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The Return from Troy
Lindsay Clarke


PART FOUR OF THE TROY QUARTET Bringing ancient myth to life with passion, humour, and humanity, Lindsay Clarke vividly retells the story of Troy and of the heroes who fought there. Traumatized by the slaughter that his ingenuity unleashed upon the people of Troy, Odysseus believes himself unworthy of returning home. Embarking on an epic journey to the ends of the world and deep into the shadows of his own heart, Odysseus turns at last for Ithaca, where his wife and son await, besieged by rivals who believe – and wish – him dead. ‘An engaging retelling of the whole story, neatly blending mythic archaism with modern psychodrama and satire’ Mary Beard 1 – A PRINCE OF TROY2 – THE WAR AT TROY3 – THE SPOILS OF TROY4 – THE RETURN FROM TROY









THE RETURN FROM TROY

Lindsay Clarke










Copyright (#u9aa7f1c9-0380-527a-b259-0f18af1aed1d)


HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

First published in Great Britain as part of The Return from Troy by HarperCollinsPublishers 2005

Copyright © Lindsay Clarke 2005

Map by Andrew Ashton © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

Cover illustrations © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com)

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Lindsay Clarke asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008371104

Ebook Edition © September 2019 ISBN: 9780008371098

Version: 2019-09-25




Dedication (#u9aa7f1c9-0380-527a-b259-0f18af1aed1d)


For Phoebe Clare


Contents

Cover (#ua454d252-e6b8-53c2-a6e9-5aae122c699e)

Title Page (#u1dfa61c5-efdd-54cf-bb89-cb12306c84e2)

Copyright

Dedication

Map

The Pledge Redeemed

The World Turned Upside Down

Zarzis

The Young Lions

Nobodysseus

The Wind-Callers

A Game of Shadows

Telemachus

The Mysteries

Menelaus

The Homecoming

The Winnowing Fan

Glossary of characters

Acknowledgements

Also by Lindsay Clarke

About the Publisher




Map (#u9aa7f1c9-0380-527a-b259-0f18af1aed1d)













‘A Prayer to Odysseus’

(Inscription found on a terracotta fragment in ‘the Cave of the Nymphs’ on Ithaca)




The Pledge Redeemed (#u9aa7f1c9-0380-527a-b259-0f18af1aed1d)


Whoever finds these papyrus scrolls will see from the inscription on their urn that they are offered in prayer to Odysseus. They contain a reliable account of the ordeals and initiations he underwent on his journey home from Troy, along with the story of the fate of the House of Atreus and the other Argive heroes. By the end of the day I shall have concealed the whole collection of scrolls in the Cave of the Nymphs, hoping that they will be found in better times when men may be ready to listen to tales other than those sung in praise of war. Meanwhile, they must stand in fulfilment of the pledge I made one winter night in Ithaca when Odysseus sought to make peace with his own turbulent past.

‘You are an honest man, Phemius,’ he said to me that night, ‘if not always as wise as you believe yourself to be. You are also my bard and the time has come for me to share with you things that I have told to no-one else except my wife. I do so trusting that one day you will make a fine song of my story – a song by which the world will come to know what kind of man Odysseus truly was. And it will be a song unlike all the other songs because it will show that the ordeals he endured on his long voyage home from Troy were more marvellous, because more human, than all the extravagant inventions of the poets.’

When Odysseus asked me if I would do him this service, I vowed that I would. So now, remembering the solemnity of that moment, it is my earnest prayer that his revered shade will believe that, in the many words written in these scrolls, the pledge I gave to him that night has been faithfully redeemed.




The World Turned Upside Down (#u9aa7f1c9-0380-527a-b259-0f18af1aed1d)


A brand from the burning city of Troy was used to light the triumphal beacon fire on Mount Ida. Within minutes the signal was spotted by the picket of Argive scouts camped on a mountain peak sacred to Hermes on the island of Lemnos. From there the fanfare of flame leapt across the Aegean to the rock of Zeus on Mount Athos, and thence down the mainland, from summit to summit, through Thessaly to Locris, from there into Boeotia and Attica, and on across the Saronic Gulf until at last a beacon was lit on Mount Arachne. That blaze was seen by the watcher on the crag at Mycenae, and there the fiery signals stopped.

Having all the information she needed, Queen Clytaemnestra was possessed by no urgent desire to share it further. So the western kingdoms of Argos would have to wait for runners to bring the news; and Ithaca must wait still longer, for the Ionian Sea was tormented by gales throughout that wintry month, no ships were putting out, and we might have been as distant from the Peloponnesian mainland as we were from Troy itself.

Then the winds abated and the seas calmed down. A Phoenician merchantman, damaged by the gales and blown off course for the island of Sicily, put in for repairs at a haven on Zacynthos. Two days later an Ithacan fisherman who had been stranded there returned to our island with the news that the Phoenician captain had heard about the fall of Troy just as he was putting to sea again from Crete. It was rumoured that the Trojans had been completely wiped out and that the Argive host had taken a stupendous quantity of plunder.

Telemachus and I were in town on the morning that the excited fisherman pulled his boat up on the strand, so we were among the first to hear the news. I jumped up and down in the sand and gave a little skip; then I turned and punched Telemachus in the shoulder. ‘Did you hear that?’ I shouted, amazed that he was not more excited. ‘We’ve won. It’s over. Troy’s done for. It can’t be long before they all come home.’

‘Be quiet, Phemius,’ he said, and he turned to the fisherman – his name was Dolon – asking whether there was any news of his father. Unfortunately, Dolon was not the brightest of men, and he was passing on what he had learned at third or fourth hand, so none of us could make much sense of what he had to say about the crucial role played in the fall of Troy by a cunning horse belonging to Odysseus. It wasn’t long before Antinous and Leodes, two of the young men of the island who had been drawn down to the strand by Dolon’s shouts as he drew his boat ashore, accused him of spreading fanciful gossip.

‘No, no, it’s true,’ Dolon protested. ‘They were dancing on Zacynthos when I sailed. Already they are feasting in Same. It’s true, I tell you. It’s all true.’

‘But my father’s alive?’ Telemachus pressed. ‘They said he was alive.’

‘Oh yes, Odysseus is alive,’ Dolon answered with a grin that exposed his few remaining teeth, ‘he’s alive all right and no doubt covered in gold these days. We shan’t know him when he comes back. He’ll be chiming like a herd of goats with all the gold dangling about his person.’

Antinous, who had been drinking wine, sneered at Telemachus, saying, ‘I can’t think why you’re so excited. You won’t know him anyway. And I can’t see Odysseus being at all happy about sharing your mother’s bed with you.’

Telemachus glared up at Antinous with his mouth open and his fists clenched, but this handsome lout was well over a foot taller and more than ten years his senior. If it came to a fight, there was no doubt which of them would win, and both of them knew it, which was why, in the absence of Odysseus, Antinous took malicious pleasure in keeping warm the bad blood between their two families.

Antinous was the son of a prosperous baron called Eupeithes who kept court in the north of the island on the far side of Mount Neriton. He was a distant kinsman of King Laertes, but there was little warmth between them, and Odysseus had not been surprised when Eupeithes contributed two small ships to the Ionian fleet but declined to go to the war himself on the grounds of ill health. Some years earlier the man had revealed a cowardly and duplicitous side to his nature when he came sweating into the palace late one afternoon seeking refuge from the wrath of his own people. Soon afterwards a band of shepherds were hammering at the outer gate demanding that he be handed over to them.

Things only came clear when a spokesman for the shepherds was admitted to the palace. He claimed that Eupeithes was in league with a gang of Taphian pirates who had recently despoiled several villages on the coast of Thesprotia. Some kinsmen of the northern Ithacans who had settled there a generation earlier had refused to pay these pirates for protection. Days later they had seen their crops and houses burned and their cattle and sheep run off. Three men who tried to resist the pillaging had been cut down. And when King Laertes demanded to know what any of this had to do with his cousin, the shepherd answered that cattle bearing the brand of one of the Thesprotian farmers had been found among Eupeithes’ herd.

Though Eupeithes at once denied the charge, his guilt had been immediately evident to Laertes and Odysseus. They were unconvinced, however, that he deserved to die for his unsavoury part in the affair. ‘Let me reason with him,’ Odysseus suggested, and Eupeithes soon found himself entangled in the devices of a subtle mind. Beguiled by his kinsman’s understanding manner and mistaking it for sympathy, he ended up confessing that he had been a fool to get mixed up with the pirates in the first place. Moments later, he saw the sense of it when Odysseus muttered that the only way that Eupeithes could now save his skin was by paying generous compensation.

Relations between the two men had been uneasy ever since, and when he was recruiting warriors for the fleet he would take to Troy, Odysseus had been in no doubt that he would rather leave such an unreliable character at home than have him fighting at his side. Briefly he considered drafting Eupeithes’ eldest son Antinous, but the boy was not yet twelve at the start of the war and Odysseus guessed that he would probably turn out to be more trouble than he was worth. So Antinous had stayed at home, where at every opportunity he took pleasure in humiliating Telemachus.

The two of them stared at one another now, Telemachus quivering where he stood, Antinous smirking down at him. Beside them Leodes gave a little snigger of contempt. Flushing, Telemachus turned on his heel and walked away. I was about to follow him when I saw our friend Peiraeus among the people hurrying down to the strand where the fishwives had begun to sing and dance. Anxious to divert attention from what had just happened, I called out the news.

‘Now you’ll really have something to sing about,’ he said as we caught up with Telemachus. ‘You’d better start working on a song for when Odysseus gets back. It can’t be long now.’ Then he took in the taciturn frown with which Telemachus was staring at the sea. ‘You don’t seem too cheerful about it. Why the long face?’

But though Telemachus flushed again, he failed to answer.

‘Antinous is a fool,’ I said. ‘Take no notice of him.’

‘What did he say this time?’ Peiraeus asked.

When Telemachus still said nothing, I muttered ‘It was nothing. Just some stupid remark about our not recognizing Odysseus when he gets back.’

‘But he’s right,’ Telemachus snapped. ‘I won’t know him, will I? I’ve no idea what he looks like. He’ll be nothing more to me than a glorious stranger.’

Again he turned away and walked on ahead of us, taking the path that led around the hill towards the southerly shore where the pale glare of a wintry sun shimmered across the sea. Peiraeus and I looked at one another, wondering whether to follow him, both of us aware that in his injured pride the boy might stay glum and sullen for hours now, even with us, his friends.

‘Aren’t you going to the palace to tell your mother?’ Peiraeus called after him.

‘She’ll find out soon enough,’ he said without looking back. ‘You can tell her.’

‘But she’ll want to share the joy with you,’ I protested. ‘What shall I say you’re doing?’

Telemachus stopped in his tracks for a moment. I watched him struggling with his feelings, a turbulent eleven-year old with a fearsome frown, who eventually pushed back the shock of tawny hair that fell across his brow and said, ‘Tell her I’ve gone down to the Cave of the Nymphs. Tell her I’m making an offering for my father’s speedy return. Tell her what you like. I don’t care.’

In the event, I discovered later, he did neither. Instead he walked to Arethusa’s Spring where he stood scratching the back of a fat sow that the swineherd Eumaeus had penned away from the rest of the herd while she suckled an early litter. From there he could gaze southwards across the sheer fall of Crow Rock to where the island of Zacynthos lifted its blue-grey blur on the horizon. A strait of water separated the island from the mainland, and it was through that strait that his father’s fleet of ships would sail on the day of their return.

Telemachus had been looking forward to that day for as long as he could remember; yet now that it was at hand he was filled with unexpected trepidation. What if he didn’t like the man? After all the marvellous things he had been encouraged to believe about him, wasn’t he bound to be a disappointment? Still worse, what if his father should take a critical look at him and form the same low opinion of his son as Antinous held? Again Telemachus flushed at the thought. Big as Antinous was, he should have bloodied his nose down on the strand and taken the punishment it brought, rather than turning away and saying nothing. What would Odysseus, sacker of cities, the hero of the war at Troy, make of a son who backed down before a bully’s jibes?

With her farrow beginning to snatch at her teats, the sow snorted and waddled away across the grass towards the shade of a holm-oak, where she dropped her hind legs and collapsed, grunting, onto her side. Squealing, the piglets clambered over one another in their haste to plug their small snouts to her belly.

