Odysseus told them only so much at first, starting well through his travels from the time of his sojourn with Calypso.
‘Night after night she insisted I make love to her.’
‘And did you?’ inquired Arete.
‘Every night for seven years.’
At that point Nausicaa got up, flushed, and went out into the night.
‘I had no choice. There is no saying no to a goddess and there was no satisfying her.’
‘You poor man, you must be exhausted after the labours of Sisyphus.’ The king grinned. ‘Though not perhaps so unpleasant a labour as rolling a rock up a hill without the satisfaction of ever reaching the peak!’
The hall rippled with laughter.
Odysseus winked back at the king. ‘I reached the peak, but instead of resting had to start all over again.’
That night, after so many sufferings, Odysseus slept the deepest of sleeps, and next morning Alcinous took him down to the ships where the Phaeacians held their assemblies, and the king told his people that the gods had sent a stranger whom he liked so much that he would like him to stay and be his son-in-law.
‘By the sound of him, he’s a man who could people this entire country with my grandchildren!’
He also had reason to believe, he said, that his daughter Nausicaa would approve of this arrangement, except that the stranger, who had not yet given his name, had already asked for guides to take him home – wherever that might be – and that a ship should therefore be made ready and manned by the best mariners in the land, to transport the stranger wheresoever he should direct.
While the ship was being made ready, Alcinous led Odysseus back to the palace hall, where a blind minstrel and the Phaeacians’ favourite poet, Demodocus, sang sweetly and soulfully about the Greek heroes at Troy, and in particular about a quarrel between Odysseus and Achilles. It was too much for Odysseus. When he heard the songs of Troy, the tears sprang to his eyes and rolled down his cheeks unchecked, glistening like dew on his beard, and he quickly had to hide his head in his cloak. The king was close enough to see this and leaned across.
‘What man, never bury your face in the sea-blue fabric, not here. You needn’t be ashamed of a few tears, friend. After all, he really is a superb singer, isn’t he? Beloved by the Muse, who mingled good and ill in the drink she gave him, depriving him of his eyes but letting him seduce with the sweetness of his song, so persuasive he could pull tears down Persephone’s cheek, who has seen so many dead, and even draw the iron drops from Dis.’
‘Tears?’
She felt the wetness on her neck. I couldn’t stop the sobs. She hugged me tight.
‘And from such an iron man.’
Iron tears. Some fucking iron. Some hero.
‘It’s all right,’ I said, ‘I’m all right, I was just remembering, that’s all.’
‘A woman?’
‘No, not a woman.’
‘A man, then.’
‘No, not a man either. Many men, so many. Thousands of them. Where are they now?’
‘Ah, so it’s the war. It’s always the war.’
The war that never ends.
‘Where are they now?’
Gone to grave-mounds, every one.
‘Don’t cry,’ she said.
She took my hand and pressed it into the soft wetness between her legs.
‘The war ends here.’
She’d taken me to her parents’ house. We’ll do it a favour and call it a house. Not exactly a bronze palace, but it was a step up from a mud hut. At least it wasn’t another fucking cave. And I was made welcome enough – food, drink, clothes, chatter. It was a home. There was a scruffy dog by the blistered wooden door. Who needs doors of beaten gold? And what else does a man need? What else does a woman need?
The old folks went to bed, and she took me outside behind the wall of the pigsty, with the swine grunting encouragement on the other side. I started to say something, but she put her hand over my mouth and her fingers to her lips. She dropped down and lay back in the straw, pulling her dress over her head and pulling me down on her. She fumbled quickly for my prick and gasped when she found it. I was ready to be gentle so as not to wake up the parents through the thin walls, but she thrust herself up onto me with a little cry. Then she fucked with the sort of innocent earnestness that made me wonder if it was her first time. I scented blood. It was her first time. She made tiny squeaking noises like a little mouse or piglet. Then she flooded me with her orgasm.
