Amphinomus shook his head. ‘He declined their invitation to come to Corinth. He said that, much as he loved his comrades, he was old and weary and still stricken with grief over the death of his son Antilochus in the last days of the war. But he also said what may be true — that it would be unwise to plunge all Argos into a civil conflict which could only leave it weakened against the Dorian threat. Nestor intends to see out his days in peace in sandy Pylos. Should they wish to do so, Diomedes and Idomeneus are welcome to join him at his hearth.’
Yet Amphinomus had not come to the island only to report on events in Argos. It was also his intention to prepare Penelope as best he could for the possibility that her husband might never return. Things he had heard in Corinth left him in no doubt that the Aegean Sea had been hit by a disastrous storm. The coast of Euboea had seen many shipwrecks. Hundreds of men had drowned. As was shown by the case of Diomedes, vessels blown eastwards by the storm had fared little better, and since he had got back, no other survivors had appeared. Amphinomus feared that these unhappy facts offered no good omens for the safe and speedy return of Lord Odysseus.
‘Yet Nestor’s ships all seem to have survived the voyage,’ Penelope countered. ‘And their passage required them to double Cape Malea where the waters can be more treacherous than Euboean kings and faithless wives.’
‘Lord Nestor made an early departure from Troy after the death of his son,’ Amphinomus answered, glancing away. ‘He would have been well across the Aegean before the worst of the storm blew up. He was among the first to return.’
Penelope sat in silence for a time, staring into the hearth where the brands collapsed with a sigh amid a scattering of sparks. For a moment I thought that she too had given up hope; then she shook her head and gave a little smile. ‘But tell me, Amphinomus,’ she said, ‘does the world know of a better seaman than the Lord of Ithaca?’
The young prince of Dulichion shook his finely boned head. ‘There is none, lady,’ he replied, ‘or if there is I never heard tell of him. And yet …’
‘Yet what?’ she defied his frown.
‘I am anxious only that you do not entertain false hopes.’
‘Nor you either,’ Telemachus put in from the shadowy corner where he sat.
The hostile edge to his voice was unmistakable. Mentor and the older men around the table stirred uncomfortably at his petulant breach of hospitality.
‘I try not to do so,’ Amphinomus answered, ‘even though the fate of my kinsman Meges also remains uncertain. I merely seek to be realistic.’
‘As I do myself,’ Penelope intervened, frowning at her son.
‘Yet the fact remains,’ Amphinomus said quietly, ‘that Odysseus was last seen turning back to rescue Sinon and his crew from their sinking ship.’
Penelope smiled. ‘I would expect nothing less of him.’
‘Nor I, my lady, but such care for his friends will have left him far behind the rest of the fleet. He will have been given less time than them to run for shelter. His ship must have taken the brunt of the storm.’
‘Odysseus has run before many storms and lived to tell tales of them. And if I read what you say aright, Amphinomus, then the false beacons that Nauplius lit around Cape Caphareus will have burned themselves out before my husband could be confused by them as others were.’
‘Yes,’ Amphinomus conceded doubtfully, ‘it is certainly possible. Of course I pray, as we all do, that you are right.’
‘Then pray louder and longer,’ Telemachus muttered beside me, ‘and trouble our hearts less.’
But his mother had already raised her indomitable voice. ‘I am quite sure that my husband lives,’ she declared, ‘for I am certain that I would know if he did not.’ Penelope was smiling with the confidence of a woman assured of her own truth. ‘Some difficulty has delayed his return. Shipwreck perhaps … yes, it is possible in so severe a storm; yet even if he has suffered such mischance, he may have survived only to be frustrated by unfavourable winds, or confined by some enemy looking to ransom him. But that Odysseus is alive I have no doubt. My husband has always been among the bravest and most resourceful men in the Argive host. I know that the same courage and ingenuity that took him into Troy when everyone else had begun to believe that city unassailable, will bring him home safely to his wife and son.’
Telemachus led the cheers that greeted her words. I joined in roundly; but so close was the attention I paid to the nuances of my lady’s face these days that I could not miss the pensive shadows that settled briefly about Penelope’s eyes and mouth moments later when she thought herself unobserved.
