The Return From Troy

by Lindsay Clarke

  ‘See what they’re like,’ Telemachus snarled. He stared, panting, at his father. ‘It’s a rats’ nest, I tell you. They have to die.’ He hurled another spear, which was deflected by the edge of the table behind which Pellas crouched.

  ‘Enough,’ Odysseus shouted. ‘It’s enough, enough.’

  But while they were staring at each other, Pellas picked up the spear.

  Seeing what he was doing, Philoetius shouted a warning just in time for Odysseus to push his son away. The spear flashed between them. It tore the sleeve of Telemachus’ tunic and scored his left arm before falling to the floor. The boy stared down, trembling, at the cut; then he looked back into his father’s eyes.

  Odysseus was gazing back at his son, appalled that he had come so close to death. He closed his eyes and gritted his teeth, but a fierce shout leapt out of his broken heart. As once before, that night at the fall of Troy, frenzy combusted inside him like a burning barn.

  Turning, he saw the men hurrying out of the passage with their arms full of swords and spears. His first arrow wounded one of them in the shoulder so that the weapons fell clattering on the stones. The next punctured the lung of a man who got up from behind a table to reach for a spear. The third bounced off the shield with which the last man coming from the armoury had thought to equip himself. All the suitors were under cover then, whispering as they distributed the weapons. I could hear four of them planning to lift a bench for cover and charge at Odysseus with his spears. But the veteran of Troy acted first. Throwing down his bow, he grabbed a sword and shield from the pile that his allies had placed beside the door and leapt across a fallen table where he swung the blade down into the flesh of cowering men. Others rose to their feet with weapons or tried to scramble away; but Eumaeus and Philoetius were there with spears to stab them as they rose. Telemachus leapt to join them, brandishing a sword.

  From where I crouched with my head in my hands, I could hear men shouting and screaming as they died. Somewhere, Leodes was begging for mercy, crying out that he was a priest and that he had tried to talk the others out of their evil ways; but his pathetic pleas were cut short as Odysseus sliced his sword into the priest’s neck. Utterly frantic now, some of the suitors were slipping in blood as they vainly tried to get away from him; others put up a fight with what weapons they could grab, only to fall under the herdsmen’s swords and spears.

  Uncertain what to do, terrified beyond all thought, I heard the hoarse sound of panting close to where I hid, and that of someone else coughing on his blood as he clutched at a hanging and dragged it down from the wall. Then the throne was pulled to one side. Its feet scraped across the stones. When I looked up I saw Odysseus standing over me. His beggar’s rags were drenched with blood. He was muttering profanities. His eyes were a madman’s eyes. The sword hung above his shoulder, poised to swoop.

  I must have shouted something then; or Telemachus must have seen me, I don’t know which, but the boy grabbed hold of his father’s arm; he was crying out that I was his friend; that I should be spared; that now it had to stop. I saw blood on his arm. I saw the tears streaming down his face.

  Eurycleia is the first of the women to come down. Drawn by the prolonged silence, she descends step by step, looking across the confusion of the hall at the fallen tapestries, at the blood trickling with spilt wine among the stones. Quickly her eyes scan the bodies that lie sprawled between the tables and benches. She sees Eumaeus and Philoetius standing together by the opened postern door. Then she catches sight of Odysseus seated on the silver throne. His elbow rests on one of its studded arms; his head is down, his face covered by a bloodstained hand. Telemachus stands trembling beside him.

  The cry released by the old nurse begins as a gasp of relief, but when she raises her fists beside her face, her voice lifts in a savage ululation. It is the only sound in the stillness of the hall, like an old eagle shrieking over its kill.

  Then she is stamping out her dance of triumph as she yells.

  ‘Enough!’ Odysseus shouts again. ‘Enough.’

  Seeing Eurycleia stare in amazement, he shakes his head, incredulous at the dead who lie around him. ‘Gloat in silence, old woman … I know these men,’ he whispers hoarsely. ‘These are my people … Gloat in silence, if you must.’

