The Return From Troy

by Lindsay Clarke

  Again the Spring Festival proved to be a boisterous affair and many of the suitors were already drunk by the time they presented themselves at the palace. Telemachus and I watched them roll into the courtyard with sinking hearts. As they set to, making the most of the feast that had been prepared for them, letting their hands stray round the buttocks of the serving-wenches, I tried to calm the air with some of my sadder songs, but they soon shouted me down, calling for livelier tunes with bawdy refrains that set them banging the tables with their cups. Penelope had wisely chosen to remain in her apartment. When Eurymachus demanded to know what was keeping her, Telemachus dryly replied that she was working late on his grandfather’s shroud.

  Amphinomus arrived the next day, having presided over the Spring Festival on Dulichion, and it was he who led the delegation that was allowed to inspect the progress of Penelope’s work. Though they were all impressed by the wondrous complexity of her design, they were also dismayed to see how much of the warp remained unwoven. Amphinomus endorsed her unruffled plea that work of such fine quality could not be hurried, but he raised no objection when Antinous and Eurymachus maintained that an agreement was an agreement and that they at least intended to stay in the palace to see the work completed.

  Eavesdropping on their conversation as they came away, Telemachus was forced to bite back his rage when he heard Ctessipus grumble that at this rate old Laertes’ corpse would be well-rotted by the time his winding-sheet was done.

  Yet by now, with the king fading into senility and Telemachus too young to rule men stronger than himself, the suitors had a reasonable case to make. The islands could not be allowed to drift for much longer without a firm hand on the steering-oar. Some of the barons claimed they were already finding it harder to collect tribute. For the first time in living memory beggars had begun to appear in the streets, and the Taphian pirates were lifting cattle again, safe in the knowledge that they would meet only disorganized local resistance.

  Because no councils had been called, this was the first time in several years that all these lords had met to share their difficulties, and the longer they talked, the graver grew their concerns. Demands for action became more vociferous. The gathering shouted its assent when a Zacynthian lord moved that they should summon an embassy from Taphos to ask what that kingdom intended to do about the pirates. And once they had felt their concerted strength, they were ready to demand that, whether or not the shroud was finished, Penelope must agree to choose a new husband for herself by the time of Apollo’s summer feast or they would choose one for her.

  The Taphian ambassador was a man called Mentes who had been a friend of Odysseus in the old days. He was astounded, therefore, to arrive at the court of Ithaca only to be subjected to a bout of drunken barracking. Amphinomus tried to restrain his colleagues, but they had found a vent for their frustrations in the presence of this foreigner and it brought out the worst in them. At last, having endured their insults with offended dignity, Mentes rose to his feet, declaring that he had come of his own free will to consider the problems posed by a few unruly young men of his own land. It seemed, however, that Ithaca had fallen into the hands of its own disorderly rabble, and Taphos would have no further dealings with them until they brought themselves to order.

  Mentes would have left the island immediately but he was stopped outside the hall by Telemachus who sought to apologize for the shameful way he had been treated. The ambassador would have shrugged him off, but when Telemachus announced himself as the son of Odysseus, he became more sympathetic.

  ‘That loudmouth Antinous is dangerous,’ he warned. ‘Allow this state of affairs to carry on for much longer and you’ll have real trouble on your hands.’ Quickly he glanced around. ‘Will you take a word of advice from your father’s old friend?’

  ‘Gladly,’ Telemachus responded.

  ‘It’s clear to me that nobody here has any serious interest in seeing Odysseus return. I know for a fact that Amphinomus has been less than energetic in his efforts to look for him than he would have you believe. So if you want to find him, you’re going to have to seek him out yourself. I know your father of old, boy. We’ve done some roving together in our time and I’ve seen him ease his way out of more scrapes than a greased cat. I’m pretty sure he’s alive and kicking somewhere out there. Someone’s sure to know where he is.’

  ‘But who?’ Telemachus asked. ‘I don’t know where to begin.’

