The Return From Troy

by Lindsay Clarke

  Odysseus was looking around in dismay when the maiden who had brought him there spoke in a thickly accented version of his own language. ‘Here you sleep,’ she said pointing to the fleece. ‘In the night a dream comes. When the sun comes in the sky you speak the dream to us.’

  He did dream that night but the women of the temple seemed unable to make much sense of it. They merely shook their heads and muttered in worried tones when Hanno tried to translate the images of a dream that was shaped by an old story unknown to all of them except Odysseus.

  In the dream his ship had made landfall on a fertile island where meadows ran down the cliffs to the shore. At the head of his men, he set out to explore and came upon a cave hung with laurel boughs where two kid-goats were penned. Only when, as is the way with dreams, time shifted suddenly and he saw the one-eyed monster entering the cave, did he know that he was dreaming the story of the Ithacan folk-hero Oulixos and the Cyclops Polyphemus. But the story got confused in the dreaming. He and his men contrived to put out the ogre’s eye and to escape from the cave by clinging under the fleeces of his flock of sheep; but when Odysseus stared into the face of the Cyclops with its burned-out ruin of a single eye, it seemed to be his own face that he saw. And when he tried to shout out in triumph as the doer of this deed, he could not remember his name.

  He had woken from the dream with the deranging sense of not knowing who he was, and that his name was Nobody.

  So bleakly did the dream mirror back to him the dark cave of his despair that Odysseus stood in no need of interpreters. Nor did he expect to take comfort from the women who muttered round him. Hanno, however, listened intently. After what seemed like an endless disquisition from an old crone with withered breasts, who rocked and chanted as she spoke, he turned to confront Odysseus.

  ‘She says that in her wisdom the Goddess has turned the dark side of her face towards you,’ he said, ‘but you are not yet willing to look on it. She says that your mind is sharp like the edge of a sword but that the sword has turned its edge against itself. She says that your heart is so full of blood that it will burst inside you if you do not find a way to open it again. She says that she is sorry but at this season of your soul she can find no way into your darkness. She says that you will speak to the Goddess again in another place at another time but she fears that many years must pass before your soul stands up inside your skin again.’

  Though he had expected nothing of this consultation, Odysseus’s heart was stricken by this bleak confirmation of his desperate state. He got up and turned away, neglecting even to thank the priestess in his misery.

  Narrowing his eyes against the blazing dazzle of light off Lake Tritonis, he felt bereft of everything that was Odysseus. His wit, intelligence, eloquence, courage, inventiveness — all were gone. All that remained to him was an ageing body and a grizzled head in which he could still feel the thunder of his pain. He was without a ship even - at least until that body had been dragged back to where his men were guzzling the lotus fruit. His limbs flooded with weariness at the thought.

  ‘There is still the oracle,’ Hanno was saying. ‘If you have questions to ask, its priest may know better how to address an Argive’s heart.’

  Though they arrived at the place of the oracle before noon, the queue of people waiting with questions to ask was so long that it was nearly sundown before Odysseus paid his dues and presented himself before the scrawny, caramel-coloured figure wrapped in a sky-blue robe, who sat beneath a thatched awning at the edge of the lake. Crude pictures of birds were carved into the wooden poles supporting his pavilion. A black woman crouched behind him, flicking the flies from her face with a horsehair whisk. A horned viper, presumably with drawn fangs, lay coiled beside her in the shadow of a stone.

  The man gave a cheerful, wall-eyed grin as Odysseus approached. ‘It’s a long time since we saw an Argive,’ he said. ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘Ask the oracle,’ Odysseus replied.

  The man’s face fell at once. When he spoke again, the friendliness had gone from his voice. ‘The Oracle of Mopsus welcomes all who seek its aid, but the god answers only either yes or no. Tell me, is there blood on your hands?’

  With a wry grimace, Odysseus said, ‘More than you would believe.’

  The man shrugged. ‘But you have made your offering at the shrine of Neith? You have been cleansed there?’

  ‘If you can call it cleansing, yes.’

