by Glyn Iliffe
‘Get over the wall and head into the hills!’ Eperitus shouted.
He turned to help Antiphus, only to see he had fallen in the street. His unconscious charge was lying across his legs and the horde of lotus eaters were almost upon them, snarling like a pack of dogs.
Eperitus drew his sword and charged towards them.
‘They’ll tear you to pieces!’ Odysseus shouted after him.
He ran on. The first rank of the lotus eaters were armed with swords and spears. Antiphus tore the bow from his back, fitted an arrow and shot one of his attackers through the throat, tumbling him in the dust and bringing down a few others as they fell over his body. But the rest rushed on like a wave, unthinking and unstoppable. Leaping over Antiphus, Eperitus knocked the spear from the first man’s hands, elbowed him aside and ran at the next. The lotus eater swung his sword clumsily and Eperitus hacked down at his wrist, severing it so that hand and weapon fell into the dust. Another rushed at him. He twisted aside and pulled the weapon from his attacker’s hands, punching him hard in the face with the pommel of his sword so that he went flailing back into the men rushing up behind him. Eperitus now swung the spear in an arc, back and forth in the narrow street so that the lotus eaters were forced back before him.
‘Kill him!’ cried a familiar voice. ‘Kill them all before they bring back their army to destroy us!’
The Old One was close behind the front rank, his face a mask of fury. Men and women reached out to grab at the spear, some screaming as the point slashed their fingers and hands, until they succeeded in taking hold of the shaft and pulling it from Eperitus’s grip. He stepped back, balanced the weight of his sword in his hand and prepared to meet the onslaught.
A dozen lotus eaters rushed towards him. Then, with a loud shout, Odysseus appeared. He drove into them with a spear held crossways before him, throwing several back in confusion. Eperitus knocked the sword from one attacker’s hand and punched another in the jaw, knocking him unconscious to the ground. Two or three bows twanged, but the arrows were badly aimed and flew wide or high. A figure ran out of the confusion and hurled a spear. Eperitus saw it from the corner of his vision and knew immediately that it would strike him in the chest. With all the reflexes his enhanced senses could lend him, he twisted his shoulders aside and arched his back. The head of the spear skimmed his breastplate and buried itself in the door of the building behind him. He stared with fierce anger at his assailant and saw it was the Old One.
‘Kill him!’ Odysseus shouted, swinging his spear as Eperitus had done to keep the lotus eaters back. ‘He’s the one driving them on.’
Eperitus pulled the spear from the door, balanced it over his shoulder and took aim. In the same instant the Old One snatched a sword from another man’s hand and launched himself at the Ithacan. Eperitus’s spear found the base of his neck and hurled him back into the crowd of his followers, the blood spurting from the wound as he kicked out the last of his life. With a terrible cry of grief, the lotus eaters forgot about the Ithacans and fell at his side.
Odysseus grabbed Eperitus’s arm and pointed to Antiphus, who was with Omeros and the others by the wall.
‘Come on. Let’s go.’
Chapter Nineteen
IN THE CAVE
Selagos sniffed the night air. It was damp with the mist, but like every other seasoned sailor on board he could detect the unmistakeable scent of land. He could hear it, too, in the faint sound of waves breaking against a nearby shore. But what sort of shore would it be? Looking about himself, he could see the unsettled looks on the faces of the crew, knowing that any moment an unseen rock could tear a great hole in the hull and plunge them into life-threatening turmoil. Not that Selagos shared their fears. The gods were with him, helping him to plot his revenge on Odysseus. Until the moment came when he faced the Ithacan king alone in combat, he knew he was safe.
The wind had dropped a little after sunset, leaving the air still enough to carry the creak of rigging and the flap of canvas across the water from the nearest galleys. Every now and then he caught the glimpse of a sail through the thick fog, or saw the bulk of another ship’s stern. Eperitus was in the bows with Polites, the former pitting his supernatural senses uselessly against the wall of vapour that had swallowed the fleet, the latter casting a weighted line to measure the depth of the water and calling out ‘no bottom’ at intervals in his deep voice. Other voices echoed his findings from the ships on either side, adding to the tensions of their crews.
