Penelope's Web

by Christopher Rush

  What was going on was the longest, most lyrical love scene in the whole human history of love, the most protracted and the most postponed. And only when she was sure that we had taken our complete fill of love, and more, in each other’s busy arms, rounded off by a little sleep, did Athene of the flashing eyes finally tip the wink to the lazy dawn to leave her golden ocean throne and bring back daylight to the darkened world.

  SIXTY

  And while Odysseus lay entwined with the fair Penelope, still fair after nineteen years, Cyllenian Hermes was busy shepherding the souls of the slaughtered suitors, who still milled about their own corpses, mystified and adrift. Using his golden wand, the god summoned them sternly to the next world, and they answered the summons, squeaking and gibbering like bats, trailing after the releaser of spirits with their thin shrill voices down the dark mouldering ways, over the barren sea, past the White Rock and the Western Gate and the sphere of dreams until they reached the fields of asphodel, the chosen place for the burned-out wraiths of erring men, the whispering drifted dead.

  And here they experienced the first great revelation: small fry as they were compared with the heroes of the past, they could now converse on equal terms with the souls of the most illustrious dead of all Achaea, the glory of Greece – Achilles, Patroclus, Antilochus, Ajax and Agamemnon, all equal in Hades, lacking rank in eternity and shorn by death of the last shreds of their former glory. They’d lived great lives, but now it was as if life itself had never been.

  Agamemnon, nonetheless, had much to say, as ever, irrelevant as his words were now, his estate an illusion. The suitors’ souls overheard him angrily bewailing his lot.

  ‘Achilles, here we are together still in the House of the Dead, but you are the happier because you had the happier death. Men fought and died for you in the dirt-cloud that covered your corpse. There in the whirling white dust you lay in Troyland, from Argos far, but illustrious in your fall. Your mother, the goddess Thetis, rose from the sea, the deathless sea-nymphs round her, and a great wailing went up, unearthly out of the ocean. Thetis had left the depths to look on the dead face of her son, she and the daughters of the old sea-god, clothed in the robes of eternity and the scents of the salt sea. Many were the tears they shed for you then as they stood around your corpse, sighing with sea-voices bitter with spume, and all the nine Muses singing for you too, their threnody laced with such sweet sorrow that there wasn’t a dry eye in the Argive army, so plangent was their song.

  ‘And that was only the start. Seventeen days and seventeen nights of mourning we held for you, until on the eighteenth day we gave you up to the fire. You had all that a corpse could have wished for in the flames: the fatted sheep, the shambling cattle, the garments of the gods, ointments and unguents and sparkling wine, the honey, the infantry, the cavalry with chariots round the pyre, and the white bones gathered in the dawn.

  ‘They were laid in sweetest wine and oil and placed in a golden urn, given by the grieving goddess herself, a gift, she said, from Dionysus, and crafted by Hephaestus. This is where your white dust lies, mingled with the dust of the great Patroclus, who died before you, and Antilochus after him, yet in your deaths you were not divided but brought together as you were in life. And, over you, the Argive army built a great memorial, a glorious grave-mound on a headland commanding the Hellespont, so that sailors of today and tomorrow will salute you as they pass. That was what I call a death, Achilles. That was an ending. Not like mine – murdered miserably in my bath by an adulterous wife and her ruthless lover, a wretched end for the man who won the Trojan War.’

  Agamemnon’s lament had been interrupted by the arrival of Hermes ushering in the shades of the suitors to their eternal abode, and he was amazed to see so many fresh arrivals all at once. The first he saw and recognised was Amphimedon, and Agamemnon tried to disguise the bitter joy he felt at finding an old acquaintance come to join him here in Hades, shared misery being pleasing to certain souls who abhor solitary grief. Above all, Agamemnon was eager to learn of the manner of Amphimedon’s death.

  ‘Do you remember, Amphimedon, the time I came over to Ithaca with Menelaus to ask Odysseus to join the expedition, and you looked after us so well before we left for Troy? At least your father did – you were very young then, and it was a long time ago. What’s happened since then to bring you down here so early instead of living out your span, you who were so privileged?

