Ithaca

by Patrick Dillon

  “Picnic?” Nausicaa called, suddenly worried.

  “I’ve got the basket!” shouted a voice from the back.

  Nausicaa flicked the whip expertly over the leading mule’s ear and took the turn down to the river slightly too fast, lifting one wheel off the ground and evoking screams of outrage and excitement from the back. In one of her dreams—one of the stories she told herself—she rode in a fighter’s war chariot, gripping his muscled arm as they hurtled across the plain of Troy past heaped bodies and fallen ramparts, with the wind blowing her long hair out behind.

  It didn’t take long to do the washing. Each basket was emptied out into the rapidly flowing stream, then, hitching their skirts up to their thighs, the girls waded, screaming, into the icy water to tread the heavy cloth with their feet, kicking up spray and screaming again as it splashed them. Streamers of purple dye trailed away downstream.

  Like blood, Nausicaa thought. For a moment she looked left, toward the river’s mouth. It must have been some storm last night. The thick bulrushes that fringed the river were blown flat, and driftwood had been washed all the way up from the beach.

  When the washing was trampled enough, they hauled each piece out, heavy with water, wrung it out, and hung it on the bushes to dry.

  “We’ll swim!” Nausicaa ordered.

  They all swam. The girls copied everything she did. Glancing around to make sure no male eyes were watching, they pulled their light dresses over their heads and waded out into the deeper water, splashing each other and shrieking. Nausicaa swam the farthest. Afterward they dried themselves in the sun on the bank, then dressed again, unpacked the picnic, and ate bread, fish, and apples from Alcinous’s orchard. The washing still wasn’t dry.

  “We’ll play ball!” Nausicaa commanded. She was annoyed with the washing. She needed to be back home in time to dress for the feast, which always took hours, but the heavy cloth remained stubbornly damp. One of the girls got a ball from the back of the wagon, and they picked their way along the bank to a meadow nearer the bulrushes. They formed a ring and threw the ball to each other, sometimes bouncing it, sometimes full toss. Nausicaa lobbed it, and the ball sailed over the girls’ heads to disappear in the rushes beyond.

  “I’ll get it!” Nausicaa shouted.

  She ran across the grass to the rushes and began to pick her way through them. The stems pricked her bare feet. The ball must have gone farther than she thought. There was no sign of it, so she kept on, steadying herself on the branch of a little bog oak. The ground was marshy and uneven. Nausicaa stumbled once, slipped on the edge of a hollow, and then stopped.

  There was a man lying in the hollow beyond the tree.

  He was sunburned and caked with brine, his beard tangled, the hair on his chest and shoulders all white with salt. His legs were drawn up under him.

  He was naked.

  Nausicaa clung to the tree branch. The sound of the girls’ voices seemed very far away. Was he alive or dead? He wasn’t moving. The wind fluffed his curling brown hair. Maybe he was dead.

  She reached down and touched him, then almost screamed as the man moved.

  He sat up with a start, eyes staring, fingers clutching for something he couldn’t find—a ship’s oar or a sword. They found Nausicaa’s wrist instead and gripped it. She found herself staring closely into two blue, bewildered eyes. His breath came in hoarse pants.

  Actually, his breath stank a bit.

  She said, “It’s all right. You’re safe. I’ll look after you.” She swallowed. His grip hurt. “We’ll look after you.”

  “Nausicaa?” The girls were shouting her name.

  “Just coming,” she called.

  Frightened, the man looked past her shoulder. “It’s all right,” she said. “They’re my friends. Everything’s all right.” It was so like her dream. He was even handsome, like the men in her dreams. “We’ll take care of you. Are you hurt?”

  The man thought for a moment, then shook his head, bewildered. He tried to say something, but his lips were too dry.

  In fact, he was a bit older than Nausicaa had first thought—perhaps even as old as her father, although it was hard to tell. Suddenly the man seemed to become aware of his nakedness, and he squirmed away from her, trying to roll over and cover himself.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I’ll bring you some clothes. Wait here.”

  Her own mouth was dry as she clambered back through the rushes. The girls stood in an expectant circle on the edge of the meadow.

  “You haven’t got the ball,” Nereis said.

