The Return From Troy

by Lindsay Clarke

  A cheerful soul, she had quickly made friends with the servants of the house, and it was from them that she learned the truth about the death of Agamemnon. With her own secret suspicions now confirmed, Geilissa saw how grave a threat these circumstances must pose to the welfare of the two children. Yet sooner or later the truth must come out. Better that they heard it from her than from some careless stranger.

  So once again Orestes was forced to listen while a person he trusted told him things so terrible that he could hardly bear to hear them. Already distraught from the news that her father was dead — a grief that was as instinctive as it was emotional, for the girl had no retrievable memories of Agamemnon — Electra was devastated by this further revelation. She sat with her hand across her mouth, trying to suppress her wailing. Orestes sat beside her, gripping her shoulders as she rocked in his arms.

  ‘It is Aegisthus,’ he shouted suddenly. ‘The villain has poisoned her mind. It must be his foul hand behind this thing. I should have killed him long ago.’

  Anxiously Geilissa hissed, ‘You must keep your voice down, master. Lord Podargus is not of your father’s party.’

  Orestes looked across at the nurse in bewilderment as he pieced together the long, manipulative process by which he had been separated from his friend, cut off from contact with his returning father, and sent to a place where he could be held in check. His mind was working quickly now. He was not a guest in Midea: he was a prisoner. His mother would send for him when she was ready. She would tell him that he had a new father and must learn to love and respect him. And if he failed to obey? Orestes remembered what Aegisthus had said to Pylades. He remembered the hostility he had glimpsed in the man’s eyes when he had made his own mistrust for him plain. Aegisthus had no love for him. As far as Aegisthus was concerned, he was Agamemnon’s brat. The man must be living in fear that a day must come when Orestes would seek to avenge his murdered father.

  And he was right to fear it.

  But for the moment Aegisthus held all the power. Only Clytaemnestra stood between Orestes and death, and Clytaemnestra had already killed her husband. Was she capable also of killing her son?

  In an insane world where fathers killed their daughters, it was entirely possible.

  For the first time in his young life, Orestes felt consumed by fear. Somehow he must get away from Midea. He must go to Pylades. His friend would take care of him in Phocis. He would know what to do.

  It was Geilissa who arranged for his escape. On her way through the market-place, she observed a Sicilian merchant dealing in slaves who appeared to take reasonable care of his valuable human stock. When she learned that he would soon be moving on, it occurred to her that Orestes might be smuggled out of the city among his train. Geilissa discussed the idea with a friend she trusted from the old days in Mycenae — a grizzled warrior who had lost an eye serving at Troy with Agamemnon. When neither of them could come up with a less risky plan, she approached the merchant and quickly discovered that his venal soul had no loyalties in Argos other than to his desire for profit. Once sure of her ground, she set about persuading him that his desire would be well served if he delivered safely to the court of King Strophius in Phocis a certain person whose identity must not be disclosed in Midea or any other city through which they might pass.

  ‘Including Mycenae?’ the merchant shrewdly asked.

  ‘Mycenae, above all, is to be avoided,’ Geilissa said.

  The Sicilian opened his hands. ‘I look to do good business in Mycenae.’

  ‘And doubtless you will,’ Geilissa answered, ‘on your return from Phocis. King Strophius is a wealthy man. He will compensate you well for the delay.’

  ‘And what assurances do I have of this?’

  Geilissa unwrapped from a cloth the casket in which were gathered all the jewels and golden ornaments that Electra had insisted on bringing to Midea. ‘These are already worth more than all your slaves. You shall have the casket when you leave the city with my friend safely concealed in your train.’

  ‘Let me think about this a little.’ Smiling, the Sicilian made a self-deprecatory gesture with his hands. ‘I am a timid man.’

  Geilissa watched him stroke his beard. ‘Think too long,’ she said, ‘and you may begin to wonder what there is to prevent you from taking the casket and then betraying my friend to those who mean him harm. You should be aware, therefore, that were you to do such a thing, there are those who will not rest till they have hunted you down and cut your tongue out of your throat and divided your manhood from your loins.’