At first I thought she’d peed on me in her excitement, but then I remembered the drunken talk in the camps at Troy, the gabbling about the bed-girls, comparing notes. I kept hearing about the women who wetted you when they came, and I had asked silly, stupid questions, exposing my ignorance. Diomedes had teased me about it.
‘What, never been drenched, Odysseus? You haven’t lived! You get back a lot more than you put in – it warms your balls like a hot bath!’
I thought about it as I lay looking at her and stroking her upturned rump. She was short and plump-bummed, which suited me fine. This time there had been something else, though, a weird reciprocity, two tides meeting, a conflux, a melting into one another, a mingling, a precious libation, mutually poured out of the ocean of love – fuck me, I’m no singer, but she was making a poet out of me. She’d made me stop and think. She’d given me something, something different. What was it she’d given me?
Peace? Was that the word? I think that was it. I was at peace with her. It felt simple. Sometimes we’d lie for hours afterwards, still in the coital position, me still inside her, still melting and resolving into that vaguely sad post-coital calm. If not pure peace, then at least a suspension of judgement, or decisions, or worries about anything at all, and we’d murmur to each other. She’d ask me about the stars as she lay on her back behind the pigsty, her short legs still tucked round me. She had a great view of the heavens. I couldn’t see them; my view was of her left earlobe, but I could picture them, of course, and tell her what was up there and what planets were on the wander. She was no star-gazer – the whole thing was absolute fucking chaos to her – and she never could piece together a hunter or a wagon or a bear, even though I was teaching her with eyes in the back of my head, as it were. That intrigued her for some reason, and I liked her fascination. I suppose I liked being admired too, though I admitted there was nothing clever or unusual about it. I’d done a lot of travelling in my time, and I’d got to know the stars, that’s all, as travellers do, even better than I’d got to know people. The stars were a lot more reliable, that was for sure.
‘But you’re a traveller no more,’ she whispered, squeezing me with certain muscles and giggling when she felt the hardness suddenly return, quickly filling up her little cunt.
‘Your wanderings are over.’
We fucked again. Under hunters and wagons and bears. And she told me she loved me. And why not? Nausicaa – the ship. That’s what her name meant, she said, roughly speaking. A ship without a sailor. And the sea had brought her a sailor. And together we made her go. Of course she loved me.
Did I love her? I’d say I loved her. Who wouldn’t? She was funny, sunny, wanting, giving, uncomplicated, compact. A sweet little fuck. Her folks took to me as well, even said to come inside, there was no need to do it behind the pigsty anymore, they’d turn their backs. And they wanted grandchildren. They’d run the farm in time, after I’d grown old, older. After I’d gone. So why not? Why the fuck not indeed?
I could have told them it had something to do with those very words – grown old, gone, and that I didn’t like the sound of them, they sounded too much like an ending, like sheathing your sword and letting it rust, letting your life rust. I could have told them I had my own farms to see to, in whatever state they were now, and if they were still mine. I could have said I had a wife I hadn’t seen since before the war and a son who’d be a young man. I could have said I might even have grandchildren by now that I’d never seen and never would unless I got back home. I
could have said that although I’d been washed up here a naked vagrant, I was actually no beggar but a king. I was not a fucking nobody.
A somebody then? A king without clothes? A king without a crown? Lost it in the ocean, had I? Poseidon had pilfered it, ripped it off, tossed it away on the waves. He’d made a pauper out of a prince; he’d made a man into no man, Noman. And I could have said that I was missing all that I’d had, all that I’d been, that I was pining for the hearth, the hills of home, pining for my Penelope, for my Ithaca.
Would it have been true? Yes, we all long for Ithaca, it’s true. Except that we all know Ithaca isn’t really there: it’s a mirage, a deception, a lie, as illusory as the horizon, that long hard clipped line drawn across the world, the boundary that beckons you and hems you in, because you can never get there. But still you can’t resist it, the pull and counter-pull, the old smoke of home, the need to blow it away, to break the bolts and shackles of the ocean, shutting you in, the desire to touch the intangible, to break the line, just like at Troy – break the fucking line!