  Thegea said, “What’s happened?”

  Nausicaa drew herself up. It was her role, as the chief’s daughter, to be in charge of everything. “There’s a man,” she said as offhandedly as she could. “He’s hurt. We need to help him. He needs clothes.”

  “Isn’t he wearing anything?” Nereis squeaked.

  “Just get some clothes,” Nausicaa snapped.

  They brought a purple shirt back from the bushes, still slightly damp. Ordering the girls to wait, Nausicaa carried it through the rushes to where the man still lay. She handed it to him, then turned her back as he pulled it over his head.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer. He still hadn’t spoken.

  “Come with me.”

  She took him by the hand. The girls screamed when he rose up out of the rushes, but Nausicaa ignored them. He was limping, she noticed. There was a gash on his leg, caked with dried blood. His torso, under the curling hair, was knotted and crisscrossed by scars.

  She had noticed that before he pulled the shirt on.

  At the meadow, Nausicaa gave orders. “Thegea, get a jar of water. Nereis, get food.”

  The stranger ate as if he hadn’t seen food for a month, squatting on the grass and tearing at the bread with his teeth. Nausicaa could see his shoulder muscles moving under the shirt as he raised the jug to drink.

  Then he looked up at her. His eyes were the bluest she had ever seen, the color of the sea in the harbor’s shallows, or the sky on a gentle morning.

  He said, “Thank you.” His voice was still hoarse. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “Thank you.” He looked around him, at the meadow, the stream, and the purple washing hanging on the bushes. “Where am I?”

  “You’re in Phaeacia. My father, Alcinous, is chief of the Phaeacians. I am Nausicaa, his daughter.”

  The stranger nodded, still squatting on his haunches. He said, “I need to wash.”

  “Are you hurt?”

  He examined his thigh, running calloused brown fingers over his scar, as one might test the strength of a piece of wood.

  “I can bind it up for you,” Nausicaa said. “I know how.”

  “I need to wash first.” The man looked confused. “But not while . . .”

  Nausicaa blushed. “We won’t look.”

  The girls stood on the bank in a prim line, facing the meadow, while the stranger washed himself in the stream behind them. Nausicaa could hear the water splashing over his body and his grunt as he dipped his head in the icy stream. She had already picked him something to wear from her father’s clothes, a dark shirt, almost blue—like his eyes—and a purple kilt. But even she was surprised at the transformation when she turned around. His hair and beard were paler than brown, almost golden, and with his face clean of salt, the eyes stood out even more startlingly, if anything, against his deep tan. He didn’t look quite so old.

  Or perhaps, to be honest, still a bit old. His face was lined, and his hair was streaked with grey. Quite a lot of grey. But definitely better-looking.

  “Shall I bind up your wound?”

  “I’ve done it.”

  “Oh. Can you walk?”

  He nodded. “Is there a town? A chief’s house? Are we on the mainland or an island?”

  Nereis said, “Don’t you even know where Phaeacia is?”

  Thegea said, “So were you shipwrecked or what?”

  “Do
n’t pester him,” Nausicaa said.

  The stranger looked over his shoulder, out toward the sea, where waves were still breaking in the brisk onshore wind.

  “I was at sea for sixteen days,” he said in a dazed voice.

  “Did your ship sink?”

  Thegea said, “Are you a fisherman?”

  “Obviously he isn’t a fisherman,” Nausicaa snapped.

  “I had a raft,” the man said. “I made a raft.” Suddenly his knees sagged, and he pitched forward. Nausicaa sprang toward him and gripped his arm as he fell. She found herself cradling his head. His hair and beard were soft. It was a moment before his eyes opened again, blue and unfocused.

  “You’re weak,” she said. “We must get you to my father’s house.”

  “I can walk.”

  “We’ve got a wagon.”

  It took two of them to help him into the wagon. Driving back to town, Nausicaa grew thoughtful. It was all very well to turn up in Phaeacia with a handsome stranger. That had happened really quite often in her dreams. But in real life it was a bit awkward. She knew how people talked. Girls weren’t supposed to be on their own with men other than their brothers and close relatives. She was confident she wouldn’t get in any trouble, but she didn’t want to be teased afterward. She hated being teased.

