lifetimes, content in the grit of a strange beach, his soul unhooked from the wheel of the earth, nothing tugging it up to be reborn each morning. Nothing now but the soft geometry of his thoughts dissolving.