The Return From Troy

by Lindsay Clarke

  For a moment Aeolus mistook the response for a light gesture of modesty.

  ‘Come, come, Lord Odysseus,’ he smiled, ‘your skill at guileful speech is well known, but we are plain-speaking folk on Aeolia. You may be frank with us here.’

  Aware that he was in gross breach of all civility, Odysseus snapped back, ‘You don’t understand me. I don’t mean to be indirect with you. The truth is I know nothing about the balance of power.’ He looked up and saw the dismay in the older man’s eyes. Making to stand, he put down his wine-cup carefully as though uncertain where the edge of the table lay. ‘Forgive me,’ he said again. ‘I’m no longer fit to keep company with decent men. I should return to my ship.’

  But Aeolus laid his own hand gently across the one with which Odysseus supported himself against the table. The two men were arrested there for a moment, gazing into each other’s eyes, and Odysseus felt himself under the scrutiny of an intelligence that was at once astute and sympathetic.

  ‘Some shadow lies across your heart,’ Aeolus said in a discreetly lowered voice. ‘Come aside with me, away from this din. We will talk quietly together.’

  At a word from their father, Macareus and Canace gladly undertook the hosting of the feast. Aeolus led his uneasy guest out of the banqueting hall into a comfortably appointed side-chamber where an open balcony looked out on the shifting radiance of the moon across the sea. Aeolus dismissed the serving-woman who brought them wine, saying that he would do the mixing himself. Once the wine was going quietly about its work, the king eased the occasion by telling Odysseus that he himself had never fully recovered from the time, some eighteen years earlier, when his island was visited by pestilence. All his children had been taken from him except Macareus, and he had lost his wife to an incurable malady of the heart soon after the infant Canace was born. ‘I tell you this,’ he said, ‘only because I recognize suffering when I see it. Now you must speak to me of yours.’

  Because this was the first time that Odysseus had confessed the full scale of his misery to anyone, the words did not come easily at first, and when they came he was more articulate in denouncing the way that he and his comrades had been corrupted by the war than in speaking his most secret fear, which was that the whole brutal adventure must have cost him the love of his wife and child.

  ‘Yet you have no certain evidence of that,’ Aeolus firmly reminded him when that difficult truth emerged.

  ‘No,’ Odysseus conceded, ‘but I know that I have thrown away ten years of my life, and I know that the wives of my comrades have turned against them in that time. If there is justice in the world, I can see no reason why Penelope should not have done the same.’

  ‘The inconstancy of others does not make your own wife inconstant,’ Aeolus countered. ‘She may be waiting faithfully even now.’

  ‘She may or she may not,’ Odysseus answered grimly. ‘If she is wise - and I believe her to be so — then she will have come to see that I was never worthy of her love.’

  ‘Come, man, ’Aeolus reproved him. ‘I cannot believe that to be the case. Once wretchedness begins to make us feel sorry for ourselves we no longer see things clearly. I do not know your wife and cannot speak of her, but one thing is clear to me and you would do well to remember it. Whatever may be happening on Ithaca, you are the island’s rightful lord. If you’re a true man, you will return as speedily as the wind will take you and reclaim what is your own. Should you find your wife has betrayed you, then make her pay for it. But secure your kingdom — by force if need be.’

  Odysseus muttered something which Aeolus could not hear, so the king leaned forward, asking him to repeat it.

  ‘The omens are against me,’ Odysseus said more loudly and with a bitter edge to his voice. ‘I consulted an oracle at the shrine of Athena Tritogeneia in Libya. I was told in no uncertain terms that I am unfit to return.’

  Aeolus grunted with the corners of his mouth sourly down-turned. ‘I have heard that they still serve the Mother before Father Zeus in that part of Libya.’

