Cursed by the Sea God

by Patrick Bowman

  At the stern, Lopex could see it coming. “Rowers! Ship oars! Ship oars!” he shouted. “And as you fear the gods, hang on!” I dropped to the deck and wound my arms tightly through the bow rail struts. Gods, what had I done? I could hear the wave growing louder as it roared toward us. For a moment it towered over the stern before lifting us like a leaf and thrusting us back up the throat of Hades.

  The ship smashed against the tunnel walls as the water threw us back up, snapping off oars and carrying away entire hull planks and railings. Behind us, the roaring black wave filled the entire cave, threatening to engulf us at any moment. My arms were being pulled off my shoulders as I clung desperately to the struts, praying to the gods to hold the ship together. I couldn’t even see the last few feet of the stern, swallowed by the rushing black wave. Was it already gone? The Greeks were moaning in terror, and I clamped my mouth hard to keep from doing the same.

  Suddenly it was brighter. A moment later we shot out of the tunnel like a cork squeezed from a goatskin, twisting in mid-air to smash down on the water, heeled halfway over in the middle of the grey lake. For a moment I thought the impact had ripped my arms off. The ship bobbed unsteadily, then slowly righted. If we had rolled over and sunk right then, no one could have raised a finger to stop it. As I lay panting, looking back at the solid rock wall I knew we had just been vomited from, my mind returned to something I had glimpsed just before the wave carried us into the tunnel: the huge Lord Hades, bent over the hill and retching, as though he had swallowed something he couldn’t digest.

  “Why, Lopex!” Circe chirped as he splashed onto the beach from the shallows, her bird’s-nest hair bound with a kerchief that matched her robin’s-egg blue robe. “What a nice surprise! You couldn’t keep away from me after all!” She reached out playfully to take his arm but he yanked it away.

  “Not by my choice, witch!” he growled. “No sooner had we departed the river of Hades than a sea current snatched up our ship, a current that we could neither row nor sail against until it beached us here. Do you stand there and tell me it was none of your doing?”

  She pouted at him. “Oh, don’t be that way.” She reached out to brush his hair from his forehead but he frowned and pushed her hand away.

  “Please, don’t be angry with me.” Her face brightened. “And look at your ship, my wolf, you really must stay and repair it. What have you been doing to the poor thing? It looks like owls have been nesting in it. Tonight I’ll prepare a banquet for you and your men, and read the auguries again to see what else might be in your future.” She stood on tiptoe to whisper something in his ear, her hands on his chest. This time he didn’t push her away.

  That evening, as I approached the soldiers’ campfire, I heard Deklah, speaking with his mouth full of bread. “It’s true, she didn’t even chew her own food. Had a slave do it for her.” At someone’s question, he added, “No, it wasn’t a poison taster. She actually had a food chewer. Spooned it right out of her mouth into the queen’s.”

  The mention of poison reminded me of Pen’s death. Pen! I stiffened, remembering my promise. A glance at Ury told me he was too drunk to be a danger to anyone but himself. Even so, I was careful to slip away without being obvious. Grabbing a bolt of sailcloth from the hold as a shroud, I headed for where I had left Pen’s body.

  The moon, a few days off full, was the kind we called a trencherman’s moon, back in Troy. It was high overhead by the time I found Elpenor’s body, lying under a bush. Whether by some magic or the dry island air, it was barely decomposed, and the lions hadn’t found it. Wrapping him in the sailcloth, I wrestled him over my shoulder and staggered off in search of a burial site.

  I knew it as soon as I spotted it, a moonlit cove a short walk north of the Pelagios. A few night gulls wheeled above the moonlit water. An unthreatening scene, the kind Pen would have liked. Buried properly here, perhaps he would have the respect in Hades that he had never had in life. And perhaps the guilt that had eaten at me since his death would finally be appeased.

  I laid him in a depression in the hard soil and began to hunt for rocks to build a cairn over him when I realized I wasn’t alone. I leapt to my feet, afraid that Ury had followed me after all, but I was wrong. It was Lopex.

