Penelope's Web

by Christopher Rush

  But I was oblivious to all that as my escorts lifted me out of the stern, still sleeping, and laid me on the sands, out of reach of the sucking tide, the tricky liquid fingers of Poseidon. They stacked all the Phaeacian gifts against the olive tree and sailed off again without waking me, though dawn had broken. The Phaeacians soon put blue furrows on the ploughlands of the sea, and they were quickly back within sight of their native Scheria.

  I found out later that they didn’t make it. Poseidon’s anger never left him, and though I was now safely back on Ithacan soil, he continued to hound me in the only way he could, by attacking my friends. He was waiting for them not far from the home port.

  ‘So you think you can offer safe passage to an enemy of mine and get away with it, do you? Think again!’

  They braced themselves for a squall, but the salty old sea-shaker had something much worse in mind. One smack from his crashing hand – and ship and crew were frozen, turned to stone in a twinkling together, anchored to the sea-bed, the ship and her petrified sailors now nothing more than a rock off Scheria, a rock whose shape bore witness to the crime of their convoy and Poseidon’s eternal anger.

  Safe? I’d woken up alone and unprotected on a home soil that was crawling with dangers. I wasn’t even sure at first that I really was in Ithaca. The entire landscape was veiled in a mist, and I couldn’t recognise a thing. I looked about me for the old familiar hill-tracks, the sleepy bays, the steep crags, the green trees of home. Where were they? What I couldn’t see, being a mere mortal, was the goddess standing on the edge of the web, working her wonders. Pallas Athene had sent the mist to hide me. Sitting there beside a pile of treasure, I could easily have been robbed and murdered by the first bandits to happen along. And there was also the need to disguise me from the murderous suitors, and from my own wife and son, servants and subjects. Athene needed to allow me time to form a plan of action, to take the suitors by surprise and make them pay for their crimes. So she appeared before me as a handsome young shepherd, cloaked and sandalled and carrying a javelin, a likely looking lad. And when I asked where I was, the bright eyes mocked me gently. Only an idiot wouldn’t know he was in Ithaca.

  I could have cried on the shepherd’s shoulder. But disguising my relief and explaining my ignorance, I spun a tangled yarn. I’d killed a man in Crete and had had to flee. This was after I’d fought at Troy. It had been a long campaign and I’d come back with all the spoils that were stacked now against that tree. The man I’d killed had tried to rob me of what I’d won, and one tar-black night I’d ambushed him and given him a breastful of bronze to remember me by in Hades. He never knew what hit him. After that I had boarded the first ship I could find – a Phoenician – and paid the captain to take me to Pylos or Elis, but they were driven off course and landed in Ithaca. They ditched me and my booty on shore and set sail for Sidon, leaving me to my treasures and my troubles.

  ‘Old Odysseus still!’

  I was studying the sand as I spun the yarn, as if deep in thought, and when I looked up the shepherd had turned into a tall beautiful woman, dazzling and accomplished, obviously a goddess. She was laughing at my story and congratulated me on it.

  ‘But you’re quite right to be so wary. This place may be home, but it’s a death-trap for you if you reveal yourself, so listen to what I have to say.’

  First she hid the gifts at the back of the cave, stashed well away in the gloom. Then she sat me down under the olive tree and brought me up to date with all that had happened in Ithaca over the past nineteen years, and what was going on now. Penelope had of course proved herself to be the soul of patience and piety, faithful to her long-absent husband, even though most folk openly pronounced him dead or at least unlikely to return.

  This admirable stance of hers came at a price. She had suffered and was still suffering the agonies of not knowing for sure if she’d ever see me again, and not a dreary day nor slow night passed when she didn’t wash her worries with her tears or bury her sorrowful head in her hands. Worse than that, for the last three years she’d been under intense pressure from her father to declare me dead, or missing presumed dead, and to re-marry. During these last years, she’d been hounded by a pack of wasters, idle young aristocrats, each of whom entertained high hopes of marrying her with tempting offers and becoming king in my place. Penelope was a beautiful woman on whom age had bestowed depth and desirability, but it was the potential power and not Penelope that spurred on these unprincipled profligates. Whoever controlled Penelope would control Ithaca. Technically, she was still married, but to a husband who was a war statistic or an accident at sea, either way long forgotten. And, either way, throne and bed were empty. Both needed to be filled.