  ‘They do. Yet the omens were clear enough. And they were confirmed by my own dream. But I can see it for myself without the need for oracles and omens. I’m no more than the shell of the man I was. I cannot cleanse myself of the blood I’ve shed. My dreams are dreams of blood as my life has been a life of blood. That blood dims my sight even.’ Hearing the small noise of demurral in his host’s throat, Odysseus stared fiercely up at him. ‘It is true. Believe me. When I looked at your daughter at the feast just now, I saw her not living but dead. Dead as the daughter that Agamemnon sacrificed to the wind at Aulis. There was blood at her neck and mouth.’ Seeing Aeolus make the sign to ward off evil, he added quickly, ‘Yet clearly she is more vivid with life than any young woman I have looked on for a long time. It is a curse that travels with me since the things that were done at Troy. I cannot allow it to pollute the lives of my wife and son.’

  ‘Why should it?’ Aeolus answered. ‘We have cleansing rites here on Aeolia. The days of the Goddess’s ascendancy are gone. You should not permit her primitive darkness to oppress your heart. As a guest here you are under the protection of Sky-Father Zeus. Let me purge you of this guilt before his altar.’ Opening his hands, he smiled warmly, supremely confident of his own powers. ‘Then we’ll see if we can’t whistle up a wind to take you home.’

  With an effort to restrain the tears rising inside him, Odysseus turned his face to the night outside. There could be no doubting this king’s authority and benevolence, but he had no great experience of warfare and the harm it could work on a man’s mind. In these tranquil moments Aeolus was aware of no other sounds than the hushed murmur of the surf and the song of the breeze through the strings of the wind-harps, but Odysseus could hear the screaming in the streets of Troy. He saw the people dying around him. He watched the sword in his own hand rise and fall. The smell of blood was in his nostrils still.

  He shook his head in a vain attempt to clear the phantasm. Seizing control of his voice, he said, ‘As we approached your island I saw smoke rising from the mountain that overlooks your citadel.’

  With a smile, Aeolus said, ‘We say that it rises from the smithy of Hephaistus.’

  ‘I hear that they said the same thing on Kalliste before Poseidon shook the earth, and fire broke from the mountain and plunged that island beneath the sea.’

  The smile faded from the king’s face. ‘Perhaps those people had offended the god.’

  ‘Has fire ever broken from your mountain here?’

  ‘The last time was a long time ago,’ Aeolus frowned. ‘To our knowledge the mountain has never raged with such violence as on Kalliste.’

  ‘Yet the fire may come again.’

  ‘If the gods will it, which I pray they do not.’ Aeolus shifted uneasily in his chair. ‘But why do you ask these things?’

  ‘Because there are times when I feel to be like such a mountain.’ Odysseus turned his haggard eyes towards the king. ‘There are depths inside us into which we cannot see. Who knows what may be lurking there? I know only that more violence than I thought myself capable of broke out of me that night in Troy. Such fury might burst from me again. Can your rites purge me of that risk?’

  ‘Submit to them,’ Aeolus answered firmly, ‘and we shall see.’

  So the ships lay docked in the harbour at Aeolia for many days longer than Odysseus had intended. Again he endured long rites of sacrifice and purgation. He fasted and prayed. His body was scourged. Blood was poured over him and washed from him. And this time the power of Zeus invoked by the strong masculine will of Aeolus seemed to achieve what the Libyan priestesses of Neith had failed to accomplish.

  The worried Ithacans quickly sensed the change in their captain’s mood and temper. His heart felt lighter, his sense of value and purpose returned. When the king declared that the time had come to summon a wind that would speed his passage back to Ithaca, Odysseus gladly assented. His mind was clear, his confidence was high. He felt certain once more that his life �
�� his true life — was waiting for him there.

  Heralds went out from the palace and all of the three hundred people who lived on the island assembled for the great rite by which the wind was called. With King Aeolus and his white-robed priests at their head, they marched the sacred way around the smoking mountain, waving quince boughs as they walked, and with clay whistles slung on lengths of twine about their necks. They sang as they made their way towards a place on the northern strand where a narrow cave had been carved out of the cliff, and the air chimed with the sound of the warm south wind plucking at the harps.