  I grunted, annoyed. If he didn’t like what I was doing, he could do it himself. To my surprise, he said nothing, watching in silence as I covered Pen’s body with stones to keep out the animals. As I completed the cairn, Lopex stepped up beside me with a broken oar from the scrap pile. He wedged it, paddle upward, in the stones as a grave marker. We stood side by side for a little while, looking at the grave in silence. “You’ve done right by him, boy,” Lopex said at last. “None of my own men thought to.” Confused, I said nothing. He turned and left.

  I stood for a little while longer, looking at Pen’s grave in the cool night air, but my calm had been broken. Why did he keep doing that? Ever since Aeolia, I had hated him. He had given me away to Ury. He had used me, when we first landed on Circe’s island, to make the men eat. He wouldn’t let me speak to him, and when he spoke to me it was only to give orders. And I couldn’t forget that he was one of the Greek commanders who had destroyed Troy. He made it easy to hate him. So why did I find it so hard?

  We spent another month on Circe’s island, refitting the damage done during our escape from Hades, but Lopex didn’t speak to me again. For this refitting, although it looked bad, the damage was almost all minor, mostly railings, oars, and a few stove-in hull planks. I had no carpentry skills, something that became clear when Arturos pressed me into service turning new oars. After examining the misshapen result, he’d looked at me sourly and told me he didn’t need me any longer.

  Following breakfast one day, I crept off to hide in the shade of the Pelagios. The Greeks had propped her up on the beach with two rows of ashwood stay poles, forming a kind of triangular tunnel against each side of the hull. The side away from camp was almost out of sight, so I was a bit surprised, as I settled into place with my back against the hull, to look up and see Thersites standing there.

  “You’re the son of that healer, right?” he began. I nodded.

  “I don’t much have dealings with healers, you understand,” he went on awkwardly. “Not slaves, neither. But Pharos, he says you’re okay. And they say you saved some men at the ship break island. Is that the way of it?”

  I nodded again, wondering where this was going.

  He glanced over his shoulder before squatting in front of me. “See, it’s like this,” he began, his voice low. “I’ve gone and got myself a rash.”

  “A rash?” I repeated, surprised.

  He turned his back to me and flipped his tunic up. His buttocks and the backs of his thighs were speckled bright red. He let his tunic drop and turned back. “Thing is,” he added, “I’d just as soon you didn’t let on to the others, see? Only they’d pin my ears pretty fierce for falling asleep in a patch of foolsnare like that.” He stood up again.

  “Word is, you’ve got a healer’s box. If it’s got something to keep the itch down, well, I’d count it as a good turn.” He grimaced and whipped a hand around to scratch urgently at his buttock. “Only hurry,” he hissed. “This itch, it’s growing to eat me whole.”

  The healer’s box! Binding wounds and splinting bones didn’t need a healer’s elixirs, and I’d long since forgotten the box I had last seen on the island of the Cyclops. It took a while to find it, buried in the hold where some soldier had heaved it.

  A wave of nostalgia wafted over me as I threw open the lid. The neat rows of stoppered clay vials, the mortar, pestle and other tools in the bottom, and above all the scent of herbs, liniments and tinctures rising from the box carried me back to the days when I used to help my father in the xenion where he treated his patients.

  The vials were marked with neatly scratched labels, but I’d never learned to read, so I started opening them at random. Some contained oil with chopped leaves in them, others powder or balms. One had a piercing smell that darted
up my nostrils like a wasp. I put the stopper back hastily.

  Finally I found a vial full of a thick oil with a flowery scent that I half-recalled my father smearing on someone’s burnt arm. Could it help? Did ointments go bad, like food? I didn’t know. I poured some into a smaller vial and brought it out to Thersites. “Spread this on twice a day. It may help, if it hasn’t stopped working.”

  I didn’t hear back from Thersites, but a day later another Greek soldier came to me, a younger man named Prylis. “Listen,” he began. “I hear you’ve got something for an itch.” He held up his forearms, which were red with signs of vigorous scratching. “Can you give me a little? I can’t even sleep these last two nights.”

