The Return From Troy

by Lindsay Clarke

  Leaning against the wall in one corner of the portico sat a figure he might have mistaken for a wolf had he been able to see only the sleek fanged head with its pricked ears; but a very human pair of legs protruded from a kilt beneath the wolfskin and Odysseus knew that the fears of Eurylochus were unfounded. This might even be one of the young men he had met earlier in the day, now initiated into the wolf-cult and looking forward in his dreams to a time when he too might prey on the women with his thong. Putting a hand to the hilt of his long knife, Odysseus stepped through into the antechamber of a torch-lit hall.

  Three figures were in conference there. An athletic young man clad in a tawny leather kilt stood beside two women. The lion-pelt that he wore as a cloak now had the beast’s roughly maned head thrown back across his shoulders like a hood. The taller woman, robed in a richly embroidered blue gown of many flounces wore a jewelled diadem shaped in the head of a falcon with its curved beak protruding from her forehead. The thick hair hanging sleek and black at either side of her face was cut short at the line of her jaw. She was talking to the shorter woman beside her, who wore a plain white dress that hung in folds to her sandaled feet and was tied at her hips with a girdle that sparkled in the fitful light from the torches. Her face was completely covered by a mask that had only narrow slits for the eyes and was as silvery-white in its sheen as the full moon in the night outside.

  None of the three saw Odysseus enter the room. He would have remained perfectly still, trying to overhear them, but at that moment one of the wolf-men stepped out of the shadows beside him saying, ‘The hour is late to make your offering, friend. Come, leave the Lady in peace.’

  Immediately the three figures fell silent and turned to look his way. When the wolf-man put his hand to Odysseus’s arm, seeking to turn him away, the Ithacan stood his ground, demanding to know whether he was in the presence of Circe, the mistress of this place.

  For a moment no one answered. The man in the lion-skin stepped forward, seeking to interpose himself between this intruder and the two women, but he was stopped in his tracks by a clipped word of command at his back. The taller woman gestured to the woman in the moon-mask, who turned away and disappeared through the doorway into the inner hall; then the beak of the falcon was pointing directly at Odysseus and he saw that the eyes beneath it were dramatically painted in black and glittering green.

  ‘I see you wear the sign;’ she said in a clear, dry voice, ‘yet you do not know the Lady when you see her. This is very strange. But yes, you do indeed stand in her presence. What business do you have with her?’

  Odysseus said, ‘I have come to seek the release of my friends.’

  ‘Release?’ The falcon-head seemed to look about the place as though in some bemusement. ‘We keep no prisoners in Aiaia.’

  ‘Then am I to assume they are dead?’

  ‘Why should you assume that? Do you think we are savages here?’

  ‘Lady, I don’t know who or what you are — whether you are the queen of these people or their sacred priestess, or,’ Odysseus made the sign to ward off evil, ‘as some men seem to think, a witch.’

  ‘Then you are ignorant indeed!’

  Again he refused to be thrown by the cool authority of her voice. ‘Perhaps. But certain men about whom I care came here in peace and friendship today and they have not yet returned to my ship.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she echoed him dryly, ‘they have no wish to return.’

  ‘I will believe that when I hear it from their own lips.’

  Again the man in the lion-skin stepped forward with the claws of its great pads swinging at his side. ‘Do you accuse the Lady of lying?’

  ‘Peace,’ the woman commanded sharply. ‘Leave us now.’ And when the man hesitated, glancing first at Odysseus and then back at the Lady Circe, she repeated more firmly, ‘Leave us, I say.’

  Glancing balefully at Odysseus once more, the man bowed his head to the woman, touched his fingers to his forehead, and then backed away. The intense eyes beneath the falcon-beak held Odysseus under their scrutiny for what felt like a long time before the woman said, ‘You and I will speak together, Odysseus of Ithaca.’ Without waiting for him to answer, Circe turned on her heel and stepped through into the inner hall. The marble floor rang beneath the high-soled shoes she wore.