  With Macareus as his guide and companion, Odysseus stood a little apart from the sacred precinct where King Aeolus raised his arms towards the cloudless sky. Turning to each of the four points of the compass, the king cried out invocations in some ancient language unknown to Odysseus. At each cardinal station the assembled multitude cried out in response while an acolyte poured out libations of wine. Aeolus turned to face northwards last of all. An altar stone stood there with a herd of goats tethered beside it. A second acolyte covered the king’s robes with a goatskin apron; a third handed him a bronze knife. After a further, longer invocation in which Odysseus recognized the names of Cloud-gathering Zeus and Boreas, son of Astraeus, Lord of the North Wind, the goats were offered up, one by one, in sacrifice.

  There came a pause in the solemn proceedings while Aeolus was divested of the bloodied apron. Water was brought for him to cleanse himself. In the stillness of those moments Odysseus became aware that only faint ripples of sound now passed through the strings of the harps. The dangling nets of shell seemed muted in their chiming. When he looked up towards the summit of the mountain he saw that the plume of smoke which had been drifting north-eastwards on the breeze since the time of his arrival was almost vertical now. All around him the people of the island stood in rapt attention. At his side, Macareus fingered the clay whistle moulded in the shape of a coiled serpent that hung about his neck.

  Standing with his back to the congregation once more, Aeolus raised his hands and head towards the sky as he chanted out a further invocation. At the climax of his call he turned and beckoned to a veiled figure in white robes who stepped forward out of the chorus of women and stood before him. He lifted her veil and Odysseus saw that her face was whitened with chalk so that she looked more like some ethereal shade than a creature of flesh and blood. Only after a moment did he discern the delicate young features of Canace.

  Quietly, with her hands clasped at her breast, the princess began to sing. At first Odysseus took her song for a wordless ululation - less a hymn than a voiced accompaniment to the stillness of the moment; but then the music lifted into a paean of praise in which the sacred name of Cardea was distinctively uttered, and it felt as though the whole world had stopped to listen. Never in his life had Odysseus felt his soul searched so deeply by a voice. Its naked beauty thrilled on his senses and exalted his heart. So deep-reaching was its summons that it made him think of the song of the Sirens that the hero Jason claimed to have heard when he tied himself to the mast of his ship and made his crew stop up their ears with wax so that they should not be drawn to destruction. And suddenly his heart was beating faster as he discerned how the airy upper registers of her voice were answered by a profound harmonic resonance that seemed to rise upwards from the bare soles of her feet, through the cavern of her slender chest, and out into the open air. The breath of her body and the breath of the wind were one and identical; and for the duration of those timeless moments — Odysseus understood it as he felt the hairs rising at his neck — Canace and the Goddess had become one and the same.

  The song eddied like a breeze into silence. Odysseus became aware of a light sobbing sound beside him. When he turned his head he saw tears of joy and exultation pouring down the cheeks of Macareus, whose eager eyes were fixed so intently on the now silent figure of his sister that he was entirely unaware he was observed.

  Meanwhile, as his daughter gave verse to the final quiet cadences of her song, Aeolus and his acolytes had made their way towards the mouth of the cave. Now the king turned to the congregation and uttered a great shout. Again he raised his arms. As though they were a single person, all the islanders lifted their whistles to their lips and blew a piercing blast of sound towards the north.

  Three times, like the mewing of some titanic hawk, the whistling pierced the air. Each shrill blast set up such a vibration that it seemed to quiver in Odysseus’ ears long after the actual sound had passed, and so intense was the pain that he closed his eyes against it.

  When he opened them again, Aeolus and his priests had disappeared into the dark cleft of the cave. As out of nowhere, a gust of wind lifted off the sea and swirled across the strand. Odysseus felt it tugging at his hair, pulling the skirts of his kilt. His eyes watered as the gust passed over them. It touched his ears with cold. Then it had moved on, ruffling the corn-gold hair of Macareus, who stood with his face raised and his eyes closed as if savouring the fragrance of the wind.

  The tension of the crowd relaxed in a deep, contented sigh. Someone laughed out loud, another man released a cheer; and then everyone was chattering and applauding as music struck up and the people began to dance with the kind of joy that comes only from experiencing the seamless mystery of things.