  For a long time, she’d kept this gang of wastrels at bay with a smart ruse, assuring them she’d marry, but only after she’d completed the weaving of a shroud for her husband’s poor old father, Laertes, who was failing badly now and wasting away. The shroud had to be ready for his eventual demise, and though this was expected any day, still his body clung to life, though his spirit was long gone, a spirit extinguished by grief for his lost son.

  Every day, Penelope wove this shroud – and each night she unravelled it again in secret, so that it was never finished. When one of her maids, a slut who was sleeping with a suitor, betrayed her, they confronted her with her trickery and insisted she make her choice. Again, she continued to procrastinate by giving encouraging signals to all of them while sending out secret messages to selected individuals – thus playing them off against each other. But they had grown wise to this stratagem too and were now demanding her decision. Time had almost run out for her.

  It would have run out far earlier but for the fact that the spongers were having a high old time at my expense – slaughtering my beasts and lording it in my house and grounds, stuffing their fat paunches and swilling the best wines down the soft white necks that I now dreamed of slitting. They were out of control, living it up like locusts on the rampage, living on the fat of the land. My land. I burned with sudden blood-lust but also felt helpless and uncertain.

  ‘What should I do?’ I asked Athene.

  ‘You don’t have to do anything, not right now. I’ll do it for you.’

  She explained the first stages of the plan.

  ‘First I’m going to wither your skin and snow white hairs on your head and in your beard, which I will tangle with knots and thorns. Then I’ll drain the shine from your eyes till they’re weak and watery and running with rheum. I’ll give you a stoop and a stumbling step. I’ll clothe you in the vilest rags, blackened by smoke and rotten to the nose. I’ll crack your vocal chords so that your voice will be unrecognisable. I’ll even alter your accent. Your own mother wouldn’t be able to identify you, not even if you were to go back down to Hades and confront her. Nobody will know you.

  ‘And now for the next part of the plan. Cutting this disreputable figure, beggar and vagabond, you’ll go to the hut of your old swineherd – yes, that’s right, Eumaeus, he’s still alive, and about the only loyal servant you have left, for he’s still attached to your memory and serves Penelope as best he can, though the suitors give the orders now, decimating your herds and running riot in the palace.

  ‘You’ll find Eumaeus pasturing the pigs out at the Raven’s Crag and by the Springs of Arethusa. There they eat the acorns they love and drink deeply from the pools, fattening their carcasses for the gullets of the suitors. Go there now and introduce yourself, tramp as you are. He won’t spurn you, and even as a stranger you’ll get all the details from him, I promise you. He hates the mob that’s now running the house and would do anything to see them ousted. Just don’t give him any inkling of who you really are, that’s all.’

  ‘And you? What will you do? Are you going to leave me now? Where will you go?’

  ‘I’m going to Sparta to bring back your son.’

  ‘Telemachus – in Sparta? With Menelaus?’

  ‘He hasn’t given up hope, not altogether. You have to reme
mber how long you’ve been away. That infant Palamedes put in front of the plough is now a young man trying to assert himself. And now that he’s of age he’s trying to take on the suitors and he’s gone to Lacedaemon by way of Pylos to see if Nestor or Menelaus have any news of you, and to find out if there’s any chance that you’re still alive.’

  ‘But it’s a wasted journey. Menelaus won’t have a clue what’s happened to me since Troy. But you do. Why didn’t you just tell the boy, instead of letting him go off chasing seabirds?’

  ‘Because this trip will be good for him. Trust a goddess. Telemachus is a young man flexing his muscles and finding his feet. And he’ll need to keep his wits about him. The suitors have sent out a ship of their own to intercept him. That’s their plan – to ambush him on the return trip. They want him out of the way. That way it will be easier for one of them to marry Penelope and seize power. But don’t look so worried! They won’t get far with their plan. And if our plan succeeds, it won’t be too long till their families are throwing the dirt over their dead heads.’