Zarzis
The Thracian shore vanished in the unnatural brown gloom of the light from the thunderheads just as the skies were torn open by a ferocious strike of lightning. The mast and rigging of a nearby ship combusted into flame. A moan went up from the oarsmen of the struck ship when the mast cracked and the scorching yardarm fell among them. Oars clattered together in the swell as the rowers leapt in panic from the benches. The vessel lost way, yawed and turned broadside on to the waves. Only moments later, it was pushed over onto its side like a tipped bucket, hurling men into the clamour of the seas.
Two hundred yards away, scarcely able to hold their own against the might of the billows breaking over their prow, Odysseus and his crew were forced to watch their comrades drown while the exposed keel of the capsized ship rose and fell. Another pang of lightning flashed across the sky. The flames from the blazing spar guttered for a time with an eerie glare, and were extinguished in a sizzling of smoke and steam.
Odysseus caught a last glimpse of a man shouting through the froth of a crest before the sea dragged both him and his stricken ship down into the advancing hollow. The day thickened prematurely into night, and with the darkness came the rain.
Odysseus led the three great shouts for the drowned men who would never now receive proper burial. Some of his crew were already retching as the rain and spray smacked against their faces. With the prow and cutwater mounting the tall wave at his back, Odysseus staggered down the slope towards the stern where Baius was struggling to control the steering oar. He just had time to clutch the sternpost with both hands before his ship took the steep plunge over the crest.
A torrent of water fracturing into spume as hard as hailstones scattered across the decks and benches. Closing his eyes against the tempest, Odysseus felt the whole world lurching under him. The clamour of thunder merged with the clash of waves in a great collapsing roar. When he opened his eyes the deck-boards were awash and it seemed that The Fair Return was hurtling through a green-black passage twisting into foam, where sky was indistinguishable from sea and both were inimical to the survival of his ship.
Baius, who had sailed with Odysseus many times, had already divined his intention. The two men braced themselves together at the steering oar, looking to keep their vessel from being taken aback or swept broadside by the strength of the swell. A green light glittered about the masthead as lightning seared the sky. Over the noise of thunder Odysseus shouted to his men to ship their oars before they were snatched from their grasp. Then The Fair Return was running before the wind and there was nothing to be done but hang on to the straps and thole-pins while the cutwater of the frail craft plunged and climbed across tremendous seas.
He woke to the sound of palm fronds rattling in a breeze off the sea. Swallows scudded through the high blue zone beyond the fringes of a thatched awning above his head. He could hear the sigh of surf breaking on the shore and, somewhere closer, the laughter of men and women chatting together over the reedy sound of a flute. The tune seemed to wobble on the hot, dry air. When Odysseus lifted himself on to his elbows to look around, his eyes were dazzled by the flash of sunlight off white sand. Then he made out the sinewy body of Eurylochus stretched out on a dune, wearing only his breech-clout, while a woman whose skin was black as grapes leaned her long breasts across his chest. Beyond them, more members of his crew clapped their hands as a drum struck up. Another woman began to sway to the
tune of the flute while, further down the strand, a small boy carrying a catch of sponges smiled and stared. Odysseus closed his eyes, shook his head, looked round again, and only then did he see a small town with shining buildings and terraces and date-palms — all as it should be, in perfect detail, except that it was hanging upside down in the sky. After a moment it began to shimmer like the haze above a fire.
He thought to himself, ‘I am surely dead and in the Land of Shades.’
A voice behind him, thickly accented and throaty, said, ‘So you are awake at last,’ and Odysseus turned to see a neatly bearded man reclining in the shade. He wore a finely woven robe of deep-blue linen. His skin was as swarthy as his voice, an oily chestnut-brown, wrinkling under the high, turbaned overhang of his brow. His nose curved like a kestrel’s beak.
Odysseus said, ‘Have I been sleeping long?’
‘For two nights and the better part of three days,’ the stranger nodded. ‘You were, I think, a truly exhausted man.’
Remembering the long struggle with the worst seas he could recall ever having encountered, Odysseus merely nodded and sighed.
‘That town,’ he remarked vaguely, ‘appears to be upside down.’
‘Yes,’ the foreigner answered, ‘it appears so. In fact it is not there at all.’
‘Then my eyes are deceiving me.’