Yes, I could have said all that, or something else. But in the end I didn’t. In the end I said nothing. I just slipped away, like a deserter, slipped away on a quiet night-tide as she lay sleeping on the straw, a slight smile on her half-open lips, her white teeth glinting a little in the stars, of which she still remembered next to nothing. Somehow I loved her for that innocence of hers, and I don’t mind admitting it – that night cost me a few fucking tears.
‘No need to be ashamed of them,’ repeated Alcinous. ‘Perhaps the song reminded you of something, or of someone?’
‘Both,’ replied Odysseus.
He was weeping like a woman who has just seen her husband fall in the field while fighting for his country and his family. She screams in her grief and clings to his corpse for dear life, but the enemy soldiers behind her smash their spear-butts into her back and drag her away from him, bruised and weeping bitterly into bondage. She will never see her children again. That’s how Odysseus wept when he heard the songs of Troy.
The king immediately announced that there had been quite enough song for now and that it was time for a change of mood, and for games. Odysseus at first declined to take part, but was stung into action by a taunt from a man called Euryalus.
‘Let’s face it, you’re a bit on the short side for a contender, and you look more like a broken-down merchant skipper from some derelict old tub. From what I hear, you didn’t even manage to handle that so well either. Washed up without a paddle, weren’t you?’
Odysseus kept his temper and answered him quietly. ‘You’re a nice-looking boy, though I suspect the gods have bestowed on you more beauty than brains.’
‘Or balls!’ called a voice from the crowd, provoking laughter.
This maddened Euryalus and might have led to a challenge, but he was contained by the elders. ‘You want to prove you’re the better man?’ was all he said.
Odysseus took the field and calmly picked up the biggest quoit of all. ‘There’s only one way to prove a fool a fool,’ he said.
He hesitated, just for effect, then swung the disc. It sang its path well beyond all the other throws, and all the champion oarsmen shrank from the stone as it hurtled over their heads and thudded into the ground, where Athene was waiting in yet another disguise, pretending to be one of the crowd.
‘Right out in front!’ she cheered. ‘Well beyond the rest of the bunch! We Phaeacians have met our match today, we’d better admit it. The sea can break the strongest back, but you’re far from broken, my friend. As I see it, Euryalus had better eat his words.’
Silence in Scheria. Alcinous broke it.
‘Well, stranger, it seems we can’t compete with you – and why should we try? We’re not the best of boxers or wrestlers or runners. I have to admit we like the lute and the dance as an accompaniment to our eating and drinking, and we love our warm baths and our sleep. We are a civilised people. But that doesn’t make us softies. On the ocean we are unsurpassed – not as raiders and colonisers, carrying terror in our hulls, but as traders and geniuses of the sea. What’s more, we have the power and goodwill of Poseidon behind us, unlike your good self, sir, and our ships travel faster than thought. One of them, at your own request, will see you shortly home. Which is just as well for you, I think, since all your ships appear to have perished, and you came here, as Euryalus rightly remarked, on what was left of the last of them, a naked keel. Or were you simply naked?’
It was the speech of a superb diplomat, one that Agamemnon could have learned from, Odysseus thought, and one that had put both men in their places while remaining gracious. At the same time, the king called upon Euryalus to apologise, which he did both readily and nobly, giving Odysseus a great bronze sword with a scabbard of carved ivory. A great many more gifts followed from each of the princes in turn.
The king then commanded Demodocus to play again, this time with dancers to accompany him. They were all in the first flush of youth, all beautiful. Odysseus was struck dumb with admiration for the art of these Phaeacians.
Alcinous now asked Odysseus for the rest of his story, and wondered why he had wept earlier over the tales of the Greeks at Troy. Clearly, it was time for the hero to tell all, including the secret of his identity, and when he had finished the long account of his sufferings, both in the theatre of war and in the broad and barren arena of ocean, there was not a dry eye among the oar-loving audience.