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Take out the preternatural arrival, the petrification by Poseidon, the nymphs and shepherds, the cosy chat with Pallas Athene and the miraculous metamorphosis, goddess-provided, and that’s roughly how things fell out. Which leaves very little in the way of truth. If Athene had really shown up to help me out, it would have been a first. As it was, I had to see to the disguise myself.

  That wasn’t so hard, being an old master of the art, added to which the freebooters that took me to Ithaca were in no hurry, and by the time they put me ashore I’d grown my hair and beard and smeared myself with ship’s pitch and a lot more. I took on the bouquet of the bilge, the stench and speech of sea-dogs. I was revolting. Even the tars themselves gave me a wide berth. By the time my feet touched terra firma, a dog wouldn’t have given me the time of day.

  Or so I thought.

  In any case, I didn’t need a goddess to tell me to check out the lie of the land. There was no question of turning up and throwing open the door on Penelope. Greetings, I’m home from hell. Home from hell? I’d fucked all and sundry – so why wouldn’t she have too? Time cools your bedsheets, and what woman doesn’t want a man who can feel and see? Not a cold ghost or a pile of bones on some lonely shore. And look what happened to Agamemnon. Home from the wars to a good hot bath of his own blood, murdered by a bitch and a bastard. One hell of a homecoming, that bloodbath, comeuppance or not. I’d heard various versions of it on the long route home, but they all ended the same way – bloodily. Not wanting Agamemnon’s reception, I was coming in by the back door.

  I climbed up the old stony mountain path through the forest, feeling more of a revenant than a returner. A soldier’s ghost. I was making for the hut of my old steward, Eumaeus, the pigman, not even knowing whether or not he was still alive.

  He was. He was sitting on his own in the porch, cutting himself a pair of sandals from an oxhide. Everything looked pretty much the same, except for the courtyard he’d constructed around the homestead, built of solid quarried stone and hedged all along the top of the wall with wild pear, with a stockade running all the way round outside, forming an extra protection. It was a good sign. He was a tough old bugger, and he’d been busy in my absence. He had twelve sties safe inside the yard, a good fifty sows and their litters to a sty, with the boars outside, and four watch-dogs on guard, savage looking bastards. I had to suppress my instinct to go right in and congratulate him on his work. I hung back, thinking that if I could recognise him so easily, maybe he’d see straight through my disguise.

  I didn’t have the time to debate it. The four brutes twitched and sprang up and flew at me, all teeth and slavers. I dropped my staff and sat down fast on my arse to appease the bastards. It didn’t stop their charge, and I’d have been shredded if Eumaeus hadn’t dashed out and checked them.

  ‘That was a close call, old man,’ he panted. ‘Are you all right?’

  I said I was in one piece, and I was glad that all he saw was a broken-down old beggar. So far the camouflage was working.

  ‘They’d have ripped your throat out in two seconds – they’re bad buggers. But that’s what they’re for; they earn their keep. You’d better come in.’

  He took me in and sat me down on a brushwood seat, which he covered with a thick goatskin. I reckoned it was his mattress. He brought out bread and wine.

  ‘Now then, sup up. And once you’ve seen off your hunger and thirst, we’ll eat properly and you can tell me all your troubles. You look as if you’ve been through a few.’

  I’d not come short on sorrows in my time, I had to agree. ‘But it’s great to be given good hospitality. Your employer’s a lucky man to own you.’

  He shook his head and spat. ‘Lucky? And I’d be fucking lucky too, if I had an employer. He’d have pensioned me off by now with something better than this. A nice bit of land – and a beddable wife to go with it, know what I mean? That’s what he’d have done, if he’d stayed in Ithaca.’

  ‘And why didn’t he?’

  ‘Because he went to fucking Troy, that’s why, like the rest of his generation that got sucked into that pointless fucking war.’

  I ventured the suggestion that bringing back Helen was maybe not so pointless. I wanted to hear what he would say. He got up and stamped around the little hut.