  She turned the wagon in by the back way, the track leading to the side of the courtyard. There she helped the stranger down from the wagon. His wounded leg almost gave under him.

  “This way,” Nausicaa said. “I’ll take you to my father and mother. Lean on me.”

  Alcinous, chief of Phaeacia, disliked interruptions. When he was working a problem through—his accounts, for instance—he needed to work them through to the end, balance weight of cloth against number of ships, length of journey, size of crew, and know that it all made sense. Interruptions caused mistakes. Mistakes caused loss.

  His wife, Arete, knew that. She knew to keep spinning, for hours on end if need be, without talking, and the patient clack of the spinning wheel was oddly soothing to Alcinous’s thoughts, suggesting that they too had the regularity and precision of a machine. Only when he sat back from the counting-frame with a particular sigh and pressed his two palms together did she smile and say something—usually a quiet question about the nature of his calculations, which allowed him to explain it all to her, doubling his satisfaction. She was, in every way, the perfect wife.

  His daughter, Nausicaa, didn’t understand about interruptions. She was forever breaking in on him with dramatic problems that required instant attention—usually a torn dress or lost hairpin, sometimes a hurt bird she had found in the orchard. And she always brought with her a crowd of girls, chattering, gasping and shrieking, who didn’t understand about interruptions either.

  Even for Nausicaa, though, this latest interruption went too far. When Alcinous looked up, the din of voices having penetrated a complex calculation involving seashells and Egypt, he found her standing in the middle of the hall, clutching a man.

  The spinning wheel slowed and stopped. Alcinous stared at the man.

  He didn’t like him. The man was a fighter—he could see that straightaway. There was something in the set of his jaw and the bunched muscles of his shoulders; something about the scars on his bare arms and the way he stood like a dancer on the balls of his feet. His face was tanned to the color of walnut, and his beard was tangled. His eyes were a startling blue, and he was wearing Alcinous’s shirt.

  The Phaeacians were merchants and traders. They didn’t fight. A generation before, they had departed their old home and settled here, at the end of the world, as colonists, precisely to avoid the aggression of warlike neighbors, horse-riders who preferred sacking cities and plundering to buying purple fabric, the Phaeacians’ specialty. With relocation had come peace and abundant seashells, but also a need to develop the navigational skills necessary to access the markets they had left behind. Phaeacian sailors were the best in the world. Their ships, long and sleek, rode out storms. Their captains read stars and currents the way shepherds knew their pastures. Phaeacian ships could be seen in any port in the world. Some had even dared to voyage beyond the known world, out into the green oceans whose waves touched the clouds and whose mists shrouded islands of unknown men, demons, and monsters. The Phaeacians had traveled farther than any people before them.

  But they didn’t fight.

  Alcinous knew about fighters, though. Violent, rapacious, and cruel, and—the thing that infuriated Alcinous and all trading men the most—so arrogant as to claim that their unabashed viciousness, their rape and murder, their burning of cities and desecration of temples, their plundering of warehouses and ransacking of treasuries, was not criminal but heroic—heroic, by all the gods—and worthy of being celebrated in poetry while sensible men who actually accomplished things were dismissed as dull.

  Dull victims for fighters to kill and pillage, whose poverty and deaths were put in poems to entertain people. Storytellers were forever arriving at Phaeacia on returning merchant ships. They wasted evening after evening singing stories of war and love to a rapt audience. Nausicaa adored them.

  Nausicaa opened her mouth to say something. Her eyes were shining. But before she could speak, the stranger limped forward, dropped to his knees in front of Arete, and clasped her ankles.

  The traditional way of seeking help. It made him a supplicant, a guest. A duty.

  “Our house is your house,” said Alcinous, sighing.

  “I found him in the reeds,” Nausicaa said. “He was shipwrecked. He’s got a cut all the way up his thigh.”

  Alcinous didn’t want to know. The last thing he needed was a fighter sprawled all over his house, cut thigh or no cut thigh, with Nausicaa mooning over him. Half-healed, he would be picking quarrels with his sons, then leading his best sailors off on some voyage of rape and pillage. The man might be growing old—his hair was mostly grey. But he was still dangerous.

