Penelope's Web

by Christopher Rush

  FORTY-FOUR

  We did burn and bury the dead Elpenor, for decency’s sake, high on a headland, and built him a mound with a monumental stone on top, surmounted by his oar, almost as if he’d asked for it and we’d followed his instructions. Except that dead men don’t ask anything. So they don’t ask to be taken home.

  Which doesn’t mean that you won’t be brought back home dead from a war like Troy. Or at least more dead than alive, and still fighting the war inside you. Men talk about the end of the war, but the war doesn’t end: it comes home with you. The battlezone shifts, that’s all. Different weapons, different defences.

  On the way back, I kept asking myself about home. And about hell. What my dream of hell had meant. And what Circe had told me about the post-war trials I’d have to face, the monsters of the mind, the sirens of seduction, the arms of oblivion, in which all women turn into goddesses.

  ‘Home is sweet when you’re away from it, Odysseus, when you dream of logs on the fire and wine in the cup and a woman’s belly in your bed. A firm breast is filling up your fist and the nipple tingles on your tongue. A good dream of home. Not so sweet, though, when you wonder who’s fucking your wife while you’re in the field. Not so sweet when you get there and find the milk’s gone sour. Or when you ask yourself what you’re going to do next.’

  Next. What next? The hell of home, burying my oar in the earth, never to feel the liquid thrust of the sea against it, never again the push against ocean, the magic moment, the fluency of escape from the earth-bound life. A life without salt. A winnowing fan. Seafarer become farmer, back to tilling the thistles, the sweaty soil under which he’ll lie soon enough, unthanked, anonymous. Goodbye to the watch-fires, the comradeship, the plumed troops, the glorious charge, the horses, the thrill of survival, breasting waves, wars, coming through, coming home – goodbye to all of that.

  Women are mind-readers. No matter what you keep back from them, they’ll get behind your eyes, they’ll suck it out of you, your deepest need, your darkest dream, the private hurts. What I didn’t or couldn’t tell Penelope she reached in and probed for, like a field surgeon. The hell-dreams went up on the web, just as she saw them, or chose to see them. There was no stopping the glorious story. Her husband was a hero, and heroes have to overcome the enemy, the obstacles, the hells that open up between husband and wife to make the hero’s love stronger and his return the more heroic: monsters, gods, women, wine, songs, the sea and all its islands, and its dead, the perished dead. And the singers of the dead.

  The Sirens were the singers of the dead, and Circe’s chart started with them.

  Sail south for Levkas. Your first next encounter will be with half-women who bewitch with their beautiful voices every passing ship that sails within earshot. For once heard, however fleetingly, their songs cannot be resisted. They suck in the sailor to certain death and sing his soul away. No homecoming for him, no sailor safe home from sea, with wife waiting and children waving, not for the mariner who hears their music and its imperative allure. Sail too close and you will join the ranks of dead men.

  On your approach to the Sirens’ Isle, you will see them, Odysseus, their mouldering bones rolling in the tide, littering the meadows where the women sit and sing, sometimes frolicking in the foam. These are the skeletons of the seamen who stopped to listen and were compelled to stay. If you wish to live and avoid that boneyard, speed on past the sweetly lethal fields. The winds will drop, your crew will take to the oars, and you will have to plug their ears with soft beeswax, so that they sit stalwartly on the benches and pull stoutly on the oars, heedless of what they cannot hear. If you yourself wish to listen to the irresistible, leave your own ears unplugged, but order your men to lash you, body, hand and foot, to the mast, and to pay no attention to your mad mouthing. Tell them to tie you all the tighter and refuse to free you, and so sail on regardless through the thrilling songs of death.

  Should you survive this hazard, you will only sail straight into another, which will be one of two, depending on the route you choose to follow. One route will bring you to the Drifters, also known as the Wandering Rocks, at whose beetling base blue-eyed Amphitrite drives in her breakers in rollings of white thunder, a boiling cauldron, and a surge so high and wild that the seabirds never fly by unscathed, not even the ambrosial doves that veer off to Olympus. Not even Zeus can cut the casualties – he must replace them every one, for Amphitrite is Poseidon’s spouse and the capricious Queen of the Sea.