  Mentes thought for a moment. ‘You could start with his old comrade Nestor in Pylos. If he knows nothing, move on to Sparta.

  I hear that Menelaus is back there now. He may have come across Odysseus somewhere out east. And while you’re there, you should seek the aid of your grandfather Icarius.’

  Telemachus frowned. ‘I believe he’s never had much love for my father.’

  ‘But Penelope remains his daughter. He won’t like to see her suffer. If all else fails, Icarius can invoke the power of Sparta to help find her a husband who’ll have more care for your welfare than any of this gang will. And remember,’ Mentes pressed, ‘you’re your father’s son. You must have some of his fire in your blood. Assert yourself. Call a formal council and tell them what you intend to do. That’ll give them something to think about.’

  Tense with excitement and dread, Telemachus said, ‘That’s what I want to do, but my mother opposes it. She says I’m all she has these days. She doesn’t want to lose me too.’

  ‘A time comes when a boy has to stop listening to his mother,’ Mentes said. ‘I can see that you’re still young, but you come from a proud line and young men can achieve great things when they put their minds to it. Look at what Orestes has done.’ He took in the uncertain frown on the boy’s face. ‘You haven’t heard about that yet? Orestes and Pylades made their way back into Mycenae a month ago. Agamemnon’s son cut down the usurper Aegisthus, and then,’ — Mentes made the sign to ward off evil — ‘he did for his mother as well. They say his mind has been haunted by the Daughters of Night ever since, and only the gods know how he’ll cleanse himself of Clytaemnestra’s blood. But think about it, boy — if Orestes was ready to kill his own mother in order to avenge his father’s shade, surely you’ve got balls enough to go against your mother’s wishes and do what you have to do?’ He shrugged and glanced away at where some of the suitors were watching him suspiciously. ‘If I were you,’ he said, ‘I wouldn’t even tell her about it. I’d just make my offerings to Grey-eyed Athena, then take ship and go.’

  I was the first person that Telemachus took into his confidence. When I saw that he was resolved to go in search of his father, I offered to sail with him, but his thinking was ahead of mine. He said he needed someone he could trust to remain at court and reassure Penelope after he’d gone, and it was a request I couldn’t refuse.

  There remained the problem of how to get a ship without arousing suspicion. I offered to discuss the matter with my friend Peiraeus, who was now master of his own trading vessel. I knew that he was planning his next voyage and felt sure he would agree to time his departure to suit Telemachus’ needs. So on the day that was named for the council meeting his ship stood ready in the harbour.

  That council - the first in many years - turned into a rancorous affair from the moment that Telemachus outraged the suitors by appealing over their heads to the older members of the council. Complaining of the way his mother was being harassed and the resources of the royal household squandered, he called on them in the name of Themis, the divine mother of justice, to support him against the gang of self-seeking wastrels who were already shouting as he spoke.

  Even before he had finished, Antinous was on his feet, reminding the council of the agreement that had been reached with Penelope two years earlier. Though he began reasonably enough it wasn’t long before he was accusing Penelope of unravelling by night the work she had done on the funeral shroud by day in order to delay the moment when she must honour her promises.

  ‘That’s a foul lie!’ Telemachus shouted and looked to Amp
hinomus for support — only to pay the price for all the oblique insults he had directed at the man over the years. Amphinomus said nothing, preferring to remain aloof from what was degenerating into an unseemly brawl.

  Finding his confidence in his own case weakened by the sudden suspicion that his mother might indeed have been crafty enough to do exactly what Antinous had accused her of, Telemachus became ever more emotional in his responses. At one point he came perilously close to tears. I could see him gripping his hands so tightly that the knuckles blanched. Lord Mentor tried to speak up in his support but he was immediately shouted down by someone declaring that the old order was over and done with and it was time for fresh blood.

