Tigranes continued staring at him, his heavy eyelids narrowing to slits. “Of course it is not a barbitos,” he said, finally. “I am no woman, playing melodies for the pleasure of the household.”
“Then it is a phorminx?” Gabriel pressed.
“Yes,” Tigranes said grudgingly. “It is a phorminx.”
“And do you…use it?”
“To play merry refrains, you mean?” Tigranes said. “For visitors to dance and drink to? Is this what you have in mind, young man?”
“Of course not,” Gabriel said. “That would be an insult to the instrument. You don’t dance to the music of the phorminx—you declaim heroic poetry.”
Tigranes’ eyes widened at this, and he looked to Christos, who nodded.
“Come upstairs,” Tigranes said.
The man’s living quarters were as austere as the building’s exterior would lead one to expect. There were no signs of electricity or other modern conveniences. Through a rear window in what clearly served as Tigranes’ bedroom Gabriel saw a privy out back; in one corner of the room he saw a clay pitcher resting by a straw pallet. This room occupied roughly half of the second floor. Passing through it, Gabriel reached an even emptier sitting room whose only furnishings were drawn on the wall, a crude mural in the Attic style of a young man reclining on a bench before a seated, older man holding a lyre.
Tigranes sat cross-legged on the floor and Gabriel followed suit. Christos discreetly remained in the room outside.
“What is that picture?” Gabriel asked, nodding toward the mural.
“That,” Tigranes said, “is my grandfather’s grandfather’s grandfather. Fifty grandfathers ago.”
“He was a bard?” Gabriel said, using the ancient term for it: rhapsode, one who sews stories together.
“All the men in my family have been bards,” Tigranes said, but he used a term more ancient stilclass="underline" aoidos. “From the earliest of days to the present.”
“Here on Chios?”
Tigranes nodded, but said no more.
“And your…ancestor,” Gabriel said, reaching for a way to draw the old man out, “he…taught pupils?”
“My ancestor did teach a pupil,” Tigranes said. “His son. And his son taught his son, and so on. But you misunderstand what you see here. He is not the teacher in this picture.” He patted the wall by the image of the boy on the bench. “The young man—that is my ancestor.”
“I see,” Gabriel said. “And who is the old man teaching him?”
“Homer,” Tigranes said.
Chapter 13
“Homer,” Gabriel said.
“Homeros, the prince of the aoidi, yes—you did not know he was from Chios?”
Gabriel knew that Chios was one of several places in the region that laid claim to being the birthplace of Homer—it was the Mediterranean’s answer to George Washington slept here.
“I…I did not,” Gabriel said.
“Have you never seen the Daskalopetra? The throne from which Homer taught? It is beside the beach at Vrontados.”
He’d seen it, on one previous visit—a jutting stub of stone overlooking the sea. Any man might have sat there, or no man might; none but sea birds rested on it now.
“From father to son for twenty-eight hundred years,” Tigranes said, “the words of Homer have passed, a sacred trust. The stories of Achilleus and Odysseus and Oedipus—”
“Oedipus?” Gabriel said, and Tigranes nodded. He said: “My father taught me as his father taught him, the sixteen thousand verses of the Iliad, the twelve thousand of the Odyssey, and the seven thousand of the Oedipodea.” He drew a clawlike hand across the strings of his phorminx and an ancient chord hung in the air. “Sing, muse, the passion and hubris of Oedipus of Thebes, unhappiest of mortals, whose fate was writ before his birth…”
As he continued reciting the poem, line after line of hexameter spilling forth, Gabriel felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. It was the same feeling he got when walking into a sealed tomb for the first time, entering a place no man had set foot for centuries; or holding in his hands an artifact believed lost forever—which, after a fashion, is what this was. You could buy a copy of the Iliad or the Odyssey in any bookstore, in any language, in any country on the face of the earth. You could find it, god help you, in bits and pixels on the Internet. But the Oedipodea was one of the lost works of the ancient world, the only known written copy having been destroyed in the burning of the Library of Alexandria.
“It’s…beautiful,” Gabriel said when Tigranes reached the end of the introductory apostrophe and paused for breath. “And you say it is the work of Homer? I thought I remembered the Oedipodea being credited to someone else.”
Tigranes made a disgusted sound. “Cinaethon of Sparta,” he said, scoffing, “that’s what Pausanias said. And Plutarch. But what did they know? Did their fathers learn it at the feet of the poet himself?”
Gabriel understood now why Christos had brought him here. This was not the improvisation of a madman on a mountaintop—even the portion he had heard so far had the authenticity and coherence of a genuine artifact, a traditional lyric learned by rote as one might memorize and transmit a liturgy, from mind to mind and voice to voice across a sea of generations. It was a record of a forgotten time, one that very likely existed nowhere in the world but in this old man’s head. And it was a record with a particular relevance to the question he had posed in the tavern, since whether by Cinaethon or by Homer the Oedipodea would have told the story of Oedipus’ life—ending, famously, with his killing his father, marrying his mother, and putting his own eyes out when he learned what he had done…but beginning, just as famously, with his triumph over one of Greece’s most ancient monsters, the riddle-posing sphinx.
“Do you,” Gabriel began, “do you know the whole thing? All seven thousand verses?”
Tigranes’ eyes blazed and his chin rose haughtily. “All seven thousand! Of course!” He passed a hand before his eyes. “It is my duty to remember. Until the day I die.” His voice fell, taking on a tone of sadness. “I repeat them daily, though only to myself now. For I have no son, no one to teach. They will die with me. But not,” he said, rousing some fire again, “a day sooner.”
“I would greatly like to hear the rest,” Gabriel said.
“Then prepare yourself,” the old man said, his voice dropping into a rehearsed cadence, rich in timbre and suffused with pride, “for a story of four nights’ telling, an adventure unlike any you have heard before, for four nights of bloody deeds and terrible loss, of men brave and desperate, of women cruelly shamed.” His hand played among the strings of his phorminx, and the air jangled with a dissonant tune that spoke of distant shores, of men struggling under the heat of a foreign sun. “Prepare for four nights of splendor and depravity, four nights of—”
Christos’ voice interrupted then from the other room, where he was standing at the window. “Better make it four minutes,” he said. “We’ve got company.”
“Excuse me,” Gabriel said. He rushed to the window. Through it he saw the alleyway behind Tigranes’ home and the rooftops of the one-story buildings clustered around. Past those, he could see a sliver of the entry path leading into Anavatos, and, as they passed, the men coming up along it. Walking two abreast, it looked like a latter-day siege force: a dozen men at least, all armed, and bringing up the rear, standing a foot taller than any of the others, a man Gabriel had hoped never to see again. Andras.