Penelope's Web

by Christopher Rush

  Bitch-whore, killer, filthy slut, destroyer of ships, cities, men, she was civilisation’s worst enemy, the inspiration for the gang that came to take her. But she made the sword fall where it should have struck home. She made the spearman’s fingers itch to touch her. The archer’s arm shook, the arrow missed its mark and he lay dead. She brought down buildings stone by stone.

  She was even on the ocean. On my nineteen-night journey by the stars, after Troy, I watched her brothers, Castor and Pollux, bestriding the black seas on their white horses, as Helen’s star set fire to the ship, leaping from mast to keel and crackling the sheets. She wouldn’t leave us alone, even when we were struggling in the deeps. She was always there, striking with her lightning. Even where she left her footprints, it was said, priests stirred in their graves, hurled away their tombstones and stood erect and lusting.

  But she shed tears. Penelope took trouble with them. They were tears not of remorse but of regret, lamenting her lost beauty and the pains of love. The tear-pools produced a bitter herb, and women came quietly crowding round these dark forest pools – as we’d crowded round her bed, drawn by the pools of her eyes – to gather the helenium, withered matrons and green girls all together, old women’s worries or menstrual troubles, they all shared a common aim, to taste what had sprung from the eyes of the world’s loveliest lethal female, hoping to possess a drop of her lustre, just one little hint of her terrible beauty. And they all went away with a new look on their faces. So her legacy lived on. She was the shining one, the sun, abducted by winter and repossessed by summer. She would never die, not until time stopped.

  FORTY

  My own homecoming took longer than the others’. An epic homecoming it was. And all the time, I dreamed of it, as only soldiers do. Home. In my case a windswept mountain, Neritos, trembly with leaves, on an island – rugged, sunny Ithaca, my island, close by Doulichion and Same, woody Zacynthus, and from all of them the slow smoke spiralling upwards from the home fires, white columns rising quietly into the sky. And with something hurting in the chest, where the heart once was. Soldiers know this something like no one else. But it was to be a long time till I saw that smoke feathering the air. I was sick for it. There were times I thought I’d never see it again.

  That, at least, is what I told Penelope. And it wasn’t untrue. What I didn’t tell her about was the other me, the second self, the one that wasn’t ready to come home, not yet, maybe not ever, the one that was shit-scared to. Scared of what? Scared of closing the book of war. Scared of peace. An old campaigner gets split down the middle. He can’t just barge back in through the open door; he’s got a companion now – no concubine, but one that shares the bed, shares everything. The marriage is now a threesome. An old sea-dog on the way home, however, has one advantage over an old soldier – he trusts to the winds to do the work, to make the decision: when, where to, what next? Is it homeward bound? Or is the long trick not yet over?

  The sea-winds that took us from Troy brought my twelve crimson-beaked ships to Ismarus, the city of the Cicones. They were not prepared for hostilities, and it was obvious they were no fighters. Ready or not, they were sacked, and we wiped out most of their men. The rest ran for it, leaving their wives behind on the retreat. No balls – what would the women want with them anyway? We took the good-lookers on board to sail them back to Ithaca. A fair amount of raping went on. But I made sure the whole thing was done correctly and that the women were fairly shared out. There was no way I’d act like Agamemnon, always after the pick of the pussy and the plunder.

  I did spare one man in Ismarus. He was called Maron and he was the priest of Apollo, Apollo being high up on the Cicones’ god-list. We ripped into this man’s house – it was in a very pleasant location, a grove sacred to the god – and three of my men were already hauling his wife’s robe up to her waist when he dodged the blade that was intended to kill him and threw himself in front of me with a nippiness surprising in an old-timer. The wife was young enough to be his daughter, if not granddaughter, and she looked like quite a bedful. The splayed thighs and wine-dark gash flashed at me from the floor. That distracted me for a second, long enough for him to grab me round the knees.

  He was going to go through the usual speech, and I wasn’t going to listen to it, but he pleaded his priesthood and I thought about that. I’d never seen Apollo in my life and didn’t expect to, but where gods go you’d best tread softly, just in case – play it safe. Better an old worn-out myth on your side than a god-driven fucking hurricane heading your way out of a sky you thought was empty. Storms at sea have a habit of making you believe in gods.

