Everything unfolded as Hermes had predicted. Circe gave him the poisoned drink and struck him with her wand, ordering him off to the sties to wallow in the mud with his friends and eat pig-fodder. She was terrified when the hero remained unchanged and threatened her with his sword. That’s when she invited him to her beautiful bed, where in love and in the sleep that followed they might learn to trust each other. And this was an invitation which Odysseus could hardly refuse, being at the behest of a goddess, though first he made her swear, according to Hermes’ instructions, that she harboured no evil intentions and would do him no harm when she had him naked and vulnerable between her sheets. And so she swore, and so they went to bed.
The green eyes encompassed me again like the ocean. Night after night, she let fall the robe and loosened her hair. Night after night, she led me to her couch, lay down and extended those long white arms, like swans’ necks. I fell into those arms gladly, gratefully, and she reached out and took hold of me. I never wanted to leave. She read my body language, the tiredness of limbs and mind.
‘Anchor here, Odysseus, ride at anchor, always. Never leave me.’
I burst into tears.
‘I know,’ she said, ‘I know what it is. It’s the war, isn’t it? It won’t let you go. It will never let you go – not even years after it’s over and you’ve been too long from home.’
Home. It was here, on her belly, in her cunt. And more, more than home. Truth lay between her legs, and so did I, night after night. The harbour crooked its arm around me, excluding the ocean, eclipsing Ithaca. She drew me deeper down, down into the gentle swell of her breath. I heard the sigh of another sea. Night after night. And I wept. For all the friends I’d left at Troy, for my lost childhood, for my mother and father, and yes, for my Penelope, who would never know the truth. I told Circe I would never go home.
And so it might have been, so it might have gone on forever, until the wheeling constellations brought round the long hot days and the dreams of summer, when time stands still. And under the curse of time my men began to tire of Circe’s girls circling among them, sharing them, sharing themselves, never their own.
The four maidens were the nymphs of the springs and groves, born under boughs in crystal fountains, born of the ocean-flowing rivers. They spread chairs with purple rugs and brought silver tables, which they laid with golden baskets of bread and meat and bowls of sweet red wine, mixed in golden cups. They made baths of warm water and bathed all the men as Circe washed their captain’s memories out of him and clothed him in a new tunic, threaded without sorrow, into which not a hint of nostalgia had been woven. Only the present existed.
The men kept longing for their homes and for the sweet girls of Ithaca, who were innocent of all that Circe’s experts understood about the arts of love. I assured them they were imagining a past that existed now only in their heads.
‘The girls of Ithaca,’ I said, ‘are girls no more. They’re matrons with low-slung tits and sagging bellies. They’ve been ploughed and cropped, they’re worn-out fields. And the matrons are now old maids, all wrinkles and no teeth. The old maids are ash.’
They didn’t like that, and I had to tell them that the young girls of Ithaca, just in bud, were not waiting for a rag-tag straggle of veterans, scarred by war, to warm their beds. Their sheets were far from cool.
‘Ithaca’s a dream,’ I told them, ‘Circe’s girls are real. You have everything you could ask for here. Why change it?’
But they kept on coming at me, in ones and twos and sullen clusters, sometimes the whole crew – deputations, day after day. And in the end, I ran out of answers.
‘It’s been a year,’ Eurylochus said one day.
‘No it fucking hasn’t – it only feels that long.’
‘It’s been a fucking year.’
I was sad in Circe’s arms that night, and it wasn’t post-coital sadness. She felt it too.
‘I know you’re leaving me,’ she said. ‘And I know why. There’s no need to explain.’
‘It’s the crew,’ I said.
‘I know. But I know it’s more than that, it’s more than the men. What are they, after all? They’re the voices in your head, that’s all, telling you to be away again. I know you, Odysseus. This island can’t contain you, can it? You want to feel the flinty globe underfoot again, you want to feel your feet washed again by the cold ocean.’
‘Very poetic.’
‘And very true, don’t you think?’
It was true. And why? Why do we need it, the toil and trouble, the stress of battle, the blood and thunder, the uncertain sea? It’s something to do with not being static, not being bored, it’s something to do with pitting the wits instead, pitting the wits and surviving, staying alive. It’s something to do with death. And with hell.