  Take that route, and, be assured, you’ll see how all the other seamen who ever tried it ended up. They’re sea-drift now, flotsam, white bones whirled by waves, tossed with the timbers of their ships, and their dead heads loll, listless as seaweed, aimless, empty as dreams, blind and uncaring in the joyless surge. If you do see that much, it will be the last thing you’ll see, and your own heads will join that jostling throng and all that wreckage, you and all your crew. There’s no escape.

  Not unless the gods help you, as Hera once helped Jason. The glorious Argo was the only ship ever to make that passage and come through, homeward bound from Colchis. And it took the love of a powerful goddess to stop that ship from splintering on the crags with all its crew, lost in the waves’ white flames, as will surely happen to you, Odysseus, and to the last man on board, should you choose that route. For no goddess loves you as Hera loved Jason, and the mortal woman who loves you with all her heart sits at the loom in faraway Ithaca, powerless to save. Even I, Circe, cannot save you, not unless you elect instead to stay with me on this enchanted isle and end your struggles here. Are my breasts not sweeter than the Wandering Rocks, with the storms of white fire sweeping their feet and the sea heaving with broken spars and drowned corpses?

  The ideal hero brought home again, the dream soldier back to his dream wife through the worst journey in the world. I was enmeshed in Penelope’s web – and deader there than I’d have been at the hands of the Sirens or of Amphitrite.

  Or of Scylla and Charybdis, the next dreadful venture on Circe’s sea-map, two more female monsters to block the route to Ithaca. Circe, watching over her wanderer, was joined in thought by the fair Penelope, wearing her years like the bloom of dust on a golden bowl, long unused but still glorious to behold.

  So if you avoid the Drifters, you’ll face two more dangers, and here too you will have a choice. Or you will appear to. But study the chart carefully and you will see that this choice has already been made for you.

  The higher of the two rocks is unscaleable, even if the most nimble climber had twenty hands and feet to help him on his ascent, or descent. For the rock is polished marble. Not only that, but halfway up the peak, facing west, and running down to darkened Erebus, sits a mist-hung cave, so high that not even an expert archer’s arrow fired from the deck beneath could ever succeed in reaching it. All the arrows that were fired at Troy could not help you here. And in that cave lurks Scylla, the worst monster ever created. Her bark is a ludicrous yelp, and when sailors hear it they laugh. But the first sight of her quickly wipes the smiles from their faces. Twelve legs with clawed feet, dangling like tentacles, and six swaying necks, scarily long, each head furnished with a triple row of terrible teeth. With these, she sweeps the roaring seas beneath without ever having to leave the cave: swordfish, dolphins and dogfish are dragged from the deeps by that grisliest of fisherwomen. Even the ocean monsters are taken from their lairs. And if a ship steers past her, it’s never without the loss of six members of her crew. This happens with unfailing accuracy – one man picked off at leisure for each of those six heads. It’s an inevitability you have to accept – go there and you are six men down, even if you get through, which is by no means certain.

  Now you’ll be thinking about the alternative, but this is scarcely tempting either. The other crag has a huge fig tree growing out of it, lush and shaggy, better than Scylla’s polished tombstone of a rock, or so you might think. But beneath it sits the dreaded Charybdis, sucking hard at the dark waters. Three times a day she draws them down, e
xposing the very sea-bed, the black sands of the bottom. It’s a sight to freeze the bowels of the most salt-bitten sea-dog. And three times a day she spews them up again, raging like a cauldron on a blaze, and the flung spray soars upwards higher than the peaks on either side, raining down again like white fire. Go there when she gulps and not even Poseidon could save you, though that is the last thing on his mind. Ships and sailors are simply sucked to the bottom of the world and never seen again.

  Is there a safe middle way through the strait? The distance between the two terrors is no more than a bowshot, and if you avoid the one you face the other. No, there’s no middle way – you steer closer either to Scylla or Charybdis, and from these directions you must already have decided which to choose.