Telemachus was staring at them, wishing he was older, wishing he was bigger, when a voice behind him said, ‘Niobe’s a good old sow. Farrowed a dozen she did, and she’s still suckling the lot.’ He turned and saw Eumaeus standing there with his grandfather, old King Laertes, leaning on his staff at his side.

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 court 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 night’s 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 ill-used 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.

Amphinomus shook his head. ‘He declined their invitation to come to Corinth. He said that, much as he loved his comrades, he was old and weary and still stricken with grief over the death of his son Antilochus in the last days of the war. But he also said what may be true – that it would be unwise to plunge all Argos into a civil conflict which could only leave it weakened against the Dorian threat. Nestor intends to see out his days in peace in sandy Pylos. Should they wish to do so, Diomedes and Idomeneus are welcome to join him at his hearth.’

Yet Amphinomus had not come to the island only to report on events in Argos. It was also his intention to prepare Penelope as best he could for the possibility that her husband might never return. Things he had heard in Corinth left him in no doubt that the Aegean Sea had been hit by a disastrous storm. The coast of Euboea had seen many shipwrecks. Hundreds of men had drowned. As was shown by the case of Diomedes, vessels blown eastwards by the storm had fared little better, and since he had got back, no other survivors had appeared. Amphinomus feared that these unhappy facts offered no good omens for the safe and speedy return of Lord Odysseus.

‘Yet Nestor’s ships all seem to have survived the voyage,’ Penelope countered. ‘And their passage required them to double Cape Malea where the waters can be more treacherous than Euboean kings and faithless wives.’

‘Lord Nestor made an early departure from Troy after the death of his son,’ Amphinomus answered, glancing away. ‘He would have been well across the Aegean before the worst of the storm blew up. He was among the first to return.’

Penelope sat in silence for a time, staring into the hearth where the brands collapsed with a sigh amid a scattering of sparks. For a moment I thought that she too had given up hope; then she shook her head and gave a little smile. ‘But tell me, Amphinomus,’ she said, ‘does the world know of a better seaman than the Lord of Ithaca?’

The young prince of Dulichion shook his finely boned head. ‘There is none, lady,’ he replied, ‘or if there is I never heard tell of him. And yet …’

‘Yet what?’ she defied his frown.

‘I am anxious only that you do not entertain false hopes.’

‘Nor you either,’ Telemachus put in from the shadowy corner where he sat.

The hostile edge to his voice was unmistakable. Mentor and the older men around the table stirred uncomfortably at his petulant breach of hospitality.

‘I try not to do so,’ Amphinomus answered, ‘even though the fate of my kinsman Meges also remains uncertain. I merely seek to be realistic.’

‘As I do myself,’ Penelope intervened, frowning at her son.

‘Yet the fact remains,’ Amphinomus said quietly, ‘that Odysseus was last seen turning back to rescue Sinon and his crew from their sinking ship.’

Penelope smiled. ‘I would expect nothing less of him.’

‘Nor I, my lady, but such care for his friends will have left him far behind the rest of the fleet. He will have been given less time than them to run for shelter. His ship must have taken the brunt of the storm.’

‘Odysseus has run before many storms and lived to tell tales of them. And if I read what you say aright, Amphinomus, then the false beacons that Nauplius lit around Cape Caphareus will have burned themselves out before my husband could be confused by them as others were.’

‘Yes,’ Amphinomus conceded doubtfully, ‘it is certainly possible. Of course I pray, as we all do, that you are right.’

‘Then pray louder and longer,’ Telemachus muttered beside me, ‘and trouble our hearts less.’

But his mother had already raised her indomitable voice. ‘I am quite sure that my husband lives,’ she declared, ‘for I am certain that I would know if he did not.’ Penelope was smiling with the confidence of a woman assured of her own truth. ‘Some difficulty has delayed his return. Shipwreck perhaps … yes, it is possible in so severe a storm; yet even if he has suffered such mischance, he may have survived only to be frustrated by unfavourable winds, or confined by some enemy looking to ransom him. But that Odysseus is alive I have no doubt. My husband has always been among the bravest and most resourceful men in the Argive host. I know that the same courage and ingenuity that took him into Troy when everyone else had begun to believe that city unassailable, will bring him home safely to his wife and son.’

Telemachus led the cheers that greeted her words. I joined in roundly; but so close was the attention I paid to the nuances of my lady’s face these days that I could not miss the pensive shadows that settled briefly about Penelope’s eyes and mouth moments later when she thought herself unobserved.




Zarzis (#u9aa7f1c9-0380-527a-b259-0f18af1aed1d)


The Thracian shore vanished in the unnatural brown gloom of the light from the thunderheads just as the skies were torn open by a ferocious strike of lightning. The mast and rigging of a nearby ship combusted into flame. A moan went up from the oarsmen of the struck ship when the mast cracked and the scorching yardarm fell among them. Oars clattered together in the swell as the rowers leapt in panic from the benches. The vessel lost way, yawed and turned broadside on to the waves. Only moments later, it was pushed over onto its side like a tipped bucket, hurling men into the clamour of the seas.

Two hundred yards away, scarcely able to hold their own against the might of the billows breaking over their prow, Odysseus and his crew were forced to watch their comrades drown while the exposed keel of the capsized ship rose and fell. Another pang of lightning flashed across the sky. The flames from the blazing spar guttered for a time with an eerie glare, and were extinguished in a sizzling of smoke and steam.

Odysseus caught a last glimpse of a man shouting through the froth of a crest before the sea dragged both him and his stricken ship down into the advancing hollow. The day thickened prematurely into night, and with the darkness came the rain.

Odysseus led the three great shouts for the drowned men who would never now receive proper burial. Some of his crew were already retching as the rain and spray smacked against their faces. With the prow and cutwater mounting the tall wave at his back, Odysseus staggered down the slope towards the stern where Baius was struggling to control the steering oar. He just had time to clutch the sternpost with both hands before his ship took the steep plunge over the crest.

A torrent of water fracturing into spume as hard as hailstones scattered across the decks and benches. Closing his eyes against the tempest, Odysseus felt the whole world lurching under him. The clamour of thunder merged with the clash of waves in a great collapsing roar. When he opened his eyes the deck-boards were awash and it seemed that The Fair Return was hurtling through a green-black passage twisting into foam, where sky was indistinguishable from sea and both were inimical to the survival of his ship.

Baius, who had sailed with Odysseus many times, had already divined his intention. The two men braced themselves together at the steering oar, looking to keep their vessel from being taken aback or swept broadside by the strength of the swell. A green light glittered about the masthead as lightning seared the sky. Over the noise of thunder Odysseus shouted to his men to ship their oars before they were snatched from their grasp. Then The Fair Return was running before the wind and there was nothing to be done but hang on to the straps and thole-pins while the cutwater of the frail craft plunged and climbed across tremendous seas.

He woke to the sound of palm fronds rattling in a breeze off the sea. Swallows scudded through the high blue zone beyond the fringes of a thatched awning above his head. He could hear the sigh of surf breaking on the shore and, somewhere closer, the laughter of men and women chatting together over the reedy sound of a flute. The tune seemed to wobble on the hot, dry air. When Odysseus lifted himself on to his elbows to look around, his eyes were dazzled by the flash of sunlight off white sand. Then he made out the sinewy body of Eurylochus stretched out on a dune, wearing only his breech-clout, while a woman whose skin was black as grapes leaned her long breasts across his chest. Beyond them, more members of his crew clapped their hands as a drum struck up. Another woman began to sway to the tune of the flute while, further down the strand, a small boy carrying a catch of sponges smiled and stared. Odysseus closed his eyes, shook his head, looked round again, and only then did he see a small town with shining buildings and terraces and date-palms – all as it should be, in perfect detail, except that it was hanging upside down in the sky. After a moment it began to shimmer like the haze above a fire.

He thought to himself, ‘I am surely dead and in the Land of Shades.’

A voice behind him, thickly accented and throaty, said, ‘So you are awake at last,’ and Odysseus turned to see a neatly bearded man reclining in the shade. He wore a finely woven robe of deep-blue linen. His skin was as swarthy as his voice, an oily chestnut-brown, wrinkling under the high, turbaned overhang of his brow. His nose curved like a kestrel’s beak.

Odysseus said, ‘Have I been sleeping long?’

‘For two nights and the better part of three days,’ the stranger nodded. ‘You were, I think, a truly exhausted man.’

Remembering the long struggle with the worst seas he could recall ever having encountered, Odysseus merely nodded and sighed.

‘That town,’ he remarked vaguely, ‘appears to be upside down.’

‘Yes,’ the foreigner answered, ‘it appears so. In fact it is not there at all.’

‘Then my eyes are deceiving me.’

‘Not your eyes but the light. I know the place. It is perhaps forty miles from here. The desert air works such trickery. In a little while it will be gone again.’

‘In my island,’ Odysseus replied, ‘buildings prefer to remain where we put them.’

‘But then Ithaca is not Zarzis.’

‘Zarzis?’

‘You are in Libya, my friend, in the land of the Gindanes.’

Odysseus frowned. ‘We were blown right across the Cretan Sea?’

‘So your men tell me. Your three ships are beached over there.’

‘Only three?’

‘In such a storm perhaps the sea was merciful to spare so many?’

Odysseus tried to get to his feet, but his head swirled with a dizziness that was not entirely unpleasant. Like a drunkard puzzled by his condition, he sat back down again. Despite the calamitous news he was strangely untroubled. In fact, he felt oddly serene, with a degree of acceptance that was more dream-like than philosophical. Life came and went, men lived and died, ships floated for a time then sank, and if a town saw fit to shift itself forty miles across the desert air and then hang head-down like a bat as it snoozed in the afternoon sun, well that was fine by him. And the music too was mildly narcotic. In fact the more he thought about it, this languid country, of which, if truth were told, he had never previously heard, was a pleasant enough place to fetch up.

‘The Land of the Gindanes, you say?’ Odysseus studied the smiling, magisterial figure across from him. For the first time he noticed two dark patches at his temples where the skin might have been scorched by fire a long time ago. ‘And you are a king among these people?’

‘By no means,’ the Libyan smiled, ‘I am a king nowhere. Merely a wanderer filled with curiosity about the world.’ Relaxing back against a pile of fringe cushions, he told Odysseus that his name was Hanno, that he came from a peace-loving people called the Garamantes, who lived to the south of Lake Tritonis, and that he liked to travel wherever the desert winds blew him.’

‘Have you sailed to Argos then,’ Odysseus asked, ‘that you speak our language?’

‘You are not the first Argives to come to these parts,’ Hanno answered. ‘Your hero Jason was blown to Libya once. His ship became landlocked in Lake Tritonis a hundred miles from here. The goddess released him when he dedicated a silver tripod at her shrine in offering for his safe return. But some of his men chose to remain in Libya. I learned your language from their sons.’

The music writhed like a snake on the sultry air. Odysseus looked back where his crew were loudly applauding the dancer. One of them, a stout-bellied fellow called Grinus, leapt to his feet and began wiggling his hips beside her.

Hanno laced his fingers together at his chest. ‘They are happy, I think, to find themselves in a place where they are welcome – as they were not, I understand, in Phrygia and Thrace.’

‘They’ve told you about that?’

‘I had heard rumours of the war before you came. Now I know more, Lord Odysseus.’ He opened his hands in a mildly ironic gesture of obeisance. ‘I know, for instance, that your men love you fiercely. It has been hard to persuade them that you were merely sleeping from sheer exhaustion and should not be disturbed. They will be glad to find you awake when the dance is done. In the meantime, is there something more I can do for you?’

‘I am,’ Odysseus realized, ‘immensely hungry. If you have an ox to roast, I have room to devour it. Perhaps two even.’ He looked up, smiling, and was surprised to meet an expression of dismay on the other man’s face.

‘When you know Libya better,’ Hanno said, ‘you will see that none of the wandering tribes between Egypt and the Pillar of Heaven ever taste the flesh of cows. The beast is held sacred to the goddess.’ He rose to his gorgeously slippered feet. ‘In any case, it will be wiser if you do not eat too much too soon. Come, take more wine. It will help restore your strength. And you must try the local fruit. I think you will find it much to your taste.’

