Читать книгу: «The Return from Troy», страница 5

The Sicilian opened his hands. ‘I look to do good business in Mycenae.’

‘And doubtless you will,’ Geilissa answered, ‘on your return from Phocis. King Strophius is a wealthy man. He will compensate you well for the delay.’

‘And what assurances do I have of this?’

Geilissa unwrapped from a cloth the casket in which were gathered all the jewels and golden ornaments that Electra had insisted on bringing to Midea. ‘These are already worth more than all your slaves. You shall have the casket when you leave the city with my friend safely concealed in your train.’

‘Let me think about this a little.’ Smiling, the Sicilian made a self-deprecatory gesture with his hands. ‘I am a timid man.’

Geilissa watched him stroke his beard. ‘Think too long,’ she said, ‘and you may begin to wonder what there is to prevent you from taking the casket and then betraying my friend to those who mean him harm. You should be aware, therefore, that were you to do such a thing, there are those who will not rest till they have hunted you down and cut your tongue out of your throat and divided your manhood from your loins.’

The merchant studied her for a long moment with a ringed hand at his mouth. Then he lowered the hand to reveal a sour smile. ‘You reason like a Sicilian,’ he said. ‘But I will do this thing for you. Pray tell your friend that this humble merchant is at his service.’

That evening they untied the long hair that Orestes wore clubbed at his neck, dressed him in one of Electra’s gowns and wrapped around his head and shoulders a shawl that she had embroidered with figures of prowling lions and winged griffins. Geilissa started with shock when she looked at the finished effect, for in the unsteady light of the oil-lamps, it might have been his dead sister, Iphigenaia, standing demurely there.

So Orestes escaped from Midea early the next morning as one among a coffle of slaves. Unaware that the son of Agamemnon was slipping through their guard with a kitchen knife clutched under the folds of his pretty shawl, the sentinels at the gate paid scant attention to the train. Almost a month later he was welcomed to safety by Pylades with tears and open arms. Denied their chance of glory in Troy, and with the world at home turned hostile round them, the young lions began preparing themselves for the day when they too would play a significant part in the continuing drama of the long catastrophe that was the Trojan War.

As the reader will recall from my account of the day when Dolon the fisherman brought us the news that the war had ended, Ithaca also had a number of young lions frisking about the streets, and even before Troy fell, they had already begun to make a nuisance of themselves. That’s how we thought of it at first – as no more than a nuisance, for we Ithacans might have our feuds and quarrels and grudges, and blood might even be shed at times, but murder was rare on the island and we lacked any talent for evil on the grand scale with which it flourished in Mycenae and the other great cities of the world. So King Laertes and his ministers did little more than sigh over the noise of drunken revelry in the streets of the town at night. But out of small neglected troubles larger problems grow, and soon there were signs that Antinous and the gang of young men who followed his lead were getting out of hand.

The first of the truly bruising encounters between Telemachus and Antinous took place at the Feast of Pan in the spring of the year after the war had ended. At that time the mood of the island was gloomy and apprehensive. Diotima, who had been priestess of Mother Dia’s shrine on the island for longer than anyone could remember, had died during the course of a hard winter. Because she was already very old, her death came as no surprise, but she had outlived all the women who knew the ways of the snake well enough to succeed her, so the power of the shrine itself began to wane.

No one took her death harder than King Laertes and his wife Anticleia. They too were old, and each day that failed to bring news of their son increased their grief and anxiety. Laertes had been eager to lay down the burdens of kingship for many years, and the business of exacting tribute from men younger and more ambitious than himself, and of giving justice among quarrelsome islanders, was increasingly a trial to his soul. So to Queen Anticleia’s concern for her son was added the further strain of watching her husband’s strength fail. Her nights were sleepless and her appetite poor. Never a large woman, she began to shrink visibly, both in weight and stature. Soon people began to mutter that if her son did not return she might simply die from grief.

In these circumstances, Penelope had to be strong for everyone and her faith did not fail. Whatever private anxieties troubled her nights, she remained ever hopeful, refusing to allow any other possibility but that her husband was alive and on his way home. Yet she had not seen Odysseus for more than ten years, and there must have been times when she had difficulty remembering what he had looked like then, let alone imagining how he might have been changed by war.

