The Return From Troy

by Lindsay Clarke

  In his rough smock and tattered straw hat, Laertes looked more like a peasant farmer than the lord of all the islands. ‘It’s good to see you taking an interest, Telemachus,’ he smiled at his grandson. ‘Your father’s head was always full of ships and the sea when he was a boy. He loved the island well enough, but he was restless — thinking more about what lay over the next horizon than what was here in his own back yard.’ Shaking his head, Laertes squinted into the glare of light off the sea. ‘Odysseus wasn’t like you — he never had the patience to make a good farmer.’

  Telemachus had heard this complaint a number of times before. Each time it was uttered he noticed the only half-suppressed note of admiration — of envy almost — in the old man’s voice — as if the old king loved, and missed, his errant son a great deal more than he cared to admit.

  Eumaeus said, ‘There’ll be time enough for him to learn patience when this war is over and done with.’

  ‘It’s finished,’ Telemachus said, almost dully. ‘Troy’s fallen. We’ve won.’

  The two men looked at him in some bewilderment. The news, if it was true, was tremendous, but it had been announced with so little excitement that they thought the boy must be imagining things. Seeing their uncertainty, Telemachus allowed himself to smile. ‘It’s true,’ he said with more elation. ‘Dolon the fisherman got back from Zacynthus an hour ago. He heard the news there. He’s telling everybody. Troy’s beaten. They’re singing and dancing down in the town.’

  ‘You’re sure of this, boy?’ Laertes demanded.

  But the swineherd was frowning dubiously as he said, ‘Dolon’s got fewer wits than he has teeth.’

  ‘I know,’ Telemachus replied, ‘but he seems certain of it. He heard it from a Phoenician trader who’d put in on Zacynthos for repairs. I think the fighting’s been over for weeks but nobody told us.’

  Laertes and Eumaeus looked at each other, scarcely daring to believe. ‘What about your father, boy?’ the old king asked. ‘Was there news of him?’

  ‘Dolon said he was the great hero of the hour. He said something about a clever horse that my father brought to the fight … It seems to have made all the difference, but I’m not sure how.’

  ‘A clever horse?’

  ‘That’s what he said. But I may have got it wrong. I couldn’t really make head or tail of what he was saying. Anyway, it seems my father’s definitely alive. And Dolon says he’s going to come back very rich.’

  ‘Rich?’ Laertes hand was trembling at his staff. To his amazement, Telemachus saw that tears had started at the rims of his eyes. ‘If he still has all his limbs about him he’ll be rich enough for me.’ The old man lifted his staff and shook it in the air. A laugh cracked out of his throat, and another that turned into a shout of triumph at the sky; then he and Eumaeus were jumping up and down together, hugging each other by the shoulders and laughing and shouting as they wept.

  Laertes turned his head to see his grandson staring up at him in wonder. ‘I must share this news with the Queen,’ he exclaimed, ‘and there are grateful offerings to be made to the gods. And what does your mother have to say about it, boy? Has she ordered up a feast already? It must be attended to immediately. Back to your sties, Eumaeus. Pick out some good porkers. And tell Philoetius to choose a bull for the sacrifice.’ Only then did he arrest the flowing torrent of his pleasure long enough to observe the almost sickly flush of distress on his grandson’s face. ‘What is it?’ he asked, his concern only slightly tinged with impatience. ‘And what are you doing up here on your own here anyway? Why aren’t you celebrating with the others? Why aren’t you at your mother’s side, sharing her joy?’

  Telemachus stood frowning at the recumbent sow and her tussling litter, not wanting to cloud his grandfather’s happiness yet unable to disguise the turmoil of his feelings.

  ‘What’s the matter with you, boy?’ Eumaeus asked.