  ‘Very well. We shall proceed.’ He studied Odysseus for a moment with his mouth down-turned. ‘You would be wise to choose your question with great care.’

  ‘I’ve already chosen it,’ Odysseus said. ‘Must I speak it aloud?’

  Again the man shrugged. ‘It is between you and the god.’

  ‘Then I will keep it that way.’

  The man grunted, turned his head and snapped his fingers at the woman who picked up an object wrapped in folds of blue linen from the ground at her side.

  Then he reached for Odysseus’s hand, opened it, and studied the lines inscribed there for a few seconds before placing a smooth pearly-white pebble in his palm. He touched the stone with the tip of his finger, saying, ‘Yes.’ Then he opened the other hand, placed a shiny black pebble inside it and said, ‘No.’

  Nodding sagely, as if some great mystery had been revealed, he moved to one side and the woman shuffled forward, chanting quietly, and crouched before Odysseus to unwrap the folds of linen. The Ithacan smiled grimly at what was revealed. She was holding a bronze war-helmet cast in the old Lapith fashion, plain but for its dents and scratches, and without a plume. One of its leather cheek-guards had gone and the other dangled dry and frayed from its rings. Presumably this antique object had once adorned the prophetic head of Mopsus.

  This type of oracle was well-known to him. He told Hanno to leave, took the helmet from the woman’s hands, dropped the pebbles inside it and sat for a time with his eyes closed, concentrating his mind on the question he wished to ask. Then he began to move his hands in a circular motion until the stones rattled inside the bronze. Grimly aware of his own absurdity, he swayed his shoulders, swivelling the helmet faster and faster until one of the stones jumped over the rim and fell to the ground before him. It was blacker than the woman’s skin. She raised the whites of her eyes, sighed impassively, and took the helmet from his hands to wrap it in the linen folds. The oracle had spoken. It was time to go.

  The disaster of this whole inauspicious expedition felt complete to Odysseus when he discovered the next morning that Hanno had slipped away from their camp in the night. Young Elpenor, who was supposed to keep watch over the Libyan, had drunk too much throughout the heat of the afternoon and fallen into a stupor of sleep.

  Furious with the contrite young man, Eurylochus clouted him round the ears, while Odysseus looked on in a trance of dismay.

  Their camels and pack-mules still stood tethered in the shade of a spring, but when the three Ithacans pooled their resources, they realized they had only the vaguest picture of the landscape through which they had passed on their way to the shrine. They could take their general orientation from the sun, and knew to keep the lake at their backs and the snow-clad range of mountains to the north; but not one of them was confident that he could guide the others across the salt-flats and on into the almost featureless waste of scrubland beyond.

  An uneasy silence fell between them. Odysseus sat staring into the dazzle of the lake, thinking of the violets that must soon be flowering in Ithaca.

  Then the voice of the small Libyan boy piped up from where he sat in his dirty smock, solemnly watching Eurylochus berating Elpenor for his stupidity.

  ‘You want go Zarzis,’ he said. ‘I take you Zarzis.’

  To pass the time on the journey there, Eurylochus had taught the boy a few words of his own language, and he must have picked up more by listening to the Argives chatting by the fire at night.

  Dubiously Eurylochus said, ‘You know the way?’

  ‘I know it.’

 
; ‘How do we know you know?’

  The boy wagged his head from side to side and looked up at Eurylochus with widened eyes that were as black as olives. ‘I come three time here.’

  Eurylochus turned to his companions in amazement and delight. A smile broke across his grizzled face. ‘I think this boy was sent to us by a god,’ he said. Then he swung the little mule-driver up in his brawny arms. ‘Hermes,’ he shouted. ‘That’s what we’ll call you. You’re promoted, boy. Your name is Hermes now.’

  But the boy, it turned out, was not always certain of the way, and the journey back to Zarzis took longer than the journey out. In the heat of one afternoon, they were running low on water and might have got lost for ever had Hermes not approached the hillside lairs of a reclusive tribe of cave-dwellers. A scrawny man in a loin cloth, with decorative scars etched into his cheeks, glowered at the boy for a time, saying nothing. But Hermes persisted, gesturing with impatient hands, until the man put them back on the right track through a wilderness of rocks.