  The merchant studied her for a long moment with a ringed hand at his mouth. Then he lowered the hand to reveal a sour smile. ‘You reason like a Sicilian,’ he said. ‘But I will do this thing for you. Pray tell your friend that this humble merchant is at his service.’

  That evening they untied the long hair that Orestes wore clubbed at his neck, dressed him in one of Electra’s gowns and wrapped around his head and shoulders a shawl that she had embroidered with figures of prowling lions and winged griffins. Geilissa started with shock when she looked at the finished effect, for in the unsteady light of the oil-lamps, it might have been his dead sister, Iphigenaia, standing demurely there.

  So Orestes escaped from Midea early the next morning as one among a coffle of slaves. Unaware that the son of Agamemnon was slipping through their guard with a kitchen knife clutched under the folds of his pretty shawl, the sentinels at the gate paid scant attention to the train. Almost a month later he was welcomed to safety by Pylades with tears and open arms. Denied their chance of glory in Troy, and with the world at home turned hostile round them, the young lions began preparing themselves for the day when they too would play a significant part in the continuing drama of the long catastrophe that was the Trojan War.

  As the reader will recall from my account of the day when Dolon the fisherman brought us the news that the war had ended, Ithaca also had a number of young lions frisking about the streets, and even before Troy fell, they had already begun to make a nuisance of themselves. That’s how we thought of it at first — as no more than a nuisance, for we Ithacans might have our feuds and quarrels and grudges, and blood might even be shed at times, but murder was rare on the island and we lacked any talent for evil on the grand scale with which it flourished in Mycenae and the other great cities of the world. So King Laertes and his ministers did little more than sigh over the noise of drunken revelry in the streets of the town at night. But out of small neglected troubles larger problems grow, and soon there were signs that Antinous and the gang of young men who followed his lead were getting out of hand.

  The first of the truly bruising encounters between Telemachus and Antinous took place at the Feast of Pan in the spring of the year after the war had ended. At that time the mood of the island was gloomy and apprehensive. Diotima, who had been priestess of Mother Dia’s shrine on the island for longer than anyone could remember, had died during the course of a hard winter. Because she was already very old, her death came as no surprise, but she had outlived all the women who knew the ways of the snake well enough to succeed her, so the power of the shrine itself began to wane.

  No one took her death harder than King Laertes and his wife Anticleia. They too were old, and each day that failed to bring news of their son increased their grief and anxiety. Laertes had been eager to lay down the burdens of kingship for many years, and the business of exacting tribute from men younger and more ambitious than himself, and of giving justice among quarrelsome islanders, was increasingly a trial to his soul. So to Queen Anticleia’s concern for her son was added the further strain of watching her husband’s strength fail. Her nights were sleepless and her appetite poor. Never a large woman, she began to shrink visibly, both in weight and stature. Soon people began to mutter that if her son did not return she might simply die from grief.

  In these circumstances, Penelope had to be strong for everyone and her faith did not fail. Whatever private anxieties troubled her nights, she remai
ned ever hopeful, refusing to allow any other possibility but that her husband was alive and on his way home. Yet she had not seen Odysseus for more than ten years, and there must have been times when she had difficulty remembering what he had looked like then, let alone imagining how he might have been changed by war.

  For a time, everyone’s spirits were lifted by the news that a Zacynthian sailor called Axylus had returned to his island, having walked hundreds of miles overland from Euboea where he had been cast ashore after his ship went down. Summoned to Ithaca, he reported that he had been among the survivors of a disastrous raid on Ismarus in which many men, including the brother of Prince Amphinomus, had been killed. He was certain, however, that Odysseus had managed to escape from the skirmish on the Ciconian shore, though how he had fared in the storm that had wrecked his own ship, Axylus was unable to say.