The only other man who seemed careless to the danger was Eurylochus. He sat on the bench beside Selagos, his hands curled upwards in his lap and his expressionless eyes staring vacantly out at the billows of fog rolling over the bulwarks. When Odysseus had brought him back from the city of the lotus eaters he had been like a madman, filled with a raging desire to return and eat the fruit again. It had been necessary to tie him up and bundle him under the benches, as much for his own safety as those around him. The two men who had accompanied him on the scouting mission were the same, screaming and shouting to be released as the fleet had sailed away. Only when the shore was out of sight and night had fallen did they calm down. They sobbed uncontrollably like children until they fell asleep, then on waking they withdrew into a trance-like state and refused to eat or speak. Eventually Eurylochus’s hunger brought him round, and as he ate he also answered the questions Odysseus had put to him. It soon became clear he could remember little or nothing of who he was or where he came from, which seemed to affect Odysseus deeply. Selagos took upon himself the task of reminding Eurylochus of his identity, in the hope it would spark something in his memory and bring him back to himself.
He had nothing but loathing for the king's weak-minded cousin. But until that point he had played his part usefully, stirring up antipathy towards Odysseus and presenting enough of a threat to Astynome to unsettle and distract Eperitus. So as he made Eurylochus repeat his name, the name of his father and the name of his country over and over again, Selagos reminded him that Odysseus was a bad ruler, that as his royal cousin he would make a better king, and that Astynome would be his queen. As he reiterated the latter, something stirred at the back of Eurylochus’s empty eyes: a memory; an urging that had not been entirely lost to the lotus. And Selagos knew, smiling to himself, that he would win Eurylochus back.
Polites’s voice boomed out urgently. His line had found the bottom. Moments later there was an outcry from one of the other galleys, followed by another. Selagos stood and looked in the direction of the voices. As it registered in his mind that there had not been an accompanying crash of wood splintering against rock, he heard the crews calling out again, this time in relieved joy.
‘Sand!’ Eperitus shouted back to the stern, where Odysseus and Eurybates were at the steering oars. ‘Brace yourselves!’
An instant later the galley ground to a halt on the unseen beach, pitching everyone forward across the benches in a chaos of limbs and curses.
They could not have wished for a better landfall. On waking the next morning they saw that the curving beach was long enough to have accommodated twice their number of ships, and a freshwater stream fed into the bay from a cave among a knot of poplar trees. While they refilled their water casks, Eperitus called out and pointed up at the wooded hillsides that formed a crescent about the natural harbour. Long-horned goats were seen leaping among the crags, their bleats echoing from rock to rock. Men rushed to fetch their weapons before setting off in keen pursuit. Odysseus and Eperitus joined them, hunting the dextrous and elusive animals up the steep slopes into the thick woodland. Before long they found an opening in the trees. It allowed them to look out and see they were on a small island, not far from a much larger body of land. They studied it for a while, but after Eperitus had assured Odysseus he could see no signs of life, they carried on the hunt, bringing down an animal each. As they laughed and joked together, it seemed to Eperitus that for one morning at least – the first in a long time – Odysseus had put aside the pressures of k
ingship and rediscovered his carefree nature of years ago, before the clouds of war had cast their long shadow over him. When they returned to the beach, most of the others had already returned, several victorious in their endeavours. Antiphus and his bow had shot two of the creatures, both of which were slumped across Polites’s broad shoulders. Eurybates, Omeros and Elpenor emerged from the trees shortly afterwards with a live goat trussed up on a thick branch that the two young men were carrying between them.
‘It wasn’t easy,’ Eurybates declared as they strolled up to Odysseus, ‘but here’s your sacrifice.’