  ‘And why all these young men with you, the pick of Ithaca? It’s as if Persephone had ascended and come back down with the flowers of the island, culled by her pale hand and specially selected to decorate these dark halls. Did some savage tribe surround you when you were lifting their cattle and raping their women? Or did Poseidon take you in a gale and drive you down the sea’s white windpipe? Surely it must have been some catastrophe, or the work of a god? You weren’t murdered in your bath by any chance, were you?’

  A look of hope appeared in Agamemnon’s dead eyes and faded fast as Amphimedon shook his sad, blood-bespattered locks. For hope there is none in Hades.

  Amphimedon’s death-grin was the one left on his face after Telemachus had unlocked the doors of his belly with his spear.

  ‘It was the work of a god,’ he said, ‘and a catastrophe too. They were both called Odysseus.’

  He told him the whole story – the courting of Penelope, the play for time, the unravelling at the loom, the return from Troy, the king in disguise, the stratagem of the bow, the net that enmeshed them all, the terrible slaughter. Agamemnon heard it all eagerly, drank it up like blood.

  ‘So Odysseus is still the same old fox – and a survivor. He survived all that, and still his shade is not yet coming to accompany us in Hades and recall sweet life with a tear. But it will come in time. Even the soul of the wily Odysseus must submit and appear at the appointed hour. In the meantime he’s happy and can celebrate a wife who will go down in legend for guile equal to his own. And for loyalty and constancy – Penelope the faithful, the flawless, the patient. What would I have given for a wife like her! Men and gods will sing her praises for centuries to come. And they’ll pour scorn on my married lot and what I got instead, a murderess and a whore. Penelope and Clytemnestra, the opposites of their sex, two songs that will never cease to be sung, and mine the bitter one that eats at the ear.’

  While all that was happening, I went to visit another man in hell. It was time to see my poor old father, Laertes.

  I found him in a hovel which passed as a cottage, a run-down set of walls up in the farmlands. He’d chosen to live out his last days among the serfs, with only an old Sicilian woman to see to his basic needs. Otherwise he’d have left off eating altogether. His old heart was broken.

  Of course he didn’t know me. He was too far gone. Too much time, too much heartbreak, ashes on his head, black holes for eyes. A husk. And a son? He didn’t even remember he had a son, he had no memory left, he was barely alive. That was all that was left of him, a white wisp among the ashes. That husk.

  Clasp him in your arms all the same? Oh yes, hug him hard, but not so hard as to hurt him. Show him the scar, enumerate the events, the places, the people, Autolycus and his sons, the boar’s white tusk, everything you can think of that will stir the ashes, light a candle in those eyes, make the flame where the life went to flicker, somewhere inside, the life that got lost at Troy, like so many other lives that were ended by war when sons did not come home.

  ‘And after your son was lost, old man? What then? What happened then?’

  ‘Then? Then there was no then.’

  It was hopeless. You can’t bring back a son to a dead father. You can’t bring back then to lost time, unless in art, as ever, which is long where life is short, as they say. And don’t women prefer happy endings anyway? Penelope came up with the idea of the trees.

  ‘Do you remember, father? This will surely bring it back to you. One day when I was quite a little boy, I trotted after you among these trees, the very ones, and you told me all their names and said they w
ere all to be mine; they were to be my trees. You gave me thirteen pear trees, ten apple, forty fig, and you showed me the fifty rows of vines that were also to be mine, your gift to me, your little lad. You see? I even remember the exact numbers, from all those years ago!’

  Did it work? Of course it worked – in the web, where everything is well worked and worked out, where life is as it should be, not as it is. In that happy country, my brain-dead old dad is given back his mind. He remembers me, accepts me, leaps up and hugs me, arises from his ashes and becomes a new man. And why? And how? Because Pallas Athene is at work again, ensuring that all is as it used to be, all goes back to how it was, all to what they were. The derelict becomes the soldier, the beggar the king. And an unremembering veteran stands up and salutes his dead son who is alive again, stands with him in the line, stands against the suitors’ families and their friends. He even kills one of them. He can throw a spear again. He can hear the song of the bronze.