‘That’s right, Odysseus, you’ll have to go to hell and back. And as soon as you leave me you’ll be in hell. For a time.’
And thus Odysseus lay supine and sad for a whole year while the lovely goddess lay with him, on him, and pleasured herself constantly, and all that time he longed for Penelope. And when the year was up, she agreed to let him go but assured him there was no going home until he undertook the next stage in his long journey – to find the Halls of Hades and Persephone the Dread, and there to seek out the spirit of the blind Theban prophet, Tiresias, who had seen Athene naked and had his eyes blasted out – though in compensation for this punishment she had given him the gift of prophecy. Tiresias knew things about people. Only Tiresias could help him come home.
‘But how to find the House of the Dead, Circe? Who can sail a ship into that darkness?’
And the goddess gave him the way.
‘Darkness is the only door. First, the north wind will waft you on your way, over the River of Ocean to a wild coast and to Persephone’s dusky groves, where the tall black poplars grow and the willows shed their seeds. Beach your boat there, on the edge of the eddying ocean, and proceed on foot into the House of Decay, the mouldering home for the dead. There the Styx breaks into the Wailing River and the River of Flaming Fire, which swirl around a rock to pour their thunder into Acheron, Water of Sorrow. At this spot dig a trench a forearm’s length and make it square, and around it pour your offering to all the dead, honey and milk mingled, sweet wine and water, sprinkled with white barley. The perished dead will hear your prayer. Promise them a sacrifice when you are back in Ithaca, and now sacrifice a young ram and a black ewe, turning their heads towards Erebus, with your own head turned away, facing the River of Ocean. Then all the souls of the glorious fellowship of the dead and departed will come up to you in their hundreds, and your crew must quickly skin and burn the beasts, killed by the pitiless bronze for pale Persephone, while you sit still, your sharp sword in your hand, and let not one stray spirit from the swarming phantoms of the dead approach the blood until you have had speech with Tiresias. He will appear and will direct you home again across the cold fish-glittering seas.’
These were Circe’s instructions. And when Odysseus informed his crew that they were bound for Ithaca that very day, they were overcome with joy, but when he told them about the journey they must make first to the House of the Dead and Persephone the Dread, they wept hot salt tears and bitterly tore their hair.
We suffered a casualty just before we left. Elpenor was the youngest of our bunch – not much of a soldier, or a sailor either, for that matter. He’d got himself as drunk as a lord the previous night and had gone up to the roof for fresh air and fallen asleep. He was wakened at dawn by the racket we made as we got ready to move out and, completely forgetting where he was, poor bugger, toppled from the roof and broke his neck, killed outright.
‘Well, that’s another silly cunt waiting for us in hell,’ said Eurylochus.
‘The more the merrier when we get there.’
FORTY-THREE
Hell. What is it? A story to chill a child by the fire on a winter’s night? An extension to mere extinction? A life of a kind beyond the grave, however ho
rrifying, however awful? Some say hell’s nothing, and therefore nothing to be afraid of. Who’d be afraid of nothing at all?
But that’s the very thing that frightens, isn’t it? Nothing is precisely what hell is, because hell is loss – loss of what you want and can never have, loss of what you had once, knew once and can never have again, never know again. That’s the cause of all unhappiness. And the ultimate loss is the loss of life, the eternal exile, the expulsion from light into darkness. That’s hell.
In the end, all men go to hell, good and bad. It makes no odds how you’ve lived; hell is the end of life, the land of nothings. And for the bereaved, until they too die and lose even their loss, hell is the nothing they’re left with, the loss of the loved ones that will never return.
Soldiers sometimes say that the battlefield is hell. But when you’ve played your part on that stage for long enough, far worse is the hell of leaving the theatre and wondering what to do now the show’s over. This is the hell of coming home, where you think you’ll be somebody, but where you discover that you’re nobody, you’re no man, not like in the field, where the next soldier relied on you. Home is hell. Soldiers’ dreams are hell. For a sailor, the unharvestable sea is hell.
I dreamed of hell once, not long after leaving Circe. Though I didn’t have to dream it to be in hell; I was in hell already after leaving her, just as she’d said I’d be. It wasn’t a bad dream, just weird, as dreams always are, though this one was weirder than weird.