  Again the hall falls still around him.

  From where I sit with my back against the wall, clutching my lyre to my chest, I see Telemachus glance uncertainly at his father; then he too sits down on the stone floor with his shoulders shaking, holding his head between his hands.

  And this is what Penelope sees when she comes down from her apartment, scarcely breathing, her face pale as a shade, uttering not a sound.

  At first Odysseus does not know that she is there. Only when she catches her breath does he look up. She has stopped by the body of Amphinomus where he lies with one arm thrown out, sprawled across a fallen bench, his costly garments pooled in blood, the spear lolling over him.

  Penelope looks at him for a long time before raising her eyes to gaze at her husband. Odysseus sees the dismay and bewilderment in her face. He too catches his breath. As if in fulfilment of a dreadful dream, the hand he reaches out to her is wet with blood. His shoulders begin to shake. But he tries to speak.

  ‘This is not …’ he begins, and falters. ‘This is not as I wanted it to be.’

  Penelope watches her lord slump back on the silver throne in his bloody rags. She glances across to where her son is sobbing quietly and sees that his cheek is streaked with blood where he has wiped a boyish hand across it.

  Her instinct now is to gather them both to her sides, but both man and youth are too concussed with shame even to look at her. So she stands between them, at a loss what to say or do, knowing that shock and anger, sorrow and fear, are all present in the numbed tumult of her feelings, but accepting for now that only an immense patience will suffice if all these wounds of war are ever to be healed.

  Again Odysseus tries to speak; again he fails.

  He looks up, expecting to meet reproach and judgement - the stone face of the goddess — in her eyes; he finds instead only the compassion of her careworn human face.

  ‘I know,’ she whispers, reaching out to him. ‘Be still now. Soon there will be time for words.’

  And as once, long before him, Menelaus wept, Odysseus is weeping now, weeping for his wife’s pain and his son’s lost youth, weeping for his love of them; weeping for the faith he has broken and the errors he has made; weeping for all the comrades who have died, for the dead of Troy and for these dead who are assembled round him; weeping from the deeps of his mortal heart for all that is gone from him forever, and for all the present grief of things.

  The Winnowing Fan

  My work is almost done. When I first began to tell the story of the war at Troy I was already an old man. My sight is weaker now and my fingers tremble each time I unroll one of the scrolls that Telemachus brought home from Sparta. They were a gift I prized; one of such value that they remained stored away untouched for more than forty years. And now, by the time I bring these stories to completion, the last inches of papyrus will be covered in script.

  One remaining story tells how, on his departure from Troy, the hero Demophon was given a locked casket by his Thracian concubine with the firm instruction that he must never open it unless he decided that he was not going to come back to her. No one knows what the woman had hidden inside the casket, but when Demophon unlocked it and looked at the contents, he was instantly driven mad.

  A strange story, of dubious provenance and probably untrue, except in so far as it resumes the whole insanity of the war.

  The fate that finally caught up with Neoptolemus was no kinder. Having won back most of the lands lost by Peleus, and deserted Andromache for Hermione, he soon discovered that his new bride’s womb was barren. When he went to Delphi to demand of the oracle why he should be made to suffer this affliction, he encountered Orestes who was also at the altar beseeching help from the god. A struggle br
oke out between the bitter rivals. At the end of it, the son of Achilles lay ingloriously dead, and Orestes seized Hermione for himself.

  So eventually, when Apollo saw fit to dispel the Furies of madness that had roosted in his mind, Agamemnon’s son became King of Sparta after all. From there, as the years went by, he gradually extended his rule across the strife-riven kingdoms of Argos.

  Meanwhile, Peleus and Thetis, at whose ill-fated wedding the first seeds of the war were sown, were desolated by their grandson’s untimely death and, for the first time in forty years, they agreed to meet. At the funeral games held for the shade of Neoptolemus, they were at last reconciled to each other in their grief.

