The Last Song of Orpheus by Robert Silverberg Read Free Book Online

different, a cycle of eternal return, a dying and a coming to life again, even as the cornfield and the grapevine spring to new green growth after the brown barren time of winter has passed. I often wonder what it is like to be truly mortal, to be ordinary, to be not in the least mythical: to live only a short while, sixty or seventy years, and then to die and be forgotten, even by one’s own sons, who are just like oneself and will quickly grow old and die in their turn. And when mortals return to life, as the Mysteries say they will, it is without memory of what they have been before, so that they must learn and do and suffer all over again. I have sired mortal children, Musaeus, many of them, your brothers and sisters, though you never knew them. Now and then I encounter them in the world, aging wrinkled people with thinning hair and sagging frames. Some of them are unable even to sing. It is all very strange. 
    I returned to the Mysteries into which the Egyptian priests initiated me, the Lesser Mysteries and the Greater Mysteries, until I had mastered them. Now that I was an initiate I wore clean white linen robes every day and dined only on greens and cheese, for I could touch neither meat nor wine except at the time of the sacrifices to the gods. All the ancient strangenesses of Egypt were piped into my eager mind, holy secrets that have guided me ever since, and which I impart, sparingly and with caution, to those I think merit knowing of them. In the temples of Egypt I learned all that there was to learn of the struggle that awaits one when life has ended, of the judging of the soul after death and of the soul’s strange midnight wanderings through the twelve caverns of the Netherworld, surrounded on all sides by dread enemies that must be repulsed, and of the lake of fire, and of the boat that sails the waters beneath the world, and of the bull with four horns, and of the Great One kneeling in the sacred barge, and much, much more of which I may not speak. And although I had been to the Netherworld myself, not once but many times in the eternal cycle that is my life, I came to understand much about it from these priests that had not been clear to me before. 
    And then I knew that it was time for me to leave Egypt; for I always know when it is time to close one phase of my journey and begin the next. So I moved along from that sun-gripped land and set forth to return to my native Thrace. 
    There I found my father Oeagros dying. He had just enough strength left to speak of making a final journey into the wild mountains of the north, as he had always said he would do when he felt his end approaching, a journey from which there would be no coming back. I offered him the consolations I had learned in Egypt, but he would have none of them. In our land Dionysus was the reigning god, the old fierce Dionysus whom they worshipped with wild torch-bearing processions and the drinking of wine and the rending of beasts and the guzzling of their blood, and so my father ended his days with what he saw as the proper homage to his god, making a last offering to Dionysus, eating of the flesh and drinking of the blood, and went on his solitary journey into the dark mountainous wilderness dense with mighty trees that surrounded our city, and that was the last of him. So for a time I ruled as king in his place. Knowing that this was what I was meant to do at this point in my days I dwelled placidly among the roughhewn Ciconians and was for a time their ruler, their lawgiver, their teacher. I gave them the art of letters and showed them better ways of sowing their crops and made songs for them that tempered to some degree their cruel and savage spirits, and attempted to inculcate in them some of the true Mysteries, though that was hard, because I wanted to guide them toward the cool and disciplined way of Apollo and it was plain that they preferred the riotous and bloody way of Dionysus. I did my best. The years went by, and still I