For a time, everyone’s spirits were lifted by the news that a Zacynthian sailor called Axylus had returned to his island, having walked hundreds of miles overland from Euboea where he had been cast ashore after his ship went down. Summoned to Ithaca, he reported that he had been among the survivors of a disastrous raid on Ismarus in which many men, including the brother of Prince Amphinomus, had been killed. He was certain, however, that Odysseus had managed to escape from the skirmish on the Ciconian shore, though how he had fared in the storm that had wrecked his own ship, Axylus was unable to say.

This was the first definite news that Penelope had received and she preferred to let it strengthen her hopes rather than darken her fears. Telemachus chose to share her optimism and draw strength from it; but when Amphinomus returned to Ithaca after his time of mourning was complete, and the boy watched his mother receive her friend, weeping, with open arms, his mood turned sullen again.

Though he tried to elicit my sympathy, I saw nothing wrong in the friendship. Sitting side by side at the high table or walking together on the cliffs above the expansive glitter of the sea, Amphinomus and Penelope might have been taken for a brother and sister who shared a lively affection and were always sensitive to each other’s shifts of mood and feeling. So it seemed to me there was something excessive in the way Telemachus kept watch, like a prick-eared dog, over his absent father’s wife. Only after a time did I come to see that his heart was riven with a kind of jealousy. Perhaps he couldn’t bear it that anyone – least of all this handsome prince out of Dulichion – should be more intimate with his mother than he was himself? Whatever the case, sooner or later his anger was going to turn violent. It happened at the Festival of Pan.

The Spring Feast is always a bawdy and boisterous affair. Shepherds come from all over the island and, once the sacred offerings have been made, there is much eating and drinking and many hours of dancing and singing of songs. Commonly enough, a fair proportion of the children born each year are sired during the course of that night, not all of them in wedlock. Because the winter had been bitter and everyone had been miserable for so long, the revelry was wild that year. The heat of the sun lay heavy on the afternoon, the wine was strongly mixed, and fathers looked to their daughters as Antinous and a gang of randy young men paraded around the awnings with long leather phalluses protruding from the goatskin clouts they wore.

I was in luck myself that day – a plump young woman from a village over by Mount Neriton sat near me as I sang. She had honey-brown skin and thick hair, and an encouraging way of dipping her eyes. Later we found our way to a sunlit glade beneath the trees. She was my first, and it wounded my heart to discover a day or two later that she was already pledged to a prosperous shepherd in her own part of the world; but I have sometimes wondered whether his firstborn son has the gift of singing verses too. In any case, being so pleasantly occupied, I didn’t learn what had happened elsewhere until Peiraeus told me after the event.

Waiting till late in the day when all the royal party apart from the prince had retired, Antinous asked Telemachus if he would judge the merit of a satyr play that he and Eurymachus were improvising for the people’s entertainment. To my friend’s astonishment, Antinous took the part of a woman overwhelmed by the blandishments of her lover, who was played by Eurymachus. Speaking in a high-pitched voice and fluttering his eyelids, Antinous allowed his hand to stray towards the grotesque codpiece protruding from between Eurymachus’s thighs. Only when he released an amorous sigh and squeaked, ‘But what if my husband should return, Amphinomus?’ did the true nature of the game become apparent.

Before anyone realized what was happening, Telemachus had thrown himself at Antinous, knocked him off the wine-stained trestle-table where the young man reclined like a whore on a couch, and fastened his hands about his throat.

By the time Eurymachus and Leodes pulled the boy away, Antinous was choking and retching for air. Telemachus was still much smaller than the man he had attacked, and left to his own malevolent devices, Antinous might have inflicted a terrible beating on him. But some of the less drunken shepherds had been disgusted by the play, and many of them had no love for the family of Eupeithes. Three stood up from their benches making it plain that no harm would come to their prince as long as they were there to prevent it. Two of them were very burly. The other, an older man with a broken nose, thoughtfully weighed the curve of his crook in his hand.

Taking stock of the menace in their faces, Antinous glanced for support to Eurymachus who released Telemachus and stood uncertainly beside his friend with the ridiculous phallus knocked askew at his waist. Sensing that neither Eurymachus nor Leodes had the stomach for a fight, Antinous gasped, ‘What’s the matter with the brat? Can’t he take a joke?’