  Telemachus had been biting his lip but now the words burst out of him. ‘What if he doesn’t like me?’ Heated and angry, he looked up at the two perplexed old men. ‘Sometimes I think everybody knows him but me. And I’m his son. His only son. But I don’t even know what he looks like. If he stepped off a ship tomorrow I wouldn’t know who he was. And he doesn’t know me either, and he’s a great hero, isn’t he? The whole world knows about him. He’s famous everywhere from here to Troy and probably further than that by now. And what am I? I’ve done nothing. No one knows who I am outside this island. And even here …’

  Uncertain whether he was more amused or perturbed by this untypically verbal spate of emotion, his grandfather said, ‘What about here, boy? You’re the royal prince of this island and don’t you forget it. You’re the scion of a noble line that goes back through me to my father Acrisius, and his father Abas, who was grandson to Lynceus and great-grandson to King Danaus himself. There’s no better blood in all Argos than runs in your veins.’ He frowned down at Telemachus, shaking his head. ‘Your father will be as proud of you as you should be of him. It’s my belief that for these last ten years he’s been pining for nothing more than the moment when he gets back home and holds his wife and son in his arms again. So let’s hear no more of this sorry nonsense. Now I’m going back to my farm to tell your grandmother this news, and you should hasten to share it with your mother. This is a great day for Ithaca, boy, a great day!’

  Laertes tousled his grandson’s hair, then turned away and hurried off through the glade, making for his lodge where Anticleia would be busying herself about the garden or the farm. Telemachus watched him go, feeling the weight of his ancestry about his young shoulders more closely than the reassurance that Laertes had sought to give him. When he looked round, he saw Eumaeus scratching his beard as he studied him with shrewd eyes.

  ‘So what’s brought this on?’ the old swineherd asked. ‘T’was only two days ago you were jumping up and down to have your father back.’ When he saw that Telemachus was reluctant to speak, he said, ‘What is it, lad? Has somebody been goading you?’

  Again Telemachus flushed. ‘Why do you ask that?’

  ‘Because I don’t only keep my eyes out for my pigs, you know. I’ve been watching Antinous and his cronies throw their weight about. Phemius tells me they’ve been giving you a hard time.’

  ‘Phemius should mind his own business.’

  ‘Phemius cares about you. We all do. And as for you — you don’t want to take any notice of those layabouts — especially Antinous. He was too young to go to the war when Odysseus first set out and he didn’t answer when the call went out from Aulis for more men last year. Strutting about on Ithaca making a nuisance of himself is all he’s good for.’ The swineherd gathered the spittle in his mouth and spat onto a fern. ‘I blame his father for it. Eupeithes never amounted to much himself, and ’tis like enough his son will go the same way.’

  ‘I should have struck him,’ Telemachus said. ‘I should have tried to knock him down.’

  ‘And got a bloody nose for your pains? Believe you me, your father wouldn’t have seen much sense in that! That Antinous is twice your size, boy. And he’s old enough to know better. Just hold your water till the master gets home. He’ll teach him respect soon enough. Now on your way. Do as your grandfather says. Your mother’ll be looking for you, and there’s feasting tonight. So put a cheerful face on. And be grateful to the gods you’ve got a father to admire.’

  Not for a long time had anyone on the island seen the lady Penelope look as blithe and beautiful as she did at the feast that night. True, there were a few moments when Laertes and Queen Anticleia first came into the hall wearing all their finery and with garlands in their hair, and the three of them embraced one another in a small squall of tears; but there was more relief and gratitude in their weeping than regret for all the lost years of the war, and those moments were quickly over. Soon the old king was to be seen tripping featly in the dance as though twice that number of years had fallen from his shoulders and his heart was young and strong again. All the old men of the cour
t danced with him - Mentor first among them, stamping his feet and clapping his hands, while the women called out, laughing as the pace quickened. The eyes of Telemachus brightened with excitement, and once the hall grew quieter, I struck my lyre and opened my voice in the song of praise to Lord Odysseus which I had been harbouring for many weeks, waiting for just such an exalted time as this.

  The hall must have fallen silent around me but I was conscious of no one and of nothing there. As though I had taken a deep draught of wine, the god came into me and in those rare moments I was left with no sense of my body’s boundaries; with no sense of my self at all, if truth were told, for I was as much an instrument in the god’s service as was the lyre in my hands. Nor was there any space left in which to be astonished that such a thing should have happened in the company of others, even though the god had only visited me before when I sang alone in the high places of the island, looking down across the empty acres of the sea. And so, for a time that might have been no time at all, but a kindly gesture of eternity towards my mortal life, I and the god and the song were one; and I knew that my fate had come upon me and I could never again be quite the same.