  The green eyes of Circe gleam at me from the web. Will it be possible, I wonder, to steer clear of Charybdis and be ready to take on Scylla myself when she attacks the ship?

  The green eyes blaze.

  You always were a stubborn fool, always swimming against the stream instead of going with the flow. There is no taking on Scylla, as you put it. Do you think it will be like facing six Trojan soldiers at once, or even twelve? Listen hard. Scylla was not born to die. There is neither defence nor attack against her. She’ll be trapping men till time stops. Put off one second by attempting to fight her and she’ll simply take six more men at the next snatch. How many sailors do you think you can spare? How few can work the ship? Charybdis means certain death for all of you, but if you are quick past Scylla, you lose the six men and sail on. Accept this – she’s unshunnable but not inescapable. Speed on therefore, drive the ship like the wind.

  ‘Homeward bound?’

  Alas, no. If you survive these hazards, your next landfall will not be Ithaca. On the way south from Levkas, you’ll see a trident sticking out of the sea. That’s what it looks like, at least. It’s three hilltops, three headlands, and you know you’ll be approaching the island of Thrinacia, which is home to seven large herds of sheep and the same of cattle, fifty head each herd. They’re prize beasts, so beautiful your famished mariners will at once wish to begin slaughtering and feasting and living like kings. But be advised, the man who touches them will not live long, for they are sacred animals. The cattle are the oxen of the sun, and the sheep also belong to the sun-god. All the herds that pasture there are his, and they are immortal; they neither lamb nor calve, never a birth or death. Even their shepherdesses are divine – the lovely nymphs Phaethusa and Lampetia of the glinting locks, the sun-god’s own children, whom glowing Neaera to Hyperion bore, and brought them up, and later took them to Thrinacia to be the protectors of their father’s fatted cattle and his magnificent white sheep. Leave them be, therefore, and there’s a chance that all of you may yet arrive at Ithaca. Harm them and you die, the entire crew. And even if you yourself should escape death, Odysseus, you’ll come home later rather than sooner, much later, condemned by the years, friendless, alone, and in a very bad way.

  What a journey! What madness mapped out! What madman would attempt it? And in rejecting Circe’s safe embrace and setting out instead to meet gods and monsters of the deep, what could I be other than a madman? Lover, husband, father, soldier, son, veteran adventurer, wanderer by circumstance and not by choice, hero from the wars come home, home-bird on the wing, hell-bent for Ithaca, all against the odds, Poseidon, Persephone, all that heaven and earth and hell itself could possibly throw at me.

  *

  We left Aeaea, scudding along with a fair breeze behind us, and approached the Sirens’ Isle. Sure enough, the wind went out of the sails and a flat calm fell on the water. So we stowed the sails, and the men took their places on the benches and began to row, whitening the level water. I took a wheel of wax, cut off a good lump and kneaded it to a softness under the sun. With wedges of this, I stopped the ears of the crew and ordered two of the rowers to lash me to the mast before returning to the benches – just in time, as it happened, because the Sirens had seen our ship and sent their songs our way.

  Songs? They were no songs; they were liquid honey, dripping in the air, filling ears and mouth and mind with longing, such a longing . . . for what?

  Glorious Odysseus, stop your ship

  and linger, listen to our singing

  and voyage on with greater wisdom,

  for we know all things, all you did,

  all you suffered in the long struggle

  on the sea-sounding beaches

  and on Troy’s resounding plains

  where the men of Argos went to war.

  The songs went on. The things they were singing about, the beauty of the dead, the heroic dead, the epic past, the glories of war – yes, god help me, I missed all that, I loved it all, the thrill and stress of combat, the sheer simplicity of it all, of simply staying alive, I wanted back to it, back to the great Achilles whom we knew, to Agamemnon’s war, to the mighty dead. It didn’t matter that they were strengthless now, that it was over, that Achilles was a wailing wafer, sadder, wiser, mordant in Hades, it didn’t matter, the songs persuaded, corrupted. I cursed and swore at the crew to stop and let me drink it in, the wine of war to the very lees, but they only rowed the harder, past the rolling, mouldering bones and the ravishing singers, with homecoming hot in their hauling, every muscle, every pull on every oar, and no returning, no going back to the war that killed Achilles.

