by Glyn Iliffe
‘Be calm,’ he muttered to himself. ‘There’s only one way out of here. Give up now and you’re stuck.’
Then the torch that Odysseus was pushing along ahead of him went out, plunging them into total darkness. Eperitus balled his hands into fists and squeezed his eyes tight shut, fighting the terror that was beginning to tear at him. He took a deep breath and moved on, faster this time until his groping hands found the warm body of Odysseus’s sheep filling the tunnel before him. He wanted to shout at Odysseus to move quicker. He clenched his fists again and paused. How much longer now? How long had he been in the tunnel? What if there was a rockfall? What if the tunnel was endless? Was this what it meant to be dead: to be entombed forever in rock, still living and breathing but unable to move, trapped for eternity? And all the time inflicted with the biting cold that was turning his fingers and face numb, his ears filled with the whispers of the dead? He wanted to cry out, to scream at his imprisonment, anything but remain in that place. But he fought it. He faced down his fear with every last thread of his willpower, telling himself over and over again that there would be an end to the tunnel, that soon they would be out on the other side – wherever that may be – and that he would be free. He thought about Astynome. He tried to recall the forest on Aeaea. The wind on his face on the plains of Troy. The smell of the sea and the taste of Maron’s wine. But he could remember nothing, nothing to relieve the terrible sense that he was trapped forever in the tunnel between Odysseus and Omeros.
‘I can’t do it!’
He opened his eyes to blackness. What had he said?
‘I can’t go on!’
It was Omeros. The sound of the lad’s terror should have broken him, too. But it did not. Somehow it strengthened him.
‘Omeros, listen to me,’ he called back. ‘You can do it. This won’t go on for much longer. We can’t go back; we can only go forward, so be strong. Now’s the time to prove yourself.’
‘I can see something!’ he heard Odysseus say somewhere ahead of him. ‘I can see a light.’
‘Did you hear that?’ Eperitus shouted back to Omeros. ‘Odysseus can see a light. We’re nearly there.’
A glimmer of hope now reignited itself within him. He thought again of Astynome and this time he could see her face. Gritting his teeth, he hauled himself forward, only to find Odysseus’s sheep before him again. He grasped at the wool and squeezed it hard, feeling the panic return.
‘Omeros, are you there?’
‘Yes. Yes, I’m here. I’m sorry for –’
‘If you apologise to me, lad, I’ll give you the worst beating you’ve ever suffered the moment we get out of here.’
How could he even tolerate an apology from a boy when the same terror was clawing at every fibre of his own sanity?
His body was stiff with tension. He wanted to kneel, stand, walk, run, anything but crawl on his stomach like a worm through the bowels of the earth. But he could not, so he could either keep on crawling or go out of his mind. He kept crawling: one elbow at a time, reaching and pulling, reaching and pulling. Astynome had deserted him again. All he saw was blackness; all he felt was cold; all he could smell was sulphur; all he heard was the moaning of the dead.
And then it was over. A desperate scrambling before him, followed by a shout – a cry of joy or terror, he could not tell – and a thin yellow light, so faint he did not know whether he was seeing it with his eyes or in his mind. Then, realising his eyelids were tight shut, he flicked them open and saw a hole in the blackness ahead of him. It was the end of the tunnel. A moment later he saw Odysseus crouching down and stretching a hand towards him. He dragged himself forward, reached out and felt his friend’s strong fingers around his wrist, pulling him out.
Chapter Thirty-Four
THE LAND OF THE DEAD
Odysseus dragged Eperitus onto the black grass, where he lay on his back and covered his face with his hands. Untying the ropes attached to his ankle, he hauled out the black ewe and the small bag of barley and then looked into the mouth of the tunnel. He caught the pale gleam of Omeros’s terrified eyes further back in the darkness.
‘Come on, take my hand.’
The poet stayed where he was.
‘What’s it like out there?’
‘Don’t force me to come in and get you.’
After a moment’s hesitation Omeros pulled himself forward on his elbows until he could take hold of the king’s outstretched hand. Once out, he raised himself on his hands and knees and stared in silence at the world they had entered, until finally he could take no more. He rolled onto his side and, like Eperitus, threw his hands over his face.
Odysseus turned and looked at the strange and terrible landscape he had only dared to glimpse as he had tumbled out from the tunnel. He was standing beneath a tall cliff face on a sward of black grass, looking out over a barren, mist-shrouded plain that appeared to have no end. Grey clouds tinged with yellow rolled in agony overhead, promising the refreshing sustenance of rain in that dry place and yet never giving it. At some distance to his right a cataract of thick red liquid like living fire plunged noisily down from the clifftop into a large pool, where it formed a river that oozed down towards the plain. It threw up a curtain of crimson light that danced and flickered in the murky air, but if it was indeed a river of fire then it emitted no heat, for this was a place of life-sapping iciness. Leaching over the cliffs to Odysseus’s left was another falls, silent and black. From the summit, globs of tar-like slime drooped and spattered onto the dead meadow below, forming a heap that eventually seeped down the slope to create another river. This, Circe had told him, was Cocytus, the River of Lamentation. It carried the sluggish, shapeless grief of the living for their loved ones who had entered the Land of the Dead. The other was Phlegethon, the River of Flaming Fire that flowed with the blood of the dead. Both slid forward to join together beyond a pinnacle of rock that rose up out of the fog a bow’s shot from the foot of the cliff where Odysseus stood. Here, at the point of their mingling, they plunged over another cliff into a third, much larger river that wound its way through the sombre landscape like a yellow scar. This was the Acheron, the greatest of the five rivers that ran through the Underworld. Its bitter waters gave the Land of the Dead its pallid illumination, a corpse light that was devoid of life and hope.