  The applause rang loud and long when the song was ended. I saw tears in the eyes of Eurycleia, the old woman who had nursed Odysseus when he was a boy. Mentor and the other lords of the island were beaming with approval. For a time my heart swelled with the pride and pleasure of that moment. Then the god went out of me as swiftly as he had come, and I was left empty and disarrayed like a soiled garment when the hot nights dance is over and done.

  I saw Telemachus looking at me with a kind of wonder from where he sat, fondling the ears of the dog Argus, but I could not hold his gaze. Only later when, with her customary tact and grace, Lady Penelope sought me out, not merely to commend but also to counsel me, did I begin to recover my senses.

  ‘Your song was a good song, Phemius,’ she said quietly. ‘The Lord Odysseus will be proud to hear it on his return, and your father will be prouder still … if the sea-gods have spared him.’ Then she crouched down beside me, right there at the edge of the hearth, and studied me with such tender concern that I scarcely knew where to put myself. Stammering out an awkward phrase or two of thanks, I made to stand, but was stopped by the gentle pressure of her hand. ‘I see what has been given to you,’ she said, ‘but there is always a price to pay for such gifts. I think you should go alone from the hall soon and make an offering to the god. And you would be wise to ask for his mercy as well as his strength.’ Rising gracefully to her feet, she rested the tips of her fingers on my head and added, ‘I feel sure that this is what your father would tell you if he was here.’

  I was still not much more than a boy in those days, and I see now that I had less understanding of her words than I believed at the time. But I had a youth’s impatience to be taken seriously, and that, above all else, was the gift that those words conferred on me. I had loved Penelope before, as all the island did, with warm affection and regard; now I was lost in adoration of her. And so, as I stood alone under the night sky, making my solemn offering to the god as she had bidden, I truly had nothing more to ask of life than the right to sit for the rest of my days at my lady’s feet in the great hall at Ithaca and serve her with my gift.

  Telemachus and I quarrelled around that time. Four years divided us, so his behaviour sometimes felt petulant and childish to me. For his part, he took my lapdog devotion to his mother as a rebuke to his own, sometimes cruel efforts to detach himself from her care. I suppose he was trying to accelerate his growth into manhood in order to ready himself for his father’s return, but the effect was to turn him into a cross-grained prig whose fractious moods drove his mother close to distraction. One day our exchanges became so vehement that I told him I would have nothing more to do with him until he apologized both to his mother and to me. But he was too proud and intransigent for that, so Telemachus withdrew into a tight-lipped solitude on which only the patient old swineherd Eumaeus was sometimes permitted to intrude.

  The loss, as it turned out, was as much mine as his. I tried for a time to get along with Antinous, Eurymachus and the other young men who hung about the taverns of the town, but they were all older than me, and too much idle comfort had made them sophisticated in ways which left me feeling uneasy and gauche. By contrast, there had always been a bond of kinship between Telemachus and myself; our tastes were similar, our imaginations were fired by the same stories, we were both happier listening to the chime of goat-bells in the hills or the sound of the wind working off the sea than to the prattle of the town. So I missed my friend in those difficult days. Probably more than he missed me.

  Yet if Telemachus and I were despondent, so too, as the weeks dragged by, was everybody else. Even though we knew our hopes unreasonable, the feast had generated an expectation that Odysseus would come sailing home with his fleet within a matter of days. Old men whose sons had gone off to the war, and boys much younger than Telemachus, began to gather on the cliffs to see which of them would first spot the mastheads crossing the horizon. There were dawns when I woke filled with the irrational conviction that this was the day when the ships would make port and my father Terpis would be there at the prow, alive and well, singing his vessel ashore. So I would run all the way out to Crow Rock and stand staring out across the blue-green swell with the birds lurching on the wind above my head. But there was nothing to be seen through the haze where sea became sky and the great world lay beyond our own small clutch of islands.