‘Not your eyes but the light. I know the place. It is perhaps forty miles from here. The desert air works such trickery. In a little while it will be gone again.’
‘In my island,’ Odysseus replied, ‘buildings prefer to remain where we put them.’
‘But then Ithaca is not Zarzis.’
‘Zarzis?’
‘You are in Libya, my friend, in the land of the Gindanes.’
Odysseus frowned. ‘We were blown right across the Cretan Sea?’
‘So your men tell me. Your three ships are beached over there.’
‘Only three?’
‘In such a storm perhaps the sea was merciful to spare so many?’
Odysseus tried to get to his feet, but his head swirled with a dizziness that was not entirely unpleasant. Like a drunkard puzzled by his condition, he sat back down again. Despite the calamitous news he was strangely untroubled. In fact, he felt oddly serene, with a degree of acceptance that was more dream-like than philosophical. Life came and went, men lived and died, ships floated for a time then sank, and if a town saw fit to shift itself forty miles across the desert air and then hang head-down like a bat as it snoozed in the afternoon sun, well that was fine by him. And the music too was mildly narcotic. In fact the more he thought about it, this languid country, of which, if truth were told, he had never previously heard, was a pleasant enough place to fetch up.
‘The Land of the Gindanes, you say?’ Odysseus studied the smiling, magisterial figure across from him. For the first time he noticed two dark patches at his temples where the skin might have been scorched by fire a long time ago. ‘And you are a king among these people?’
‘By no means,’ the Libyan smiled, ‘I am a king nowhere. Merely a wanderer filled with curiosity about the world.’ Relaxing back against a pile of fringe cushions, he told Odysseus that his name was Hanno, that he came from a peace-loving people called the Garamantes, who lived to the south of Lake Tritonis, and that he liked to travel wherever the desert winds blew him.’
‘Have you sailed to Argos then,’ Odysseus asked, ‘that you speak our language?’
‘You are not the first Argives to come to these parts,’ Hanno answered. ‘Your hero Jason was blown to Libya once. His ship became landlocked in Lake Tritonis a hundred miles from here. The goddess released him when he dedicated a silver tripod at her shrine in offering for his safe return. But some of his men chose to remain in Libya. I learned your language from their sons.’
The music writhed like a snake on the sultry air. Odysseus looked back where his crew were loudly applauding the dancer. One of them, a stout-bellied fellow called Grinus, leapt to his feet and began wiggling his hips beside her.
Hanno laced his fingers together at his chest. ‘They are happy, I think, to find themselves in a place where they are welcome — as they were not, I understand, in Phrygia and Thrace.’
‘They’ve told you about that?’
‘I had heard rumours of the war before you came. Now I know more, Lord Odysseus.’ He opened his hands in a mildly ironic gesture of obeisance. ‘I know, for instance, that your men love you fiercely. It has been hard to persuade them that you were merely sleeping from sheer exhaustion and should not be disturbed. They will be glad to find you awake when the dance is done. In the meantime, is there something more I can do for you?’
‘I am,’ Odysseus realized, ‘immensely hungry. If you have an ox to roast, I have room to devour it. Perhaps two even.’ He looked up, smiling, and was surprised to meet an expression of dismay on the other man’s face.
‘When you know Libya better,’ Hanno said, ‘you will see that none of the wandering tribes between Egypt and the Pillar of Heaven ever taste the flesh of cows. The beast is held sacred to the goddess.’ He rose to his gorgeously slippered feet. ‘In any case, it will be wiser if you do not eat too much too soon. Come, take more wine. It will help restore your strength. And you must try the local fruit. I think you will find it much to your taste.’
His companions were overjoyed to find their captain recovered from his long ordeal at the steering oar of The Fair Return. Already exhausted from the long battle with high seas during the southward voyage around Euboea and Sounion Head, Odysseus had tried again and again to double the steep eastern bluff of Cape Malea. Once through that rough passage, they could make the home run for Ithaca. But both wind and current has been against him and the waves were riding higher than his masthead. At each attempt to round the cape the ship was forced back; yet he had given up the effort only when Baias, equally exhausted at his side, cried out, ‘Poseidon is against us, lord! Better to run with the wind than be driven onto the cliff’
With tears of rage and frustration mingling with the rain in his face, Odysseus had watched the savage headland fade into the flashing grey blur of the blizzard. Cythera became a ragged shadow drifting past his port bow and vanished. By the time the western coast of Crete smudged the horizon he was sleeping where he stood at the stern of the scudding ship.