His companions were overjoyed to find their captain recovered from his long ordeal at the steering oar of The Fair Return. Already exhausted from the long battle with high seas during the southward voyage around Euboea and Sounion Head, Odysseus had tried again and again to double the steep eastern bluff of Cape Malea. Once through that rough passage, they could make the home run for Ithaca. But both wind and current has been against him and the waves were riding higher than his masthead. At each attempt to round the cape the ship was forced back; yet he had given up the effort only when Baias, equally exhausted at his side, cried out, ‘Poseidon is against us, lord! Better to run with the wind than be driven onto the cliff.’

With tears of rage and frustration mingling with the rain in his face, Odysseus had watched the savage headland fade into the flashing grey blur of the blizzard. Cythera became a ragged shadow drifting past his port bow and vanished. By the time the western coast of Crete smudged the horizon he was sleeping where he stood at the stern of the scudding ship.

Vaguely he remembered Eurylochus relieving him at the steering oar; then, so cold and stiff that he could scarcely bend his joints, he had been led to the foot of the mast and lashed there for safety while the ship hurtled on through the night.

The storm had finally cleared not long after a lurid dawn. The ship idled at last in a calmer swell. Eurylochus could make out two other vessels some distance away, but of the rest of the little fleet there was no sign. When land was sighted and the crew found the strength to row their battered vessel ashore, they had no idea where they were.

‘But I think we’ve discovered the Happy Isles,’ Eurylochus grinned at him now.

‘Certainly we’ve been lucky,’ said Baius, who had recovered more quickly than his captain, ‘and I thank the gods for it.’

‘And for the pleasures of this place,’ added Demonax, who was captain of the Swordfish.

Odysseus glanced at the half-naked dancer who sat glistening in her sweat with her thighs protruding from the fringed folds of her vermilion skirt. A number of brightly coloured leather bands were fastened about her legs.

He said, ‘The women, you mean?’

‘The women, yes,’ fat Grinus smiled, ‘the women are very good, but …’

‘And you can tell which are the best at making love,’ put in young Elpenor, ‘by the number of anklets they wear.’

‘Each of them is a tribute from a satisfied lover,’ Demonax explained. ‘So the more she has, the better!’

‘As long as you like your women well-used,’ Odysseus said. ‘However, my own thoughts incline more towards food right now, and this fruit of theirs …’

‘The lotus,’ Eurylochus supplied.

‘Well, whatever it’s called, I find it a touch sweet on my tongue. I gather that beef isn’t eaten hereabouts, but I was hoping that Procles might roast me a sucking pig.’

‘They don’t eat pork either, I’m afraid.’ Eurylochus was grinning as he spoke.

‘Yet you call this the Happy Isles! Is there nothing to eat but this cloying apology for a fruit?’

The men smiled at each other in amused conspiracy. ‘You mustn’t speak ill of the Lady Lotus, Captain,’ said Eurybates, whose black head was still bandaged from the wound he had taken at Ismarus. ‘We’ve all become her devotees.’

It had been a long time since Odysseus had seen his crew in so mellow and benevolent a mood. A little perplexed by it, aware that he was being teased, he said, ‘Then you all have even coarser palates than I thought.’

‘Not at all,’ Demonax tapped a finger at his pursed lips. ‘It’s an acquired taste.’

‘But it’s what happens when it’s made into wine,’ Grinus offered in explanation. ‘You’ve already tasted quite a lot of it, Captain, but perhaps you were too sleepy to remember. Here, let me pour you some more.’

An hour or two later, having eaten well on squid and barbecued goat’s flesh and a sticky dish made from the lotus fruit, Odysseus was sitting with his companions watching a huge sun sizzle like molten metal where it sank into the western sea. To the north a pale moon lay on its back with a single star hung in attendance. The Fair Return, the Nereid and the Swordfish lay side by side on the strand, all in need of repair, their holds only lightly guarded by a dozy watch of sailors. Egrets flashed their white wings in the evening sky. Not far away a string of camels recently arrived from a desert journey coughed and snorted as they lapped at a spring, while a solemn-eyed boy wearing goatskins soothed them with his pipes. In the distance, where the olive groves gave way to a rocky scrubland of juniper and tamarisk, they could hear a jackal yapping to the moon.

Not since they had been at home on Ithaca had the men known such a blessed time of peace. Strangely, however, none of them were thinking of home, not even Odysseus who had thought of almost nothing else in the last days of the war. The lotus had quietly worked its spell on him. Time had collapsed into a passive sequence of moments on which the past had no pressing claims, and where the future, with its prospects of anxiety and desire, was a matter of no enduring interest. And the war itself seemed to have dissolved into a wry anthology of stories that were, by this serene Libyan moonlight, curiously painless and often downright funny.

When Glaucus, the captain of the Nereid, dryly remarked that the yapping of the jackal put him in mind of that scurrilous dog Thersites, his words occasioned more hilarity than they merited. They led on to a happy remembrance of the way Odysseus had silenced Thersites’ foul-mouthed rant against him. Then they found they could laugh at the ridiculous quarrel between the insufferable Achilles and that vacillating bullfrog Agamemnon, and they were all helpless with mirth after fat Grinus reminded them of the truly awful stink of Philoctetes’ wound.

‘I see that the Lady Lotus has made you merry this evening,’ Hanno smiled as he came up beside them.

Odysseus made a wide gesture of welcome. ‘Come and join us. We’ve got plenty more in these rather handsome jars we lifted from Priam’s palace.’ But when Hanno politely declined the offer, his presence had a subduing effect on their jollity. Glaucus began to hum a song that was dear to him. Young Elpenor, whose head of blond curls now rested in a young woman’s lap, made only a poor effort to suppress an attack of giggles. Otherwise the group was silent for a time beneath the moon.

That casual reference to the sack of Troy had briefly lent a gloomy cast to Odysseus’ mind; yet he had no sooner observed the change than he seemed to float off into a more tranquil zone some distance away from his still weary body.

And it was not at all the same experience as being drunk with wine, for there was a startling clarity that came with it – a heightened sensitivity to every small sound chivvying the quiet air: the high-pitched shrilling of the cicadas, the choral belch of bullfrogs, the swishing murmur of the surf. He could also pick out the quite distinct scents of the salt-breeze off the sea, the sweet smell of the lotus and the nocturnal fragrance of jasmine and moon-flowers. Then he became fascinated by the burn-marks scarring the skin of Hanno’s temples as though the man had once been branded there. With uncharacteristic forwardness he asked about them.

‘The marks are customary among my people,’ Hanno diffidently replied.

‘As a sign of dedication to a god?’ Odysseus pressed. ‘Nothing so mysterious, I’m afraid. Our mothers burn their infants here and here,’ Hanno indicated the marks on his own head, ‘with a smouldering piece of flock from a sheep’s fleece. We believe that it induces clarity of mind in later life.’

‘A pity that Agamemnon wasn’t born in Libya,’ Demonax muttered. ‘The war might have been over years ago.’

‘It might never have begun at all,’ said Odysseus. Then to stave off the shadow once more, he asked Hanno to tell them more about the various peoples among whom he had travelled and the customs that distinguished them.

And so, as the moon mounted the sky, he was taken on a voyage of the imagination across the wide regions of Libya, through countries where the women wore bronze leg rings, where men had mastered the art of harnessing four horses to their chariots, and where the dead were buried seated upright in their tombs. Hanno told him about his own people, the Garamantes, who took no interest in the arts of war, and of another tribe who were defeated in a war with the south wind which left them buried deep beneath the sands.

‘Meanwhile, to the west,’ he said, ‘around Lake Tritonis, can be found a cult of warrior maidens who serve the one you call Athena. She has her shrine and oracle there.’

Among the many marvels he listed, Hanno spoke of a spring called the Fountain of the Sun that was known to run both hot and cold according to the time of day; of oxen which walked backwards as they grazed because otherwise their long horns would get stuck in the earth; of an obscure race of troglodytes who fed mostly on serpents and spoke a language like the screeching of bats; and of a tribe of bee-keepers who painted their skins bright red and feasted on monkeys. He spoke also of a city he had seen that was built from blocks of salt – some white, some purple – by a people who were never visited by dreams.

‘Their land stretches to what you Argives call the Pillars of Heracles,’ Hanno declared, ‘but beyond that realm I have not travelled myself. Yet I have heard stories of dense forests to the south where elephants and horned asses abound; and two-legged creatures with the faces of dogs, and people without heads who bear their eyes in their bosoms; but apart from elephants, I have never seen such things myself. Also those traders who follow the sun around the coast tell of a land where gold is plentiful. Because its people speak no language that can be understood, the Phoenicians do business by leaving their goods on display at the shore and then withdrawing until the local people have determined the value of those goods in gold. Then they too withdraw so that the visitors can consider what is offered. If the Phoenicians think the measure of gold insufficient, they withdraw again until more gold is brought. The goods change hands only when both sides are satisfied. They call this honourable custom the silent trade.’

Listening to the Libyan’s stories under a black night thick with stars, Odysseus felt the universe expand around him. On Ithaca he had always been the one who returned with tales to make his kinsmen marvel. His reputation as an adventurer ran right across Argos to Thessaly and beyond. He had sailed eastwards as far as Sidon. People in Cyprus and Egypt spoke admiringly of him. Yet here in Zarzis, at the northern margin of a continent that stretched southwards, if Hanno was to be believed, for many hundreds of miles across deserts and forests and snow-crowned mountains and lush plains haunted by curious beasts, he felt as though he had been no more than a village pedlar bragging that his name was well-known in nearby towns. And the longer he listened, the more his heart stirred with the aching thrill of wanderlust that had fired him in his youth.

The night shimmered around and inside him. His mind became a map of unknown regions. He remembered a time, many years earlier when he had talked with Theseus of voyaging out past the Pillars of Hercules and on around that exotic coastline just to see what was there. Surely that was the spirit in which life ought to be lived? That was how Jason and his Argonauts had unlocked the secrets of the Black Sea trade in gold. That was how Theseus had dared the ancient might of Crete and brought it under his subjection. Let the crass Agamemnons of this world destroy and plunder as they wished. Henceforth it would be his mission to enlarge the world of men, to bring light to dark places, to foster trade and the profitable exchange of culture, to kindle the imagination.

His own imagination was scintillating with that very thought when, as abruptly and noiselessly as his companions around him, Odysseus dropped like a bull at an altar into a sleep as crowded with wonders as the huge Libyan night.

He woke late the next morning feeling a stiff twinge in his old thigh wound. Elsewhere, his headache might have put him in a foul mood for the rest of the day; here in Zarzis he felt surprisingly mellow – as though the pain provided an excuse, were any excuse needed, to laze in the shade with his indolent friends. At their encouragement he broke his fast on goat’s milk and a dish of the sticky lotus mashed with oatmeal that was served to him in a calabash by a woman with a benevolent, gap-toothed smile. Later in the day he would find that food was not all she had to offer and only a residual qualm of conscience reminded him that he was on his way home to Ithaca where his wife faithfully awaited him.

Yet the greater temptation was to sleep, for here in Libya, sleep had proved to be a banquet of the senses in which an endlessly intriguing landscape unfolded round him, where curious beasts and monsters flourished, and everything made a bizarre kind of sense. Deciding that his ambitious vision of the previous night would take time to plan, he soon turned over on his side beneath the awning and closed his eyes against the light.

Afterwards, Odysseus would have difficulty recalling how much time had passed while he and his men lay about the shore of Zarzis, eating, drinking, fondling the women who made themselves available, and smiling with contentment at the complaisant men of the region, who appeared to have as little sense of urgency as they did themselves.

One morning they woke to find a huge grey fish stranded on the beach. It had a fronded mouth and its ribbed body was much larger than that of any fish they had seen before. They strolled about it for a while, gazing into the sad jelly of its eye and listening to the remote, failing thunder of its heart. But none of them could work up sufficient energy either to kill the monster or refloat it; so the great fish was left gasping in the sunlight till it died. After a time, when its flesh began to stink, they merely moved their mats upwind into a sheltered place and waited for a higher wave than usual to reclaim the rotting carcass and draw it out to sea.

Around that time Odysseus discovered that the lotus was not always benign. There were deranging moments when he was revisited without warning by images that had been seared on his memory at the fall of Troy. The lotus allowed ample time to inspect the gaudy colours erupting from the fat belly of a Trojan citizen he had slaughtered. He found himself staring at the white, pulpy texture, stained with pink, that he had seen in the brains of a boy whose head someone had smashed against a garden wall. He could hear the sounds of screaming women almost as clearly as the cries of the fish-eagles dawdling in the sky; and there was a bald-headed man with jewels in his ears who kept begging him for mercy, over and over again, as he lay pissing himself with fear on the steps of King Priam’s palace.

