Ithaca

by Patrick Dillon

  Only when the road begins to travel upward, passing olive groves, then pine trees, does he haul on the reins, slowing the chariot, then bringing it to a halt at the side of the road.

  He looks at me. “You were scared,” he says. His face is masked with dust. He draws a sweaty hand through it, leaving it streaked like war paint.

  I step down onto the warm grass. My legs feel so weak from the pounding of the road that I can barely stand. I have to keep clinging to the rail of the chariot, but I manage to shake my head.

  Menelaus gives a snort of disbelief. “Now we walk.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Follow me.”

  “Are we going to see my father?”

  He doesn’t answer. He leads us up a mountain path. We have to scramble over rocks and press through thick, clinging thorns, but eventually the way grows clearer, winding in loops up the side of a bare mountain. Halfway up, we can see far across the dusty plain of Sparta, past the roofs of the palace and town, past square, flat fields to the distant sea. The sun, burning through a cloudless sky, grows hotter. Lizards flick their way into crevices. I can feel sweat pooling in the small of my back.

  “Stop.” Menelaus pulls a leather water bottle from his belt and passes it to each of us in turn. Polycaste throws back her head and sprinkles water over her face and neck.

  “I brought the horses from Troy,” Menelaus says. “The fastest in the world.” But his heart doesn’t seem to be in boasting today. He looks up at the mountain. Two eagles are wheeling above its summit. “Do you know where we are?”

  “Of course not.” Polycaste looks mutinous. “How could we?”

  Menelaus only glances at her. “Mount Aroania. Up there.” Menelaus points to a cleft between two peaks. “The source of the river Styx.” He looks down at us. “That’s where we’re going.”

  He won’t say any more. We reach it two hours later, sweating and exhausted from a climb over bare, unshaded rock and burning stones that skitter away underfoot. A last twist of the path brings us to the lip of a crater. Below is a round, black pool of water.

  A wooden shack stands to one side. A tall, elderly man dressed in black appears, stooping, at the doorway. His robe is embroidered with rich gold thread, but the sleeves are stained with oil. Gold thread braids his dirty white hair. He bows to Menelaus, who begins to scramble down the side of the crater. From above we watch him draw something from the chest of his leather coat, kiss it in his balled fist, then hurl it high above the pool. It flashes once as it’s caught by the sun then falls into the water without a splash. We watch the ripples widen outward and die against the pool’s rocky banks.

  Menelaus clambers back up the crater and stops just below its rim, looking up at us.

  “When we left Troy,” he says, “the gods were against us. They hated us for destroying the city. They hated us for burning their temples. You know how they punished my brother. I too have suffered . . .” He pauses, wiping one hand across his mouth and red beard. “At Cape Malea the gods sent a storm. It drove us far south, to Egypt. I met a man there, a priest who could see things . . . he read them in the smoke of incense. I asked him which of us had perished since leaving Troy, and who was still alive. He told me the names of the dead. Agamemnon, my brother, was among them. I didn’t know my brother was dead. They killed him, Aegisthus and that whore, his wife. I didn’t know that, then, but the priest told the truth. I brought him back here to Sparta.”

  “Have you seen my father?” I try to keep my voice steady. “Do you know where he is?”

  Menelaus shakes his head. “The word of the gods is good enough for me. Lector!” He turns to the old priest, who nods, disappears into the hut, and returns carrying a brazier, his hands wrapped in cloths to protect them from the heat. He sets it on a level piece of ground outside the hut and disappears inside for a round metal dish, which he sets on the brazier. Into the brazier he throws a handful of brown powder that he scoops from a small, enameled box.

  “From this place.” The priest’s voice is deep and sonorous, strongly accented. “The waters flow deep underground through caverns where no living man can follow them. This is the river Styx, the river of the dead.” He pauses and throws another handful of the powder onto the fire. Brown smoke coils up from the dish as it heats.