  And so we passed the Sirens’ Isle according to plan. But casualties were assured when we came to the straits, Scylla to starboard, to port Charybdis, and the ship in a bowshot’s compass, steering for sweet life. The sea was spinning downwards on the port side, and we could see all the way down its whirling, tunnelled sides, all the way to the black sands of the sea-bed in which the skeletons of seamen lay embedded, till Charybdis churned and hurled them to the sun. The crew screamed, terrified, and we steered for Scylla.

  If I’d told them that six of them were destined to perish, and in what manner, they’d have refused to go on, and the only alternative would have been to turn about and return to Circe. But their gallant captain, the home-driven husband, kept quiet on that point, and the six were snatched, just as Circe had predicted. We skimmed out of the straits with the shrieks of the taken men tearing us apart. There they are – their arms outstretched to me, calling for help, calling my name, Odysseus, Odysseus, my captain, my captain! Their captain had sacrificed them, and a great captain he was too, who’d barter boatmen for his home and the heroine of his hearth. What were six ordinary able-bodied seamen to the pleasures of Ithaca?

  So the captain came through. The hero had survived the terrible females who eat a man whole and swallow him up. He had survived encirclement, sucking and grubbing, total consumption, and now the intrepid hero arrived at the lovely Island of the Oxen of the Sun, where the sacred sheep and the broad-browed cattle of the sun-god grazed in bliss, shepherded by the nymphs that were his own offspring. The eyes of all the crew were gladdened by paradise, but their captain issued the strict order to avoid this island and put it astern, as advised by Circe of Aeaea and Tiresias in Hades. Their bitterness and disbelief were hard for Odysseus to hear, for they had been through so much together that they were a fellowship like no other.

  ‘Odysseus, you’re an iron man, a survivor, bitter as bronze. Your body never lets you down; you don’t let it. But we’re ordinary men, no heroes, soldiers at the end of their tether, mariners tired by the sea. We are burned under the sun. And now night is falling and you want us to be sailing blindly on into fogs and storms and the sea-god’s anger, when we could be harbouring safely here and cooking ourselves a hot supper on this idyllic isle. You wish to slake your wanderlust, but we need to fill our empty bellies and drink wine, and above all rest and sleep. What can be wrong with that, for one night? In the morning we can rise refreshed and be on our way, set sail for Ithaca. What do you say?’

  Against his better judgement and against the iron orders he’d been given by both living and dead, goddess and prophet, Odysseus gave in, only after the c
rew had promised to a man to leave the sacred cattle well alone and to content themselves with subsisting on the ship’s rations until they reached Ithaca. Then they beached and prepared a good supper, for Circe had stocked the boat and there was plenty of fresh spring water on the island, and after they had eaten they remembered the comrades they had lost in the straits, and with full bellies they wept for the dead again according to nature.

  But next morning the stormy weather struck the island and blotted out the world. Black skies and raging gales day after day, there was no let-up and no leaving. The south wind howled for a month, at the end of which every last scrap in the ship had been eaten and the men were ravenous. The mutinous mutterings started up. Why starve in the midst of plenty? What sort of captain refuses to feed his crew based on the babblings of a lecherous witch and a dead prophet? Odysseus had probably dreamed it all anyway, or dreamed it up, another excuse for delay, another obstacle in the long journey home. It was all he could do to keep discipline and face them down. And so, gnawed by hunger and quarrelling bitterly, they waited for the weather to change.

  It didn’t. And Odysseus went inland a little to be out of their whispering and grumbling, which was building up now to outright revolt. He came across a quiet spot and prayed to the gods for help. In answer, they sent him to sleep, and while he slept Eurylochus worked on the crew.

  ‘Listen, mates, our clever captain says we’ll be shipwrecked or something if we touch these cattle. Well, I’d rather gulp down a few mouthfuls of cold seawater than die a lingering death, tormented by hunger. Starvation is a horrible way to go. I’m ready to take the risk and avoid the worst of deaths. Are you with me?’