At other times the shade of Hecuba was everywhere, barking and jeering, as she clutched the eyes of Polymnestor in her hands.

After one such visitation, Odysseus sat up groaning and beating his head with his fists, only to find Hanno looking down at him with mild concern. When the Libyan asked the cause of his distress, he tried to explain what had happened on the night that Troy fell and in the days that followed. His account was rambling and fragmentary, articulate only in its pain.

Hanno said, ‘So you blame yourself for all the destruction that was done at Troy?’

‘Who else can I blame?’ he growled. ‘It was me who thought up the means to get us inside the city. It was me who gave the false promises that persuaded Antenor to come over to our side.’

‘I know nothing of war,’ Hanno answered. ‘But from what you have said it seems you had no knowledge that the promises were false?’

Unwilling to accept such glib absolution, Odysseus said, ‘The truth is, I might still have given them even if I’d known how false they were. And perhaps I knew it all along – not consciously, but in my secret heart, you understand?’

Hanno nodded his dark head and sighed. ‘In any case, my friend, each of us must follow his fate. The gods gave you a quick mind and a plausible tongue. You have merely made use of them.’

‘But I can’t seem to think straight these days. And I find it hard to talk as well.’

‘Sometimes the lotus darkens our thoughts. It is the price we pay for the illumination it also brings.’

Odysseus turned away. ‘I’ll not blame my troubles on a fruit. Nor do I expect the gods to look kindly on the desolation I’ve caused.’

The two men sat together in silence for a while watching some members of Odysseus’ crew at a dice-game along the shore. Sighing Hanno said, ‘I remember discussing such matters once with a teacher out of India whom I encountered in Egyptian Thebes. He was a very old man and as wise as he was old. He told me that the secret of life is to float on its surface as the flower of the lotus floats on water, without sinking and without wetting its leaves. I believe the teaching to be sound.’

Dryly Odysseus said, ‘Was he ever present at the sacking of a city?’

‘That I do not know,’ Hanno conceded, ‘though I believe him to have been a man of peace.’

‘Then what could he know of a warrior’s suffering?’

‘As to that,’ Hanno smiled, ‘he told me the story of a warrior-prince among his people who came to a field of battle and was appalled to find kinsmen and friends armed against him on the opposing side. His mind was thrown in turmoil at the prospect of killing people whom he loved and admired; but in his confusion the hero was visited by a god whom he held sacred. The god told him that it was the warrior’s duty to devote himself to battle in a righteous cause, and that he should be strengthened by the knowledge that the soul outlives the body, and that those who fall in battle do so only to be refunded into the great cycle of life.’

Odysseus studied the darkly smiling eyes. ‘A very satisfactory story,’ he said, ‘if you believe your cause to be righteous and that we are permitted more than one sojourn on this sorry earth.’

‘But how can we know that we are not?’ Hanno asked mildly.

‘I’m certain only of the here and now,’ Odysseus answered. ‘Life may be very pleasant here among the Lotus Eaters, but I’ve seen enough to know it’s often wretched elsewhere. I too have had dealings with the gods in my time. As far as I can tell, we’re nothing but their playthings.’

Hanno nodded undismayed, and glanced across at where two of the dice-players were now caught up in a torpid quarrel. ‘You must allow the lotus more time,’ he smiled. ‘Come, my friend, take some wine.’

More weeks drifted by. Some desultory repair work was done on the ships; then the men relapsed into idleness again.

Late one afternoon, with a pang of self-disgust Odysseus disentangled himself from the sinuous black limbs of a woman whose name he could not pronounce. For the past half hour she had been employing the skills which had already won her many anklets to coax fresh life into his sluggish member; but suddenly he could abide her no more. He sat up, shook his head, and saw the oars of a warship flashing in the sunlight as the galley entered the quiet waters of the bay.

The captain of the ship turned out to be a Thessalian named Guneus whom Odysseus had vaguely known at Troy as a friend of Achilles and Patroclus. He splashed ashore from his beached vessel, exclaiming with surprise when he recognized Odysseus, burly and good-natured, the smile on his face cracked by the white ridge of a scar.

‘I’d heard rumours of a party of Argives camped in these parts,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t think to find you here. I’d given you up for dead, like everybody else. I should have guessed it would take more than a bad blow to finish off Odysseus. But there were so many ships lost in that storm, I assumed yours must have been among them.’

Enlivened by this reminder of a world that had almost receded over his horizon, Odysseus invited the man to come and eat with him. They sat down on the mats outside the lodge while a woman served them calabashes filled with lotus-meal. Explaining how he had been driven south by the storm as he tried to double Cape Malea, Odysseus caught the leathery face of Guneus frowning at the scene around him. As though looking through the newcomer’s eyes, Odysseus saw his men lying about their ramshackle lodges, lax, bleary and unkempt. Many of them were too far gone in their lotus dreams to take much interest in the new arrivals. Embarrassed by the sight, he was suddenly at a loss to explain how it was that they had remained here for so long.

‘We’ve been taking it easy here,’ he muttered. ‘After the long strain of the war, I mean … and one of the worst voyages I can recall.’ He took in his visitor’s polite but uncertain nod. ‘Anyway, what brings a Thessalian as far south as this?’ he added with forced good humour. ‘The last I heard you northerners had your hands full fighting some new invader. Is it all over? Have you driven them back to whatever nameless wastes they came from?’

Guneus frowned and drew in his breath. ‘The Dorians won’t be driven back. They’re too strong for that. There’s too many of them and some of them carry weapons superior to ours. Neoptolemus and the Myrmidons are holding the line by sheer bloody-minded grit and obstinacy. With luck they might retake Iolcus next year; but the lands to the north are gone for ever – my own estates among them. I got back from Troy to learn that my father and young sons had been killed in the Dorian advance, and my wife and daughters taken into slavery.’

Offering his awkward condolences, Odysseus gazed into the man’s grim face with sympathy; yet it was like listening to news from another, harsher world than the one he now inhabited. He struggled a little to connect with it.

‘But surely Agamemnon won’t let things stay that way?’ he said. ‘He needs Thessaly too much to let it go without a fight. He won’t risk letting the Dorians advance any further south.’

Guneus looked up from the handful of food he had just scooped from the calabash he had been given. ‘You haven’t heard? I thought the whole world must know of it!’ He took in the perplexity in Odysseus’s eyes. ‘Agamemnon’s dead and buried, man. There’s been revolution in Mycenae. Clytaemnestra murdered him as soon as he got back. Stabbed him to death in his own bath-house, they say.’ The Thessalian’s face wrinkled into a sour smile at the other man’s shocked gape. ‘It’s true,’ he declared. ‘True as I’m sitting here in Libya. The King of Men got even less profit from his war than I did. At least I’ve come away with my skin intact – even if I’ve lost everything else apart from my ship.’ Guneus wiped the back of his hand across his beard. ‘I’m looking to rebuild here in Libya. I hear there’s good country over to the west by the River Cinyps, and no one to claim it but a few beggarly nomads. It’s there for the taking.’ He scowled down at the mess of pottage in his bowl. ‘What is this sticky pap you’ve given me? It’s too sweet. Sets my teeth on edge.’

‘It’s an acquired taste,’ Odysseus said without thinking. ‘But what you said … it makes no sense to me. Agamemnon was coming home in triumph. He’d achieved everything he and Clytaemnestra planned together.’

And then, with a sickening lurch in his stomach, like that of a man waking from thick sleep to face the prospect of a dreaded day, he remembered the death of Iphigenaia.

‘Clytaemnestra hated his guts,’ Guneus said dryly, pushing his calabash aside. ‘Always had done, if you ask me, long before he cut the windpipe of that pretty child of theirs in Aulis. So she got the King of Men to do what she wanted him to do – bring home the treasure of Troy. And once it was in her grasp, she got rid of him.’ Grimacing, he licked his sticky fingers clean and wiped his hands on his kilt. ‘Is there no meat in this camp of yours? Don’t you Ithacans go hunting ever?’

‘There’s goat,’ Odysseus answered with a hot darkness swirling in his mind. ‘We’ll get some skinned and roasted in a minute … but I’m still trying to make sense of what you’re telling me.’

‘If you can make sense of this world,’ Guneus shrugged, ‘you’re a better man than I am.’

‘But I can’t believe the Mycenaeans would let a woman sit on the Lion Throne again – not even one as clever as Clytaemnestra.’

‘They don’t have to. She’s taken a lover. Aegisthus son of Thyestes, would you believe? Yes, he’s back in Mycenae again, and nominally king there now – though Clytaemnestra wields all the power of course. The two of them had the whole thing planned. They murdered the High King and Cassandra together, and the palace guard finished off any commanders who stayed loyal to Agamemnon.’

‘Surely it can’t have been that easy?’

‘Well, a couple of the leading citizens did try to organize resistance, but when they were put to death Clytaemnestra had absolute control of the city. There’s unrest in the army, of course, and in the hill country around Mycenae; and none of the other kings look likely to accept Aegisthus as suzerain. After all, who wants to pay tribute to a man who can’t keep the peace in his own backyard?’

‘But no one’s raising a force against him?’

‘There’s talk of it. Agamemnon’s son Orestes is still alive and he won’t have anything to do with his mother now. I hear he’s taken refuge with King Strophius in Phocis. Some of Agamemnon’s men are rallying around him.’

Astounded to learn that the bloody history of Mycenae had taken a further malevolent and vengeful twist, Odysseus asked, ‘What about Menelaus? Does he know what’s happened?’

‘There’s been no sign of him. He’s out east somewhere – Cyprus or Egypt, I don’t know. Cuddled up with Helen, I suppose, and staying out of trouble.’

Odysseus sat in incredulous silence. How could the world have undergone such changes while he lounged on this uneventful beach in a stupor of ignorance? How long must he have been stuck here that such drama could have unfolded while he dozed? And what were its consequences for the lesser kingdoms of Argos? How might Ithaca be affected?

He looked up to see Guneus frowning at him, shaking his head.

‘I’m sorry to have shocked you this way,’ the Thessalian said. ‘I thought you must know what kind of turmoil all Argos is in these days. I thought that’s why you were holed up here.’

‘What do you mean?’ Odysseus demanded with a further lurch of apprehension. ‘What else has happened?’

He listened in disbelief as Guneus informed him how Diomedes had returned to Tiryns after being shipwrecked in Lycia only to find that his wife and her lover had locked the gates of his city against him. Then he was shocked again to learn that Idomeneus had suffered the same humiliating fate on coming home to Crete.

‘The last I heard,’ Guneus said, ‘they were in council together at Corinth, hoping to enlist old Nestor’s help in regaining their lost kingdoms. But that would mean civil war right across Argos and, as you can imagine, there’s no appetite for that. Either way,’ he sighed, ‘it looks as though the poor bloody Thessalians can’t expect much help from the south right now.’

Struck by the cruel irony of it all, Odysseus said, ‘You mean that Agamemnon and the others fought for all those years to bring home another man’s faithless wife, only to find themselves betrayed by their own wives while they were gone?’

A touch uneasily, Guneus kept his gaze on the place where his crew were gathering eagerly around Eurylochus who was pouring wine into their gourds. ‘That’s about the size of it, I suppose.’

‘But that all three of them should have done it …?’ Odysseus puzzled aloud to himself, becoming aware of a dull throbbing at the crown of his head and of pressure building at his temples. ‘Clytaemnestra. Agialeia. Meda. And all around the same time, you say? It couldn’t just have happened by chance. Surely they must have been in conspiracy?’

‘The rumour is,’ Guneus muttered, ‘that King Nauplius of Euboea was behind it.’

‘Nauplius? But he was one of Agamemnon’s principal backers. He put up a huge amount of capital for the war. Without him …’

Odysseus faltered there. He caught the knowing glint in the other man’s eyes. A long-suppressed memory broke through the troubled surface of his mind.

‘Palamedes!’ he whispered.