  “All those who die come to the river’s shores. Charon the ferryman awaits them. In his boat they cross to the underworld, the realm of Dis, never to see light again. They walk the shades forever as ghosts.” The priest bows suddenly, plunging his face into the reeking smoke and breathing deeply. When he straightens up, his eyes are closed and he sways, gripping the handles of the brazier so hard his knuckles whiten.

  “Charon!” he moans. “Of those who left Troy’s shore, who has crossed your stream into the realm of the dead?” He plunges down again, burying his face in the smoke. Polycaste has come forward to stand beside me. Menelaus is watching with narrowed eyes. I notice a little bird, a sparrow, bobbing and dipping on a rock at the black water’s edge. A gust of wind blows the smoke toward us. It has a faintly acrid, sweet tang.

  “Agamemnon!” The old man’s face is running with sweat. His eyes have rolled upward until only the whites show. “Ajax!” He plunges his face back toward the dish. For a long time he breathes its vapors, but when he stands up again, he’s silent.

  “Odysseus?” Menelaus says. “Ask about Odysseus.”

  The priest breathes slowly in through his nose. When he opens his eyes again, they’re back to normal. “He said nothing of Odysseus.” He steps away from the brazier and drops to a crouch, hanging his head between his knees to recover. Gradually the smoke from the dish thins, replaced by the reek of scorched metal.

  “Enough!” The priest stands, sweeps the dish from the fire, and drops it on the ground with a clang. Then he turns and disappears back into the hut.

  “Now you’ve heard it for yourself.” Menelaus nods at me. “Your father is alive. Yes?” He glances down at the black, unrippled surface of the pool. “Now we go back to Sparta.”

  “What are you going to do?” Polycaste says.

  We found mules waiting for us at the foot of the track. Menelaus climbed into his chariot and rode ahead. Polycaste and I went back to the palace at a slower pace and washed away the dust of the journey. There was no sign of Helen. A servant brought us a message that Menelaus had been called away on business, and showed us a tray of bread and cheese set out on the table in the great hall. When we’d eaten, we retreated to the garden just as the evening began to cool. Over thickly flowering plants I can see the bare tops of the mountains we climbed earlier.

  “Nothing.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll go home to Ithaca.” I don’t look at her. “I’ll build a tomb and say prayers for my father.”

  “But the priest said Odysseus was alive!”

  That makes me angry. “Has anyone seen him? Does anyone have any news of him? He’s gone. A priest from Egypt . . . a fortune-teller . . . that isn’t proof. If he’s alive, why haven’t we heard from him? Why hasn’t he come home to Ithaca? Surely someone would have met him . . . a sailor in a port . . . Five hundred men don’t just disappear. Even in a storm, wreckage is washed ashore . . . oars, timbers. If he was in Egypt, Menelaus would have heard. If he was in Africa, I’d have heard from Mentes. If he’s dead . . .” I shake my head wearily. “Since he’s dead, it’s better to move on. For me, for my mother, for everyone. I’ll build a tomb for him in Ithaca.”

  I can remember the funeral of Laertes, my grandfather. We built a pyre for the old man’s body on the mountainside where he lived out his last years. Cedar logs, stripped of their branches and cut to equal length, were stacked first one way, then the other, with pine twigs crammed into every joint. We laid Laertes’s body on top of it, washed, perfumed, and dressed in rich white robes. His old bronze sword, the blade nicked from many fights, was placed on his chest, and his spear, with its insignia of a boar, hung on the pyre beside him. We left th
e gold rings on his fingers. His women servants twined ivy in his scanty white hair.

  I remember the way his hair—all I could see of him from the ground—was feathered by the mountain wind as we waited for the ceremony to start. Only when the sun touched the horizon did the priest step forward and thrust a torch into the pyre. It took a moment for the pine twigs to catch, then a roaring came from the base of the mound, a sudden crackling and a waft of heat that washed across the little knot of spectators: me, my mother, a dozen servants. Laertes’s old friends were all dead. The young men in the big house stayed away.