‘There’s jokes and there’s jokes,’ said the grizzled old shepherd with the crook, ‘and if you think that one was funny then you’ll be even more amused when this ash-plant comes down across your ear – which it would have done by now if I wasn’t making allowances for the belly-load of wine you’re carrying.’ Then he turned to Telemachus. ‘And you’d better run along, young sir. If your father was home, he’d tell you that it’s wise to pick a fight only when the odds are with you.’

Flustered and abashed, Telemachus turned on his heel, shouting, ‘If my father doesn’t kill you when he gets back, Antinous, I promise I’ll do it myself.’

‘Wake up, donzel!’ Antinous shouted after him. ‘Your father’s not coming back, and you’re going to have to answer for those words one day.’

Peiraeus told me that the shepherds would certainly have beaten Antinous in that moment had not Eurymachus had the good sense to hustle him away.

When I learned what had happened, I set out to look for Telemachus. Last seen heading for the palace, he wasn’t to be found in his chamber and no one in the hall knew where he was. By now darkness had fallen, so there was no point wandering the hillsides in search of him, and I was about to give up and join Penelope and the others in the hall when I heard voices in Eurycleia’s chamber.

Putting my ear to the door, I heard the hoarse croak of the old nurse’s voice reassuring Telemachus that he was just like his father – too proud and too brave not to put himself at risk. ‘He was about your age when he went hunting boar with his grandfather Autolycus in the woods around Mount Parnassus,’ she was saying, ‘Couldn’t wait for the huntsmen to lay the nets – not him. Couldn’t wait for the boar to come rushing at him neither. He has to leap straight at it with his spear, leaving his grandsire standing aghast behind him. He got his boar sure enough, but not before the great beast gored his thigh. He took such a gash that men wondered whether he’d ever walk straight again, which he did of course, though he bears the scar of it about him still. He was too proud for patience, you see – just like you – though he learned more sense in later years.’

I was about to walk away and leave them to it when I heard the shaky voice of Telemachus protest, ‘But I’ve been patient. I’ve waited patiently for years and years and it feels like he’s never coming back. I think he must be dead.’

‘He’s no deader than I am,’ Eurycleia said. ‘He’s far too good a sailor to get wrecked by any storm, if that’s what you’re thinking. And he’s too crafty to be kept down for long by any villains who may cross him. Believe you me, my boy, your father’s the rarest of men. The gods have a care for a man like that.’

‘Then why hasn’t he come back?’

‘I don’t know,’ Eurycleia answered, a little flustered now. ‘Perhaps the fancy’s taken him to go adventuring again. I wouldn’t put it past him. Perhaps he’s taken the Black Sea passage like Jason before him and come up against the Clashing Rocks, or got himself enchanted by the Sirens’ song, or hasn’t yet found the narrow way between Scylla and Charybdis. He always loved those old stories. He loved them just as much as you do. Perhaps he’s gone to find out if there’s any truth to them, and when he comes home he’ll bring back something magical and splendid like the Golden Fleece. That’s just the kind of thing Odysseus would do if he took a mind to it.’

I don’t know what effect this fanciful gesture of consolation had on the mind of Telemachus but Eurycleia’s words ignited my own imagination. I began to see how my Lay of Lord Odysseus might be embellished by motifs from those stories. I imagined his ship picking its way through the blue ice floes that came drifting across its bows out of the freezing fog of the Black Sea. I knew that if there was any chance of hearing the Sirens’ song, then Odysseus would want to hear it. Like Jason, he would have himself strapped to the mast with cables while his crew rowed past the enchanted island with their ears stopped up with wax. With my mind already racing, I persuaded myself that if anyone could steer a ship between the many-headed monster Scylla, keeping watch from her cave on the cliff, and the fearful whirlpool of Charybdis, then Odysseus certainly could. So I hurried away down the passage with the song of the Sirens thrilling through my mind, and when I went to bed I lay there yearning for the day when my lay was done and I would be crowned with laurels as the greatest of all bards.

Then, in the small hours, I was jolted back to my senses by the miserable thought that all those songs had already been written. Everybody knew them. Those marvellous adventures belonged to the story of Jason: anywhere outside Ithaca, I would be laughed out of court if I tried to claim them for Odysseus.

