Penelope's Web

by Christopher Rush

  The household came to life. Telemachus appeared, flanked by two dogs and swinging his spear. I signalled to him not to approach me yet and he went on his way. Eurycleia shouted her morning orders.

  ‘Hurry along there, you’ve all last night’s slops to clean up, and it’s a public holiday today – the jackals will be early on the scrounge!’

  Melantho, sleepy-eyed, scowled at her. ‘Who gave you the right to gab about our guests? You’d better shut your old gob!’

  Eurycleia made a face at her. ‘You’d do better to shut yours, slut – and your fanny too! Though I don’t mind betting they’ll both be shut for you before you’re much older!’

  I threw her a furious look, and she winked at me. Could she be trusted to keep the early morning flies out of her mouth?

  The women came back from the well. Eumaeus was with them, driving three fatted hogs.

  ‘Tonight’s meal.’ He let them hunt and gruntle around the courtyard. ‘Their last bite, poor buggers.’

  I nodded. I was on the point of saying something but kept it to myself.

  ‘How did they treat you after I left?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘They haven’t a decent bone in their bodies,’ I said. ‘Not one among them.’

  Eumaeus spat. ‘They’re cunts.’

  Talking of which, Melanthius arrived on the scene with the choicest goats. He and his herdsmen tethered them under the echoing portico. He spotted me and went straight to the attack.

  ‘What’s this? Still mooching around here, you old bag of shite? Not dropped dead yet, killed off by your own stink? You’d better fuck off this time – otherwise you and I are going to come to blows before this day’s out!’

  Ah yes, I thought, I fancy we are. But I kept my tongue between my teeth.

  He was still eyeballing me when the master herdsman came up and ordered him to get on with his work. Philoetius. I remembered him well. He looked at me curiously and came straight over, his hand outstretched, smiling. My heart beat hard. God, there were tears in his eyes. I shook his hand and waited. I could hardly breathe.

  ‘You know, old friend, I don’t know who you are, but right now you just happened to remind me of somebody.’

  ‘Oh, and who might that be?’

  ‘My old master. There was something of him in you, I thought, just for a moment – that’s why the sudden tears. I’m sorry.’

  He brushed them away.

  ‘Anyway, welcome to Ithaca. You look as if you’ve come far.’

  ‘Far enough. And on my travels I heard news about Odysseus. They say he’s close.’

  ‘They all say that. Odysseus is on everybody’s lips. No lack of sightings either. But he’s a dead man.’

  We weren’t being overheard as Melanthius had gone, so I persisted. I liked the look of Philoetius.

  ‘It’s not that I’m on the lookout for a free meal or anything – I’m being well taken care of as it is. But I have it on excellent authority that Odysseus is not only not a dead man but is headed for Ithaca and may even be here right now.’

  Philoetius grimaced.

  ‘You don’t say. Well, in that case it’ll be the jackals that’ll be the dead men, when the lion gets in among them.’

  ‘You don’t think much of them, then?’

  ‘Oh, I’d like them well enough – with their throats cut. Then they wouldn’t be squandering all these beasts. You should see what they’re doing to the herds. Odysseus employed me to look after them when I was out in the Cephallenian country, just before he went off to the fighting, and in a few years I don’t mind admitting I worked wonders. These herds have spread like cornfields – only to be slaughtered as if there’s no tomorrow. I’ll tell you this much, if Odysseus appeared on the scene it would be the two-legged ones for the chop, and I’d be right in there lending him a hand.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Serious? You can bet your old life I’m serious. What, slaughter these bastards? That wouldn’t be work, it would be a fucking pleasure!’

  The jackals did come early. And everybody got busy dancing attendance on them. Eumaeus put out the golden cups, Philoetius piled the baskets high with fresh bread, and Melanthius went about with the wine, filling every cup to the brim. He came over and sneered at me.

  ‘Fuck all for you, Father Time – not till I need a piss anyway. Then I’ll be over at the toot to fill your cup and force it down your neck. I’m telling you for the last time to shift your stinking arse out of here!’