I dreamed I’d gone to hell – I’d made the actual journey. There I ran into Tiresias, the blind Theban, who knew things. In the dream, he told me to take an oar once I reached Ithaca and make a last journey with it – but not a sea journey. I had to set out on foot carrying this oar till I reached a people who’d never seen the sea, never even heard of it, a people who had no salt to sprinkle on their meat. And I was suddenly in this foreign country, trying to tell them what a ship was. Some of them thought the oar I was carrying was some sort of winnowing fan. I picked up a sharp stone and drew a ship in the dust, with all the oars out. They thought it was a bird and the oars were wings.
After we left Aeaea, we were swept north – and north and north and further fucking north, relentlessly, till we were shrouded in cloud and mist and didn’t glimpse the sun or stars for nearly a week. We couldn’t even tell the difference between night and day; there was just this darkness hanging over us, as heavy as the thick black cloth over a friend’s urn.
One day, we struck land. Or one night, or night-day, or day-night. As desolate a place as I’d ever seen, barren crags, clinging mists. The crew refused to go ashore – they were fucking sick of my exploits, they said, and how I’d dropped them in one shit-hole after another. I couldn’t blame them, but I told them I’d go ashore solo this time and see what I could find out. Without sun or stars, we hadn’t a clue where we were, so I struck out, desperate for some clarity. I found nothing but an unexplained heartbreak inside myself and fields of asphodel stretching away from me, millions of white spikes rising up out of the bloated bulbs on which, so the old stories went, buried corpses gorged.
Soldiers fallen on the field with the life pouring out of them often cry out for their mothers. There’s a small boy with a hurt knee or cut finger in every grown man. And when the man is about to die, that small boy cries, wanting his mother to patch him up and hold him. At that low point in my journey, it was my mother I wanted more than anything, my dear old mother Anticleia. That’s when I knew I was in hell, just wanting to see her face again, to hear her voice and knowing, long before I reached Ithaca, that I never would.
There were moments in that dead land, on that dead shore, when I thought I saw her right in front of me. I reached out into the mist for her, and my arms embraced emptiness.
‘Where are you, mother? What are you?’
‘Wind,’ came the answer. ‘Air. All bones and flesh and sinews gone, burned away by the flames. But what’s left can still suffer. Even air can suffer, even a breath can feel sorrow. Even the wind can be sad.’
The tears ran from me. Was I still dreaming?
And then I felt it – drying the tears, literally, a breeze on my face, ruffling my beard. Wind. And a blue bore of sky overhead. I could see the ship sitting quietly in the tide, her sails fluttering. I started to run.
The crew were relieved. They crowded round me. ‘Where have you been?’
‘In hell,’ I said.
‘Is that all? We thought you were in trouble!’
‘I am in fucking trouble, and so are you. I need to see Circe again. One last time. Set a course if you can, for Aeaea.’
They stared at me. ‘What the fuck are you talking about? We want to go home!’
‘And home you’ll go, lads. But right now we have a reverse wind, and it’ll blast us back to meat and wine and warmth, to the sun and the stars.’
‘And to that woman! That fucking woman – who you want more than your wife!’
‘I’ll ignore that,’ I said. ‘Circe has the sea in her head. I need to speak to her again. I need her knowledge to bring us home, that’s all. I want what’s in her head.’
‘Between her legs, you mean!’
We found her again in less than three days, bustled back by the quick bright wind, steady as she goes. The men stayed on the ship. They’d had their fill of Circe’s girls. I registered their protest, but all the same I was back in her bed and glad to be there, though I knew this really was the last time. I poured myself into her.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘and where did you go to after you left me?’
‘To hell.’
‘I told you. You’ll be back there again, long before you reach home. And even after.’
We were blasted by the north wind out to the deeps, to the far-off frontiers of the globe, cuffed all the way to the fog-clung country of the Cimmerians, the people of perpetual darkness. We crossed the deeps and came to a savage shore and then to Persephone’s Grove, just as Circe had said. We saw the big black poplars and the seed-shedding willows, and we beached the boat by the churning strand and marched on to the place where the two rivers converged, spilling their thunder into Acheron. There I dug the trench and made my offerings, promising in Ithaca to slit the throats of a barren heifer and a jet-black sheep and to pile the pyre high with treasure.