  The row might have turned violent, but for a most unusual event. Above the noise of argument, the air was split by a piercing shriek. We all looked up and saw two eagles fighting against the brilliant blue of the sky. They seemed to hang there for a time, directly overhead, as if hooked to each other. Everyone stared in amazement until the birds swooped and curved away with talons flashing, spilling pinion feathers from their wings.

  The old soothsayer Halitherses spoke up in the silence. It was he who used to attend the prophetess Diotima at the shrine of Earth-mother Dia, and over the years he had become proficient in bird-lore.

  ‘This is a sign that bodes no good for evil-doers,’ he cried. ‘Mother Diotima foretold that Odysseus would be gone from Ithaca for many years, but she did not say that he would not return. His time is at hand. When he comes he will demand satisfaction of those who have wasted the substance of his kingdom.’

  The whole episode had been so startling that everyone was speechless for a moment; but then Eurymachus — the coolest thinker among the suitors — was on his feet dismissing the soothsayer’s reading of the sign with coarse humour.

  ‘Had the eagles shat on our heads Elalitherses might have had me worried,’ he scoffed. As soon as the uneasy laughter died down, he turned to Leodes, who had just succeeded his father as guardian of the temple of Apollo and might have made a decent priest but for his weakness for wine. ‘Tell us, Leodes, how does the priest of Apollo read this sign?’

  Without great conviction, Leodes said, ‘It could be that the eagles were showing us the way things fall apart when a country lacks a strong king.’

  Amid the murmuring, Antinous leapt to his feet. ‘Or it could be that they’re just having a bad day like the rest of us. Either way, I’ll trust my own judgement sooner than an old fool’s superstitious rant.’

  The other young men cheered and jeered in support. Telemachus, however, seemed to have drawn strength from the sign. ‘Say what you like,’ he shouted, ‘but the gods are just and this island has a king who will come back to claim his own. I’ve heard enough of your impious wrangling. I mean to take ship this day and go in search of my father. If I hear certain word that Odysseus is dead, then my grandfather, the Lord Icarius of Sparta, will choose a new husband for my mother — one who will rule Ithaca till I’m of age to claim the kingship for myself.’

  Then he swept away out of the courtyard, leaving them all open-mouthed in their stone seats. By the time that they had collected enough wits to try and stop him, Telemachus had boarded Peiraeus’ ship and was putting out to sea

  The Mysteries

  Darkness. A darkness so deep it leaves no place to stand. A darkness where all his dead lie in wait for him. He feels he is drowning in this darkness. Long ago, it had been the starting-point of his involuntary descent; it deepened throughout the long middle passage. Now, as he struggles to breathe on darkness and the struggle no longer seems worth the effort, it must also be his destination.

  The dead are indeed assembling here.

  Consciousness returns as the sound of Circe’s voice. Later he is vaguely aware of someone else in the chamber — another, younger woman wearing a veil, who comes and goes, bringing water and wine and other things, the identity of which elude him. It is she, he realises, who is singing to him now. She is singing the words of a hymn he has never heard before, and it is as if the darkness turns to sound inside him. A sound that travels through his body with the circulation of his blood and breath.

  What had for so long seemed a descent without hope or compass is converted by that voice into an onward journey of the heart.

  Had the strains of the hymn lulled him into sleep or not? He is unsure. But he is certainly conscious again and somewhere close to the dead centre of things. He is a traveller resting by a tall stone herm on which only an open eye is carved. There is no moon, though the sky is full of stars, and it feels as though the whole world is circling round him in a slow and stately dance.

  There comes the bronze reverberation of a softly struck gong. Quietly, like chords of water, a lyre strikes up.

  Now Circe is chanting. The words sound ancient on her tongue. They might have been cast, long ago, in gold. ‘The doors are swinging in the House of the Dead,’ she chants. ‘What was once open is now closed; that which was shut is open now. Sunlight enters the unlit house. The soul returns with its shadow.’