‘That’s right,’ Guneus nodded and spat into the sand, ‘Palamedes. Old Nauplius never forgave Agamemnon for having his son stoned to death as a traitor. And who can blame him? It always struck me as a dubious business. Palamedes was too popular with the troops for Agamemnon’s liking. Anyway, it must certainly have been Nauplius who ordered the lighting of the false beacons that wrecked the Argive fleet off Euboea. It could never have happened without his consent.’ The Thessalian hesitated, glanced uncertainly at his friend, remembering too late how closely Odysseus had been implicated in the death of Palamedes; then he decided to proceed, though with less of the bluff confidence in his voice. ‘There’s a rumour that Nauplius had been travelling through the kingdoms of Argos long before that, trying to persuade the queens to betray their husbands. He wasn’t strong enough to avenge his son’s death any other way, so he turned himself into a viper pouring poison in their ears. He was definitely seen in Tiryns and Mycenae. It seems fairly clear he was in Knossos too.’

Sensing now that more was withheld, Odysseus said, ‘And Ithaca?’

The leathery, scarred face of the Thessalian looked up at him.

‘Yes,’ Guneus said, ‘in Ithaca too.’

‘Tell me,’ Odysseus said, and tightened his lips.

‘It’s all rumour,’ Guneus answered uncomfortably. ‘Ithaca’s a long way off and … I don’t know. We go away to fight a war and while we’re gone, while all our backs are turned …’ He smacked at a fly that was buzzing about his cheek. ‘Anyway, ten years is a long time, I suppose, but … who knows what’s to be believed?’

‘Tell me,’ Odysseus said again.

Guneus studied his friend grimly for a moment. ‘It’s only hearsay,’ he said, twisting the bronze-plated wrist-guard he wore. ‘It’s probably not true at all, but the word is that there’s some young prince out of Dulichion – Amphinomus I think his name was – who’s been … Well, he’s been spending a lot of time on Ithaca …’

Odysseus gave a small laugh of relief. ‘Amphinomus? I know the boy. I know him well. He’s the youngest son of old King Nisus. We lost his brother in Thrace. Amphinomus is harmless enough. He was too young to come to Troy with us and nearly broke his heart over it.’

Guneus cleared his throat. ‘That was more than ten years ago, Odysseus.’

‘Yes, but …’ Odysseus faltered again. He watched the man’s eyes shift away.

A burst of coarse laughter rose from where the two crews were drinking together.

Odysseus narrowed his eyes. ‘What are you saying, Guneus?’

The Thessalian lifted the palms of his hands. ‘I’m not saying anything … not for certain. But times change and the world changes with them. As I said a minute ago, ten years is a long time … Boys turn into men. Women can get restless … And no one knows what’s happened to you, remember. By the time I left Argos everybody had pretty much given you up for dead.’

In a voice low with menace, Odysseus declared, ‘Not Penelope.’

Guneus shrugged. ‘Perhaps not. Perhaps she’s different from the rest.’

‘You don’t know her. There’s no perhaps about it.’

Sensing the heat in the man, Guneus made to withdraw. ‘I’m sure you’re in the right of it. Like I said, it’s only hearsay.’

‘Then you shouldn’t go spreading it about.’

But the voice was so malignant now that Guneus got to his feet, reflexively checking the dagger at his belt.

‘This is unjust,’ he said. ‘I spoke only because you forced me to speak. Left to myself I would have said nothing.’

Odysseus glared at him through hot eyes. ‘You would have done better to keep silent sooner.’

Guneus grunted as a man will who feels himself badly done by. ‘If my words have troubled you, Lord Odysseus, I’m sorry for it.’ Adjusting the strap of the leather corselet he wore, he looked up, expecting some acknowledgment of his apology. When none came he grunted again, stared out to sea a moment, and then looked back to where Odysseus sat glowering with one fist tightly clenched. A fine trickle of sand was falling from it, down onto the fringes of his mat, as though he had ground a stone to dust in his bare hand.

‘Well, I don’t care to leave a man gnawing on his own vitals,’ Guneus said, ‘but I think it best if I withdraw.’

‘Do as you like,’ Odysseus snapped back, ‘it makes no difference to me.’

Guneus looked down at him for a moment with an uneasy mixture of pity and contempt in his scarred face. Deciding to call his crew together and drag his ship back into the surf, he turned away, but he had taken no more than a dozen strides when Odysseus shouted after him, ‘If you value your life, Guneus, you’ll keep this slander to yourself.’

Guneus stopped in his tracks. When he turned to face Odysseus again there was something closer to mockery in his eyes. ‘I’ll defend my own honour before any man,’ he said quietly, ‘and I’ll keep silent as and when I choose. But for the sake of the respect I once had for you, I’ll say this much: take a look around you, Odysseus. I don’t know what’s been going on here and I don’t want to know; but this camp’s a pigsty and there isn’t one of your crew who’s in a fit condition to stand up against mine. Take a good look at yourself while you’re at it. You’ve got a belly on you like an Aulis tavern-keeper. If I wanted to, I could knock you down as soon as spit at you. You’d better start shaping up and get out of this squalid hole if you’re to stand any chance of winning your wife and island back again.’

He had turned on his heel and started walking back towards his men when he heard Odysseus running across the sand towards him. With no difficulty at all he dodged the first blow that came at him and merely leaned the other way to avoid the loosely swinging second. Then, being a taller man than Odysseus, with a longer reach, he pushed the palm of his hand into the Ithacan’s chest and stiffened his arm to hold him at bay.

‘That’s enough,’ he hissed so that the men watching in dismay down the beach should not hear him. ‘Stop it now or I’ll humiliate you.’ His fierce, imperative stare was fixed on Odysseus’s bewildered grey eyes. A moment later, to his immense consternation and surprise, he saw tears starting there.




The Young Lions (#u9aa7f1c9-0380-527a-b259-0f18af1aed1d)


In my later travels across Argos I encountered a chronicler who insisted that more than eight hundred thousand people had died in the war for Troy. Though his estimate strikes me as more bloodthirsty than accurate, many thousands of men and women must have lost their lives in what proved, in the end, to be a wholly destructive enterprise. Countless more came back with injuries that disfigured them for the rest of their days. But what of its effects on those other, unsung casualties of the war – those who were too young to fight?

Having grown up without a father’s guidance, they were forced either to endure the wretched silence of those who could not bring themselves to talk about the war at all, or to listen again and again to stories which left them feeling that real life had passed them by. This is what Odysseus came to recognize as the dreadful patrimony of war. Even as he identified its corrosive power, he was aware of the shadow that his own glorious reputation cast across the life of his son; but I know that he was also thinking about Neoptolemus and Agamemnon’s tragic son, Orestes.

The fierce young son of Achilles – his true name was Pyrrhus – was of a different order than other boys who had been left behind at home. Though he was only twelve years old in the final year of the war, he had been summoned to the fight by an oracle. It was prophesied that Troy would not fall until he came to the city, and so, against the will of his mother Deidameia and his grandmother Thetis, who were both devastated by the news of Achilles’ death, he was fetched out of Skyros. No one expected him to take an active part in the fighting. He was seen merely as a kind of mascot, a talismanic presence required by the gods; one who might rouse the flagging morale of the host by reviving the memory of his father. Yet he was given the name Neoptolemus – the new warrior – and quickly astounded them all. It seemed that he put on his father’s intrepid spirit with his gilded suit of armour, and the Myrmidons guarded his young life with a loyalty that encouraged him to such fearless acts that some said his soul was possessed by his father’s ghost.

Odysseus believed the boy to be possessed rather by the idea of what his father’s ghost demanded of him, for Neoptolemus was a child whose sense of manhood was shaped by the desire both to avenge the death of Achilles and to equal him in glory. It was a consuming appetite, unqualified by such tenderness as Achilles had known in his love for Patroclus and Briseis, and perhaps also for Polyxena. And so, long before he left Troy without a wound on his young body, Neoptolemus was a casualty of the war.

What could Andromache have made of him as she was forced to submit to his embraces on board his father’s black ship? Here was a woman who had lain in Hector’s arms. She had known the devotion of a man for whom warfare was not the chief goal and glory of a man’s existence but a violent fate forced on him by other men. She in turn was forced to watch as Hector fell under Achilles’ spear. She had seen her husband’s body dragged around the walls of Troy. The son of Achilles had hurled her child from a balcony onto the stones below; and now she must endure the thrust of his callow hips as Neoptolemus strove to plant his seed in her loins.

Yet if her body was captive, her spirit was not, and the boy can have found little pleasure in her bed. After a time, he began to leave her alone; and though his Myrmidons may have guessed that she emerged the victor from those loveless encounters, those grim men were too loyal to reveal their amusement and contempt. But Neoptolemus knew what had happened, and the knowledge made him all that more furious a fighter. Returning from Troy to recover his father’s lost lands, he was unable to land in Iolcus, which remained in Dorian hands; so he navigated the straits between Euboea and southern Thessaly and then marched inland in search of glory. The march brought him to the Orthris Mountains, where his grandfather Peleus – an old man aged further by the death of his son – had withdrawn his forces to make his stand against the alien invasion.

Before the day when his grandson marched the advance-guard of Myrmidons up into the mountains, Peleus and Neoptolemus had never met. The boy had been raised on the island of Skyros, in thrall to his formidable grandmother Thetis, from whom Peleus had been estranged for many years. Through her influence, Neoptolemus had developed a profound attachment to his heritage among the Dolopian people, some of whom had long since migrated from Epirus in the far west, through Thessaly, and on to Skyros. In these circumstances, Neoptolemus might have felt little attachment to Peleus, who was, for him, a remote and dubious figure, one who had long outlived the noble achievements of his youth. But the Myrmidons belonged to Peleus, and he had given them to Achilles; and since Neoptolemus had acquired an appetite for blood at Troy he had begun to think of himself as a Myrmidon first above all things. So now he was eager to make a stand beside his grandfather, and swear on his father’s shade that the soldierants of Thessaly would not rest until they saw King Peleus seated again on his rightful throne in Iolcus.

The old man gazed at the armoured youth with tears in his eyes. He recognized more of his wife’s features in the humourless yet unexpectedly soft young face than he did his own. The hair blowing about the boy’s head had the same reddish tinge to it as hers; the eyes were the same grey-green: and Peleus wondered whether something of her rage still ran through his veins. But there was a colder edge about him too – the coldness of a blade in winter – as if the things he had done at Troy had cancelled all feeling from his heart and left only ambition there.

Standing on the windy mountainside Peleus knew that when this boy fought on his behalf, it would not be for love of him, but merely out of a voracious appetite for battle. He shook his head, remembering the disastrous quarrel among the goddesses at his wedding feast at Mount Pelion all those years ago. There were those who claimed that the seeds of the war at Troy had been sown that day. Well, here was its harvest now – an unsmiling boy who had lopped off King Priam’s head and led a murderous assault on his beautiful city. And the dreadful truth was that Peleus had need of such warriors now.

‘Did you come here directly from Troy?’ he asked. ‘You must be weary.’

‘I am rested well enough,’ Neoptolemus answered stiffly.

Peleus nodded. ‘Did you not put in at Skyros?’

The youth glanced away. ‘For one night only. Iolcus had already fallen, so one night could make no difference.’ He hesitated a moment before adding, ‘Also I wished to speak with my mother.’

Peleus nodded. ‘And with your grandmother no doubt?’

‘Yes, with my grandmother also.’

So he had guessed right. Thetis had dropped some of her old poison in the boy’s ears. Yet she had not been able to prevent him from coming at his call. Loyalty to his father’s Myrmidon heritage had brought Neoptolemus to the fight for Thessaly. Peleus could build on that. Somehow he must find a way to win his love and respect as well as his cold service.

Smiling into those calculating eyes, he said, ‘May I see the spear you carry?’

Neoptolemus considered a moment before relinquishing his weapon. ‘This was my father’s spear,’ he said.

‘I know it was,’ Peleus answered, feeling the familiar weight in his hand, and balancing it there as if for the throw. ‘And it was his father’s before him. This spear was given to me by the gods as a wedding gift. The head was forged in the smithy of Hephaistus. This ash-wood shaft was carved by Divine Athena.’

Unable quite to conceal his boyish awe, Neoptolemus said, ‘You truly stood in the presence of the gods?’

‘As we all do, all the time,’ answered Peleus, ‘though not all of us are privileged to see them. Your father once took down this spear from the hooks where it hung beside my hearth. He was no more than a restless boy at the time, younger than you are now. I found him hurling it at a tree for target-practice and was angry with him because he had taken my spear without seeking my consent. But it was on that day that Achilles declared his desire to become a Myrmidon.’ Peleus smiled at the memory. ‘I told him that he should have his wish but that I would keep my spear until I could be sure that I had a son who was fit to wield it.’