Yet my mind would not rest and, before dawn broke, another thought struck me. There was a story belonging to our island that might still be turned into a noble song. It was a crude enough tale of the encounter between our ancient folk hero Oulixos and a one-eyed cannibal giant that devoured some of his men when they landed on his island. Trapped in the giant’s cave, Oulixos and his men blinded the Cyclops and made their escape. But wasn’t it possible that on his voyage home Odysseus had chanced on that same island? With all his resourcefulness, surely he would think up some ingenious way of outwitting that dull monster?

And so it was that, because I heard an old nurse comforting my friend with stories, I conceived the first lines of a song that would not be completed till after Odysseus’ return and is sung across Argos by bards who claim it for their own. As is well-known, the song tells how Odysseus and his men escaped from the island of the Cyclopes by fooling Polyphemus into the belief that a man called ‘Nobody’ had put out his eye. But with Odysseus now long dead, I feel free to tell how there was once a time when his strong sense of identity was so reduced by his ordeals that Odysseus truly believed that he had become Nobody indeed.

Nobodysseus

The sight of their leader collapsed and weeping in the arms of Guneus shocked the crew of The Fair Return into a state of dumb bewilderment. This was Odysseus, their lord and captain, the most endlessly resourceful of men and among the most eloquent. What news could be so bad as to wreck him like this?

And Guneus himself scarcely knew what to say or do in that moment because the whole weight of Odysseus’ upper body had slumped against his chest as if all the power had drained from his legs and he was left with strength only to gasp and shudder as he wept.

‘I meant no harm,’ Guneus heard himself saying after a time. ‘The gods are just, Odysseus. I’m sure all will be well.’ But Odysseus had passed beyond reach, beyond hearing and each word was of small account against the force of the blizzard gathering inside his mind. The tears running down his face and the sobs shaking his body were no longer marks of grief or loss or any other emotion with a known name: simply the outward signs of a suddenly accelerated process of dissolution over which he had no control, and which was as impersonal in its power as a flash-flood crashing through a forest and on into the chambers of a well-built house.

Guneus turned his head towards the dumbstruck men along the beach and shouted, ‘Give me a hand here, someone. This man needs help.’ Then Baius came running, and Demonax, and Eurybates who now wore a vermilion cloth wrapped about his wounded temple in the Libyan fashion. But Odysseus fended them all off as though they were Furies coming at him like bats out of the dark. He pushed Guneus away, staggered in the sand, and stood swaying with his head in his hands and the sobs juddering through him and a hoarse, protracted noise, like the creaking of a door, breaking from his mouth.

Eurymachus came up alongside Guneus, demanding to know what was happening and was astounded to see Odysseus stare at him with a grimace of horror across his face, almost as though he was covered in blood, before turning away and making for his lodge with one hand still pressed to his head.

‘What happened between you?’ Eurylochus demanded of the armoured man across from him, who was tugging in puzzlement at his beard. ‘What did you say to him?’

Guneus opened his hands as if to demonstrate his harmlessness. ‘I just told him what’s been happening at home. The news isn’t good. It’s given him a shock, I’m afraid. He’ll be all right again when he gets over it.’

Yet the man’s voice lacked the confidence of the opinion, and as the hours passed, the condition of Odysseus deteriorated further. He sat inside his lodge, rocking backwards and forwards, groaning and holding his head, and would accept no comfort from anyone – not the women who were used to serving him, nor from any of the friends who approached him. He either stared at them aghast without responding or snarled like an injured dog, demanding that they let him be. They muttered together outside the lodge, all of them dismayed by what they too had now learned of events back home in Ithaca and across all Argos, yet still unable to comprehend why Odysseus had been so unmanned by the news.

Arguments broke out as to what best should be done to help him, and the situation became further confused when Guneus decided that he had no wish to see his own crew contaminated by the febrile atmosphere of this camp. There were a couple of hours of light left in the day and he decided to use them to make progress towards the mouth of the river Cinyps rather than allowing his crew to sink into a stupor with this demoralised bunch of Ithacans. Not all his men were happy at being ordered back to sea but he forced his will on them, and climbed aboard his ship shouting to the Ithacans watching from the shore that if any of them were of the mind to shape up, he could always use good men.

Glaucus, captain of the Nereid, and Demonax of the Swordfish glanced uneasily at one another as they watched the Thessalian pentekonter pull out into the bay.