  Telemachus got rid of him and brought me an old stool and a small table which he placed by the threshold just inside the hall. He poured me my wine and helped me to a selection of meat. The suitors had pushed the boat out tonight – they’d killed the biggest sheep and the fattest goats and porkers as well as the heifer from the herd.

  ‘I want none of the usual abuse,’ Telemachus announced loudly. ‘No brawls or quarrelling, not as long as you’re under my roof.’

  ‘As long as it is your roof!’

  The yell came from an overweight lout called Ctesippus. Pallas Athene had no intention of letting things calm down. She wanted the anger to bite even deeper into my brain, until I was driven mad by the blood-lust and the quest for vengeance. So she put it into the head of Ctesippus, who was an idiot, to behave even more insolently than ever.

  He was a slob from Same who had a fool’s view of wealth. He thought his fabulous fortune would turn Penelope’s head his way. It was a long time since he’d seen his own reflection in a wine cup. The queen would rather have slept with a donkey.

  ‘Hey, lads,’ he shouted. ‘Telemachus wants this old fart of a friend to be properly looked after. Seems to me he’s got plenty on his plate as it is. But to make sure he’s not stinted, I’m going to give him a personal present straight from the table. I’d rather you choke on your own vomit, you old stinker, but if not, well, there you go, try choking on this!’

  He picked up the heifer’s hoof and hurled it at my head. When you’ve ducked the Trojan javelins in your time, a cow-hoof is easy. It hit the wall behind me. He grabbed another. It sailed straight through the open doorway and clattered in the courtyard.

  Telemachus stood up.

  ‘I asked you politely. I won’t ask again. You’re lucky you didn’t hit him. If you had, you’d have felt my spear in your fat guts!’

  Ctesippus clenched both fists.

  ‘I ought to fucking kill you for that threat! Any more and I fucking will!’

  Agelaus stood up. ‘That’s enough, Ctesippus. You were well out of order. But I have to point out, Telemachus, you can see what all this prevarication of your mother’s has led to. We’re all pissed off. She’s pocketed her gifts and still no decision. No more shilly-shallying. Let her choose once and for all and have done with it. Then you can enjoy your own inheritance, and she can look after her new husband’s house. Your father is not coming home. Face that fact and move on. Just let it go. My advice is kindly meant and I hope you’ll take it. Is it fair?’

  Telemachus raised both hands.

  ‘It’s fair – on the face of it. A good speech, Agelaus, and a reasonable proposal, and kindly taken too, I assure you. I have absolutely nothing to gain from my mother’s procrastination. She shouldn’t delay her decision a day longer, you’re right. And I can tell you right here and now, I have actually urged her to get married. My father is not coming back. I weep to say it, but again you’re right. On the other hand, for a son to say the final word, the word that would expel her from the palace, evict her from her own home and against her will – no, I’m sorry, that would be against my principles. It would be profoundly immoral. She’ll have to make her own decision. Personally, I can’t do it. I just can’t.’

  ‘He can’t do it! He can’t do it!’ A few sneering echoes were taken up and followed by prolonged chanting, thumping the tables and banging down the brimming cups so that the red wine spilled from the gold and ran over tables and floor as they continued to roar in unison.


  ‘He can’t do it! He can’t do it! He can’t do it!’

  And so like flies they fell into the web. They struggled to escape but couldn’t. They were caught in their own hysteria and deafened to reason by the pealing of their own helpless, uncontrollable laughter, brought on for the occasion by Pallas Athene. She befuddled their brains faster than wine could have worked on them. Then she altered the expressions on their red spluttering faces to looks of incomprehension and terror. The food in front of them was suddenly spattered with blood, the gold cups brimmed with it, thick and dark, the tables ran with it, the floor was awash. They tried to drink away the fear but spat and vomited when they tasted not wine but black death. Their eyes filled up with tears and they broke down.

  Theoclymenus the prophet stood up.

  ‘You poor sorry little men! What’s this I see on you, all around you? Night has fallen on your heads, and the funeral pall hangs about your knees. I hear a wailing in the air – it’s your stricken families, lamenting your end. I see faces wet with tears, cheeks scarred by nails, heads white with ash. Your guilt runs in blood down the palace walls, the porch is thronged with ghosts, the whole court’s a-glimmer, flickering crowds of phantoms hurrying down to Hades, scurrying into the dark. Your souls precede you, the sun is blotted from the sky, your end is nigh, catastrophe has come to you at last, you’re dead men all and the mist surrounds you. I can see no more. I wish to see no more. I am leaving this house of the dead, while there is yet time.’