  “What’s your name?” Alcinous asked. “Where are you from?”

  Still kneeling, the man looked up at him through his startling blue eyes. He didn’t answer. He simply shook his head. That was a guest’s right. You should be welcomed just as a guest, not for who you were. And since the tangled webs of kinship and old feuds, rivalries, oaths, blood brotherhoods, and ancient quarrels linked almost every family in Greece in ways so tortuous no one could begin to untangle them—even if they could remember them all—any traveler, arriving innocently in a town, might find himself hosted by a man whose cousin had killed the uncle whose blood brother had once saved his father’s life, and would therefore be obliged to murder him. Many guests preferred to claim their hospitality anonymously.

  “You’re none the less welcome,” Alcinous said drily.

  This needed time to think through. Time to think through in private, not in a crowded hall with the young men casting admiring glances at the stranger’s scarred arms, and the women hanging on his every word.

  “You look tired,” he said. “You must rest.” He raised his voice, turning his next words into an announcement. “Tonight’s feast will be postponed until tomorrow. Our guest needs time to recover.”

  Arete nodded. For a moment Nausicaa looked outraged, then gave a resigned shrug.

  “He could never have danced on that leg anyway,” she said.

  Alcinous raised one hand, dismissing them all. He had bought himself some time. He knew what his strategy had to be. He must show the stranger every courtesy that the laws of hospitality demanded. And more. He would offer the stranger all possible assistance. Everything in his power—ships, men, gold—to help him travel wherever he was going when he was shipwrecked. To his home, to his friends, to whatever war he was planning to start. To the ends of the earth, if need be . . . just so long as it was far from Phaeacia.

  Without, of course, being rude. He didn’t want this man coming back with a shipload of vagabonds to sack the town, burn the house, and fill his ships with all the wealth he had glimpsed in Phaeacia�
�s storerooms. Alcinous shuddered.

  The stranger spent the rest of the day, and the morning following, lying in the courtyard on a low chair with his face up to the sun. His arms dangled on either side of the chair. On his left wrist was a thick leather bracelet stamped with the image of a boar.

  Nausicaa and her friends clustered around him like hummingbirds around a flower, bringing him apples carefully peeled and cut into slices, cups of water, cushions. Once, when Alcinous crossed the courtyard, he found Nausicaa kneeling next to the chair, trimming the stranger’s fingernails. Another time, to his extreme displeasure, she was combing his hair. The fighter seemed happy to let her do so. He whispered something to her as she combed, talking so low and fast no one else could hear.

  Most of the time he slept, though. Or seemed to be asleep. Once Alcinous thought he saw a gleam between the man’s closed eyelids. That was exactly what he would have expected from a fighter: guile, cunning, ruthlessness. Fighters were liars—he knew that well enough.

  A couple of hours before the feast, Alcinous’s sons and their friends arrived in the courtyard with a ball and began kicking it around. By then Nausicaa and her friends had disappeared upstairs to dress, otherwise they would have stopped them. From the office where he was checking accounts with his steward, Alcinous watched his son, Halius, go up to the stranger and shyly ask if he wanted to join in. The stranger simply shook his head and went on sleeping.

  After a time, the boys tired of their ball game and, instead, started shooting arrows at a row of barrels at the far end of the courtyard. As always there was a lot of laughter, but most of the arrows missed. Archery was not a sport much practiced by the young men of Phaeacia. Again, Halius went up to the stranger, who this time seemed a bit impatient at being disturbed. Again he refused to join in the game.

  When the boys were bored with archery, they started throwing spears instead. The courtyard of the big house at Phaeacia was rectangular, twenty paces wide and forty long. The boys had been shooting arrows the length of the courtyard, but none of them could throw a spear that far. Instead, they clustered in the corner where the stranger sat and threw their weapons at the wooden wall of the shed opposite. Not many of them managed even that. Most of the spears missed or, at best, hung for a second in the woodwork before sagging and drooping to the ground. Again, Halius eyed the stranger for a while, then went up to ask if he wanted to join in. The scarred, suntanned guest fascinated him. But again the stranger shook his head.