  And with tremendous force something radiant comes into him like the strike of lightning at a mast. He can scarcely breathe for the power of it. His hair might be on fire, his whole skeleton is luminous; then he is staring into the dark dazzle round him. What he sees is the midnight sun.

  Events that take place inside ritual space cannot be told in the annals of time. Nor could Odysseus himself remember everything that happened during those incubatory hours in Circe’s chamber. But he recalled that many stages of the way were painful, for all the horrors of the war at Troy returned to him again that night. More vividly than at any time since he had seen the city fall, they flashed across his vision. They were written on his mind as indelibly as his wounds were written on his body. Each was a station on his way, all permanently him.

  Also there were experiences that were neither dreams nor waking dreams, yet fluid with elements of both, so that he seemed to sink and float like an amphibian in those nocturnal waters — old Nobodysseus roving the seas in dirty weather, struggling with the steering-oar, again and again unable to double Cape Malea.

  It was then that he saw Penelope, standing on the cliff at Ithaca, yet receding down the halls of time with a speed that frightened him.

  Yet the terror of that moment was only the preliminary to the fear that seared across his nerves when he lay, strapped like Prometheus on his rock, watching the Goddess shifting shape through form after terrifying form: the Lady of Ruin and Despair, the Whore of Heaven, the Lady of the Lotus, the Lady of the Knife, the Lady of Flame, The Lady of Light, The Beggared Lady, The Lady of Strength, of Thunder, of Slaughter, of Splendour, the Lady of Death.

  Image after image appeared before him, some so fearsome that he heard himself cry out loud; others so lambent with beauty that he wept with awe. There were times too when he felt that this display of air and fire must end in madness; and others when he was so oppressed by her presence that he sensed evil rise inside him like a sludge of asphalt from the sea.

  Yet once the fear and the evil were expressed they seemed to pass out of him. He was lifted through into another place, a place of sensual exultation where everything appeared possible again and his breath passed freely through him like the calming balm of poppy in the wine.

  The clearest memory of all came from the moment of waking. It might have been the morning of the next day or a week after he had entered the chamber. But it was light, a fresh dawn light, sweet with the fragrance of orange-blossom on the air, and he could hear the doves among the myrtle boughs outside. Yet his most prescient sensation as he lay with eyes closed was of his own lightness, as though a great weight had been lifted from him and he had been left as vacant and bouncy as a dandelion seed.

  When Odysseus opened his eyes again, a vaguely familiar face was gazing down at him. Her eyes were an intense gentian blue, long-lashed; her black hair was braided in glossy coils; and there was such a startled expression at her lips when his ey
es shot open that he wanted to laugh out loud.

  It was, he thought, quite the most beautiful human face he had ever seen.

  When he next woke he knew himself entirely rested, avid both for food and life. The air of the day had never tasted so fresh; the trees around the house were luminously green, and the sound of water at the spring almost shone upon his ears as he sat beside it with Circe later that day. Above all, he was seized by a sense of the seamlessness of things, for everything around him rejoiced in its individual existence, while nothing was finally separable from anything else. The world was entire, single and whole; and he himself no longer an abject, exiled consciousness, apart from that communion, but wholly at one with it. And as the kites swooping above the Hill of Silence reminded him, that unity was nowhere more evident than in the dependence on death for renewal.

  He felt refashioned, stripped down, scoured out and remade — the old, exhausted Odysseus replaced by a more vigorous and wiser man; one more attuned to the deep mystery of things. Circe, however, seemed merely amused by his desire to make immediate love to her.

  ‘I’m quite sure,’ she said, lightly pushing him away, ‘that you’ll find plenty of women to help you ease that ache if it presses you so hard.’

  ‘But it’s you that I want,’ he insisted.

  ‘You and I have known our time with Aphrodite,’ she smiled. ‘Now you must look elsewhere.’

  ‘There is, I admit,’ Odysseus said with a teasing hint of hesitation in his voice, ‘one young woman who’s caught my eye. I saw her when I first awoke.’