Meanwhile, the sudden gush of blood brought the ghosts of the gone ones surging up from Erebus, the pale shoals of the dead, eager to drink the spilt blood and to taste departed life again. The numbers were unimaginable, as were the dark depths from which they swam: fresh young brides who’d known only an hour of love, untouched virgins, innocent and green, unmarried boys, old men with all of life’s sufferings falling like long shadows behind them, young lasses feeling the first thrusts of love and the stabs of sorrow in their hearts. And then came the mass of men who’d died like cattle in the field, some still wearing their bloodstained armour, some stripped and naked, just as they’d been left, unburied in the dust, hundreds of battle-dead, their stab-wounds still showing where the bitter bronze had let sweet life go and sent it wailing to this terrible place. The battlefield was nothing compared to this, so many gaping mouths, crimson lips on pale carcasses. And the screams of the field were just a fraction of the anguish of those lost souls, the combined howling of that horrible host.
But there was to be no pity for them, not until Tiresias had drunk the dark blood and outlined the next stages of my voyage and the extent of all my travels across the fish-gladdening waves, until gods and oceans finally let me go. Even then, the shoals of ghosts still had to form themselves into an orderly line so as to drink the blood in turn, one by one . . .
Elpenor, as the most recent of entrants to the horrors of Hades, came up first in the jostling throng, and it pained me to point my sword at him, barring the way to the blood, while he poured out his sorrow. How do you cheer up a soul in hell?
‘Hey, Elpenor!’ I exclaimed. ‘How did you manage to get here before me? You’ve been faster on f
oot than I’ve been by boat, though the black ship sped like a seabird!’
Souls in hell lose more than bones and muscles and blood; they lose all laughter. And Elpenor reminded me gloomily that in my haste to get away I’d left his body unburied and unwept on Circe’s island, where it still lay rotting. Perhaps Circe counted on my returning for it, and he begged me to pick it up for him, to put in again at Aeaea and burn him with all his arms, and to put up a mound for him there against the grey uncaring sea, a memorial to a luckless drunkard, and a sea-mark for sailors to steer by in time to come, charting a course far from the House of the Dead.
‘And Odysseus, will you take my oar to Aeaea and crown my mound with it, the oar I ploughed the sea with when I sat on the benches with my mates? All that ploughing, though to the wave-blooms on the broad sea-plains there comes no autumn, no reaping of the unharvestable ocean.’
I promised Elpenor I’d see to all of that, and still we stood there facing one another across the blood, as if he were an enemy, knowing that nothing but death could unite us again, and that was a union which I longed to postpone.
After Elpenor, there appeared Anticleia, my heart-cracked mother, but I could not allow her to approach me, stricken as I was with grief, until I had spoken to Tiresias.
Up he came out of the dark and ordered me to put up my sword and back away from the trench so that he could drink the blood and tell me my future. And so he found the voice he’d had in life, the very same. As always with Tiresias, it was no short speech.
‘So, Odysseus, you have left the sun to visit this joyless place where laughter and light are excluded and sweet life a bitter memory. But you are not yet ready for the House of the Dead, your time has not yet come. Only a man of many troubles would come here, and although I know how you long for home, I have to tell you that the gods have more trouble in store for you, and they will make your homeward voyage harder still. Poseidon hates you for what you did to Polyphemus. To you he was the dreaded anthropophagite, a man-eater you blinded for your revenge, but he was also the Earthshaker’s beloved son, and the father will shake you up on the seas before he’s done with you. He will open wide his white throat, and the sea-bed will stare you in the face. Even so, you may yet reach Ithaca with all your crew intact, but you must run a tight ship. Just be sure to take extra care when you arrive at the Island of the Oxen of the Sun. The cattle on Thrinacia belong to the sun-god, who sees everything under the blue sky. Touch them at your peril, and if your friends do so, they will perish, every one. You will lose your ship and you will come home broken and alone, with no crew to help you, on a foreign vessel, only to find a pack of wolves eating up your estate – ruthless, worthless beings, contemptible scroungers and seducers aiming to lure your wife into a marriage that will make a king of the winner and rob you of everything, kingship, country, the companion of your former years. One way or another – and it will not be easy – you will have to kill these suitors, destroy them to the last man, and the conclusion will be brutal, bloodier than any slaughter-house.
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