  This was the first definite news that Penelope had received and she preferred to let it strengthen her hopes rather than darken her fears. Telemachus chose to share her optimism and draw strength from it; but when Amphinomus returned to Ithaca after his time of mourning was complete, and the boy watched his mother receive her friend, weeping, with open arms, his mood turned sullen again. Though he tried to elicit my sympathy, I saw nothing wrong in the friendship. Sitting side by side at the high table or walking together on the cliffs above the expansive glitter of the sea, Amphinomus and Penelope might have been taken for a brother and sister who shared a lively affection and were always sensitive to each other’s shifts of mood and feeling. So it seemed to me there was something excessive in the way Telemachus kept watch, like a prick-eared dog, over his absent father’s wife. Only after a time did I come to see that his heart was riven with a kind of jealousy. Perhaps he couldn’t bear it that anyone — least of all this handsome prince out of Dulichion — should be more intimate with his mother than he was himself? Whatever the case, sooner or later his anger was going to turn violent. It happened at the Festival of Pan.

  The Spring Feast is always a bawdy and boisterous affair. Shepherds come from all over the island and, once the sacred offerings have been made, there is much eating and drinking and many hours of dancing and singing of songs. Commonly enough, a fair proportion of the children born each year are sired during the course of that night, not all of them in wedlock. Because the winter had been bitter and everyone had been miserable for so long, the revelry was wild that year. The heat of the sun lay heavy on the afternoon, the wine was strongly mixed, and fathers looked to their daughters as Antinous and a gang of randy young men paraded around the awnings with long leather phalluses protruding from the goatskin clouts they wore.

  I was in luck myself that day — a plump young woman from a village over by Mount Neriton sat near me as I sang. She had honey-brown skin and thick hair, and an encouraging way of dipping her eyes. Later we found our way to a sunlit glade beneath the trees. She was my first, and it wounded my heart to discover a day or two later that she was already pledged to a prosperous shepherd in her own part of the world; but I have sometimes wondered whether his firstborn son has the gift of singing verses too. In any case, being so pleasantly occupied, I didn’t learn what had happened elsewhere until Peiraeus told me after the event.

  Waiting till late in the day when all the royal party apart from the prince had retired, Antinous asked Telemachus if he would judge the merit of a satyr play that he and Eurymachus were improvising for the people’s entertainment. To my friend’s astonishment, Antinous took the part of a woman overwhelmed by the blandishments of her lover, who was played by Eurymachus. Speaking in a high-pitched voice and fluttering his eyelids, Antinous allowed his hand to stray towards the grotesque codpiece protruding from between Eurymachus’s thighs. Only when he released an amorous sigh and squeaked, ‘But what if my husband should return, Amphinomus?’ did the true nature of the game become apparent.

  Before anyone realized what was happening, Telemachus had thrown himself at Antinous, knocked him off the wine-stained trestle-table where the young man reclined like a whore on a couch, and fastened his hands about his throat.

  By the time Eurymachus and Leodes pulled the boy away, Antinous was choking and retching for air. Telemachus was still much smaller than the man he had attacked, and left to his own malevolent devices, Antinous might have inflicted a terrible beating on him. But some of the less drunken shepherds had been disgusted by the play, and many of them had no love for the family of Eupeithes. Three stood up from their benches making it plain that no harm would come to their prince as long as they were there to prevent it. Two of them were very burly. The other, an older man with a broken nose, thoughtfully weighed the curve of his crook in his hand.

  Taking stock of the menace in their faces, Antinous glanced for support to Eurymachus who released Telemachus and stood uncertainly beside his friend with the ridiculous phallus knocked askew at his waist. Sensing that neither Eurymachus nor Leodes had the stomach for a fight, Antinous gasped, ‘What’s the matter with the brat? Can’t he take a joke?’ ‘There’s jokes and there’s jokes,’ said the grizzled old shepherd with the crook, ‘and if you think that one was funny then you’ll be even more amused when this ash-plant comes down across your ear — which it would have done by now if I wasn’t making allowances for the belly-load of wine you’re carrying.’ Then he turned to Telemachus. ‘And you’d better run along, young sir. If your father was home, he’d tell you that it’s wise to pick a fight only when the odds are with you.’

  Flustered and abashed, Telemachus turned on his heel, shouting, ‘If my father doesn’t kill you when he gets back, Antinous, I promise I’ll do it myself.’

  ‘Wake up, donzel!’ Antinous shouted after him. ‘Your father’s not coming back, and you’re going to have to answer for those words one day.’