Odysseus was eager to recognise the gods for their safe landing the night before. He cut the animal loose and snicked off a lock of its hair, which he tossed into the flames of the nearest fire. Meanwhile Eperitus poured a slop of water into a bowl and placed it in the sand before the goat. It bowed its head to drink and unwittingly nodded its consent to the sacrifice, which Odysseus quickly and efficiently carried out, muttering prayers of thanks to the gods for their protection.
Later that evening the crews feasted on roast goat and the remnants of the wine they had taken from the Cicones. But through the songs and the laughter, Eperitus became aware of other sounds, distant but unsettling. He left Astynome with Polites and the children and went to find Odysseus. The king was standing at the edge of the beach, staring at the rippled reflection of the moon in the calm waters of the bay.
‘You’re not enjoying the feast with the others?’
Odysseus turned, caught unawares.
‘No, I needed some time to myself.’
‘I’m sorry –’
‘It’s fine. Stay, please. I was just thinking about the hunt earlier and how much I enjoyed it.’
‘It felt like the old days,’ Eperitus said. ‘Before the war.’
‘It did. For a while it was as if Troy had never happened. As if we were back on Ithaca or Samos hunting boar, not lost on an unknown island far away from home, in a place where even the stars are different. The moon, too. Every time I look at it, it seems strange. The same, but somehow changed. Am I wrong?’
Eperitus did not need to look up to know his friend was right. Just as the constellations had been distorted, so the face of the moon was altered too.
‘In the daytime you can forget you’re lost, but not at night,’ Odysseus continued. ‘Sometimes I wonder if we’re all dead, a fleet of ghosts wandering the oceans of the Underworld. And then I think about what might have happened if you hadn’t arrived when you did, back in the great hall of the lotus eaters. What if I’d swallowed the lotus? You’ve seen Eurylochus and the others. They can’t even remember Ithaca.’
‘They will, in time. The Old One knew where he was from, and he was as much a slave to the lotus as the rest of them. Besides, one way or another you’ll get us home. There’s no-one more determined to see Ithaca again than you; and if you can bring us through ten years of war, what’s a few more days at sea going to do to us?’
‘Don’t tempt the gods,’ Odysseus warned, with a smile. ‘But you’re right. Tomorrow we’ll head over to the mainland. There must be someone there who can tell us where we are.’
‘I’m not certain we should. I can hear strange sounds; I think they’re coming from across the water.’
‘Then let’s go to back up into the woods and see what we can see.’
Aided by the moonlight, they found their way to the gap in the trees from which they had seen the mainland earlier. The woods were silent, but for the whispering of the wind in the dying leaves above them and the distant sound of the Ithacans on the beach. From across the water they could hear the bleating of penned-up goats and sheep, a sound that might have reminded them of their peaceful homeland were it not for the harsh voices that disrupted it. They were deep, booming and angry, like the cries of great beasts in the night. And yet, unmistakeably, there were words amid the roars. And from the glimmer of lights here and there among the trees it was clear there were fires burning.
‘So there are men there,’ Odysseus said.
‘But what sort of men?’
‘What does it matter? Savage or civilised, they can tell us where we are. They can tell us the way home.’
Eperitus said nothing.
Eperitus woke before dawn to the sound of birds in the trees and the lapping of waves against the shore. He found Odysseus already aboard the galley, leaning against the bow rail and staring across the water at the mainland. Eperitus joined him, but the king seemed unusually taciturn and only spoke to ask him to ready the crew. What was burdening his thoughts he could not guess.
Leaving the other ships in the bay, the men rowed the galley out into the channel dividing the island from the coast. The shoreline was too inhospitable for a landing, but Eurybates spotted a headland further up and steered towards it. After rowing past the narrow spur of rock they found a long, shingle beach backed by grey cliffs. Halfway along the shore a stone wall looped out in a semicircle from the cliff face. The mouth of a cave was just visible behind it, mostly hidden beneath a curtain of overhanging laurel.
‘That wall is man-made,’ Eperitus said. ‘But the stones are too big to have been put there by a few fishermen or a bunch of savages. It’s the work of a hundred men, at least.’
‘Perhaps it’s an old fortification,’ Eurybates suggested. ‘The foundations of a tower, maybe?’
