Upstream

by Irenaeus of Lyon, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

Togirix had two hundred and forty jars of Baetican oil in the hold and room for one passenger, and the passenger who came down the quay at Arelate was a Greek.

He knew him for a Greek before the man opened his mouth: the cloak was pinned the wrong side, and he looked at the river the way men from the sea look at it, as if it ought to stand still. Then he did open his mouth, and it was Gaulish that came out, the Gaulish of the Lugdunum markets, spoken like a man chewing gravel.

"You go up?"

"To Lugdunum. Twenty days, if the Druentia keeps to its bed. Twenty-five if it doesn't."

"I have been twenty days on the sea. Twenty more is nothing." The Greek put coins on the barrel-head one at a time, Roman silver, and when he reached eight he stopped and waited to see whether Togirix would say nine. Togirix said nine. The Greek put down the ninth without arguing, which told Togirix that he was in a hurry, or a fool, or a priest of something.

His name, he said, was Irenaeus. He had been in Rome on business for people at Lugdunum. He carried one satchel, and he kept it on his body even when he slept.

---

A barge goes down the Rhône by itself. It comes up on men.

There were eleven on the rope that season, hired at Arelate, and Togirix's boy Cobnertus made twelve, though he was nine years old and the rope did not notice him. The line ran from the top of the towing mast, so that it rode high over the willows and the reeds, down to the haulers on the bank, each man in a breast-strap of leather, leaning forward at the angle of a man walking into a gale. Togirix had the steering oar. The current came at the bow brown-green and heavy, low after the summer, and the barge went up against it at the pace of a slow funeral.

On the second morning the Greek got down onto the towpath and walked.

Togirix let him. Passengers did this sometimes, for the legs. But at the noon halt the Greek asked the foreman for a strap, and the foreman, a Helvian with no front teeth, laughed and gave him the spare, and the Greek put it over his shoulder and leaned into the rope with the rest. He did it badly. He pulled when the others eased and eased when they pulled, so that the man behind him trod on his heels. By evening his palms were open in two places and his shoulder was raw where the strap had worked.

"You paid nine denarii," Togirix said, "to haul my boat."

"I paid nine denarii to be carried. The hauling I do for nothing." The Greek was looking at his hands, turning them over in the firelight, not in self-pity. He looked at them the way Togirix had seen a farrier look at a hoof. "Yesterday I sat on your deck and watched these men walk the river backwards. All day, the same mile the water had just come down, they went up again. Step for step. I wanted to know what it costs."

"Now you know."

"Now I know what it costs a man of forty-five who has been sitting in Rome all summer." He reached into the satchel, not for whatever he guarded there but for a flask, and he poured oil into his palm and worked it into the raw places. Then he looked down the fire at Esumagios, the youngest hauler, who had a rope burn along his forearm he had been ignoring for two days, and he went down the fire and took the boy's arm without asking and oiled that too.

Esumagios let him, astonished.

"He's a doctor," the foreman said.

"No," said the Greek. "But I think the arm is worth the oil."

---

They passed Avennio, where the Druentia comes in grey and full of the mountains, and the haulers had to wade the mouth to their waists with the rope over their heads. They passed the long empty reaches above it, where the bank was only reeds and herons and a farmstead now and then with a dog that ran the length of its land beside them, barking, and turned back at its boundary as if it had been told.

The Greek asked questions. Togirix had carried merchants who asked nothing and soldiers who asked only where the wine was. This one wanted to know everything about the river, and in an order that made no sense to Togirix until later. He wanted to know where the current ran fastest and where the sand built up. He wanted to know what happened to a log thrown in at Lugdunum. He wanted to know who had taught Togirix the river.

"My father."

"And who taught him?"

"His father. Dubnos. He hauled grain for the army when Trajan was Emperor, for the wars." Togirix spat over the side. "Dubnos learned it from a Cavare who had the boat before him. Before that I don't know. Before that I suppose somebody looked at the water and got in."

The Greek seemed pleased with this beyond its worth.

"I have mine the same way," he said. "From an old man at Smyrna, who had it from a man who had seen with his eyes. Three men, from me back to the thing itself. You can count your river back to Trajan. I can count mine back to the beginning."

"What did your old man teach you?"