  ‘Oh, fuck off then!’

  They laughed and laughed. The tears streamed down their cheeks.

  Eurymachus stood up. ‘You won’t have to leave – you’ll be thrown out if you don’t shut your mad mouth! Here lads, somebody chuck this drunken fucker out into the street, since he finds it so dark in here!’

  ‘I’ll do it!’ yelled Melanthius.

  ‘I’m on my way,’ said the seer. ‘As you’d be if you had a brain to share among you. Stay here and be slaughtered, then. This hall is a burial chamber. You’re all corpses!’

  Melanthius ran at him as he left, aiming kicks at his arse. Antinous applauded. They were over their fit.

  ‘Yes, Telemachus, you really are unfortunate in your choice of friends. First you drag in this work-shy old fraud, who’s done fuck all since he came here except eat – and cause trouble. And now we’ve had to put up with this gibbering imbecile. Where the fuck did you find him? Take my advice – and this is also kindly intended – clap them both in irons and send them to Sicily. They’ll fetch a nice price there, and we can all share in the profits!’

  Telemachus kept his head. He was watching and waiting for the moment of attack.

  ‘Still the same old Antinous, eh? Look, why don’t we all calm down and get back to our meal? After all, it’s a holiday, and I’m paying for it, and I don’t want good food to go to waste. Eat up, all of you, eat in style, forgive and forget. I expect to see the tables cleared. Eat, gentlemen, until you can no longer move.’

  That’s the spirit, Telemachus, nobly spoken. And they all swallowed it, along with an amount of eatables that would have made an elephant incapable. Even so they were still planning on a late-night supper to which this dinner was only the prelude. They had no idea what was being planned elsewhere, still less of the bronze in the bowels that awaited each man, the final portion of the great feast.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  Time now for Penelope’s last prevarication, the trial of strength and skill, of which the suitors as yet knew nothing. When the feasting was nearly finished, she left her apartments and entered the storeroom, where she still kept Odysseus’s treasures, together with all the chests of clothes laid by and layered with scented herbs. Here among bronze and gold there hung on a peg the king’s great bow and the quiver packed with death, both of which had been presented to him by the great Iphitus when they met each other in Lacedaemon.

  Odysseus had left Ithaca for Messene to recover three hundred sheep stolen by the Messenians. He was still a young lad, and it was his first solo mission, entrusted to him by his father. Iphitus was also searching for animals, a dozen mares together with their foals, good muscular little mules, and it was in his quest for these missing beasts that he encountered the cruel-hearted Heracles, who first feasted him and then murdered him, as Aegisthus did Agamemnon, stealing the stock for himself, and for the enrichment of his own stables.

  But some time before the dreadful end to his story, Iphitus came across Odysseus in Ortilochus’s house in Messene and gave to the youth his great bow – which had been bequeathed to him by his father. Odysseus valued it so highly that he decided not to take it with him to Troy and stored it away with the rest of his treasures. This was the weapon that Penelope now took from the peg and removed from its shining case. She burst into tears when she saw it but brushed them away and carried it downstairs and into the hall to confront her suitors. The quiver bristled with pain for those proud lords – though as yet even she was unaware of who would fire its arrows. Her women followed her, carrying the additional arrows and a dozen bronze axes, all pierced. There was a stir of interest among the suitors. What was she up to now? What was her latest ploy?

  ‘It’s very simple, gentlemen,’ she announced. ‘I am declaring my intention to be married at last – but only to the one among you who can string this bow and shoot an arrow from it through these twelve axe-heads lined up in a row. Odysseus used to do it as a party trick – this is the very bow – and I think it’s only reasonable for me to expect the same degree of strength and skill in my new husband as I admired in Odysseus.’

  So spoke Penelope, hoping in her heart that none of the suitors would succeed in meeting the challenge.

  She went on.