  Word must have gotten around, because after that, the men began coming to me with a stream of burns and minor injuries, giving me an opportunity to experiment with the other salves and tinctures in the healer’s box. Through trial and error, I began to identify what some of the ointments and powders were good for. By the time we set sail from Circe’s island again after a month, I understood what at least a third of the vials in the healer’s chest were for. From the men’s grudging comments, that made me at least as good as the Greek healer I had replaced, the late and unlamented Kalli-krates.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Peril on the Water

  PROCOROS HAD A CONFUSED frown. “Toward it? Don’t you mean around it?”

  Standing beside him at the bow rail, Lopex was studying his sheepskin chart. He glanced up at the late morning sun, now emerging from behind a scrap of cloud. “Hold this course,” he repeated. “The island will come into view within two hands. Bring the ship close by, keeping the island two oar-lengths to starboard. Under no circumstances are you to land us.”

  The navigator muttered into his beard. At the water halt a little while later, Lopex ordered me to hand out a thumb-sized piece of beeswax to every man on board. I’d wondered about it the day before when I saw it in the hold as we prepared to leave Circe’s island. Whatever we were about to meet, Lopex already knew about it.

  He hadn’t mentioned the slaves, but I dropped a lump down the forward ladder into the hold anyway. Zosimea, I had learned after we sailed, had been left with Circe as a gift. The half-dozen other slaves we had set out with had been reassigned to other ships after the Cyclops island and lost at the ship breakers, leaving only me and Kassander aboard the Pelagios. As I worked my way down the benches, handing out lumps of wax to the rowers, Lopex spoke up from the stern.

  “Men of Ithaca!” he called, holding up a lump of beeswax. “You are being given a piece of wax. Roll it in your hands to soften it and fashion yourself two plugs, like this.” He demonstrated. “On my command, push them into your ears. As you value your lives, make sure they are tight, and do not remove them until Phidios gestures to you. Ury, bring up the mast from below. Leave off the sail and spars.”

  Unimaginative as always, Ury stepped up from the forward rowing bench where Lopex had relocated him after Circe’s island, and gruffly ordered four men to the task. They wrestled the mast from the hold and struggled with its stay ropes to mount it through a collar hole in the bench. I finished distributing the wax and reached the stern deck just as Lopex was telling Phidios to tie him up.

  I blinked. Had I heard that wrong? From the look on his face, Phidios was wondering the same thing, but Lopex was thrusting a coil of ox-hide rope at him. Phidios uncoiled the rope gingerly and reached for Lopex’s arms.

  “Not here, idiot. To the mast!” At least that explained why he had asked Ury to raise it. The men watched with interest as Lopex was bound to the mast, facing to starboard, his feet on the reinforced bench that housed the mast hole. He raised his voice. “Fellow Achaeans, I charge you all: no matter what you see or hear, and in particular no matter what I say, do not untie me until we are safely past the island.” He turned to Phidios. “Tighter! There must be no chance for me to escape.”

  I thought about this as the men began rowing again. What sort of danger was best met tied up? And why weren’t the rest of us being bound too? I shrugged and hopped across the benches to my standard spot in the bow. Lopex ignored me as I passed.

  A shout came from Procoros. “There it is! Steersman, alter your course to my mark!” He pointed a steady arm toward a spot on the horizon as the ship gradually swung around.

  I watched from the bow rail as the island crept closer. Could I hear something? I strained to catch the sound, a low, sweet throbbing. Lopex’s voice boomed out again. “Plugs! Now!” I stuffed the wax plugs into my ears and the world became nearly silent, the creaking of the ship and the waves against the hull muffled.

  The men resumed rowing at an arms-out gesture from Phidios. As we drew nearer to the island, I began to make out details. Thrust jaggedly up from the waves, it was more of an outcropping than a real island. Sharp-edged rocks lined the base of the sheer cliffs that protected it on all sides, and scattered among notches in the cliffs were some half-dozen . . . creatures.

  Now I could make them out. Women! Beautiful women with long, dark green hair that shone like seaweed draped over their shoulders to run like rivers down smooth, silvery skin. Their mouths were open as though they were calling. No, singing. With my ears plugged I couldn’t hear their voices, but their open-armed, graceful gestures were clear.