The Greek considered him, the way a man considers a jar to see whether it will hold what he wants to put in it.

"That the one who made the first man out of mud did not afterwards despise the mud," he said, and then, as if he had said too much in a bad language, he went forward to the bow and stood there a long time.

---

The log, Togirix had told him, would be at the sea in four days at summer water. Five if it caught in the willows. A man was different. A drowned man went down first and came up later, when the gases had him, and the Rhône, which hid him for a week, liked to give him back at the same few places: on the shingle below Vienna, at the bend under Tegna, on the long sandbar the boatmen called the Bed. Togirix had pulled two men off the Bed in his life, and a cow.

"And if a thing is lighter than a log," the Greek said. "Lighter than a leaf."

"Then the river has it, and nobody gets it back. Why?"

"I am trying to learn the river," said the Greek.

They came to the Bed two days later, in the afternoon, a long tongue of pale sand on the inside of a bend with the current pressed hard against the far bank. The haulers swung wide of it on the towpath. The Greek asked Togirix to put him off there, and Togirix, who would not have done it for a merchant, eased the barge in under the willows and let the rope go slack.

The Greek walked the length of the sand and back. There was nothing on it but driftwood and a heron that rose and settled again further down. He stopped where the sand was darkest and stood.

"Here was the cow?"

"About there. She'd come down from above Vienna. Swollen like a wine-skin. A man came from Tegna for her with a cart, two days after, and paid me for the hauling. He knew her by a nick in her ear."

"He knew her," said the Greek, "after the river." He seemed to turn this over. "And he paid you. Good. It's right that he paid you."

He came back aboard with sand on his feet, and the haulers took up the weight, and the Bed went past and behind them.

---

It was at Vienna that they heard.

The barge tied up below the town for a night and a day, because the foreman wanted his money and two of the haulers wanted the women in the lanes behind the warehouses. Togirix went up to the boatmen's tavern by the customs post, where the crews of the down-river barges drank and traded news like coin. A Lugdunum crew was there, a day out with a cargo of tiles, and they had a story they had been telling all the way down and had worn smooth.

The Christians, they said. The governor had had them in the amphitheatre at the games of the Three Gauls, the whole confederacy watching, and some he had beheaded for being Roman citizens, and the rest had gone to the beasts. There had been a slave girl the beasts would not finish. They had tried her with everything, the grill, the bull, and she would not die, and in the end they had to put a knife in her. Then the soldiers had kept the bodies lying out under guard, six days, so that nobody could take them away and bury them. The Christians had offered money, the tile-men said. The soldiers took the money and gave nothing. On the sixth day they burned the bodies to ash and swept the ash into the Rhône below the bridge, and one of the soldiers called out over the water, Now let us see them rise.

The tile-men thought this was a good joke and told it twice.

Togirix carried it back to the barge with the bread, because it was river news, and the river was his trade. He told it at the fire. He told it well. He had it nearly word for word.

The Greek had been eating. He put the bread down on his knee and did not pick it up again.

"When," he said.

"Before the last moon. Late in the summer. After the games."

The Greek counted on his fingers, slowly, moving his lips in Greek. Togirix watched him reach a number and start again and reach the same number.

"Then I was on the sea," he said. "When they went into the river, I was on the sea, coming the other way."

Nobody at the fire said anything. Esumagios looked at his oiled arm.

"The old man," the Greek said. "Ninety years old. Was he with them? In the river?"

"Died in the prison," Togirix said, because the tile-men had said it, and because there was nothing else to say. "Before the games. They beat him in the street, and he died in the prison two days after. I don't know where they put him."

"Yes," said the Greek. "I had a letter at Arelate about him. I knew about him. I didn't know about the river."

Then Togirix understood what he had carried up from Arelate on nine denarii, and what was in the satchel, and why a Greek would come from Rome to Lugdunum in a hurry, and he looked, without meaning to, at the customs post up the bank. The governor had burned these people. A boatman who carried one of them could have his place in the guild taken from him by any man with a writing tablet.

The Greek saw all this in his face. He was not a stupid man.

"I'll walk from here," he said. "It is two days. You have been paid."

Togirix looked at him. He thought of the tile-men in the tavern, telling the joke twice. He thought of the cow on the Bed, which had been somebody's, and which he had hauled off the sand and given back to them, because the river had carried it but it was not the river's. He did not know why he thought of the cow.