The king rose to his feet.
‘Odysseus,’ he said, ‘for now we know your name, your wanderings and your struggles are a greater story than any man’s. I believe it to be the greatest story of all time, and I think it will never end. Yet you have come here asking us to do just that – to put an end to your great story by sending you home. A strange position to put me in. Part of me wishes your wanderings would end here, with my daughter. But I see now that this cannot be. Another part of me wishes your wanderings would never end, they are so heroic. But end them I shall. It would be inhuman not to. The time has come for you to go forth and endure the destiny that the heavy spinners spun for you at your birth. You will return at last to Ithaca, starting at dawn, for I noticed tonight that you kept turning your face to the setting sun, as if spurring him on in his descent and urging him to rise again.’
Back in the palace more gifts were bestowed, a copper heated over the fire, and Odysseus was bathed and anointed in a style he had not known since his time with Calypso.
Nausicaa stood by one of the pillars, tall and slender and stately, watching him quietly with her sad grey eyes.
‘So you are married already,’ she said. ‘Well, may the gods guide you and go with you. And when you are safely back home in your own country and in your wife’s bosom, perhaps you will remember the girl who found you on a foreign shore. Or perhaps you will forget.’
‘How can I forget,’ answered Odysseus, ‘the girl whose gift to me was life itself?’
Next morning her parents and all their court conducted Odysseus to the ship they had generously provided for him, and he boarded, waved farewell, and shouted loudly to them as the rowers bent to their oars, wishing them a prosperous old age, and Princess Nausicaa a joyful marriage, and all happiness to be theirs until death took them out of this world forever.
And I could have said that my heart was fucking breaking as the little trader took me away from that sweet girl, its oars dripping moonlight and pearl, putting more and more ocean between me and a love I’d known. As ever. I could even have said that I was coming to the end of the line, and that the travels were almost over, that old Odysseus, though still unslaked, still hungry for skylines, suckling his blood, homed yet for Ithaca, his roots and hearth-ease.
So the splendid ship leapt into the swell, plunging like a chariot team under the whip. No falcon could have kept up with her as, with soaring stern and plunging prow, she ploughed the blue acres of the sounding sea, her wake always whitening the wine-dark waves. No hulking tramp then, no derelict tub after a
ll, but a sea-going miracle such as could be constructed only by the sea-kings, Poseidon’s special friends. It was laden with the gifts they had heaped on the hero. The dark waves roared around the stern, where Odysseus lay at peace, freed from the long years of bloody war and anxious wanderings, the countless curses and catastrophes that had followed him on the cruel seas and prevented his sorely wished return to home. Sick at heart for many things, but safe now in the hands of the master mariners, his sea-troubles over after twenty long years, gratefully he gave way and entered oblivion, lulled by the sea-music into a deep sweet sleep, like the sleep of death.
PART FOUR
ITHACA
FORTY-SEVEN
The return to Ithaca. An epic event after so long an absence, don’t you think? And you can hardly have our local hero slinking back surreptitiously on some beaten-up tub, dumped like an old dog on the shore to find his own way home and work out what to do next. Unthinkable. And it didn’t happen that way – at least not on the web. Penelope saw to that. She gave the homecoming an entirely different spin.
Here’s how it goes.
I was still sleeping when we reached Ithaca. Not that I was needed – the sea-kings knew all the creeks and coves, and they spotted the haven between the two headlands, named after the sea-god Phorcys, with the long-leaved olive tree at the harbour head and the shady cave nearby, sacred to the Naiads – the cave with two mouths, the north one for humans, and the south one through which only the gods could come and go. The old wives of Ithaca used to gabble about these water-sprites, the nymphs who came there to see to their hallowed work, weaving their wonderful sea-blue webs on the great stone looms while the never-failing springs gurgled all about them at their labours and the bees buzzed in and out of the stone basins and the two-handled jars they used as hives.
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