  Peiraeus told me that the shepherds would certainly have beaten Antinous in that moment had not Eurymachus had the good sense to hustle him away.

  When I learned what had happened, I set out to look for Telemachus. Last seen heading for the palace, he wasn’t to be found in his chamber and no one in the hall knew where he was. By now darkness had fallen, so there was no point wandering the hillsides in search of him, and I was about to give up and join Penelope and the others in the hall when I heard voices in Eurycleia’s chamber.

  Putting my ear to the door, I heard the hoarse croak of the old nurse’s voice reassuring Telemachus that he was just like his father — too proud and too brave not to put himself at risk. ‘He was about your age when he went hunting boar with his grandfather Autolycus in the woods around Mount Parnassus,’ she was saying, ‘Couldn’t wait for the huntsmen to lay the nets — not him. Couldn’t wait for the boar to come rushing at him neither. He has to leap straight at it with his spear, leaving his grandsire standing aghast behind him. He got his boar sure enough, but not before the great beast gored his thigh. He took such a gash that men wondered whether he’d ever walk straight again, which he did of course, though he bears the scar of it about him still. He was too proud for patience, you see — just like you — though he learned more sense in later years.’

  I was about to walk away and leave them to it when I heard the shaky voice of Telemachus protest, ‘But I’ve been patient. I’ve waited patiently for years and years and it feels like he’s never coming back. I think he must be dead.’

  ‘He’s no deader than I am,’ Eurycleia said. ‘He’s far too good a sailor to get wrecked by any storm, if that’s what you’re thinking. And he’s too crafty to be kept down for long by any villains who may cross him. Believe you me, my boy, your father’s the rarest of men. The gods have a care for a man like that.’

  ‘Then why hasn’t he come back?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Eurycleia answered, a little flustered now. ‘Perhaps the fancy’s taken him to go adventuring again. I wouldn’t put it past him. Perhaps he’s taken the Black Sea passage like Jason before him and come up against the Clashing Rocks, or got himself enchanted by the Sirens’ song, or has
n’t yet found the narrow way between Scylla and Charybdis. He always loved those old stories. He loved them just as much as you do. Perhaps he’s gone to find out if there’s any truth to them, and when he comes home he’ll bring back something magical and splendid like the Golden Fleece. That’s just the kind of thing Odysseus would do if he took a mind to it.’

  I don’t know what effect this fanciful gesture of consolation had on the mind of Telemachus but Eurycleia’s words ignited my own imagination. I began to see how my Lay of Lord Odysseus might be embellished by motifs from those stories. I imagined his ship picking its way through the blue ice floes that came drifting across its bows out of the freezing fog of the Black Sea. I knew that if there was any chance of hearing the Sirens’ song, then Odysseus would want to hear it. Like Jason, he would have himself strapped to the mast with cables while his crew rowed past the enchanted island with their ears stopped up with wax. With my mind already racing, I persuaded myself that if anyone could steer a ship between the many-headed monster Scylla, keeping watch from her cave on the cliff, and the fearful whirlpool of Charybdis, then Odysseus certainly could. So I hurried away down the passage with the song of the Sirens thrilling through my mind, and when I went to bed I lay there yearning for the day when my lay was done and I would be crowned with laurels as the greatest of all bards.

  Then, in the small hours, I was jolted back to my senses by the miserable thought that all those songs had already been written. Everybody knew them. Those marvellous adventures belonged to the story of Jason: anywhere outside Ithaca, I would be laughed out of court if I tried to claim them for Odysseus.

  Yet my mind would not rest and, before dawn broke, another thought struck me. There was a story belonging to our island that might still be turned into a noble song. It was a crude enough tale of the encounter between our ancient folk hero Oulixos and a one-eyed cannibal giant that devoured some of his men when they landed on his island. Trapped in the giants cave, Oulixos and his men blinded the Cyclops and made their escape. But wasn’t it possible that on his voyage home Odysseus had chanced on that same island? With all his resourcefulness, surely he would think up some ingenious way of outwitting that dull monster?