"You paid to be carried to Lugdunum," he said. "You get carried to Lugdunum. Sit in the stern and don't preach to my haulers."

"I have never preached to your haulers."

"You oiled them," said Togirix. "It's the same thing."

---

The Greek did not walk the towpath after Vienna. He sat in the stern by the steering oar with his back to the satchel and his face to the bank, and Togirix, who had nothing to say to him, found himself saying things anyway: the name of a spring, the depth of a pool, the place where a ferry had gone down in his father's time with a bridal party in it. The Greek listened to all of it. He had stopped asking questions, which was worse.

On the last evening, under the hill of Lugdunum, with the lights of the town going up the slope above them and the smell of the tanneries coming down, Cobnertus came and sat by the Greek and asked him what Togirix had not.

"Will your god find them? In the river?"

The Greek looked at the boy for a long time. He looked at him the way he had looked at his own blistered palms on the second night.

"How old are you?"

"Nine."

"Nine. When you were made, Cobnertus, where were you before? Before your mother carried you?"

The boy thought about it seriously, as boys of nine will. "Nowhere."

"Nowhere. And from nowhere he made you, with fingers and a voice and a rope burn of your own." The Greek took the boy's hand and turned it over and showed him a mark across the palm, a red line from the rope that Togirix had not noticed. "If he can do that from nowhere, do you think he is troubled to do it from a river? The river is somewhere. The river is a great deal more than nowhere."

Cobnertus looked at his palm. "But they're ash."

"So was Adam, before," said the Greek. "Or mud. It comes to the same."

Togirix, at the oar, said nothing. He had not understood the Greek's god and did not want to. He leaned on the oar, which did not need leaning on, and let the boy go on asking.

---

In the morning the customs men came aboard and counted his jars and found two more than his tablet said and argued, and by the time it was settled the sun was high. The Greek waited through all of it. When it was over he asked Togirix one thing.

"Show me where the bridge is. The place."

Togirix took him. He took Cobnertus too, because the boy would have followed anyway. They went along the quay past the warehouses of the guild, and past the bridge piers, and down onto the strip of grey shingle below the second pier where the water ran quick and shallow over the stones. There was nothing there. Togirix had not thought there would be. There was a broken basket and some feathers and the river going by, the same as at Arelate, the same as everywhere, fast and green and indifferent, coming down from the lake country where it was born.

"Here?" said the Greek.

"Here. Or near enough. The tile-men said below the bridge."

The Greek went down on his knees on the wet stones. Togirix had seen men kneel at the river before, to drink, or to wash, or to be sick after a night in the lanes. This was none of those. The Greek put both his hands into the water to the wrist and held them there, and Togirix could see the current pull at the sleeves of his tunic and darken them.

The water that was going over his hands, Togirix thought, had not been here when the ash went in. That water was at the sea long ago, before the Greek had even left it. This water had come down from the lake since. The Greek knew it. He had asked about logs.

The Greek took his hands out of the water. He had brought up a double handful of silt from the bottom, black and fine, the stuff the river leaves on everything, which the potters dig for their kilns. He held it, letting the water run out between his fingers until what was left was the clay. Then he closed his hand on it, hard.

When he opened his hand the clay had kept the shape of it: four ridges where the fingers had been, the hollow of the palm, a long crease from the thumb.

He set it down on a flat stone above the waterline and stood up. His knees were black. He did not brush them. He looked up the hill to where the town was, and the street that went up to it, and Togirix saw him put the satchel straight on his shoulder, the way a hauler settles his strap before he takes the weight.

"Thank you for carrying me," he said, and went up the shingle to the street, with the river still on his knees, and did not look back.

Togirix stood with his boy on the stones. It was getting on to noon. The oil had to go up to the guild warehouse, and the haulers would want paying, and Esumagios would want an advance on the down-river trip and would not get it.

When he turned to go Cobnertus was crouching over the flat stone. He had put his own hand into the hollow the Greek had left. It did not fill it. There was room all round his fingers, a margin of grey clay, already beginning to pale and crack in the sun.

---

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ab Irenaeō Lugdūnēnsī per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Irenaeus of Lyon, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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