  Checking that they had indeed been left unattended, Odysseus followed her through into a chamber where a fire blazed on the central hearth. By the light of oil-lamps burning in bronze sconces he made out the paintings on the walls — deer and wild boar prancing through woodland, with hawks circling overhead and owls and woodpeckers flying through the trees. An upright loom on which an unfinished tapestry was warped stood beside a low throne that was little more than an elaborately carved stool with the seat shaped like a crescent moon. The tall, graceful figures of three goddesses were painted on the wall behind it with two groups of attendant maidens dancing beside them. Only as the light shifted did he realise with a shock that the maidens had the heads of sows.

  Circe had crossed to a table on which stood a silver mixing-bowl of wine and was pouring some of the dark liquid into a goblet.

  Odysseus said quietly, ‘One of my comrades tasted some of your wine and I hear that it is mixed with more than water. I prefer to keep my head clear.’

  ‘I see,’ she smiled. ‘As you wish. What else did your comrade tell you?’

  ‘That his friends were so intoxicated by your wine that they were easily seduced into your palace where he believes that something very strange became of them.’

  Circe turned to look at him intently again. He saw that she was older than he had first thought, a woman in her forties, whose strong features were heightened by the skilful use of cosmetics around her angled eyes and sensuous lips; but her poised presence emanated much the same kind of unquestionable power he had felt in the hieratic figures he had once seen on a papyrus brought out of Egypt by the captain of a ship he had plundered in his youth.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘what manner of strangeness did your comrade see?’

  Odysseus hesitated a moment before answering. ‘I didn’t want to believe him but I’ve just looked at this painting here, and now I am not so sure. My friend was afraid that your magic had transformed my men into pigs.’

  Circe’s scoffing laugh echoed in the silence of the hall. ‘Why should I trouble to do that,’ she said, ‘when they were already eager to make pigs of themselves?’

  The disdainful edge to her voice reminded Odysseus of his encounter with Thetis, the wife of Peleus, when he visited Skyros to bring their son Achilles to the war. She too had commanded the dark, residual powers of the old religion and had possessed something of this same impersonal asperity which conceded nothing to men in the realms of either spiritual or political authority.

  Odysseus had never been at ease among such women. Even Clytaemnestra had unnerved him at times with the icy, insidious power she wielded over the men around her, though she was, for all practical purposes, subject to Agamemnon’s rule. Yet Agamemnon was dead, he reminded himself, and by Clytaemnestra’s hand. And Peleus, who had once been numbered among the greatest Argive heroes, had been reduced to a shadow of himself by a wife he had never learned to control. It would not do to dally with this woman too long.

  ‘Nevertheless, the men are mine, madam,’ he said, ‘and I demand to see them.’

  Again she laughed. ‘By what authority do you make demands here in Aiaia where you and your men are no more than vagabonds?’

  ‘Zeus of the Strangers requires that all travellers be afforded proper hospitality,’ he declared quietly, ‘though I fear you are sometimes less civil with them in these parts.’

  ‘Do not think you can shame me, Odysseus of Ithaca.’ As if to demonstrate that his fears had been groundless, she drank some of the wine she had poured. ‘I answer to One older and greater than your Zeus.’

  ‘Then it seems you live behind the times.’

  ‘The Goddess knows nothing of time.’


  Odysseus drew in his breath. ‘I ask you again, madam, in the name of Zeus and his daughter Athena, yield up my men to me.’

  ‘And if I choose not to do so?’

  Faintly aware of the garlicky scent of the flower he wore, he took four steps forward to stand more closely beside her. ‘You asked by what authority I make my demand,’ he answered, slipping his hand inside the folds of his robe. ‘Here is my authority.’ The blade of the long knife was now pointed at her breast.

  Unflinching she looked down at its bronze point, and up again into his narrowed eyes. Then she took a step backwards, smoothing the folds of her gown behind her, and calmly sat down in the crescent-curve of the stool. Her chin was tilted upwards, presenting the bare length of her neck to the blade. When its point came no closer, she shifted her gaze so that their eyes met. With a jolt that shocked invisibly through him, Odysseus sensed her entering his mind.