  After a time, Odysseus turned solemnly to Macareus. ‘Your sister is possessed of the most marvellous singing voice it has ever been my privilege to hear,’ he said. But the young man was so overwhelmed by emotion that he could only nod in response with the tears still running down across his cheeks. He lifted the back of his hand to his nostrils and drew in his breath, striving to regain control of it. Unable quite to do so, he glanced upwards and away.

  Sensitive to his embarrassment, Odysseus was about to avert his attention elsewhere when he felt the young man’s hand grip tightly at his wrist.

  ‘Look,’ Macareus whispered, and pointed upwards with his other hand.

  Lifting his gaze, Odysseus drew his breath in a gasp. The white smoke rising from the mountain had shifted, point by point, and was drifting towards the south-west. The wind, which had brought them northwards to Aeolia out of Libya, was now set fair for Ithaca and home.

  The Swordfish had already put to sea and young Elpenor was at the prow of The Fair Return ready to cast off, when King Aeolus and his son and daughter came to say their farewells to Odysseus on the wharf. The king motioned to one of his attendants who stepped forward holding a large and very full goatskin bag that was carefully bound at its mouth with silver wire. ‘This is the gift I promised you,’ Aeolus said. ‘Remember to handle it with great care.’

  ‘Have no fears,’ Odysseus smiled. ‘This precious cargo will be stowed safely away below decks. I have your instructions by heart.’

  ‘Then I wish you a truly fair return to your homeland,’ Aeolus said, opening his arms in a parting embrace. Odysseus held his friend for a long time before turning to embrace Macareus and the delicate shoulders of Canace. Then he took the goatskin bag from the attendant and climbed aboard his ship with a shout to Elpenor to cast off. Carefully he put down his burden on an oar-bench and stood by the rail, waving to the diminishing figures on the wharf as his vessel pulled out into the clear waters of the bay.

  At Eurylochus’ command, the sail was unfurled. Quickly it billowed in the wind so that the sign of the ram’s head painted on the sheet seemed to run for home. Dolphins leapt in bright splashes of silver from the waves, keeping pace with the ship’s gathering speed. Water gurgled around the keel. A spray of spindrift lifted on the breeze. Homeward bound at last and with a fair wind at their backs, the crew began to sing an old seaman’s chant that was dear to their Ithacan hearts. Meanwhile, balancing himself against the sway, Odysseus carried the bag along the benches under the curious eyes of all his crew, and ducked his head into the gloom beneath the afterdeck where Baius stood at the helm.

  Elpenor glanced up at Eurylochus from where he was making the painter fast to its cleats. ‘Wh
at do you suppose the old man’s got there?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Eurylochus glowered back, ‘but whatever it is I’m sure it’s none of your damned business. Now look lively with that hawser and get your arse out of my way.’

  They were making good progress along the northern coast of Sicily when a keen-eyed sailor on the Swordfish spotted a small fleet of ships emerging through the haze on the horizon.

  ‘It looks as though there are two them,’ he called up to his captain on the afterdeck. ‘If we stay on this course we’ll shave their bows.’

  Demonax pushed his helm over to heave closer to The Fair Return and shouted the news across the water between.

  ‘Let me know as soon as you can make them out,’ Odysseus ordered, aware that the vessels could be either pirates or peaceful merchantmen who might have news of the latest developments in Argos and Ithaca. ‘Keep her steady as she goes. We’ve got the weather-gauge of them whoever they turn out to be.’

  Around an hour later the ships came into clearer view, and Odysseus saw that there were in fact three of them, all Argive built. Two of them were pentekonters, probably refitted after the war, while the third, bringing up the rear some distance away, was a small coastal trader making heavy weather of the light seas. None of the vessels carried any mark by which they could be identified, so Odysseus guessed they must be pirates.

  He turned to Eurylochus, ‘We’re in better shape than they look to be,’ he said. ‘Do we want a fight or not?’ But before his mate could answer, Demonax shouted from the Swordfish. ‘They’re shortening sail, Captain. It looks as though they’re waiting for us.’