  Odysseus’ mood grew grimmer with every mile they travelled. He could not dispute the answer that the oracle had given to his question, but to accept it consigned him to despair. He knew that if he was not careful he might die in this condition and he was not yet ready to die. So as he drove his camel onwards through the glare of heat, hour by hour he summoned the vestiges of his will. He imagined himself strapping and buckling it around the muscles of his heart. He enclosed his head inside it like a helmet of bronze, and he made up his mind that if the world was going to take everything from him, then he would make sure that he took something back.

  Odysseus, Prince of Ithaca, Lord to Lady Penelope and father of Telemachus, might have died in the arid reaches of this Libyan desert; but Nobody the Rover still lived. His ships were waiting for him on the beach at Zarzis, and there was a whole unknown world to the west, out beyond the Pillars of Heracles, where a new life might be found.

  Yet when they finally arrived, exhausted, on the strand at Zarzis, they found only two ships waiting for them there. Having almost made up his mind that his leader would never return, Demonax greeted them with joy and relief; but his face darkened as he explained that Glaucus and the crew of the Nereid had given up on Odysseus five days earlier. They had sailed westwards in search of Guneus and the Cinyps River where they were looking to mend their fortunes.

  Only later did it emerge that many of the Swordfish’s crew were also restless. They too might have sailed, hoping to get safely back to Ithaca, had Odysseus’ return been delayed by another day. Nor had the decision to put the Nereid to sea passed without furious disputes among the men. Most of the crew of The Fair Return had remained fiercely loyal to Odysseus. His helmsman Baius had even sworn that he would cut Glaucus’ throat if their ships ever beached on the same strand again. There was, however, one encouraging piece of news: most of the men had been so shamed by the encounter with Guneus and his still-vigorous crew that they had resolved to pull themselves together. Apart from a few now chronic addicts for whom there was little hope, almost all of them had sworn off taking the lotus, though it had been a miserable time for those whose stomachs had convulsed in violent reaction to the sudden stoppage of the drug.

  Odysseus took stock that night. He had two ships and around seventy men left to him. It was enough. If they rounded up a few sheep and goats from the local herdsmen, they could put to sea adequately equipped to make their way back into the sea-lanes around Sicily. There were islands he had heard of there.

  Then he would hand over the Swordfish to any of his men who wanted to return to Ithaca, and turn his own prow westwards to discover what fate the gods might have in store for him beyond the known margins of the world.

  The Wind Callers

  A warm wind blowing off the mainland eased their passage north along the coast; then they struck eastwards hoping to make landfall in Sicily. But an anxious time passed before the man at the masthead sighted a pale plume of smoke drifting from the summit of a cone-shaped island on the horizon. Recalling reports he had heard from navigators who had sailed westwards out of Argos, Odysseus surmised that this might be Aeolia, the island of the wind-callers.

  His guess was confirmed when they approached the well-built harbour of a prosperous town and saw the banners flying from the bastions of the citadel. After the sultry heat of Zarzis, the sailors’ hearts were lifted and refreshed by the airy music reaching their ears as they pulled in towards the marble wharf. Only when they docked did they realize that they were listening to the sound of the breeze strumming through countless wind-harps and chiming among webs and lattices of translucent shell. It felt as though the wind that had blown them there was now celebrating their arrival.

  Odysseus soon discovered that his reputation had preceded him, although the crowd gathered at the wharf was surprised to learn that the Ithacans were little better informed about recent events in the wider world than they were themselves. The Aeolians knew that Troy had fallen and had heard rumours both of Agamemnon’s assassination and the Dorian invasion. What they could not know — and he did all he could to keep them in ignorance of the fact — was that Odysseus was a different man to the one whose valour and resourcefulness they had heard lauded in stories told by earlier visitors to the island.