  “Come! Visit with us!” Facing backward, the rowers couldn’t see them yet, but our course would take us directly past them, a stone’s throw to starboard. I glanced back at the men, wondering how they would react, and was transfixed as I caught sight of Lopex.

  His head was turned toward the island, and his face bore an intense expression that might have been rapture or agony. His lips were moving as he muttered something, his face working, sweat beginning on his forehead. His mouth opened and I realized that the voices must be growing louder. I crept down the benches until I could make out his words through the earplugs.

  “. . . music . . . wrong . . . let me go . . . voices of gods . . .”

  Suddenly his eye fell upon me and his voice raised to a shout. “You! Come here! Yes, you!”

  I hesitated and his shout came again. “Boy! Now, may the gods damn you!”

  I bench-hopped over uncertainly as Lopex continued to curse.

  “Untie me, slave. Now!”

  I stared at him in amazement. “But you ordered us not to!”

  Lopex glared at me, panting, sweat running freely off his face. “I said untie me!”

  I looked at him innocently. “I’d love to, but you’re not my master anymore. Remember?”

  His face twitched as he fought to control himself. Suddenly his expression changed, a cunning look stealing over his writhing brow. “Oh, yes. Ury.” He was struggling not to shout. “Not much of a . . . master, is he? Tell you what, Alexi. Let me go and I’ll make him give you back to me. How’d you like that?”

  The singing must have grown louder, for I could suddenly hear it too, a faint humming. Even through the wax, it was beautiful. What would he do if I released him? A brief spasm crossed his face.

  “What do you say, Alexi? Ury reports to me. I can order him to. The gods know there’s . . . precedent.”

  I glanced anxiously toward the island, now directly to starboard as we rowed past. This close, I could see broken shapes among the sharp-toothed rocks at the base of the cliff. A momentary breeze blew a carrion smell past my nostrils, and I knew what those shapes had to be.

  Lopex was speaking again. “Better still—” a conspiratorial look crossed his face as he leaned toward me, straining against the ropes, “I’ll make him set you free! Think of that. Free again!” The crumpled shapes were men, the broken bodies of sailors who had been driven to scale those impossible cliffs by these creatures’ music. Now I knew what he would do if I let him go.

  Lopex’s voice rose as the last of his self-control vanished. “Do it now, boy!” he shouted, straining at the cords, his eyes bulging. “Or I’ll make your final days short and full of pain!” His face contorted fur
ther as I fidgeted. “You stinking Trojan scum! Do it! Now! I should have let Ury cut out your heart back in Troy, you little filth!”

  So that was how he really felt. Could anyone blame me now if I cut him loose? My hand was reaching on its own for Melantha’s knife. Lopex watched me hungrily. “That’s right, boy. Do it. Do it now,” he said, his voice cracking.

  I shielded my eyes against the sun as I looked for the main rope strand to cut that would free him. Wait—the sun? It shouldn’t be in my eyes. I glanced toward the bow. We were turning directly into the island! I spun and looked backward, ignoring Lopex’s angry cry. Zanthos, the steersman, was pulling the starboard steering oar hard in toward the island, a manic smile on his face. Phidios, keeping the rower’s pace on his pipes, hadn’t noticed yet.

  I dashed over the benches toward the stern, kicking the oars to foul them as I passed, but the sailors cursed and recovered their stroke. At the stern deck I leapt to grab Zanthos’s arm, but his wiry body was stronger than it looked. As I wrestled with him I spotted the problem: a wax plug had fallen from his ear! I gulped—there was only one solution. I pulled a wax plug from my ear and reached up to thrust it into his.

  An immediate change came over his face. He looked up as though waking from a dream, shook his head and hurriedly twisted his steering oar for a sharp turn to port. Nearby, Phidios had dropped his flute and was frantically signalling for the men to reverse direction, but I didn’t notice.

  I could hear the music now.

  Powerful and pure, it flooded through me like sweet wine, setting my entire body thrumming like a lyre string. I had to get closer. I had no more choice than a raindrop has to fall. I was already halfway over the railing when an arm caught me. A voice spoke in my ear. “Easy, boy. They’re not worth dying for.”