A rosy glow of sunlight glanced off her sail as it billowed from the yard. The oars were shipped, spindrift scattered from the prow, and a white wake glistened behind the vessel as she scudded westwards on the breeze. For the landlocked Ithacans it was like watching their own lives recede.

Some time after the sun had gone down Eurylochus decided to try to speak to his leader again. A good sailor, cautious and pragmatic, always with a keen eye for the run of the weather, he was never gifted with the sharpest of wits but had a feeling heart and could not bear to think of his old friend lying wretchedly alone. Prepared for a further angry dismissal, he went into the lodge with an oil-lamp in one hand and a bowl of food in the other, and found his captain lying on his bed in a dishevelled state.

‘I’ve brought you some food,’ he said gently. ‘You should try to eat something.’ When no answer came, he put down the lamp and bowl, stood uncertainly for a moment, then said, ‘It’s me – your old shipmate Eurylochus. You can talk to me.’

By the dim light of the lamp he saw Odysseus turn over on the bed. A haggard face looked up at him.

‘Eurylochus?’

‘That’s right, sir,’ the man answered, encouraged, ‘Eurylochus, as ever was.’ He took the hand that Odysseus reached out to him and felt the strength of its grip.

‘I keep seeing her,’ Odysseus said, ‘again and again. I can’t get my head clear.’

Eurylochus nodded his head in sympathy, certain now that he understood the cause of the man’s grief. ‘I’m sure you there’s no need to trouble your head over Penelope, lord. Your wife has always loved you and she always will. You’ve got nothing to fear there, whatever foul lies Guneus was spreading.’

But Odysseus frowned and shook his head. ‘No, it’s not her’ he said. ‘You don’t understand.’

Eurylochus furrowed his brow. ‘Then who, sir? Who do you see?’

Odysseus lifted his stricken face. ‘Polyxena,’ he whispered. ‘Even in the dark, she’s there, looking back at me.’

Bewildered by the response, Eurylochus said, ‘King Priam’s daughter, you mean? The one that young Neoptolemus took in vengeance for his father? She’s long dead and in the Land of Shades, lord. You don’t have to worry about her.’

Tightening his grip on his friend’s wrist, Odysseus said, ‘We never atoned for her. That’s why she won’t let me go. Don’t you see it? She was innocent and not one of us atoned for her death. We shan’t ever be free of her now, not unless …’

Swallowing, calling silently on the gods for protection, Eurylochus said, ‘Unless what, sir?’

‘The thing is, I keep seeing her – even when I close my eyes she’s there across from me. I see her baring her breasts on Achilles’ tomb, lifting her chin before the sword, defying us, knowing that she’ll always be there.’

‘But you didn’t kill her, lord,’ Eurylochus tried to reason with him. ‘If there’s still blood-guilt there, it’s none of yours. It lies with Neoptolemus.’

‘I should have prevented him. I knew what he was going to do and I should have stopped it. He was only a boy. A boy possessed by what he thought was his father’s shade. But he was too young. He should never have been at Troy. And neither should Achilles before him. And it was me who brought him there.’

‘Indeed it was,’ his friend encouraged him, ‘and because you brought Achilles to Troy, Hector was killed, and it was because of that we won.’

But his bluff attempt at confirmation and reassurance sparked only anger. ‘Did we, Eurylochus?’ Odysseus demanded. ‘Tell me, what did we win? Yes, we burned Troy and killed men in their thousands, but if Agamemnon and the others lost everything when they got back, and men like Guneus and hundreds of others like him are counting themselves lucky just to get out of the war alive, what did we win that’s worth all that suffering, all those deaths?’

‘You can’t start to think that way,’ Eurylochus protested. ‘Madness lies that way.’

‘But so does the truth,’ Odysseus returned, ‘and Polyxena knows that. That’s why she won’t let me go. She’s always there, tilting her neck to show me her wound as if to say,“It was you, Odysseus. You were the cause of all of this.’’’

Eurylochus looked down in perplexity as his captain’s body began to shake again. The hairs at the back of his neck were prickling. In the flickering lamp-light he sensed a presence that should not be there and the knowledge chilled his heart. He glanced around the gloomy lodge as though expecting to see the ghost of the dead girl standing in the shadows with the blood of a sword-wound flowing from her neck. He wanted to get out of there but how could he leave his lord to tremble on that desolate bed? Outside the notes of a flute haunted the evening air with their yearning for home.