Vaguely he remembered Eurylochus relieving him at the steering oar; then, so cold and stiff that he could scarcely bend his joints, he had been led to the foot of the mast and lashed there for safety while the ship hurtled on through the night.
The storm had finally cleared not long after a lurid dawn. The ship idled at last in a calmer swell. Eurylochus could make out two other vessels some distance away, but of the rest of the little fleet there was no sign. When land was sighted and the crew found the strength to row their battered vessel ashore, they had no idea where they were.
‘But I think we’ve discovered the Happy Isles,’ Eurylochus grinned at him now.
‘Certainly we’ve been lucky,’ said Baius, who had recovered more quickly than his captain, ‘and I thank the gods for it.’
‘And for the pleasures of this place,’ added Demonax, who was captain of the Swordfish.
Odysseus glanced at the half-naked dancer who sat glistening in her sweat with her thighs protruding from the fringed folds of her vermilion skirt. A number of brightly coloured leather bands were fastened about her legs.
He said, ‘The women, you mean?’
‘The women, yes,’ fat Grinus smiled, ‘the women are very good, but . .
‘And you can tell which are the best at making love,’ put in young Elpenor, ‘by the number of anklets they wear.’
‘Each of them is a tribute from a satisfied lover,’ Demonax explained. ‘So the more she has, the better!’
‘As long as you like your women well-used,’ Odysseus said. ‘However, my own thoughts incline more towards food right now, and this fruit of theirs …’
‘The lotus,’ Eur
ylochus supplied.
‘Well, whatever it’s called, I find it a touch sweet on my tongue. I gather that beef isn’t eaten hereabouts, but I was hoping that Procles might roast me a sucking pig.’
‘They don’t eat pork either, I’m afraid.’ Eurylochus was grinning as he spoke.
‘Yet you call this the Happy Isles! Is there nothing to eat but this cloying apology for a fruit?’
The men smiled at each other in amused conspiracy. ‘You mustn’t speak ill of the Lady Lotus, Captain,’ said Eurybates, whose black head was still bandaged from the wound he had taken at Ismarus. ‘We’ve all become her devotees.’
It had been a long time since Odysseus had seen his crew in so mellow and benevolent a mood. A little perplexed by it, aware that he was being teased, he said, ‘Then you all have even coarser palates than I thought.’
‘Not at all,’ Demonax tapped a finger at his pursed lips. ‘It’s an acquired taste.’
‘But it’s what happens when it’s made into wine,’ Grinus offered in explanation. ‘You’ve already tasted quite a lot of it, Captain, but perhaps you were too sleepy to remember. Here, let me pour you some more.’
An hour or two later, having eaten well on squid and barbecued goat’s flesh and a sticky dish made from the lotus fruit, Odysseus was sitting with his companions watching a huge sun sizzle like molten metal where it sank into the western sea. To the north a pale moon lay on its back with a single star hung in attendance. The Fair Return, the Nereid and the Swordfish lay side by side on the strand, all in need of repair, their holds only lightly guarded by a dozy watch of sailors. Egrets flashed their white wings in the evening sky. Not far away a string of camels recently arrived from a desert journey coughed and snorted as they lapped at a spring, while a solemn-eyed boy wearing goatskins soothed them with his pipes. In the distance, where the olive groves gave way to a rocky scrubland of juniper and tamarisk, they could hear a jackal yapping to the moon.
Not since they had been at home on Ithaca had the men known such a blessed time of peace. Strangely, however, none of them were thinking of home, not even Odysseus who had thought of almost nothing else in the last days of the war. The lotus had quietly worked its spell on him. Time had collapsed into a passive sequence of moments on which the past had no pressing claims, and where the future, with its prospects of anxiety and desire, was a matter of no enduring interest. And the war itself seemed to have dissolved into a wry anthology of stories that were, by this serene Libyan moonlight, curiously painless and often downright funny.
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