Penelope's Web

by Christopher Rush

  And even then, your travels will not be over. For if you clear your land of locusts, you must then shoulder your oar of polished pine and take it to the people who have never seen the sea, or tasted salt, or sailed the crimson-cheeked ships, and you must plant the oar in the soil of that country, making proper sacrifices to Poseidon. Only then will he allow you to come back home at last, where you will enter into an easy old age, exhausted but encompassed by calm, your people happy and prosperous around you. Your own death will steal up on you almost unaware, a sweet and gentle death, come to you out of the swing of the sea, to take you down, loaded with years, into the ebb. That is all.’

  ‘Wait,’ I said, ‘tell me more. These last words – how to interpret them? Will I die on land or at sea? Is it literal? Will I die at the ebbing of the tide? Is it the ebb tide of old age?’

  The seer’s shade flickered. ‘Other spirits are anxious to speak to you. Allow any ghost access to the blood and it will converse with you as if alive and rational. Deny access and the rejected spirit will fall away and leave you in peace. Your mother sits in silence, wordless without blood. I have had my say and must retire.’

  ‘But your last words – what do they mean?’

  The blind Theban was sucked away, back into the dark, his last words broken whispers, echoes.

  ‘The life will ebb out of you . . . death . . . the sea.’

  Old Anticleia now approached, dipped her lips into the dark cloud, drank the black draught, and looked at Odysseus with the hollow eyes of death, sparked with recognition. Her lifeless lips trembled, blood-bedashed, pale, impassioned.

  ‘My son, I thought it was you, and now that I’ve drunk, I know you for my child. But why and how are you here, since you are still a living being? This is a dreadful place, worse than the western gloom, the Rivers of Fear, and the dead, cold ocean and all its wastes. It’s unthinkable. How long since you left Troy? Have you been to Ithaca? Have you seen Penelope and your son Telemachus? Or are you still voyaging? And why did you break your journey to look on bitter death before your time?’

  ‘Dearest mother,’ he cried, ‘I am under orders. I needed to speak to the soul of Tiresias to seek his advice and hear his prophecy for me. No, I’ve not yet seen Achaea, let alone Ithaca. I’ve been doomed to wander, to struggle and fight, from the very day I left Penelope for Troy. The war is over but not the struggle, and the Theban’s prophecy is that my sufferings are far from done. And you, dearest mother? I have dreamed about you. How did you come to die? Did you linger long? Or did the arrows of Artemis fly gently into your heart? And what of my father, and my wife and son? Do you know anything of them, other than what Tiresias has told me?’

  ‘All are alive,’ came the reply, ‘and you know already that Penelope is so. But she sheds many tears as the slow nights pass without you, and patience is her only companion in the dark. You son is of age and protects your rights as best he can against the detestable suitors, but he is one against many. As for your poor father, he lives the life of a recluse, and has long since left off sleeping in a real bed with sheets or rugs. In summer he lies out on leaves, high in the vineyard, and in winter sleeps in the ashes along with the labourers, stretched out by the fire, grief-stricken, clothed in rags, pining for your return, as old age dogs his heels and death draws near. That is what killed me in the end; not Artemis the Archeress, unerring with her dove-like darts, but sheer despair of ever seeing you again, home from the war – my son, who once brought such sweetness into my life. I gave up hoping for your return and died of a broken heart.’

  The cruellest scene in the web. Even dread Persephone would have shown more mercy than Penelope. I broke down and wept as my mother spoke to me, and I reached out to her with outstretched arms, only to embrace air, a shadow, a dream. It was the pain I’d felt in Cimmeria, the harrowing hell of eternal separation.

  ‘O god, mother, why can’t I reach you? Why won’t you let me come to you even for a moment? Can’t we clasp our arms around each other even in hell and drink each other’s tears? Can’t we draw some cold consolation, like poor wine, from that bitter mingling? Or has sullen Persephone sent me not my mother but some surly shade to torture me even more in my torment?’

  Odysseus wept like a little boy.

  ‘My son, O thou, my lovely boy, your sufferings have been greater than any man should have to bear. But this is no trick of Hades, this is merely the law we all obey, and the last measure of our mortality. The sinews that bind bones and flesh together melt like snow in the blaze of the flames. Life leaves the charred bones, flies from them like a dream, the bright soul from the formless ash, soundless, impalpable, and all that was you becomes less than a butterfly, fragile for an hour in air. You can never capture it again, never have it back. It flutters down to here – here where we have become nothing but a dream in the dark. That’s why I cannot clasp you in your pain and bring you comfort as I used to do. But you, my son, you are no dream, you are not for the dark, not yet, and you must hurry now back to the sun and to life, which is still sweeter than death, in spite of all its sorrows.’

  So his mother flickered and faded, her sad countenance sinking from view, like the face of one drowning and descending into the depths for the last time, never to be seen again.

  She was followed by a host of women, the illustrious wives and daughters of princes, all thronging in their thirst to the life-giving blood, a thirst for that one moment of human contact with the world they’d left behind. Like some ghostly host on the attack, they would have stormed the trench, but Odysseus used the sword to compel order, and so, one after another, they approached and drank and told their stories, which is all that was left of them.