  ‘Let her go,’ I said. ‘And you, old man, you’d better thank Apollo.’

  He did more than that. The old priest was so grateful he said he’d pray to the god right away for my health, prosperity and safe return. Not a bad offer considering I’d just sacked his city. He saw to the prosperity himself by loading me up with gold and silver, never mind the bronze. He saw to my health too, pledging it with a dozen jars of wine – not any old vintage, either, but something really special he’d kept hidden away, he said, and to prove it he broached a jar on the spot and filled the cups to the brim.

  Nectar? The word does not exist that could convey the taste; nectar will have to do. As for the kick, he said you could mix just one cup of this drench to twenty of water and still go woozy. I believed him. That wine hit the god-spot and took you straight to Elysium. The fumes could almost knock you out, and when you were sleeping it off, he said, the wine had properties that worked wonders for the blood. I didn’t know it at the time, but that brew was more than just salubrious. It turned out to be a life-saver.

  After the spoils, the men wanted to cut and run. The wind was good for Ithaca and they were eager to get under way. I said we’d stick around; they belly-ached, and I bullshitted them – just for the night.

  ‘Besides, there’s plenty of fresh pussy around here,’ I said. ‘Do any of you have a problem with that?’

  They did what soldiers do, obeyed orders. Maron prepared cuts of meat and plied me with wine. I was careful to water it. I wondered whether he was a slippery old shit who planned to slit my throat the minute I was legless, but he was knocking back more cups than anybody, and I gave him the benefit of the doubt and collapsed in the portico.

  I woke up in the dark, wrapped in the long white arms of his wife. I thought at first I was having a wet one, but dreams don’t come with scent, and this one smelled good. She was just a girl. Her tongue probed my mouth.

  ‘And your husband?’ I whispered.

  ‘No need to worry on his account, Odysseus. Or about the code of honour, if that bothers you. I’m part of the hospitality – a gift. If you want me.’

  I wanted her. She climbed aboard and swept her breasts slowly from side to side over my face, letting her nipples stroke my lips. Then her long black hair was brushing my belly and she began the blowjob, a long slow one, a tantaliser, taking just the right time. She knew what she was doing.

  ‘Do you like that?’

  I couldn’t speak. I was breathless. On Olympus.

  ‘And now it’s my turn.’

  She rammed herself hard onto me and guided my hands to her breasts. The nipples stood out like bursting chestnuts. Then she brought my hands round to her haunches. I gripped them while she did the thrusting. A beauty of a bum, rounded, big and firm. I inserted one finger into her arsehole. She shuddered suddenly and howled and I flowered inside her. The howl modulated into a girl’s giggle and she sank slowly onto me with a long soft sigh.

  We stayed in Ismarus for another twenty-one days.

  ‘And some fucking blunder that turned out to be, Odysseus!’ as the crew wasted no words in telling me. ‘And all on account of an arousing arse!’

  ‘It was not an arousing arse,’ I said, ‘it was an arse to die for.’

  ‘And some of us did die for it too!’

  So they did. Not on the web, of course, where you can see the hapless captain, Odys
seus, urging his crews on, eager to be away from Ismarus, longing to plough the watery waste that lies between him and his hearth, where his faithful wife, the soul of patience, waits with outstretched arms, a far cry from Clytemnestra.

  Plough the barren waste? Odysseus wouldn’t prefer to plough a firm and fertile belly, would he? Why would he want to be fucked each night by a broad-rumped nymph when he could be slogging at the oars, hauling home to Ithaca, to farming and fidelity? Perish the thought – and piss on the real villains of the piece, the crews, the drunken cunts, knocking back Maron’s wine, slaughtering the sheep and cattle, and shagging the arses off all the women in sight.

  Not so far off the mark, in fact. Some of the free women, the ones we hadn’t taken on board, took to approaching the ships and bringing wineskins and baskets of bread. They also lay on their backs for any sailor who cared to slip them a trinket from Troy, a bead, a bangle, anything no longer worn by the Trojan women, who now wore only shackles. War doesn’t put a stop to the world’s oldest trade, it promotes it. We took these women to be the local whores.