As stiffly as if some insult had been intended, Neoptolemus declared, ‘No man was ever worthier than my father.’

‘I know that,’ Peleus answered him, unsmiling, ‘and no father was ever prouder than myself. And now this spear is yours.’

The youth narrowed his eyes against the wind. The beardless jut of his chin was held high as he said, ‘My hand shall never dishonour it.’

‘I trust not, Son of Achilles.’ Gravely, Peleus handed back the ash-wood spear. ‘I am proud to have you at my side,’ he said. ‘I hope to be made prouder still. Now come, let us make our offerings to the gods and to your father’s shade.’

Many weeks later, some fifty miles to the south, at the city of Crisa in Phocis, another son of the war – a sandy-haired youth with truculent eyes, some two or three years older than Neoptolemus – was practising sword-play with his friend. They wielded only wooden swords and carried light duelling shields, but both of them sweated from the length of the bout even though a cold wind was gusting off the rugged slopes of Mount Parnassus.

Growing suddenly impatient of his failure to break through his opponent’s guard, the sandy-haired youth came at him with a swift series of swingeing blows that drove him back on the defensive; but the vigour of his assault left his shield-arm swinging almost as widely as his sword. Just as he was about to deliver what must be the winning stroke, he felt the blunt point of his opponent’s weapon nudging at his ribs.

‘Ha, you’re dead, Orestes!’ cried the darker youth. He gave a gay, slightly mocking laugh that was picked up by the four girls wrapped in brightly coloured shawls who had been watching them from the balcony above. Their clapping set the doves whirring their wings across the court.

Orestes glowered briefly up at them and flushed.

‘Take no notice of them,’ said Pylades, who was the king’s son in Phocis and the most intimate friend to the youth he had just stabbed with his wooden sword. ‘Their applause is as empty as their heads. In any case, it’s you they fancy!’

‘It was a lucky stroke,’ Orestes scowled.

Smiling still, Pylades arched his brow. ‘Even if that were so, you would still be dead. But I was waiting for you to lose control and that’s just what you did.’ Putting down his sword and shield, he wiped the back of his arm across his brow. ‘You’re still far too hot-headed. It’s part of your passionate nature, and I love you for it. But if you want to live long enough to take your vengeance, you’re going to have to rein in that temper of yours.’

‘That’s easy enough for you to say.’ Doing his best to ignore the tittering of the girls, Orestes threw down his sword. ‘The gods have always been kind to you. What complaint can you possibly have against this life?’

‘None,’ Pylades answered, ‘except that it has treated my friend very ill.’ He took a towel from the heap on the bench beside him and tossed it across to Orestes. ‘Come, let’s take a bath together. Then I’ll give you a game of knucklebones before we eat.’

The two youths were cousins and had been friends since they were children, though it was not a friendship of which Clytaemnestra had recently approved. Even before the death of his sister Iphigenaia at Aulis, Orestes had become a major source of concern to his mother. His temperament was pugnacious and impatient, his manner verging on the insolent. In a court where everyone else went in fear of her power, Orestes had begun to take liberties, trying her patience in ways that he would not have dared to risk with his father. Yet Clytaemnestra found it hard to be firm with her son, even though she often devastated others with her cruel reproofs.

From the first, she had always entertained such hopes of him. One day he would marry his cousin Hermione and unite the thrones of Mycenae and Sparta, thus confirming the hegemony of their royal house across all Argos. And he would become the kind of king that her first husband might have been had Agamemnon not murdered him. A king who ruled supreme over a world of artistic beauty and intellectual excellence, a world such as she would have chosen for herself if a strong fate had not willed otherwise.

Yet with her mind preoccupied with the cares of state, Clytaemnestra had found it impossible to give her son the quality of attention that such ambitions required. She had recruited the best mentors she could find to teach him eloquence and music, to cultivate his aesthetic sensibility and encourage him in philosophical enquiry as well as instructing him in the elements of politics and statecraft. But the plain fact was that Orestes wanted to be at the war. More than that, he wanted to be fighting alongside Achilles – to serve as his cup-bearer or humble armour-polisher if no more glorious role was available. Anything to be close to the man whom he idolized above all others. While Troy still stood and there were deeds of glory waiting to be done, what interest could he have in poring over old clay tablets and the finer points of sophistry?

And then when Clytaemnestra returned to Mycenae with the bitter news that his father had put Iphigenaia to death on the altar of Artemis at Aulis, the mind of Orestes had taken a darker turn. What was he to make of this – that his sister, whose beautiful face and exquisite singing voice had always been sources of wonder and delight to him, should have been murdered by his father? How could such a thing make sense unless the gods themselves were mad? In his confusion, he raged against his mother. How could she have permitted this to happen? Why had he not been informed of what his father intended so that he could have offered himself up in Iphigenaia’s place? But Clytaemnestra seemed remote and frozen inside her grief, and where Orestes looked to find maternal understanding, he met only silence or the impatient snarl of an injured lioness.

Eventually he found consolation in the company of his friend Pylades, who had been brought from Phocis to Mycenae in the hope that his companionship might make Orestes’ hours of study less solitary. The two boys had always been fond of one another, but now their imaginations were ignited by the same hopes and dreams. At last Orestes had found someone willing to play Patroclus to his own Achilles; and the cheerful modesty of his friend elicited a greater generosity of spirit from the spoiled prince. The two boys became inseparable. They swore the same oaths of undying love for one another as their heroes had sworn. Secretly they began to sleep in each other’s arms.

Then the news reached Mycenae that both Achilles and Patroclus were dead.

For a time Orestes was inconsolable. Not only did victory seem inconceivable now, but life itself seemed a vain and empty thing. How was it that everything he loved was taken from him? How was it that Achilles could have been slain by treachery while his father – a man he barely knew, who had callously put his own daughter to death – lived on and did nothing with all the power at his command?

Cooler-headed, more pragmatic in temperament, Pylades consoled his friend as best he could. Surely, he said, the best way to honour the shades of their heroes was to become greater heroes still. Together they would make good the loss. Let the war drag on, for soon the two of them must be called to the front. They were the young lions who would carry on the fight. Agamemnon would look on with pride as his son Orestes did what even Achilles had failed to do and led his forces through the Scaean Gate into the very heart of Troy.

Yet before any of that could happen, changes began to take place in Mycenae itself. Pelagon, the court bard who had sung for years of the deeds at Troy, mysteriously died. Familiar figures about the palace were relieved of their posts. Less approachable young men replaced them. Then Aegisthus appeared.

When his father first left for the war, Orestes had been too young to hear a full account of his family’s history, so the name of Aegisthus meant nothing to him. Nor did he take against the man at first. Handsome and charming, the newcomer appeared to be no more than a further addition to his mother’s ever-growing staff of ministers and officials, though one with whom she spent an unusual amount of time closeted in private. Only on the day when he remarked on the man’s lively wit to Pylades, and he saw his friend glance uneasily away, did Orestes become conscious that something might be amiss.

‘What is it?’ Orestes demanded. ‘Don’t you like him?’

Pylades merely shrugged and carried on oiling his bow.

‘I agree he seems a bit full of himself,’ Orestes said, ‘and I resent the way he tries to speak to me sometimes as if he thought he was my father. But he’s better company than those other drones that hang about my mother. I mean, which of them ever stops to pass the time of day with us?’

‘I don’t trust him,’ Pylades muttered almost below his breath.

Orestes blinked in surprise. ‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know.’ And then, two seconds later. ‘I’d rather not say.’

‘What do you mean?’

Pylades flushed. ‘You must have noticed,’ he murmured, ‘how much time he spends alone with your mother.’

‘They work together,’ Orestes countered, but the back of his neck was suddenly hot. He wanted to demand what his friend meant by that mumbled remark but he couldn’t do it without losing his temper. His mind started to lurch as he watched Pylades put more oil onto the kidskin. Could it be that the friend he loved was imputing his mother’s honour? And why would he choose to do that unless he had good reason?

‘I think,’ he said quietly, ‘you had better explain yourself.’

Pylades turned his honest face towards him, ‘Do you trust me?’ he asked.

‘Are we not sworn to one another?’

‘Whatever might happen? Whatever I might say?’

Orestes saw that they were both trembling a little.

‘Now you’re alarming me,’ he gasped.

‘Then perhaps silence is better.’

‘It’s too late for that. Tell me what you know.’

Pylades looked down at his feet. His knuckles were gripped tight about his bow. ‘Do you remember some time ago when you were ill with a fever and you asked me to bring your mother to you? It was quite late one night.’

‘I remember.’

Pylades swallowed before continuing. ‘I went to the Queen’s private apartment and saw her serving-woman Marpessa admitting Aegisthus to her bed-chamber.’

He watched the colours changing in Orestes’ face. He saw the anger rising in his eyes, but he pressed on, forestalling interruption. ‘I withdrew at once, of course, and came back wondering what reason I could give for not bringing your mother with me. Fortunately you’d already fallen asleep so I didn’t have to explain.’

‘Is that all?’ Orestes demanded hotly. ‘What’s so terrible about that? Doesn’t it occur to you that he might have needed to speak to her urgently? Some matter of state business must have come up. Anyway, if Marpessa was there, they weren’t alone. There need have been no wrong in it.’

But his boyish heart was floundering.

‘That’s what I told myself,’ Pylades answered. ‘I would have put it out of my mind but Marpessa must have spotted me leaving the apartment because the next day Aegisthus came up to me and …’ Pylades faltered there. He glanced away from his friend’s fierce regard, uncertain but not abashed.

‘What?’ Orestes demanded.

‘He threatened me.’

‘How? How did he threaten you?’

Still not looking at his friend, Pylades drew in his breath a little shakily before answering. ‘He said that he knew very well what the Queen did not yet know – that you and I have taken to sleeping in each other’s arms. He said that if the Queen got to learn of it I would certainly be sent away from Mycenae.’

‘How?’ Orestes protested. ‘How could he have known that?’

‘He must have spied on us while we slept. He or some minion in his pay. I don’t know, but he said that he would say nothing to the Queen about it so long as I too agreed to say nothing to anyone of what I thought I might have seen. He said that if we failed to reach such an agreement, he and I, then the consequences would be very unpleasant for you.’

‘I’ll kill him,’ Orestes said.

‘I don’t think so,’ his friend answered quietly.

‘I’ll go to the armoury and take a sword and plunge it in his traitor’s heart.’

‘Think about it, Orestes, Even if you got close to him – which I very much doubt – what would your mother do? How would you explain yourself without disgracing her? And who would believe you anyway? Pylades put a hand to his friend’s trembling shoulder. ‘I wouldn’t have said anything, but you asked me and … I don’t know, but there’s something going on in this city that I don’t understand.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Why have so many of the old ministers gone from the palace? And haven’t you noticed how hard it’s become for ordinary people to petition the Queen? The whole feel of the place is different. Nobody seems to speak their mind any more. I may be quite wrong about it, but,’ Pylades glanced around to make sure they were still unobserved, ‘the only person I trust right now is you.’

Orestes listened to his friend with growing trepidation, for everything he said corresponded to vague feelings that had crossed his mind without ever becoming clear. Yet the implications were so worrying that his heart jumped about his chest and his mind refused to keep still long enough to think.

Pylades looked up and saw the agitation in Orestes’ face. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you. But it seems to me that the only thing for us to do is keep our eyes and ears open and our mouths shut till things come clearer.’

And that’s what they did for a time in an anxious conspiracy against the world. Orestes found it hard to conceal his newfound feelings of revulsion for Aegisthus. Clytaemnestra felt ever more frustrated by her son’s behaviour, and her daughter Electra resented the way that her brother and his friend excluded her from the secrets they shared. Then the boys’ apprehensions were allayed in the excitement that burst across Mycenae with the news that Troy had fallen and Agamemnon must soon return to the city in triumph.

Yet Orestes found it still harder to sleep in his bed at night. How should he receive his father? Should he greet him, like everybody else, as the great hero of the age, the conqueror of Troy and King of Men? That was what he wanted to do; but he couldn’t free his mind of the sickening thought that this was the man who had put his sister to death in order to further his ambitions. Orestes told himself that the thread of a man’s fate was spun at his birth and there was no avoiding the ordeals that the gods devised for him. Yet that thought brought him no peace for it seemed to turn life into a prison where no one was free to choose for himself. Victory and defeat, courage and cowardice, fidelity and betrayal – all blurred to insignificance in a world ruled by capricious gods.