  ‘You have seen such a moment before,’ she said after a time. ‘You saw Agamemnon stand this way above his daughter on the altar at Aulis. You saw one who is little more than a boy stand like this over a girl at his father’s tomb. And there was another time — a man you know well, a friend, who stood with a sword in his hand over his wife on a bed of blood. You have seen this many times because this is how men always stand over women when they are confronted by a darkness inside themselves that they can neither understand nor control. So is this how you will stand over your wife when you return to her? Will you tell her she must do as you say or you will cut the breath out of her throat?’

  It was as though she had looked directly through into the shadows of his mind. Swallowing, he sought to obliterate each of the pictures she had examined there, but they would not go away. The point of the knife was now trembling in his grip. He heard the shrieking of women inside the breached walls of Troy. Sweat broke at his brow and at the back of his neck. He saw Hecuba lying dead before him. He remembered how Aeolus had told him to return to Ithaca and take his life back by force if necessary — Aeolus who now had his own daughter’s blood on his hands. Again he saw his wife Penelope running to meet him down the strand on Ithaca. Again he watched her face fall as she saw that he was drenched in blood. He forced open his eyes and saw that he was looking into the face of a woman who wore a falcon’s beak that seemed poised to tear his liver out.

  ‘What can you know about what happened at Troy, sitting here in this remote place where men still grovel at your command? You can know nothing about me. Nothing at all.’

  Circe heaved a sigh. ‘I know a man who is in trouble with his soul when I see one. Put down that knife, and come and drink some wine with me.’

  Odysseus raised the blade of the sword towards her throat. ‘Give me back my men and let us go.’

  ‘Your men are safe,’ she replied, untroubled. ‘Nor do I think they would thank you for disturbing them right now.’ He caught the wry smile in her eyes. ‘No, they have not been turned into pigs. Your friend must have glimpsed the masks of the moon-maidens and his imagination did the rest.’ Circe lifted the falcon-diadem from her head, placed it beside her and shook out her hair. ‘The morning will be soon enough for you to meet with them again. Now why not sheathe this weapon? Or are you still thinking of using it?’ With the silvered fingernails of her right hand she pushed the knife aside. ‘Come,’ she said, ‘you need have no fear of my magic, you who already carry the sign of my initiation. Let me see if I can’t help you to be worthy of the Moly flower before this night is done.’

  Circe was smiling — a smile that spoke more of compassion than contempt. It seemed to imply that what was unfolding between them was a kind of game — a game of shadows; a serious game, but a game nonetheless; and one in which he would be wiser to rely on his intelligence than his strength.

  To his astonishment, he found it difficult to resist that smile.

  And so, as quickly and easily as that, Odysseus of Ithaca, Sacker of Cities, most resourceful and ingenious of men, found himself outflanked.

  Not knowing what to expect when he entered the marble palace, he had believed himself prepared for all contingencies; but Circe was, it turned out, unlike any woman he had encountered before — with the possible exception of his wife, who always seemed to be waiting for him at every turn of his thought and feeling. But Penelope had never laid claim to any power other than that which came from her loving heart, so the two women were of a quite different order. And where Thetis had remained imperious and unyielding, the Lady of Aiaia seemed ready to abandon hostility for friendship as soon as the occasion warranted it.

  Odysseus put aside the knife as he was bidden, and sat down on the couch at which she gestured. After a moment’s hesitation, he drank from the cup that she put into his hand.

  Seeing him taste the wine with more wariness than delectation, she said, ‘Your friend was correct in his suspicions. The wine he drank earlier today was more than wine. It is our custom on feast days to open our hearts to visions other than those Dionysus brings. But what you have is only wine — although I think you’ll find it mellower on the tongue than any from your Argive vineyards.’

  ‘You are familiar with Argos then?’