  Many years later, when he was a man at peace, content with his quiet life beside the hearth, listening to the tranquil chatter of the women at their looms, or to the sound of the sea breaking against the cliffs at dusk, Odysseus talked to me about the time when he and Penelope had also found their way back into the comfort of each other’s arms.

  ‘I thought that I had understood something about the dark face of the goddess during my time with Circe and Calypso,’ he confessed, ‘but I was still a mere novice in such matters. Not till I got back home to Penelope did I begin to grasp what power the goddess has at her command when she decides to put a man through the ordeals of the heart.’

  When I answered that this surprised me, given the degrees of initiation he had undergone in Aiaia and Cuma,’ he said, ‘But an initiation is only that. It’s just a start, a new beginning, a preliminary to the longer course of things. And there are few things harder to reach than an honest reconciliation between a man’s pride and a woman’s truth.’

  There had been times, he admitted, when he grew restless with the difficult struggle between Penelope and himself. In many ways it would have been easier for him to commission a ship and take to the seas again, looking for what other marvels the world might hold for his distraction. But each time he lost patience with the struggle and made to leave, he was stopped in his tracks, as if the love between them had a will of its own.

  And then, quite suddenly after a last passionate conflict that exhausted all the bitter residue of pain and frustration, they looked across the space between them, and saw that they had passed beyond remorse and forgiveness to the place where there was only the love left, and they were free to come together as the husband and wife they had always truly been.

  Everything altered in those moments. It was as if the whole island had been holding its breath, caught between hope and dread, desiring this reconciliation yet fearing that it might never happen. But when Odysseus and Penelope came out of their chamber together and joined the people who were dancing in the soft air of the night outside, everyone who was gathered there instantly sensed how their world had been renewed. The music lifted in response to the knowledge. The dance gathered pace. I watched the lord and lady smiling at each other with the conspiratorial air of a man and woman who have just made love and shortly intend to make love again; and I remembered how I had seen them dancing once, many years ago, at the naming-feast of their son, in that last happy hour before the wind of the coming war gusted across the ocean to blow them apart.

  Yet watching them together now, everyone saw that, having won once more the love of a woman in whom the bounty of Hera and the passion of Aphrodite were matched to the wisdom of Athena, Odysseus was not about to leave her again.

  So he took pleasure instead in helping Telemachus to equip a ship and choose the men who would sail with him — northwards to Scheria at first, where he met Nausicaa and brought word to the Phaeacians of his father; and then out to the far west, driven by his own desire to see what he might find.

  Meanwhile there were the islands to be ruled.

  Old Laertes lived long enough to rejoice at his son’s return. He even played a part in preventing the feuds that might have followed the day of Apollo’s Feast. The most menacing threat came from Eupeithes, who tried to rally the kinsmen of the other dead suitors in a bid both to avenge his son Antinous and to seize the throne of Ithaca. For a time the islands might have collapsed into civil war. But too much blood had already been shed, and every honest man could see that Odysseus had never intended the massacre that took place in his hall. They also saw that there was no better king to be found among them.

  So after an uneasy stand-off between Eupeithes and the others, a settlement was reached. With the help of Menelaus, generous compensation was paid and Odysseus set about the long task of ensuring the peace and prosperity of the islands at a time when, all around them, the world was in turmoil still.

  After the death of Neoptolemus, resistance to the Dorian invaders quickly crumbled. Iolcus fell before their renewed advance; then all of Thessaly was lost. Soon their iron weapons were cutting a swathe down into Locris. Already losing control over Attica and the western kingdoms, Orestes lacked the authority to count on even half the number of men his father had once raised, even though the threat was to the homeland now. So, long before Mycenae was sacked by the Dorian horde, it was clear that if Troy had been utterly destroyed by the war, the High Kingdom of Argos could not long survive its consequences.

  Everywhere order was breaking down. Men grew lawless, the roads became unsafe; piracy and cattle-lifting were rife again. By that time Odysseus was more than sixty years old, but he was still vigorous, and when raiders began to disrupt the hard-won peace of Ithaca he resolved to put a stop to their depredations.