Lost in such dark contemplation, Orestes lay uneasily awake night after night, or jumped into darkness out of terrifying dreams.

One afternoon he returned from a long, uncomfortable conversation with his mother to find that Pylades had already gone from the city. All his things had been hastily packed and not a trace of his presence remained. Orestes was simply told that King Strophius had required that his son return home at short notice and that the herald who had brought the message would brook no delay.

On the following day Orestes and his sister Electra were despatched into the care of Lord Podargus in Midea. When Orestes complained that, as well as being denied the company of his only friend, he would not even be permitted to witness his father’s triumphant return into Mycenae, he was told, incomprehensibly, that such was Agamemnon’s express wish. No further explanation was forthcoming.

Some days later Orestes and Electra were sitting miserably together in the draughty hall at Midea when Podargus came up to them wringing his mottled hands. Something terrible had happened in Mycenae, he declared. They must brace themselves for a shock, for he could see no gentle way of breaking the news that their father had been assassinated.

Electra’s face whitened as though she was about to faint. She uttered a little strangled cry, tried to stifle it further, and then burst into tears. Orestes sat in shock. He felt as if someone had struck him a blow on the back of his head.

Then he demanded, ‘Who has killed him?’

But Podargus merely shook his gaunt head, grim-lipped. The situation in Mycenae remained confused, he said. He had told them the little that he knew. When more information became available he would share it. Now they must prepare to mourn and make their offerings for their father’s shade.

Some time would pass, therefore, before Agamemnon’s children learned that their father’s assassin was their mother. The source of that information was a serving-woman called Geilissa, who was one of the small band of guards and retainers who had accompanied the children on their journey from Mycenae to Midea. She had known Orestes and Iphigenaia since infancy and had been wet-nurse to Electra, but she and Clytaemnestra had often been at odds over the Queen’s cold way with her children. Geilissa never doubted where her own warm loyalties lay, and she had been included in the party against Clytaemnestra’s better judgement only because Electra declared that she would refuse to go without her. Geilissa herself was glad enough to put Mycenae behind her and take care of her charges once more during their sojourn in Midea.

A cheerful soul, she had quickly made friends with the servants of the house, and it was from them that she learned the truth about the death of Agamemnon. With her own secret suspicions now confirmed, Geilissa saw how grave a threat these circumstances must pose to the welfare of the two children. Yet sooner or later the truth must come out. Better that they heard it from her than from some careless stranger.

So once again Orestes was forced to listen while a person he trusted told him things so terrible that he could hardly bear to hear them. Already distraught from the news that her father was dead – a grief that was as instinctive as it was emotional, for the girl had no retrievable memories of Agamemnon – Electra was devastated by this further revelation. She sat with her hand across her mouth, trying to suppress her wailing. Orestes sat beside her, gripping her shoulders as she rocked in his arms.

‘It is Aegisthus,’ he shouted suddenly. ‘The villain has poisoned her mind. It must be his foul hand behind this thing. I should have killed him long ago.’

Anxiously Geilissa hissed, ‘You must keep your voice down, master. Lord Podargus is not of your father’s party.’

Orestes looked across at the nurse in bewilderment as he pieced together the long, manipulative process by which he had been separated from his friend, cut off from contact with his returning father, and sent to a place where he could be held in check. His mind was working quickly now. He was not a guest in Midea: he was a prisoner. His mother would send for him when she was ready. She would tell him that he had a new father and must learn to love and respect him. And if he failed to obey? Orestes remembered what Aegisthus had said to Pylades. He remembered the hostility he had glimpsed in the man’s eyes when he had made his own mistrust for him plain. Aegisthus had no love for him. As far as Aegisthus was concerned, he was Agamemnon’s brat. The man must be living in fear that a day must come when Orestes would seek to avenge his murdered father.

And he was right to fear it.

But for the moment Aegisthus held all the power. Only Clytaemnestra stood between Orestes and death, and Clytaemnestra had already killed her husband. Was she capable also of killing her son?

In an insane world where fathers killed their daughters, it was entirely possible.

For the first time in his young life, Orestes felt consumed by fear. Somehow he must get away from Midea. He must go to Pylades. His friend would take care of him in Phocis. He would know what to do.

It was Geilissa who arranged for his escape. On her way through the market-place, she observed a Sicilian merchant dealing in slaves who appeared to take reasonable care of his valuable human stock. When she learned that he would soon be moving on, it occurred to her that Orestes might be smuggled out of the city among his train. Geilissa discussed the idea with a friend she trusted from the old days in Mycenae – a grizzled warrior who had lost an eye serving at Troy with Agamemnon. When neither of them could come up with a less risky plan, she approached the merchant and quickly discovered that his venal soul had no loyalties in Argos other than to his desire for profit. Once sure of her ground, she set about persuading him that his desire would be well served if he delivered safely to the court of King Strophius in Phocis a certain person whose identity must not be disclosed in Midea or any other city through which they might pass.

‘Including Mycenae?’ the merchant shrewdly asked.

‘Mycenae, above all, is to be avoided,’ Geilissa said.

The Sicilian opened his hands. ‘I look to do good business in Mycenae.’

‘And doubtless you will,’ Geilissa answered, ‘on your return from Phocis. King Strophius is a wealthy man. He will compensate you well for the delay.’

‘And what assurances do I have of this?’

Geilissa unwrapped from a cloth the casket in which were gathered all the jewels and golden ornaments that Electra had insisted on bringing to Midea. ‘These are already worth more than all your slaves. You shall have the casket when you leave the city with my friend safely concealed in your train.’

‘Let me think about this a little.’ Smiling, the Sicilian made a self-deprecatory gesture with his hands. ‘I am a timid man.’

Geilissa watched him stroke his beard. ‘Think too long,’ she said, ‘and you may begin to wonder what there is to prevent you from taking the casket and then betraying my friend to those who mean him harm. You should be aware, therefore, that were you to do such a thing, there are those who will not rest till they have hunted you down and cut your tongue out of your throat and divided your manhood from your loins.’

The merchant studied her for a long moment with a ringed hand at his mouth. Then he lowered the hand to reveal a sour smile. ‘You reason like a Sicilian,’ he said. ‘But I will do this thing for you. Pray tell your friend that this humble merchant is at his service.’

That evening they untied the long hair that Orestes wore clubbed at his neck, dressed him in one of Electra’s gowns and wrapped around his head and shoulders a shawl that she had embroidered with figures of prowling lions and winged griffins. Geilissa started with shock when she looked at the finished effect, for in the unsteady light of the oil-lamps, it might have been his dead sister, Iphigenaia, standing demurely there.

So Orestes escaped from Midea early the next morning as one among a coffle of slaves. Unaware that the son of Agamemnon was slipping through their guard with a kitchen knife clutched under the folds of his pretty shawl, the sentinels at the gate paid scant attention to the train. Almost a month later he was welcomed to safety by Pylades with tears and open arms. Denied their chance of glory in Troy, and with the world at home turned hostile round them, the young lions began preparing themselves for the day when they too would play a significant part in the continuing drama of the long catastrophe that was the Trojan War.

As the reader will recall from my account of the day when Dolon the fisherman brought us the news that the war had ended, Ithaca also had a number of young lions frisking about the streets, and even before Troy fell, they had already begun to make a nuisance of themselves. That’s how we thought of it at first – as no more than a nuisance, for we Ithacans might have our feuds and quarrels and grudges, and blood might even be shed at times, but murder was rare on the island and we lacked any talent for evil on the grand scale with which it flourished in Mycenae and the other great cities of the world. So King Laertes and his ministers did little more than sigh over the noise of drunken revelry in the streets of the town at night. But out of small neglected troubles larger problems grow, and soon there were signs that Antinous and the gang of young men who followed his lead were getting out of hand.

The first of the truly bruising encounters between Telemachus and Antinous took place at the Feast of Pan in the spring of the year after the war had ended. At that time the mood of the island was gloomy and apprehensive. Diotima, who had been priestess of Mother Dia’s shrine on the island for longer than anyone could remember, had died during the course of a hard winter. Because she was already very old, her death came as no surprise, but she had outlived all the women who knew the ways of the snake well enough to succeed her, so the power of the shrine itself began to wane.

No one took her death harder than King Laertes and his wife Anticleia. They too were old, and each day that failed to bring news of their son increased their grief and anxiety. Laertes had been eager to lay down the burdens of kingship for many years, and the business of exacting tribute from men younger and more ambitious than himself, and of giving justice among quarrelsome islanders, was increasingly a trial to his soul. So to Queen Anticleia’s concern for her son was added the further strain of watching her husband’s strength fail. Her nights were sleepless and her appetite poor. Never a large woman, she began to shrink visibly, both in weight and stature. Soon people began to mutter that if her son did not return she might simply die from grief.

In these circumstances, Penelope had to be strong for everyone and her faith did not fail. Whatever private anxieties troubled her nights, she remained ever hopeful, refusing to allow any other possibility but that her husband was alive and on his way home. Yet she had not seen Odysseus for more than ten years, and there must have been times when she had difficulty remembering what he had looked like then, let alone imagining how he might have been changed by war.

For a time, everyone’s spirits were lifted by the news that a Zacynthian sailor called Axylus had returned to his island, having walked hundreds of miles overland from Euboea where he had been cast ashore after his ship went down. Summoned to Ithaca, he reported that he had been among the survivors of a disastrous raid on Ismarus in which many men, including the brother of Prince Amphinomus, had been killed. He was certain, however, that Odysseus had managed to escape from the skirmish on the Ciconian shore, though how he had fared in the storm that had wrecked his own ship, Axylus was unable to say.

This was the first definite news that Penelope had received and she preferred to let it strengthen her hopes rather than darken her fears. Telemachus chose to share her optimism and draw strength from it; but when Amphinomus returned to Ithaca after his time of mourning was complete, and the boy watched his mother receive her friend, weeping, with open arms, his mood turned sullen again.

Though he tried to elicit my sympathy, I saw nothing wrong in the friendship. Sitting side by side at the high table or walking together on the cliffs above the expansive glitter of the sea, Amphinomus and Penelope might have been taken for a brother and sister who shared a lively affection and were always sensitive to each other’s shifts of mood and feeling. So it seemed to me there was something excessive in the way Telemachus kept watch, like a prick-eared dog, over his absent father’s wife. Only after a time did I come to see that his heart was riven with a kind of jealousy. Perhaps he couldn’t bear it that anyone – least of all this handsome prince out of Dulichion – should be more intimate with his mother than he was himself? Whatever the case, sooner or later his anger was going to turn violent. It happened at the Festival of Pan.

The Spring Feast is always a bawdy and boisterous affair. Shepherds come from all over the island and, once the sacred offerings have been made, there is much eating and drinking and many hours of dancing and singing of songs. Commonly enough, a fair proportion of the children born each year are sired during the course of that night, not all of them in wedlock. Because the winter had been bitter and everyone had been miserable for so long, the revelry was wild that year. The heat of the sun lay heavy on the afternoon, the wine was strongly mixed, and fathers looked to their daughters as Antinous and a gang of randy young men paraded around the awnings with long leather phalluses protruding from the goatskin clouts they wore.

I was in luck myself that day – a plump young woman from a village over by Mount Neriton sat near me as I sang. She had honey-brown skin and thick hair, and an encouraging way of dipping her eyes. Later we found our way to a sunlit glade beneath the trees. She was my first, and it wounded my heart to discover a day or two later that she was already pledged to a prosperous shepherd in her own part of the world; but I have sometimes wondered whether his firstborn son has the gift of singing verses too. In any case, being so pleasantly occupied, I didn’t learn what had happened elsewhere until Peiraeus told me after the event.

Waiting till late in the day when all the royal party apart from the prince had retired, Antinous asked Telemachus if he would judge the merit of a satyr play that he and Eurymachus were improvising for the people’s entertainment. To my friend’s astonishment, Antinous took the part of a woman overwhelmed by the blandishments of her lover, who was played by Eurymachus. Speaking in a high-pitched voice and fluttering his eyelids, Antinous allowed his hand to stray towards the grotesque codpiece protruding from between Eurymachus’s thighs. Only when he released an amorous sigh and squeaked, ‘But what if my husband should return, Amphinomus?’ did the true nature of the game become apparent.

Before anyone realized what was happening, Telemachus had thrown himself at Antinous, knocked him off the wine-stained trestle-table where the young man reclined like a whore on a couch, and fastened his hands about his throat.