  First came Tyro, who married Cretheus, son of Aeolus, but fell for the river-god Enipeus and kept wandering along his beautiful banks, until one afternoon Poseidon appeared, disguised as the god, and embraced her at the mouth of the river, where its water rushed out into the salt sea. He undid her virgin girdle, and as she drew him downward gladly onto her white belly, he caused a dark wave to come over them, tall as a mountain, and it hid the intercourse that took place between them. The two bodies rolled together, following the wave, fresh and salt, girl and god, one flesh in the sudden surge. But Poseidon also sealed up her eyes in sleep, and when she woke, as if from an exciting dream, he revealed his identity and assured her she’d conceive, since a woman’s belly never fails to swell beneath a god’s fruitful thrust. In due course, she bore Pelias and Neleus, and then three more sons to Cretheus. And so she told the story of a sweet life. But nothing, not even a god’s seed in her belly, could save her from the common lot that draws all mortals down to death. Bewailing that mortality, she too vanished from view.

  Next came Antiope, whose two sons founded Thebes; then Alcmene, Amphitryon’s wife, who lay with Zeus and bore Heracles; then proud Creon’s daughter, Megare. After them came the anguished Epicaste, still hanging, exposed even in Hades, her naked body dangling from the long rope that stretched up out of the House of the Dead all the way to the roof-beam high in her own house, where she had taken her life. She had committed incest with her son Oedipus, who had murdered his father and married his own mother. Her ignorance did not excuse the act, and a mother’s curses were all that Oedipus was left with as he eked out the tortures of a remorseful life.

  After Epicaste came Chloris, loveliest of ladies, wedded to Neleus, who had been so struck by her beauty that he paid a huge price for her. She became his queen in sandy Pylos and was the mother of a glorious brood, including Nestor and Pero, whom all men wanted to wed and bed.

  Leda was next, mother of Castor and Polydeuces the boxer, both held now by the green earth, but each alternately alive and dead on different days. And Iphimedeia, who swore she’d slept with Poseidon and bore the tallest sons ever known, Otus and Ephialtes. They were the famous pair who dared to try to reach and overreach the gods, attempting to pile Ossa on Olympus and Pelion on Ossa, those lofty, leaf-trembling peaks, and so build a staircase beyon
d the blue gods. But the famous Apollo from the belly of Leto of the lovely tresses, the son of Zeus, ended their ambitions, and instead of mounting to heaven they descended to Hades before they had even grown beards.

  On they came in an endless procession: Phaedre; Procris; lovely Ariadne, snatched by Theseus from Crete, though he never reached Athens with her because Artemis slew her in sea-girdled Dia.

  More, yet more – Maera, Clymene and the execrable Eriphylae, who betrayed her husband for blood-money. What a line it was – women who’d lain with gods, who’d borne and been born of heroes, women who were the wonder of men and made them mad, miserable and even happy. It made no difference: lovely, dreadful, doomed, they’d all slipped and fallen into the earth’s fruitful lap, where they lay levelled and lifeless, their shades in Hades now almost indistinguishable, the tenuous wailing wafers of once-women, each of them now a ghost without glory, lamenting the lost intimacy, the honey of life.

  And now Penelope . . .

  Penelope? Penelope in hell? No, not in hell. Penelope: patient, solitary, sedentary, pictured not in Hades but on her web, presiding wisely over the luckless line of the female fallen, Penelope the dependable prize for me, the hero who spurned goddesses and sorceresses and fought monsters and crossed cold oceans and came back to her warm bed in the end.

  Persephone held out her hand to me approvingly, while with the other impatient hand she arrested the endless line, loomed up out of her dark house and scattered it in all directions.

  Suddenly Odysseus found himself staring into the dead face of Agamemnon, whose fate at that time was still unknown to him.

  ‘What’s this?’ Odysseus asked.

  Agamemnon drank the blood, sobbed, stretched out his arms. But strong and supple as they’d been at Troy, they were hollow when they tried to clasp Odysseus.

  ‘Why? How? What happened after Troy? Were you shipwrecked? Did you never reach home?’

  The king gave a great sigh, like a wailing wind. ‘If only I’d been wrecked as you say, on some friendly reef! It would have been better for me never to have reached home.’

  And he told his story, lamenting bitterly a death by betrayal and domestic malice – not a hero’s fall on the field.

  ‘They didn’t even have the decency to shut my eyelids or close my gaping mouth and give me grace for Hades, but they left me lying for long enough like a beast in the shambles, stripped of the last shred of respect, tricked and killed by the worst bitch ever to spread her legs for a lover when her husband is away from home. I tell you, Odysseus, never trust a woman. And when you reach Ithaca, I advise you not to advertise your arrival as I did, but slip into port on the sly and take your household by surprise.’

  He finished talking and the tears rolled down their faces as they shared their memories and sorrows.