  While I was kissing goodbye to the sad husk of my father, the news had got out, as it had to. The rumours began to fly, and the murmuring mourners thronged the gates. The murmuring quickly turned to shrieks and curses when they broke into the empty palace and found the corpses, their sons. The dead were ferried out and taken to their homes. Those that belonged outside of Ithaca were shipped back to where they’d come from and where they should have stayed, where if only they’d stayed they’d have stayed alive. From every town in Cephallenia the wails went up. And a sore sobbing was heard in Same, in Dulichium and over wooded Zacynthus.

  Unsurprisingly, the chief speaker against me at the hastily called Assembly turned out to be Eupeithes, the father of the worst of the bunch, the dead Antinous. Like father, like son. It was quite a speech, as I heard later.

  ‘I denounce Odysseus as the enemy of Ithaca. I accuse him on all counts. He took away the best young men of his generation, twelve shiploads of them, took them to Troy to fight a foreign war and came back without a single man. All perished, every boy lost, and every ship of the fleet. All those years of occupation, and for what? Not a foot of land, not an ounce of gold, not a drop of oil, not a woman, not a grape, not a cow. And then he comes home at last to slaughter the best of the next generation, our sons, and only because they were offering to occupy an empty throne and an empty bed. For doing their duty, he murdered all of them. A mass murderer. A butcher from the wars. What else could he have learned out there in those killing fields, after all? And he was away so long he doesn’t even deserve to be called our leader. He’s lost the right. He’s no longer King of Ithaca. How can a man return after an absence on that scale and expect to pick up where he left off? How can a killer pick up the reins of good government? I say let’s get him now, while he’s exposed, before he has a chance to fly to Pylos or escape to Sparta, to his old chums, to make them allies against Ithaca. They ruined Troy, and they’ll do the same to Ithaca unless we stop him. In any case, we’ll stink in the nostrils of posterity if we don’t pay him back for our murdered sons. Let’s do it now, before he can seize a ship. Come on, he’s killed all of ours. It’s time for him to die as he’s lived – bloodily.’

  A demolition job. It would have convinced even me if I’d been there. I might have killed myself, it was so persuasive. At the very least I’d have turned myself in. And not one of them spoke for me in that spineless tribe.

  Except for Medon, who’d stayed behind long enough to find out which way the wind blew. He told Eupeithes he pitied him in his anger and his grief, but that, like many others whose sons were despised in Ithaca, he had fathered a rotten apple. They’d never done a stroke of work, they’d lived off the handouts of an absent authority. Or rather they had filched from the authority, and now the authority had returned. He’d handed out punishments instead, payback for the years of sloth and slobbery, and much else. It was harsh, but things had been evened up.

  ‘They were wasters,’ said Medon, ‘and a waste of space. Of no use to our society and a drain on its resources.’

  ‘A damage to its standards as well,’ chipped in good old Halitherses, reminding the men of how often he’d urged them to restrain their offspring. ‘They plundered and they whored. They knew no bounds, no decency. They were a disgrace to you as parents and a disgrace to Ithaca. They got what they deserved.’

  The oratory was too full of home truths. The fathers didn’t fancy taking those bad apples home with them, to tell their wives that the fault lay not in the stars but in the rotten fruit of their bellies. There was uproar, and Eupeithes won the day. The meeting ended with a call to arms.

  We were at the farmlands when the scouts came rushing into the house. They’d heard from Medon and reported that the force was on its way.

  ‘Hundreds of the fuckers!’

  I ran out and saw it for myself, a dust cloud in the distance. On my side there was Telemachus, Eumaeus and Philoetius, and added to the force of four that had seen off the suitors, there was Phemius and now Medon. That made six. The old Sicilian woman looking after my father did have six sons. They were serfs, not soldiers, but then the opposition was anything but soldierly. Even so, twelve against hundreds was desperate. The suitors had outnumbered us, but they’d been cornered and outmanoeuvred. I couldn’t count on my father. He couldn’t count on himself. He couldn’t even count. There was no getting out of this situation. We were out in the open, and all they had to do was surround us. If we retreated, they’d hunt us down and pick us off one by one. It was only a matter of time till all of us died. If we holed up in the farmhouse, they’d smoke us out or burn us down. I didn’t fancy a live funeral pyre. I didn’t fancy running either.