By the time Eurymachus and Leodes pulled the boy away, Antinous was choking and retching for air. Telemachus was still much smaller than the man he had attacked, and left to his own malevolent devices, Antinous might have inflicted a terrible beating on him. But some of the less drunken shepherds had been disgusted by the play, and many of them had no love for the family of Eupeithes. Three stood up from their benches making it plain that no harm would come to their prince as long as they were there to prevent it. Two of them were very burly. The other, an older man with a broken nose, thoughtfully weighed the curve of his crook in his hand.

Taking stock of the menace in their faces, Antinous glanced for support to Eurymachus who released Telemachus and stood uncertainly beside his friend with the ridiculous phallus knocked askew at his waist. Sensing that neither Eurymachus nor Leodes had the stomach for a fight, Antinous gasped, ‘What’s the matter with the brat? Can’t he take a joke?’

‘There’s jokes and there’s jokes,’ said the grizzled old shepherd with the crook, ‘and if you think that one was funny then you’ll be even more amused when this ash-plant comes down across your ear – which it would have done by now if I wasn’t making allowances for the belly-load of wine you’re carrying.’ Then he turned to Telemachus. ‘And you’d better run along, young sir. If your father was home, he’d tell you that it’s wise to pick a fight only when the odds are with you.’

Flustered and abashed, Telemachus turned on his heel, shouting, ‘If my father doesn’t kill you when he gets back, Antinous, I promise I’ll do it myself.’

‘Wake up, donzel!’ Antinous shouted after him. ‘Your father’s not coming back, and you’re going to have to answer for those words one day.’

Peiraeus told me that the shepherds would certainly have beaten Antinous in that moment had not Eurymachus had the good sense to hustle him away.

When I learned what had happened, I set out to look for Telemachus. Last seen heading for the palace, he wasn’t to be found in his chamber and no one in the hall knew where he was. By now darkness had fallen, so there was no point wandering the hillsides in search of him, and I was about to give up and join Penelope and the others in the hall when I heard voices in Eurycleia’s chamber.

Putting my ear to the door, I heard the hoarse croak of the old nurse’s voice reassuring Telemachus that he was just like his father – too proud and too brave not to put himself at risk. ‘He was about your age when he went hunting boar with his grandfather Autolycus in the woods around Mount Parnassus,’ she was saying, ‘Couldn’t wait for the huntsmen to lay the nets – not him. Couldn’t wait for the boar to come rushing at him neither. He has to leap straight at it with his spear, leaving his grandsire standing aghast behind him. He got his boar sure enough, but not before the great beast gored his thigh. He took such a gash that men wondered whether he’d ever walk straight again, which he did of course, though he bears the scar of it about him still. He was too proud for patience, you see – just like you – though he learned more sense in later years.’

I was about to walk away and leave them to it when I heard the shaky voice of Telemachus protest, ‘But I’ve been patient. I’ve waited patiently for years and years and it feels like he’s never coming back. I think he must be dead.’

‘He’s no deader than I am,’ Eurycleia said. ‘He’s far too good a sailor to get wrecked by any storm, if that’s what you’re thinking. And he’s too crafty to be kept down for long by any villains who may cross him. Believe you me, my boy, your father’s the rarest of men. The gods have a care for a man like that.’

‘Then why hasn’t he come back?’

‘I don’t know,’ Eurycleia answered, a little flustered now. ‘Perhaps the fancy’s taken him to go adventuring again. I wouldn’t put it past him. Perhaps he’s taken the Black Sea passage like Jason before him and come up against the Clashing Rocks, or got himself enchanted by the Sirens’ song, or hasn’t yet found the narrow way between Scylla and Charybdis. He always loved those old stories. He loved them just as much as you do. Perhaps he’s gone to find out if there’s any truth to them, and when he comes home he’ll bring back something magical and splendid like the Golden Fleece. That’s just the kind of thing Odysseus would do if he took a mind to it.’

I don’t know what effect this fanciful gesture of consolation had on the mind of Telemachus but Eurycleia’s words ignited my own imagination. I began to see how my Lay of Lord Odysseus might be embellished by motifs from those stories. I imagined his ship picking its way through the blue ice floes that came drifting across its bows out of the freezing fog of the Black Sea. I knew that if there was any chance of hearing the Sirens’ song, then Odysseus would want to hear it. Like Jason, he would have himself strapped to the mast with cables while his crew rowed past the enchanted island with their ears stopped up with wax. With my mind already racing, I persuaded myself that if anyone could steer a ship between the many-headed monster Scylla, keeping watch from her cave on the cliff, and the fearful whirlpool of Charybdis, then Odysseus certainly could. So I hurried away down the passage with the song of the Sirens thrilling through my mind, and when I went to bed I lay there yearning for the day when my lay was done and I would be crowned with laurels as the greatest of all bards.

Then, in the small hours, I was jolted back to my senses by the miserable thought that all those songs had already been written. Everybody knew them. Those marvellous adventures belonged to the story of Jason: anywhere outside Ithaca, I would be laughed out of court if I tried to claim them for Odysseus.

Yet my mind would not rest and, before dawn broke, another thought struck me. There was a story belonging to our island that might still be turned into a noble song. It was a crude enough tale of the encounter between our ancient folk hero Oulixos and a one-eyed cannibal giant that devoured some of his men when they landed on his island. Trapped in the giant’s cave, Oulixos and his men blinded the Cyclops and made their escape. But wasn’t it possible that on his voyage home Odysseus had chanced on that same island? With all his resourcefulness, surely he would think up some ingenious way of outwitting that dull monster?

And so it was that, because I heard an old nurse comforting my friend with stories, I conceived the first lines of a song that would not be completed till after Odysseus’ return and is sung across Argos by bards who claim it for their own. As is well-known, the song tells how Odysseus and his men escaped from the island of the Cyclopes by fooling Polyphemus into the belief that a man called ‘Nobody’ had put out his eye. But with Odysseus now long dead, I feel free to tell how there was once a time when his strong sense of identity was so reduced by his ordeals that Odysseus truly believed that he had become Nobody indeed.




Nobodysseus (#ulink_0e8b073c-d6e5-5046-9986-b445cc6d5ec4)


The sight of their leader collapsed and weeping in the arms of Guneus shocked the crew of The Fair Return into a state of dumb bewilderment. This was Odysseus, their lord and captain, the most endlessly resourceful of men and among the most eloquent. What news could be so bad as to wreck him like this?

And Guneus himself scarcely knew what to say or do in that moment because the whole weight of Odysseus’ upper body had slumped against his chest as if all the power had drained from his legs and he was left with strength only to gasp and shudder as he wept.

‘I meant no harm,’ Guneus heard himself saying after a time. ‘The gods are just, Odysseus. I’m sure all will be well.’ But Odysseus had passed beyond reach, beyond hearing and each word was of small account against the force of the blizzard gathering inside his mind. The tears running down his face and the sobs shaking his body were no longer marks of grief or loss or any other emotion with a known name: simply the outward signs of a suddenly accelerated process of dissolution over which he had no control, and which was as impersonal in its power as a flash-flood crashing through a forest and on into the chambers of a well-built house.

Guneus turned his head towards the dumbstruck men along the beach and shouted, ‘Give me a hand here, someone. This man needs help.’ Then Baius came running, and Demonax, and Eurybates who now wore a vermilion cloth wrapped about his wounded temple in the Libyan fashion. But Odysseus fended them all off as though they were Furies coming at him like bats out of the dark. He pushed Guneus away, staggered in the sand, and stood swaying with his head in his hands and the sobs juddering through him and a hoarse, protracted noise, like the creaking of a door, breaking from his mouth.

Eurymachus came up alongside Guneus, demanding to know what was happening and was astounded to see Odysseus stare at him with a grimace of horror across his face, almost as though he was covered in blood, before turning away and making for his lodge with one hand still pressed to his head.

‘What happened between you?’ Eurylochus demanded of the armoured man across from him, who was tugging in puzzlement at his beard. ‘What did you say to him?’

Guneus opened his hands as if to demonstrate his harmlessness. ‘I just told him what’s been happening at home. The news isn’t good. It’s given him a shock, I’m afraid. He’ll be all right again when he gets over it.’

Yet the man’s voice lacked the confidence of the opinion, and as the hours passed, the condition of Odysseus deteriorated further. He sat inside his lodge, rocking backwards and forwards, groaning and holding his head, and would accept no comfort from anyone – not the women who were used to serving him, nor from any of the friends who approached him. He either stared at them aghast without responding or snarled like an injured dog, demanding that they let him be. They muttered together outside the lodge, all of them dismayed by what they too had now learned of events back home in Ithaca and across all Argos, yet still unable to comprehend why Odysseus had been so unmanned by the news.

Arguments broke out as to what best should be done to help him, and the situation became further confused when Guneus decided that he had no wish to see his own crew contaminated by the febrile atmosphere of this camp. There were a couple of hours of light left in the day and he decided to use them to make progress towards the mouth of the river Cinyps rather than allowing his crew to sink into a stupor with this demoralised bunch of Ithacans. Not all his men were happy at being ordered back to sea but he forced his will on them, and climbed aboard his ship shouting to the Ithacans watching from the shore that if any of them were of the mind to shape up, he could always use good men.

Glaucus, captain of the Nereid, and Demonax of the Swordfish glanced uneasily at one another as they watched the Thessalian pentekonter pull out into the bay.

A rosy glow of sunlight glanced off her sail as it billowed from the yard. The oars were shipped, spindrift scattered from the prow, and a white wake glistened behind the vessel as she scudded westwards on the breeze. For the landlocked Ithacans it was like watching their own lives recede.

Some time after the sun had gone down Eurylochus decided to try to speak to his leader again. A good sailor, cautious and pragmatic, always with a keen eye for the run of the weather, he was never gifted with the sharpest of wits but had a feeling heart and could not bear to think of his old friend lying wretchedly alone. Prepared for a further angry dismissal, he went into the lodge with an oil-lamp in one hand and a bowl of food in the other, and found his captain lying on his bed in a dishevelled state.

‘I’ve brought you some food,’ he said gently. ‘You should try to eat something.’ When no answer came, he put down the lamp and bowl, stood uncertainly for a moment, then said, ‘It’s me – your old shipmate Eurylochus. You can talk to me.’

By the dim light of the lamp he saw Odysseus turn over on the bed. A haggard face looked up at him.

‘Eurylochus?’

‘That’s right, sir,’ the man answered, encouraged, ‘Eurylochus, as ever was.’ He took the hand that Odysseus reached out to him and felt the strength of its grip.

‘I keep seeing her,’ Odysseus said, ‘again and again. I can’t get my head clear.’

Eurylochus nodded his head in sympathy, certain now that he understood the cause of the man’s grief. ‘I’m sure you there’s no need to trouble your head over Penelope, lord. Your wife has always loved you and she always will. You’ve got nothing to fear there, whatever foul lies Guneus was spreading.’

But Odysseus frowned and shook his head. ‘No, it’s not her’ he said. ‘You don’t understand.’

Eurylochus furrowed his brow. ‘Then who, sir? Who do you see?’

Odysseus lifted his stricken face. ‘Polyxena,’ he whispered. ‘Even in the dark, she’s there, looking back at me.’

Bewildered by the response, Eurylochus said, ‘King Priam’s daughter, you mean? The one that young Neoptolemus took in vengeance for his father? She’s long dead and in the Land of Shades, lord. You don’t have to worry about her.’

Tightening his grip on his friend’s wrist, Odysseus said, ‘We never atoned for her. That’s why she won’t let me go. Don’t you see it? She was innocent and not one of us atoned for her death. We shan’t ever be free of her now, not unless …’

Swallowing, calling silently on the gods for protection, Eurylochus said, ‘Unless what, sir?’

‘The thing is, I keep seeing her – even when I close my eyes she’s there across from me. I see her baring her breasts on Achilles’ tomb, lifting her chin before the sword, defying us, knowing that she’ll always be there.’

‘But you didn’t kill her, lord,’ Eurylochus tried to reason with him. ‘If there’s still blood-guilt there, it’s none of yours. It lies with Neoptolemus.’

‘I should have prevented him. I knew what he was going to do and I should have stopped it. He was only a boy. A boy possessed by what he thought was his father’s shade. But he was too young. He should never have been at Troy. And neither should Achilles before him. And it was me who brought him there.’




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