  He had not been standing long on the wharf when a herald approached from the direction of the palace parting the crowd before one of the most handsome young couples that Odysseus had seen for a long time, and his first assumption was that this must be the king and queen of the island. But the tall young man with ardent blue eyes and bird-like features introduced himself as Macareus, the son of King Aeolus, and it emerged that the young woman at his side was not his wife but his sister Canace. They were delighted to welcome Odysseus to their island in the name of Zeus of the Strangers, and to inform him that their father was eager to receive him and hear at first-hand the stories he must have to tell about the glorious war that had been fought at Troy.

  Charmed by the king’s hospitality but reluctant to confess that he had been reduced to the role of a roving pirate, Odysseus sat a little uneasily beside Aeolus at the banquet that night. A man of austere bearing with the same intense eyes as his son and long white hair falling about his shoulders, the king would eventually prove to be both an astute questioner and a patient listener; but he was also discreet, and far too well-bred to importune his guest with immediate demands for information. So Odysseus was able to keep him at bay for a time by expressing his own desire to learn more about the life and customs of Aeolia.

  His host, he learned, was the third king to bear the name Aeolus. Some eighty years earlier, and for time immemorial before that, it had been the custom for the island’s king to die each year as the rite of the Great Goddess demanded. But sensing that the power of the Goddess was on the wane, the grandfather of the present king had refused to consent to death when his time came.

  Under the aegis of Sky-Father Zeus, he had installed himself as permanent sovereign, taken the name of the island to himself, and securely established both his throne and his line. His son had consolidated the new regime, yet Aeolus confessed to Odysseus that the memory of the old religion still remained strong among the common people of the island. ‘How could it be otherwise,’ he conceded with a dry smile, ‘when they believe that the power to call the wind is in her gift?’

  When Odysseus asked by what name the Goddess was worshipped in those parts, Aeolus informed him that her sacred name was Cardea. ‘They say that she lives at the back of the North Wind at the hinge of the year,’ he said, ‘and that it remains in her power to open what is shut and to shut what is open. For many years now my priests and I have dedicated the wind-rites in the name of Zeus the Cloud-gatherer, as my father and grandsire did before me. But the ancient practices remain much the same.’ He looked back at Odysseus, shaking his head. ‘Regrettably, my people are less changeable than the wind.’

  With almost unseemly eagerness, Odysseus made plain his desire to learn more of
those rites. ‘I can imagine no more useful knowledge for one of my rootless trade,’ he smiled in reparation. But Aeolus merely answered his smile with the suggestion — it was not quite a promise - that Odysseus might hear more of their art before he left the island.

  ‘Meanwhile,’ he added, ‘the wind tells us many things and the Phoenician traders tell us more, but with such grave unrest in the world, I find it hard to keep abreast of the times. So I look to you for guidance, friend.’

  Odysseus glanced away from the interrogative tilt of the old man’s head and saw Macareus and Canace laughing together a little further down the table. Their evident pleasure in each other’s company brought a sudden painful reminder of how things had once been on Ithaca, when he and Penelope had presided over many such feasts as this, each always taking pride in the other’s talent for hospitality — gracious in her case, ebullient in his — and life had seemed to offer no larger ambition than the increase of their mutual happiness. The thought came hard to him now, and when it flashed on the dream image of his wife recoiling from him as a man of blood, it became pure pain. The convivial chatter of the feast turned to noise inside his head. Sweat broke at his brow. When he glanced across at Canace, the king’s finely boned daughter, he saw the young body of Iphigenaia lying dead in her place. Her face was white. There was blood at her mouth and neck.

  A little perplexed by his guest’s absence of attention, Aeolus was saying, ‘I feel sure that the war will have altered the balance of power in ways which sooner or later must affect us even here on our remote fastness. There must already be signs of it on your own island?’

  Odysseus turned to stare at his royal host with the abstracted air of a man addressed by a stranger in the street. It felt as though the words had been impeded in their progress across his mind and were only now reaching him. ‘Forgive me,’ he said, struggling for coherence. ‘You are a king with the power to call the winds, while I … these days I am a straw blown about by them. If you are in need of guidance, you would do well to look elsewhere.’