  Wrong. Approximately one hundred percent fucking wrong. They were the wives of the Ismarus quitters, and a fucking good job they made of keeping my men horizontal while their husbands went up-country getting backup from the neighbours. And the neighbours, as it turned out, were neighbours from hell, nothing like the peaceable breed we’d overrun without a man down. This lot were fighters, just like us. This is for the record – not all Cicones are spineless.

  One dim dawn we heard it, a drunken rumbling, distant, like a dream of Troy, thunder in the mountains. The priest had risen early to pray in the grove. The goddess of the grove was praying under me – with her legs in the air. Nothing to worry about. Next thing, the fucking chariots were among us. Sometimes you don’t know it’s happening till the door gets kicked in. This was one of those times. We had to arm in the dark, and not all of the men could find their arms. Some of them couldn’t find their cocks either – afterwards, we found them lying there with their throats cut and as cockless as can be, courtesy of the last shag in Ismarus. Easy to slit the scrotum of a man who’s just shot his spunk into you and is now snoring his drunken bonce off.

  Too easy. I lost more than seventy men. We didn’t surrender a single ship, but still they broke us, the bastards, the line we formed couldn’t hold, there were too many of them, and by the time we made the ships, there wasn’t a single woman left on board, not even the women we’d brought from Troy. All gone. The Cicones had whacked us, and it was down to me. I had to admit I’d shot an arrow through my foot.

  ‘Your foot? You’ve shot one up each man’s arse! And all for a bit of fucking skirt!’

  Tell it not on the web, Penelope, spin it my way, the way I told you, only don’t give the girl a name. If I knew it, I’ve forgotten it. She was Maron’s wife, that’s all I know. Not quite all, if you want to know. She was a fuck from the gods, a priest’s pussy, an altar gift. Apollo was on my side after all.

  We weren’t far off Ismarus when that hellish daytime darkness came down, the deadly calm kind that tells a sailor in his bowels what’s coming next. The gale struck us out of the north and quickly turned into a hurricane. It hit us broadside. The sails were ripped to shit in seconds.

  ‘Lower the masts!’ I yelled.

  We lowered – and rowed. And rowed and rowed. For two days and nights we rowed for dear life, nothing to eat or drink, no time to weaken, to unbend, not a second, till the third morning cracked open with a gorgeous dawn and we reached the Cape of Malea.

  Malea. Fucking Malea. The old-timers had a saying: when you round Cape Malea, forget the folks at home. Forget farms, fires, sunsets, children, your wife’s breasts. Forget the dreams of age. We’d almost rounded it when the north wind hit us again, this time combined with a bugger of a swell and a current that shoved us right off course for Ithaca and forced us past Cythera. That’s what happens when you hit the blue hump of Malea. You can come down sweetly with a northerly at your arse all the way, alter course through three hundred degrees in a jumble of whitecaps and find you’ve turned into a headwind that can wreck you on Crete or cuff you out onto the open sea, where you can be anybody’s – gods’, monsters’, the sea’s breakfast. We avoided the Cytherean reefs, but the oarsmen could do fuck all. One second there was a sea coming over the side Olympus high, next second it was sucked so far down there was nowhere to bury the blade. The oarsmen were ploughing empty air. We were whipped downwind towards Libya. Nine stinking days on end, a cunt of a storm that threatened to make corpses of us all. And there wasn’t a day on which one ship or another didn’t lose a man. By the time we struck land, we didn’t know where we were. We could have been in Africa. And the ships were battered to buggery. But they were still good to go. It was the men that were wrecks. Never mind, they said, we’d come to the right country.

  Or so it seemed. As close as you get in this life to paradise. We’d reached the land of the lotus-eaters.