‘There are only two places built with stones that big,’ Odysseus said. ‘Mycenae and Troy; and the walls of Troy were built by gods.’
Gazing along the shoreline, he pointed out a small inlet scooped out of the cliffs some distance further on.
‘Make for that cove.’
As they rowed, Eperitus scoured the wooded hilltops for any sign of men. There were several caves visible through the foliage, and here and there he noticed the stumps of felled trees. Winding its way down from the top of the headland was a rough path, but other than the wall in front of the cave there was nothing to indicate any kind of civilisation. From somewhere he could hear the bleating of goats and sheep, but there was no sound of the voices they had heard the night before. It seemed peaceful, and yet his every instinct told him it was a place of fear and danger.
Shortly afterwards they dropped their anchor stones into the shallow waters of the inlet.
‘Take me,’ Selagos said as Odysseus selected the men who would accompany him ashore.
‘You can stay here and look after Eurylochus.’
‘Your cousin is better now. I want to go with you, not stay here and play nursemaid.’
The king shook his head and pointed to Elpenor instead. Eperitus wondered at the decision to leave the Taphian behind, but the lotus had made Eurylochus such a shadow of his old self that he doubted even Selagos could goad him into starting another mutiny. Nevertheless, as Polites had been selected to join the expedition Eperitus had asked Eurybates to keep a close eye on Astynome while they were away. Odysseus also had orders for his squire: that if the expedition did not return after two days then it was up to him to lead the fleet back to Ithaca. Eperitus thought it was an ominous tone to part on.
‘Take care while I’m gone and watch Eurylochus,’ he told Astynome as they parted. ‘The lotus may have taken his memory, but its effects won’t last forever.’
‘I can look after myself,’ she reassured him. ‘It’s you I’m worried about. There’s something about this place that frightens me. Something wild and savage, like in the stories about the world before the gods tamed it.’
‘There’s nothing here but a few goats,’ he said with a smile. ‘We’ll be back by morning, empty-handed and hungry.’
He kissed her and then clambered into the waiting boat. The oarsmen rowed the party to shore, where Odysseus led them over the promontory that separated the inlet from the longer beach. The wall and cave were some distance away, but Odysseus set off with a determined stride. Eperitus caught up with him and they left the others to straggle behind in ones or twos.
‘Is that wine?’ he aske
d, indicating the goatskin slung over Odysseus’s shoulder.
‘It’s some of the vintage Maron gave me.’
‘The Cicone priest? Isn’t it a bit too good for this place?’
‘Something told me I should bring it,’ Odysseus answered with a shrug.
‘Then don’t let Elpenor get his hands on it. The lad’s nothing but a winebibber. Why did you bring him?’
‘He needs the experience and a chance to prove himself. The thought that I chose him before others will do him a lot of good.’
‘Selagos would have been better.’
‘Selagos?’ Odysseus asked, half turning to Eperitus as he strode over the shingle. ‘You trust the Taphian?’
‘I didn’t say I trusted him. But I’d rather have him around than Elpenor if we got into trouble.’
‘I wouldn’t.’
‘Because he’s one of Eurylochus’s cronies?’
‘Because a god spoke to me in my dreams last night.’
Eperitus frowned and glanced over his shoulder, but the others were several paces behind, struggling across the loose wet stones.
‘A god spoke to you? Is that why you’ve been so sullen all morning? What did this god say?’
‘That one of my own men will try to kill me. I’ve always known Selagos hated me – I can see it in his eyes – and when he demanded to come with us I knew it had to be him.’
‘But why would he want to kill you? Are you suggesting Eurylochus has put him up to it?’
‘I’m not suggesting anything, least of all that – Eurylochus doesn’t have the courage. But the dream troubled me. I’m not going to give Selagos the chance to put a knife in me before we get back to Ithaca.’
He said no more, and Eperitus was left thinking of the rope that had been deliberately cut as they had rounded Malea. But he also remembered that Selagos had not been one of the men on the cable when it had been severed.