  Tears for Agamemnon? His hell was of his own making, and the day he drove a dagger into his daughter was the day he sealed his doom: he was not murdered but executed by the unforgiving Clytemnestra. But Penelope put the bright tears on my face, more than I’d have shed even in hell if I’d met that ox-brain there. True, though, that what happened to him was shocking – after a successful expedition and surviving the long war to come home to treachery and a bloody death. Whatever I felt for him as a man, the soldier in me pitied him.

  There were tears too for Achilles. My first impulse was to congratulate him on his everlasting fame. At Troy he’d been a killing machine when he wasn’t a sulker, and his courage never failed him. He’d covered himself in glory and was now a great prince among the dead.

  He stared at me when I said this. A dull angry glare.

  ‘Prince? Immortality? Glory? What are you talking about, Odysseus? Look at me, look long and hard, and look around you too. What do you see? I’m no different from your poor old mother, no better off than a wretched weakling or the most abject coward that ever fled a fight. What sort of immortality is this? What sort of glory? If you think this is rank and fame, you can have it. I’d gladly give you all my glory, every iota of my immortality, for just one drop of your blood in my veins. Wretched though you may think life is, let me tell you, to be able to speak and feel again with those you’ve loved, I’d quit all kudos to have that back, just for a moment. I valued it too lightly when I had the chance, sacrificed too much of it. That’s what heroism does for you. Heroes don’t fit in. You end up on your own. I’d rather be a slave now above ground in the land of the living than a king among corpses. A corpse has no glory, a shadow has no pride. The kingdom of the dead is the largest of all kingdoms, an infinite empire, but all its citizens are done with life. All that mattered is no more. Who would rule them? Who’d be one of them? Not I. There’s no glory in a fistful of grains. There’s nothing honourable about ash.’

  But when I told him all about the glorious exploits of his son at Troy, the dead eyes gleamed briefly, and the great runner turned without another word to me and went off with his long light strides, so familiar, across the fields of asphodel.

  Makes you think, doesn’t it? Death addressing life across the impossible gulf and telling the impossible truth – that nothing matters. Achilles had known it already. He knew it when Agamemnon tried to buy him off with ownership, with bribes, and he said even then that all the wealth of Troy wasn’t worth what his life was worth, what life is worth. Death puts an end to all that dross. And all the time we thought we had substance and meaning, we had nothing, our lives were nothing, we didn’t even have a place to live, because the earth isn’t even ours, we’re wanderers, nothing more. No man is anybody.

  Yes, that does make you think. It made me think. About the war. About Troy and everything we did there. What were we but a gang of thugs brawling over a whore? A cuckold and a cunt. And a pile of scrap metal – gold. And where were we then but in hell, when we didn’t even have a home to go to beyond the beach. War was our home. And that was hell on earth. The other hell was just a matter of time. But some men never see that far. Even that thug Ajax stood aloof from me in the hell-web, still bitter about the defeat I’d inflicted on him back at the ships over the arms of Achilles, the prize I’d won fairly and which had put him to his grave.

  ‘So, Ajax, it’s come to this, has it? Still sulking over a pile of rust? Even in hell you’ve learned nothing. Not like Achilles. He’s got it whole at last, he’s seen through all of it, the shams and facades of heroism and war. I thought death would have matured you by now.’

  Not a sound from him. Not a single fucking word. He turned his back on me and walked back into Erebus, back into the dark. Some men never grow up; they stay stupid. And this was one oaf whose ignorance was his own special hell. Maybe he was even happy in it, in his own way.

  Enough then? Enough of hell? Never. Hell is endless. I saw Orion still hunting the beasts he’d slaughtered on the lonely hills; Tityos still stretched helpless on the ground, his liver ripped by vultures, his penance for assailing the lovely Leto as she crossed the meadows of Penopeus on her way to Pytho; Sisyphus still wrestling with his rock; Tantalus still tormented by the fruits he could never reach, the water he could never drink; and Heracles still with his bow, looking ready to loose off arrows in every direction. Hell was in his face as he glared around at targets, and even the invulnerable dead shrieked and gibbered and ran from him, scattering far and wide. He recognised me and came up.

  ‘So you’re just like me, Odysseus? Your many exploits have landed you in hell, have they? Have you nothing better to do with your life? Mine was nothing but struggle, but I was sent to hell when I ran out of things to do, and I was ordered to come here and bring out the terrible Hound of Hell. I did it too, with help from Hermes and bright-eyed Athene. And I dare say you too have gods on your side. But they won’t save you when your time really comes.’

  Hell crowded in on me after that, and the dead swam at me again in their pale shoals, swarming around me and wailing their eerie cries. I felt sudden panic, suffocation, and the green fear of that dreadful darkness in which some gorgonisi
ng terror could have lurked, sent by Persephone to strike me dead as stone. I got out as fast as I could, and when I reached the ship I ordered the crew to board and loose the hawsers and to row without delay. The oars were aided by a good current which swept us down the River of Ocean, and a sudden fresh and friendly breeze on my face persuaded me that I had left that terrible place behind me, that I’d been to hell and back and had learned something about its awfulness. It’s a place without a breeze, without a ray of warmth, without a drop of blood, without a flicker of life. For some it’s an extension of the errors of life, of a life not lived when the chance was there, and lost too late to make it right in time.