  That’s what Penelope called them. They were dope-heads – but let them be lotus-eaters and lend addiction an enhancement. None of us much cared what the fuck they were on that first landing. When you’ve been climbing walls of water for nights on end and every second expecting the big one, the one that sends you down the sea’s white gullet to greet Poseidon, the first thing you do when you hit land in the dark and feel the old earth under your feet, solid and unshifting, is to stagger up the beach a few steps, just out of reach of the sucking tide, and drop down in a dead heap into a long fucking slumber. That’s what we did.

  *

  We woke with singing in our ears. Dreaming again? Always the dreams. Then I thought I was dead and that the next life hadn’t started off so badly – till I realised the trilling lilting figures bending over us were real, and human, and I sat up and took stock.

  They were unarmed – that was the first thing that checked out. They were also bare buff, starkers, not a stitch other than the strings of beads; the men all hung out and the females bristling with pubes and boobs. Essence. They had the longest hair I’d ever seen, both sexes, and with flowers twisted in, the same flower, the clear favourite around here. The lotus flower.

  And the language? Couldn’t understand a fucking word. Not that it mattered. Most of the time they didn’t speak at all, they sang, went around singing like they were in some sort of trance. It didn’t take long to get the picture; they were stoned out of their minds. And whatever they were on turned them on, especially the women. They didn’t waste any time – they came right onto us, literally, and started rubbing their nipples and stroking their pussies and letting us see by gestures what they wanted, just in case we were too dumb to work it out. Their men just stood around grinning and singing and giving obvious approval. If we hadn’t hit the Isles of the Blessed, this was the next best thing.

  Ask a sweaty, hairy sailor for a shag and you won’t have to ask twice. The only thing that had bucked under me since Maron’s wife was the sea, and this was altogether pleasanter than being shagged by Poseidon. It got even weirder. My piece of pussy had just changed position and come on top when one of the girls tapped her on the shoulder. She got off without a word and strolled over to another couple while the new arrival took over. The same thing was going on all over the beach – free love in an open-air commune, one in which you knew you could very willingly waste your time. For a time. Which is what we did. For a time. The nights reeled like drunkards and we drowned in the deep stench of flesh, armpits thick with musk, lips groggy with lust. And by day, sun, sea and still more sex, and all in a glorious narcotic stupor. What more could you ask for?

  So Odysseus beached his ships on the island of the lotus-eaters, where it was always afternoon, and whose inhabitants spoke to the crew in a strange tranquil language that needed no translation. Benignly mindless, the words dropped softer than petals from blown roses, night-dews in dry stone troughs, tired eyelids on tired eyes.

  They looked about them. Forests, mountains, mountai
n streams. But the streams were silent as dreams, each descending slowly like downward plumes of smoke, muted by distance. There were waterfalls too, clifftop-spilling cataracts that seemed to pause rather than fall, and from far below the wet haze rose in an unheard slow cloud. In the farthest distance were three more mountains, higher still, impossibly lofty pinnacles, capped with snow, in the blue swoon of the sky, up among the gods.

  And out of the green gates of the forest they trooped, the strange race, bearing baskets laden with flowers and fruit. Unafraid and uncurious, they stroked the mariners’ salt-stiff hair, smiling and singing and encouraging them with gestures to eat. Some strolled over to the ships and put their faces briefly to the black hulls. A sea-girt people, yet they had no knowledge of ships, nor any understanding of the weapons that lay scattered on the sands, emblems of war.

  The crews accepted the fistfuls of fruit which the islanders crammed into their mouths, and instantly they lost their cares, lost all desire even for home, or for struggling ever again against the grey wastes of water that lay between them and their almost forgotten families. The eternal bench, the eternal oar, the roll to starboard, roll to larboard, the plunging prow, the soaring stern, the salt in the throat, the eyes gone mad with studying the sun and staring out the stars – all that and the life of never-ending hardship, never-ending toil: how easy it seemed now to embrace the sweetly offered alternative.

  And this is what the lotus-eaters seemed to sing.

  Stay, sailors, stay for the songs

  that bring sweet sleep softly

  down from the yellow skies,

  stay here with us, on deep cool mosses,

  sleep by the streams where the long-leafed

  flower weeps, the sun-drenched poppy hangs

  in summer stupor from the scented crags,

  and wake to hear this song, and fall