  It didn’t take long for the flames to take hold. A tongue of fire split a cedar log. Black smoke curled up into the sky. As we watched, more flames appeared, licking around the ends of logs, exploring each crevice of the pyre until, as the sun finally disappeared behind the mountain’s edge, the fire roared and crackled, bright orange flames and clouds of sparks rising up into the sky and thickening the night around us. The priest and his assistants stepped forward, shielding their faces from the heat, to throw incense onto the flames. Its sickly, rich perfume masked the stench when the fire reached Laertes’s body. Gradually we shuffled backward, driven by the heat. From the edge of the forest we watched until the flames slowly began to subside, charred logs gave way, and Laertes’s pyre collapsed into embers.

  The next morning I climbed the mountain again and found nothing but a mound of grey ash.

  My father, Ithaca’s chief, deserves something more permanent. “I’ll build a tomb by the harbor,” I tell Polycaste, “near where he sailed away. A domed tomb of cut stones. I’ll hang his bow in it, and his weapons, and burn a ship on the beach outside. I’ll make a pyre of cedar logs and resin, and sacrifice to the goddess to protect Odysseus’s soul.” I look down at my feet, scuffing the dust with my toes. “I’ve got to go home to Ithaca.”

  “Stay with us at Pylos first.”

  “I can’t. My mother has no one to protect her. I’ve got to go home.”

  Home. I think of Ithaca. But home doesn’t mean comfort and safety. It means Antinous sneering at me and Eurymachus pretending to be friendly. It means young men washing in the courtyard, brawling voices and violence always waiting to break out. It means the clack of my mother’s loom, her empty smile, her fingers plucking listlessly at the chain around her neck. And once I announce Odysseus’s death—once the flames of his pyre have died to ash and the smoke has faded from the sky—it’s going to mean something worse. I know that. I’m not under any illusions. Those young men want Penelope. They want Ithaca. They want me dead.

  “What will happen there?”

  “My mother will marry again. Someone will have to rule Ithaca. I suppose there’ll be a fight.”

  “We’ll help!” Polycaste squeezes my arm. “My father will send men. I’ll fight with you.”

  I lay my hand over hers, where she’s holding my arm.

  “Are you all right?” she says.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll teach you how to fight on the way.”

  I make myself grin. A sixteen-year-old fighting Antinous. Fighting Eurymachus and Agelaus, challenging the tattooed young men in the courtyard with their spears whose shafts are scored with notches—one notch for each life they’ve taken. And I have no choice, because I’m a fighter’s son and must be a fighter myself, even if my only fight ends at the gateposts of my home.

  “We’ll leave tomorrow,” Polycaste says.

  I nod. As I stand there with Polycaste, I know how my story is going to end. It can only have one ending. In a week’s time, little more, women will shriek my name across the harbor at Ithaca, and my mother will kneel on the sand with her dress torn and ashes in her hair. The pyre by the harbor won’t only be for Odysseus. It will be my tomb as well.

  Nausicaa loved stories.

  Stories of fighters were the best of all. She loved the story of the Trojan fighter Hector and his wife, Andromache, when Hector was going off to the war to fight. Andromache came to say good-bye to him, and they were both in tears, and Hector played with his baby son, Astyanax, dandling him on his knee and putting his great war helmet on the baby’s head.

  It was just a shame Hector was horribly slaughtered a couple of hours later.

  She loved—maybe best of all—the story of Helen and Paris, because Helen was so beautiful and they were so in love. Even after the storyteller would finish his tale, at the end of a feast in the great hall of her father, Alcinous, chief of the Phaeacians, Nausicaa would go on imagining their lives—how Paris would come back from a day on the battlefield, grimy, sweating, and covered in blood, and Helen would wash him and bind up his wounds, then maybe cradle his head in her lap and sing to him.