  ‘If any man can display the necessary strength and skill, with that man I’ll leave this house which I came to as a bride so many years ago, and I’ll be his new bride, though I’ll never leave behind me all the lovely memories of this house, for they’ll stay with me in my heart. If you agree to this, I can be married to any one of you as early as tomorrow. What do you say? Is it a reasonable proposition?’

  She passed the bow to Eumaeus and asked him to give it to the suitors. Antinous took it first into his effeminate hands and examined it carefully.

  ‘It certainly sounds reasonable, though if my childhood memory is accurate, Odysseus was the only man who could even string this bow, let alone perform the feat you describe. You’re asking quite a lot. But it’s a powerful piece of work, to be sure. Quite a weapon.’

  He was secretly hoping he’d be the one to string the bow and break the hopes of all the rest. What he didn’t know was that he’d be the first to feel an arrow from it. If he’d seen these images in the web, he’d have fled the house and Ithaca too. But no man escapes his destiny, and by the time the web was woven, Antinous was no more.

  He didn’t notice Odysseus getting up from his seat near the door and making his way into the courtyard. None of them did; they were all so interested in the business of the bow, all wanting to run their hands over it and get the feel of it, all watching Telemachus directing the servants to help him dig the single long trench in the ground of the hall for the line of axes, stamping down the earth around each one. Everybody crowded round. They wanted to be sure the alignment of the axes was impeccable, and that it wasn’t another of Penelope’s tricks.

  I went out into the deserted courtyard with Eurycleia, as arranged between us earlier. We stood in the dark by the well and washed away the worst of the grime.

  ‘Now come up with me quickly, and I’ll give you a proper bath – just like I used to do.’

  I stood naked for her as she washed me thoroughly and got busy on my hair and beard, cutting and combing, trimming and untangling, examining every part of me.

  ‘It’s nothing to an old woman like me. I saw you often enough like this when you were a little boy, and not much has changed since then, except here and there. Mostly there!’

  She cackled and applied the olive oil. Th
en she produced the new outfit I’d asked her for: sandals, tunic, cloak, every item one of my own, from the scented chests.

  ‘Now you look the part,’ she said. ‘And you’re yourself again. Now go and fuck the bastards!’

  ‘Do you think they’ll recognise me?’

  ‘Of course they’ll recognise you – you haven’t changed that much. But muffle yourself up in the big cloak when you first go in, then throw it off and watch them tremble!’

  ‘Would you have recognised me, seeing me now?’

  ‘For god’s sake, man, why do you keep worrying about it? A few years is nothing. You’re still the same old Odysseus.’

  ‘What about Penelope?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. She won’t be there – she’s been sent back upstairs until the trial’s over.’

  ‘Telemachus?’

  ‘Yes, he wants her safely out of the way. He knows there’s going to be trouble. Is it all worked out between you?’

  ‘All set-up. And remember your own instructions – all the women to be locked in and nobody to be let out, don’t forget. And the door to the hall.’

  ‘I remember everything. In you go.’

  I took a few deep breaths and made my way towards the hall.

  It would have been more startling to have stayed as the old beggar, more theatrical and thrilling dramatically to have cast off my rags at the right moment and turned them all to stone. The Medusa effect – that would have been something. Or better still if Pallas Athene had descended from Olympus and transformed me in a twinkling from the odious black bundle into the Odysseus of the imagination, the legend in his own lifetime. And I was thinking as I strode up to the threshold that if there was ever a time I could have used the help of a goddess, the time was now. I took another deep breath and stood in the doorway . . .

  But let’s play it that way, let’s run it back, let’s pretend. I’ll step into the web and back into my rags.

  They still didn’t notice me. There was quite a stir going on. Antinous had proposed the order in which each man should take his turn – it should go from left to right, following the way the wine went round. He didn’t want to be the first man up. So it fell to Leodes, son of Oenops, to try his hand first. He was a decent enough man, as it happened, better than the bulk of them. But his decency didn’t make any difference. His decency wouldn’t save him. He was part of the pack, he was one of them. Spare none was the plan. Keep it simple. Any inner doubt and debate about degrees of decency could have done for me, clouded the brain and given the enemy an edge. No, for this I had to stay sharp and keep a clear head. All these men had to die.