  ‘I’m amazed you’d even consider that point of view, my friend. They got sucked in by lies, I’m telling you, leaders’ fucking crap. Odysseus knew it well enough, but there was fuck all he could do to avoid it. Every cunt knew what that war was about. What’s any war about? Expansion, envy, avarice, prejudice, power. Helen? Helen my arse. She needed her crack filled, and she filled the young men’s mouths with dust. She was a good excuse, that’s all. What’s a tart worth to the towers of Troy? No fucking comparison. You’ll have to excuse me, old chum, I get steamed up when I think of my master lying dead out there – and all for the sake of the glory boys and the greed. And yet why should I care if kings rot or return? I should care if it rains, that’s all. Kings are clouds blown by the winds, well over my head.’

  I started to mutter an apology, but he stopped me.

  ‘No – my job, apologies. Here you were about to tell me your troubles, and what do I do? I start spitting out mine like a madman and an arse. Pardon me, and let’s make up with a fucking good feed.’

  He took two young porkers and killed them and singed them in no time, then he chopped and skewered and soon had the joints roasted on the spits then served up piping hot with a good sprinkling of white barley. He put a crude olive-wood bowl in front of me and mixed in the water and wine. He handed me a cup.

  ‘I’d give you better, friend, but the best around here gets eaten up by that pack of lazy, lickerish dogs who call themselves suitors. That’s a fucking pretext for idleness and ambition, even leaving the lechery out of it. Suitors? Cunt-sniffers and upper-crusters, every single one of them. They won’t leave my mistress alone.’

  ‘Can you blame them for that?’

  ‘She’s a fine-looking woman, it’s true – but they’re shits to a man.’

  I kept my face hidden in the bowl.

  ‘Are any of them in bed with her?’

  Eumaeus shrugged.

  ‘How would I know? She seems to keep them at bay right enough, the bastards, but who knows what goes on in the dark between the sheets. Some nights they say there’s at least one of them doesn’t go home.’

  ‘Any one in particular?’

  ‘Well, there’s Amphinomous; she’s supposed to be fond of him. And Eurymachus, the richest of the bastards. Then there’s Antinous, but he’s a complete cunt. I don’t know. Sometimes there’s more than one at a time, if you know what I mean. That’s just fucking tongue-wagging, of course. But some of her maids are having it off with them, that I know for a fact. And a woman has needs like a man, doesn’t she? And if her husband’s dead, what does it matter?’

  ‘Does she think he’s dead?’
/>   ‘How do I know what she thinks? Does she know what she thinks? Half the time I don’t know what I fucking think myself. Do you know what you think?’

  I said I thought Odysseus was still alive.

  ‘They all say that.’

  ‘Who’s they?’

  ‘All the tramps and roadsters.’

  ‘But what would you say if I told you I had reason to believe it? I mean hard evidence.’

  Eumaeus spoke quietly.

  ‘Beggar as you are, I’m going to beg you – don’t, please, come out with that one. It’s got a beard by now. Every wanderer who pitches up here turns out to have seen Odysseus. Or they’ve heard he’s still alive or he’s about to reappear. But not one of them has ever come up with the hard evidence you say you have, at least not hard enough to convince his widow. She’ll listen to what you have to say all right, and she’ll get upset, as women do when they hear their loved ones may have survived the war, when they know in their hearts they’re just as dead as they can be. This one is a story without an ending, and somebody is always keeping it going, and all for the sake of a square meal and some wine to wash it down. Give enough detail and you’ll even get a tunic with a nugget sewn in, and a cloak to keep out the next winter. You wouldn’t believe how many Odysseuses have been sighted in different countries at the same time – a dozen true stories and every one a lie. So don’t even think about adding another, don’t stoop to it, there’s no need. I’m telling you for sure, Odysseus is a corpse, a dismembered one. Dogs will have eaten him long ago and the birds will have pecked his bones nice and clean. They’re out there on some shore and his ribs are letting in the rain. Or they’re deep beneath the sands of some barren beach. Or they’re rolling in the ocean. What difference does it make? If he’d been given a proper burial, we’d have been sent word about the barrow long ago. But we never heard a thing about it, and that’s because there’s nothing to hear. He’s got no mound. He’s a lost soul. He went out to fight and never came back and never will. It’s as simple as that. I can’t make it any clearer, can I? I’ll never see him again.’