  Nausicaa would love to marry a fighter. Unfortunately most of the Phaeacians were sailors and merchants, most of them only interested in profit from the seashells they turned into purple dye in the stinking vats at the top of the town or in abstruse points of navigation, which they could discuss for hours on end, and frequently did at the feasts. Living at the farthest edges of the civilized world, the chances of her meeting a genuine fighter were practically zero.

  Even though her father was chief, Nausicaa’s life was dull, with nothing she actually had to do except lead the girls down to the river where they did the washing. Her mother was always busy weaving cloth for clothes, all of it dyed purple. Everyone in Phaeacia wore purple, thanks to the seashells, the source of their wealth. Phaeacian merchants kept the best cloth for export, though, so they all wore the cloth that had come out a bit wrong, ranging in shade from crimson to lavender. When the streets were thronged with people hurrying about their business, this variation in color gave the town a vivid appearance that visitors always remarked on, but Nausicaa was fed up to the back teeth with it.

  She hated purple. She would have given almost anything for a glimpse—just one glimpse—of a man in white, wearing bronze armor and carrying a sword instead of a counting-frame.

  Nausicaa sighed and rolled over in bed. It was washing day today—as it seemed to be pretty much every day. But today she resented the work slightly less than usual. Her favorite dress—green, with an embroidered pattern—had been out of action for a month, awaiting mending, but was now ready to wash. She would slip it in among the interminable purple gowns of her brothers, the crimson tablecloths and lavender sheets, and win at least something back from the morning. She would wear it at tonight’s feast, and the young merchants from the town would all fall in love with her.

  For what that was worth.

  Nausicaa got out of bed, shaking out her long golden hair. She brushed it, listening to the sounds from the courtyard: someone drawing water from the well; a creak of baskets as her women brought the washing downstairs. When she went out onto the gallery, she saw there was a mountain of it: four baskets, each piled high. She stood for a moment, thinking, her pretty mouth twisted, then ran down to the great hall, where her mother was spinning purple yarn and her father was flicking beads on a counting-frame of time-blackened oak.

  Nausicaa kissed her mother, then went behind her father and wound her arms around his neck. He kissed her absentmindedly.

  “Father?”

  “Mm?”

  “I was wondering . . .”

  “Mm?” Her father flicked two beads across the counting-frame, frowning.

  “Could I possibly . . .”

  He said, “No.”

  Nausicaa stood up, pouting, and dancing her fingers on his shoulders. “There’s four baskets of it.”

  Her father frowned and looked up, attending for the first time. “What is it you want?”

  “The covered wagon. To carry the washing.”

  “Oh, yes . . . if you must. Get Halius to put the mules to it.”

  “Thank you!” She kissed him lightly on the head and ran out into the courtyard, snatching up an apple for her breakfast as she went.

  The girls were already outside. It only took a moment to bring the wagon around and talk two of h
er brothers into loading it up. Then they were spinning out through the gate and past the dye vats, taking the beaten chalk road over the fields.

  Nausicaa drove. She liked driving and was good at it, even though the girls screamed when she went too fast and her brothers scolded her for wearing out the mules. There must have been a storm the night before. From the cliff at the edge of town she could see that the waves were still high, crashing viciously onto the rocks and scratching the blue sea’s surface with white breakers. The olive trees in her father’s grove were still tossing in a high wind, their leaves flashing green and then silver, and the beach, which the road skirted, was strewn with foam and driftwood. She hoped all the Phaeacian ships were safe in harbor, their long black hulls, distinctively curved, sheltered by the breakwater or drawn up safely on the sand.

  The girls chattered in the wagon behind her. Nausicaa swung the mules inland, following the track through olive trees and wheat fields to the washing place, where the island’s river, bearing cold, fresh water from the mountain, formed a little bay with its own sandy beach, a short walk in from the sea. There were stony shallows in which they could trample the dirty clothes, and stunted little bushes on which they could hang them to dry while they picnicked afterward.