  Late one afternoon, when all the others had long since lost interest in the vigil, I heard a sound among the rocks behind me. I turned expecting to find nothing more than a sheep tugging at the rough grass, and saw Telemachus staring at me, his mouth tightly drawn, his eyes uncertain. We both remained silent, neither quite ready to make the first conciliatory move. The wind bustled about our ears. The concussions of a stiff swell against the cliff shook the air.

  ‘There’s been news,’ he said at last, as if to the stones.

  ‘Of the war, you mean? Of the fleet?’

  ‘Does any other kind matter these days?’

  ‘But how?’ I demanded. ‘I’ve been here all day and I haven’t seen any ships.’

  ‘You were looking the wrong way,’ Telemachus scowled. ‘Amphinomus put in from Dulichion two hours ago. One of his merchantmen got back from a voyage into the Gulf of Corinth the day before yesterday. He says that more than half the Argive fleet was wrecked in a tempest sailing back from Troy. Hundreds of men were drowned. He says that King Agamemnon has been murdered in Mycenae and the son of Thyestes rules there now. He says that there’s fighting all over Thessaly. A new people with magic weapons have invaded. He says that the whole world has been turned upside down.’

  I stood listening to this news dumbfounded. The last we’d heard was that Troy had fallen and the fleet must soon be sailing home in triumph. If the gods had granted us a glorious victory after ten years of war, surely they would spare the host the ravages of a storm? And Agamemnon was the King of Men — how could anyone possibly wrest his throne from him? So when Telemachus began to talk of magical weapons, I became convinced that he was out to make a fool of me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and doubtless the sea will run dry tomorrow and these invaders will walk across the strait and we shall all be struck down by their magic.’

  ‘It’s true,’ he retorted. ‘It’s all true — not like your stupid songs.’

  He turned away and would have left me there on the cliff but I had seen the distress on his face before the anger displaced it. ‘Telemachus, wait,’ I shouted after him. He stopped at my call, a scrawny figure in the fading light with the wind ruffling his hair. ‘Was there any word of your father?’

  For a few moments longer he stood in silence; then without turning he said, ‘Nobody knows where he is. Nobody knows whether he’s alive or dead. The fishes might be eating him for all I know.’

  King Laertes and all the elders of the island gathered the next
day to hear what Amphinomus had to report, and the more we heard the more it seemed that the world had been turned upside down. We learned that the northern reaches of Thessaly and Magnesia had indeed been invaded by a foreign horde armed with weapons stronger than bronze; and that, even though Neoptolemus and his Myrmidons were fighting at his side, King Peleus had been pushed out of Iolcus and was hard-pressed to withstand the Dorian incursions. We learned that Menestheus was no longer king in Athens, having been defeated by Demophon, the son of Theseus, who had now reclaimed his father’s throne. We learned that Agamemnon had indeed been assassinated by his wife and her paramour and that Mycenae was not the only scene of unexpected revolution. Apparently Lord Diomedes had returned to Argos after surviving shipwreck on the Lycian coast only to discover that his wife and her lover had seized the throne of Tiryns; while a similar illicit conspiracy had unseated King Idomeneus in Crete

  Being as shrewd as she was wise, Lady Penelope quickly divined the hand of King Nauplius behind this repeated pattern of betrayals. ‘But surely those illused lords could combine their powers to help each other,’ she said. ‘Diomedes and Idomeneus are heroes of Troy. Who could stand against them?’

  ‘They gathered at Corinth with precisely that intention,’ Amphinomus answered. ‘I was there. I heard them planning to join forces and launch a campaign to retake Tiryns first, then to advance against Mycenae, and lastly to mount an expedition into Crete. But the truth is that the war and the storm have left their forces so depleted that they could do none of these things without help; and where were they to turn? Neoptolemus already has his hands full in the north. As yet’ - he cast a rueful glance towards Penelope - ‘they had heard no word of my Lord Odysseus, and Menelaus is rumoured to be far away in Egypt. Of all the warlords, it seems that only old Nestor has returned safely to his throne.’

  ‘And would he not help them?’ King Laertes asked.