  Impasse. Old Odysseus out of options at last. What’s left then?

  What’s left? What else are you left with when all else fails? Pallas Athene, of course. And Penelope. A goddess and a good woman. Quick, pick up the shuttle where the sword no longer suffices nor the spear prevails. The bronze age is over, sit down at the loom, throw away the shields. Flick, flick.

  Athene zooms up to Olympus.

  ‘Son of Cronos, Father Zeus –’

  ‘Yes, yes, you can drop the titles – there isn’t time. Get to the point. I know what’s on your mind. I am, after all, the great god.’

  ‘And only you, All-thundering One, can save Odysseus this time and avoid a massacre.’

  ‘I don’t mind a massacre, but I don’t want a civil war, and that’s what it will be in Ithaca if this goes any further. Only war itself is necessary, inevitable, and even a joy to the gods. But civil war is not glorious. It’s unsightly, and should be stopped.’

  ‘And so?’

  ‘So here is my decision. They must agree on a truce and make a peace treaty. Odysseus is the rightful king, and he and his heirs must reign in perpetuity, with an act of oblivion on the part of the gods obliterating the slaughter of their sons. We’ll have goodwill brought back on both sides, the old order restored, peace and plenty to prevail. How does that suit you?’

  ‘Perfectly.’

  ‘Then let it be. One last thing, though – we’d better have a death. One will do. A sacrifice is always good. And it will show them we’re serious.’

  So Pallas Athene put the divine plan into action and stood by old Odysseus in his last stand. She breathed life into Laertes and whispered in his deaf ear to be a man again, the hero of the hour, to swing back his long bronze spear and let it fly –

  ‘– at that man there. Aim it at him, the one right out in front, the one making the most noise. You can’t miss him, and I mean that literally. You can’t miss him!’

  He couldn’t. Not with Pallas Athene guiding the javelin, flying alongside it – see how she flies! See how it flies! Homing in on the target, seeking the heat of human blood! Oh, what a picture! Bronze meets bronze, the spear-point pierces the cheek-guard of the helmet and Eupeithes stops the noise he’s making and makes another sound, a smaller one. Then he stops that too. Then he stops altogether.

  He crashed to the ground and his armour rang
about him.

  ‘You see!’ Odysseus roared at them. ‘Even an old man is made into an Achilles when god is on his side! You’re all going to die!’

  Not that it really took a god. If that’s all it ever took, the lists of the heroic dead would be shorter and the grave-mounds few. What it took was Eupeithes splashing his followers with his brains. My javelin crashed through his forehead and out the back of the skull. When they felt the spray on their faces and saw the pinkish-grey stuff spattering their sleeves, they turned a colour like the sea in spring when the wintry muddiness has gone and the water’s green and clear. And it was clear enough to those who saw his skull spill that some of them were going to die, and that the manner of it would be something along those lines.

  Better to stay alive? The ones in the front, the ones who got splashed, thought so. Sometimes when you’re facing a pack of wolves, you only have to cut down the front runner to make the others scatter. And these men weren’t even wolves. They were armed to the teeth but arms don’t make the man. Balls make the man. And they saw that one man who had balls now had no brain, and they thought of their own firesides, and of their wives and maids laying the table and the stewards pouring the wine, and the chamber-women making the nice sensible beds . . .

  Granted, they couldn’t think of the grandchildren their sons would be giving them, because their sons were dead, but when they set all of the above, grandchildren aside, against speeches and politics and codes of honour, suddenly it didn’t seem worth it after all.

  And they stood and gaped. And we fell on them with a roar, whooping like the Trojan charioteers. We might even have wiped them out to the last man, our spears up their retreating arses, if Athene hadn’t materialised over our heads for the last time and delivered the verdict.

  ‘Ithacans! Enough! Enough blood has been spilt! Drop your weapons, all of you. You too, Odysseus! This is the time of peace!’