Eurylochus said, ‘This is only an evil dream. I think you must have taken some kind of a fever, lord. It will pass. Soon it will pass.’

‘You don’t understand,’ Odysseus snapped back at him. ‘This isn’t the first and it won’t be the last. There are others who come. I see all the others too – the ones we cut down like cattle in the streets of Troy. Sometimes in broad daylight I turn round and there they are, still lying in their blood and piss – the old men with their guts hanging out in gaudy rags, the boys with smashed heads – boys who’d never lifted a weapon … lying in piles in the streets where we burned them.’

‘But we’ve killed men before,’ Eurylochus said. ‘We’ve taken other towns and men died there, and you weren’t like this afterwards. If we won the victory, lord, it’s because the gods gave it to us. Divine Athena spoke to you in your dream. It was she who showed you how to give us victory. And if the gods were with you, why should you reproach yourself?’

‘Because I gave my word,’ Odysseus snarled. ‘It was never meant to be that way. All the blood of Troy is on my head.’

‘It’s done, lord,’ Eurylochus urged him, almost impatiently now. ‘It’s done and it’s over and you must put these things from your mind.’

But it was as if Odysseus had not heard him. ‘That child never hurt anyone in all her days,’ he said. ‘She was innocent. Achilles saw it well enough. She was an innocent caught up in all the violence of our pride and fury. And it’s as if … as if … It’s as if she sees every terrible thing I’ve done and it’s all fixed in her eyes like a frieze carved in marble, and none of it can ever be forgotten or forgiven now …’

‘I think it’s time we got you home, sir,’ Eurylochus said. ‘Guneus is right. We’ve stayed too long in this place and it’s started to rot the bottom of our minds. Let’s put back out to sea tomorrow and get the clean wind filling our sail … You’ll soon start to feel better then, you’ll see. The good salt-wind will blow these dreams away, and once you’re home …’

‘I can’t,’ Odysseus snapped at him. ‘I can’t go home.’

‘Course you can, sir. With a favouring wind we can be there inside the week. And your lady is waiting for you. She’s been waiting for ten long years. And that boy of yours – Telemachus – you’ve said it often enough yourself – he must be capering like a wild young horse for want of a father’s hand.’

‘I can’t.’ Odysseus freed his friend’s wrist from his grip and sat up with his hands clutching at his head, saying over and over again, ‘I can’t, I can’t.’

‘Why not, lord? I don’t understand. Why can’t you go home?’

‘Because I’m not fit.’ The sobbing shook his whole frame again.

‘Not right now you’re not,’ Eurylochus put a hand to his shoulder. ‘I can see that clear enough. But we’ll soon have you well again.’

Angrily Odysseus pulled the hand away. ‘I’m not fit to touch her. Not with these hands. Don’t you see? There’s too much blood on them. So much blood and so much death that I’m not fit to be among decent people any more. Penelope wouldn’t want me near our son like this. She wouldn’t even know me because I don’t know who I am myself. I don’t know what I’m for. I don’t know what to do.’ He looked up at his friend with a pang of appeal in his eyes. ‘Tell me, Eurylochus,’ he pleaded, ‘what do you do when you don’t know what to do?’

But the worried seaman had no answer. He looked down at this ruin of the man he had known and loved and admired since he was a boy, and he too had no idea what to do except take his lord’s weeping head into his arms and hold it against his chest and pray to all the gods he could think of to have mercy on them both.

That night Odysseus woke from a brief hour or two of troubled sleep with a headache so violent that he thought his brain must be bursting inside his skull. He had been wounded many times in his life but never had he known pain such as this. The hand of a god might have been twisting a stick inside a leather strap made fast about his temples. He might have been bleeding inside his head.

His groans woke Eurylochus, who had fallen asleep on the floor at his side. ‘What is it, lord?’ he cried.

But Odysseus could scarcely speak for the strength of the storm inside his head. ‘My head,’ he groaned. ‘My head feels as though it must split apart.’

Eurylochus looked helplessly down at him. ‘What can I do for you?’ he asked, clenching and unclenching his fists.

‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ Odysseus gasped. ‘In the name of all the gods, you could take a sword to my head and put me from this pain.’