  ‘I know Asia better,’ she said. ‘I lived in Colchis when I was a small girl. My mother was Circe there before me, and her mother in the time before her. It was she who encountered your Argive hero Jason on his quest for the Golden Fleece and cleansed him and Medea of the murder they had done - though she foresaw that only disaster could come from their passion.’ She stood up, saying, ‘Would you mind if I worked at my loom as we talk?’

  ‘Please,’ he said, thinking with a pang of homesickness that she might have taken the words out of his wife’s mouth. When Circe had settled at the loom, he said, ‘But if you are Asian-born, how is it that you are here, so far away?’

  Passing her shuttle through the warp, she said, ‘We came because my mother foresaw that the rule of the Goddess was ending in that part of the world. Like Argos, Troy was already delivered over to the Olympian gods, and the Scythians were invading from the north. It was time to move our cult-centre to a safer place; so we sailed westwards till we came to this country and founded a new island of Aiaia. This is a gentler, more peaceful place, and we found that the people here worshipped the Goddess above all others still. I far prefer it.’ Biting off a length of yarn between her teeth, she smiled across at him. ‘And in answer to the question you have been too delicate to ask - yes, I have many husbands, all of whom are dear to me; but sadly I have no children. There, I have told you my story; now you must tell me yours.’

  He began reluctantly at first, staring gloomily down into his wine-cup, admitting that this was the second shrine of the old religion he had visited since leaving Troy.

  ‘At the temple of Neith-Athena at Lake Tritonis in Libya,’ he said, ‘the priestess declared that the goddess had turned her dark face towards me. She said there was so much darkness in me that she could see no way through it.’

  Circe lifted her eyes from the tapestry. ‘Was that all she said?’

  Odysseus cast his mind back to that dismal shack by the salt-lake where it seemed that the world had finally closed down round him. ‘She conceded that things might go better when I came to another shrine of the goddess.’ He saw the quick lift of her brows. ‘But this can’t be the place she meant,’ he added. ‘Not if she spoke truly.’

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘Because she said that many years must pass before I would be at one with my soul again.’

  ‘It seems you agree with her judgement. It seems you’ve grown attached to your darkness.’

  ‘It is a curse, like blindness,’ he frowned.

  ‘There are blind men who see what others cannot see.’

  ‘But a man is a fool if he pretends to more light than he has.’

  ‘All pretence is vain,’ she answered. ’The Goddess is patient with everything but the wilful obscuring of the truth.’

  ‘But what if the truth is too painful t
o be disclosed? Isn’t it best that we keep our wounds covered?’

  ‘And let them fester? I think not. Aiaia is a place of healing.’

  ‘Yet Aiaia is also an Island of the Dead,’ he countered.

  Her hands were busy with her shuttle as she said, ‘Sometimes we must die to ourselves before we can be healed.’

  Odysseus said, ‘I don’t believe I understand that.’

  ‘Because it is a mystery on which you’ve not yet entered, for all that you wear my flower.’ She glanced back at her loom. ‘I wonder how you came by it.’

  Half-ashamed of his answer, Odysseus said, ‘It was stolen from one of your people by a serving-boy who came with me out of Libya. He thought it might protect me from your magic.’

  ‘He stole it, you say?’ Circe was smiling. ‘Is this the boy Hermes of whom Macareus speaks?’ And, when Odysseus nodded, ‘He is well-named. Perhaps the god travels with him; and if Hermes is with you there may be hope for your soul after all. So why are you here, I wonder? Why have you not gone home?’

  Odysseus did not speak for a long time, and once he began to speak, his answer soon became long and involved, sometimes hesitant, and not always coherent in its attempt to gather together all the ravelled tangles of his distress. By the time he ended the lamps were guttering on their sconces and the full moon had travelled far across the sky.

  He had spoken almost entirely without interruption. Listening intently as she worked at her loom, Circe only occasionally asked for more detail about some event he had reported skimpily or for a fuller account of the dreams to which he referred. Intuiting his need, she had kept silent during those long moments when he too was silent, staring fixedly into space as the pictures of death and devastation returned to his mind and left him trembling.