  A watch was kept along the coast and he instituted a system of alarms, using bullhorns and signal fires. The band of militiamen he organized were too late to save a hamlet in the north from ransack and murder, but when, only days later, a strange ship was sighted closer to home, he was ready to resist them.

  Afterwards men argued about how things had gone so wrong on that high summer afternoon. Some blamed the heat, for there was no shade on the torrid beach and men’s tempers were running short. But the militiamen were tightly disciplined. As ordered, they kept under cover while the strangers came ashore. Then they advanced with Odysseus at their head, shouting and banging their spears against their shields.

  The intention had been merely to scare them off, but perhaps the landing party panicked at the unexpected sight of so many spearmen coming at them. Perhaps Odysseus incited them by his angry shouts, or maybe he said something that the foreigners misunderstood. Whatever the case, everyone stood by in stunned astonishment as a young man with tousled red hair reached for a primitive stingray spear and hurled it at Odysseus.

  Because of the heat, Odysseus had gone down to the beach without his armour and his shield was slung low at his side. The barb of the spear entered his chest and penetrated straight to the heart. By the time his shocked men had run across those few yards of sand, he was dead.

  Already the strangers were retreating through the shallow water to where they had anchored their ship. The armed guard were so stupefied by the death of their lord that they were slow to pursue them. For that reason, the red-haired fellow was able to climb aboard his vessel and shout back at the shore.

  ‘My name is Telegonus,’ he called. ‘I came in peace. I came in search of my father Odysseus. But I see he has not taught the men of Ithaca how to welcome strangers as we do in Aiaia. Tell him I came. Tell him my mother Circe sent me.’

  Then he turned and barked an order at the men scrambling for the oars, and the boat pulled out into the quiet bay.

  Telemachus was away from Ithaca at that time on his long voyage into the west, so I stood beside Penelope as the offerings were made for Odysseus’ shade.

  ‘It is as Teiresias foretold,’ she sighed, gazing at her husband’s body where it lay at rest under the brazen sky in the rich garments she had woven for him. ‘Death came to him from the sea after all … and it seems to have come easily’ Then she added something which left me puzzled. ‘But we can be thankful,’ she whispered, ‘that he had long since planted his oar.’

  Later, after I had sung my paean at the great f
east with which we consigned Odysseus to the Land of Shades, I asked her to explain what she had meant.

  ‘It was another thing that Teiresias prophesied,’ she answered. ‘Something that became the very root of our life together.’

  I saw her deliberate a moment before confiding in me further; but then she must have recalled that I too had a great love for Odysseus and that the truest memorial to his deeds might one day be found in the stories I told of him; so Penelope admitted me to what was the most decisive moment of their later life.

  ‘When he was at the Oracle of the Dead,’ she said, ‘Odysseus was told that he must one day go on a long journey to a place where men would not know an oar for what it was when they saw it. He assumed that Teiresias meant an actual journey … and perhaps the soothsayer thought so too. Certainly there were times in the days when things were hard between us when he threatened to leave and go roving in fulfilment of that prophecy rather than endure any longer the demands and limitations that our life together made on him. But he never actually left — though at times I feared he might do so, And then one night, when he had begun to understand that all the hard things happening between us were only the labour of a wiser love trying to get born, he was visited by a dream.’

  In that dream, Penelope told me, Odysseus had gone on a long journey, far into the heart of Libya. Travelling alone, taking nothing with him but the great steering oar of The Fair Return, he had walked for mile after mile through an arid terrain, crossing mountains and deserts and wilderness in the course of a single night.

  At last he came to a place where a man wearing a wide-brimmed hat with a light cloak thrown across his shoulders, waited at a crossroads.

  ‘Why do you carry a winnowing fan with you?’ the Libyan asked.

  ‘Why do you call this a winnowing fan,’ Odysseus answered, ‘when you can plainly see it is an oar?’