Beyond the pinnacle of rock Odysseus could see other peaks rising from the restless mist on the plain below, some crowned with the twisted husks of dead trees, others with crumbling walls and broken towers. But of the doleful occupants of the Underworld there was no sign at all. For that, at least, he was glad. They would come when his sacrifice of blood was made, but at that moment it was as much as he could endure just to breathe the parching air and feel its life-stealing ice penetrate his bones. Looking out at the emptiness before him drained his desire for the things of the living world he had left behind. What was the use in sunlight or the feel of water on his skin; why the need to taste meat, or hear the sound of a human voice, or fill his nostrils with the smell of a forest when all life, ultimately, came to this? It all seemed strangely puerile now: all those journeys he had undertaken; the battles he had fought; the councils he had spoken at; and the great schemes he had devised, when in the end he would leave it all for this. Where was the good in fame and glory, even love, if it gave him no comfort when his flesh was cold and his spirit was doomed to eternity in Tartarus?
‘What was the point of any of it?’ he asked.
Eperitus, who was now standing and staring at the landscape before them, turned.
‘What did you say?’
‘He asked what the point of it was,’ Omeros answered, sitting with his chin on his knees. ‘A good question, though I don’t know the answer, nor care.’
‘The point is, we carry on and do what we came here to do,’ Eperitus said wearily. He laid a hand on Odysseus’s shoulder and shook it. ‘What did we just drag ourselves through that tunnel for? You remember, don’t you?’
‘To find Teiresias and
ask him the way home.’
Odysseus turned listlessly to the sheep and the black ewe. Untying the rope that bound their legs together, he led the subdued animals towards the rock where the two rivers met. When he reached the foot of the pinnacle – where broad steps cracked with age led up to the flat summit – he drew his sword and began digging the trench Circe had instructed him to make. As he knelt he noticed that the dry grass was carpeted with masses of small, pale flowers, every one of which was dead. Lifting his eyes, he saw through the mist the shapes of lifeless trees along the banks of the rivers. They stood root-deep in fallen leaves, which never stirred because there was not a breath of wind to move them. Their branches hung with the rotted remains of fruit that had neither been picked nor had fallen to create new saplings. Like all the withered vegetation of that place, they stood in mockery of life, a warning of what all life would eventually become. Even the stench of sulphur that filled Odysseus’s nostrils seemed to scorn the wholesome air he had breathed every moment of his life in the world above, never then appreciating its sweetness.
He stabbed the blade into the soil again, scraping away the grass and flowers with their shrivelled roots and the thin, dry earth that held them. Then he noticed something else in the soil, something small and white. He plucked it out and saw that it was a bone, the rib of a small mammal. Flinging it aside, he scratched away more of the dirt and found another bone, and another. The first he was certain was part of a fish skull; the second was a human knuckle. He dug deeper, bringing up more bones, some animal, some human. Finding the lower part of a man’s jawbone, he dropped his sword with a cry of despair and fell back from the shallow scrape.
At once he felt Eperitus’s hands under his arms, lifting him back onto his haunches.
‘Here,’ he said, handing him his discarded sword. ‘I’ll help you.’
Drawing his own blade, Eperitus began to hack at the parched ground, tossing aside the bones as he found them. Odysseus joined him, scraping furiously one moment, tensing the next as he picked out each new bone and flung it away. When the trench was as wide and deep as was needed, he turned to Omeros and signalled for the milk, honey and wine to be brought to him. Mixing the honey and wine in a wooden bowl, he poured it from side to side into the trench. This was followed by the last skin of Maron’s wine, which he emptied, then most of the water, saving enough to wet the dryness in his throat and to offer a mouthful to each of his comrades. Last of all, he sprinkled the barley into the trench, stopping when it was half full.
‘The voices have changed,’ Eperitus announced.
‘You didn’t tell me you could hear voices,’ Odysseus said, looking up sharply at the mist that seemed to have closed about them.
Eperitus gave him a questioning look.
‘Can’t you? You neither, Omeros? But they’re not distant; I can hear them as clearly as I hear you, though I can only catch words here and there. It’s like listening to a thousand people speaking at once.’
‘And can you see them?’
‘Glimpses out of the corner of my eye. They’re all around us.’
Odysseus felt a shudder. He did not fear the dead, but he was afraid to witness their fate. It was the fate that awaited all men, and he did not wish to know it before his own time came. Already he felt the despair of the place, like an iron weight in his chest that encased his spirit and made him forget all that was good. From the moment he had fallen out of the tunnel like a stillborn child from its mother’s womb he had felt the lust for life draining from him. Words like hope, desire and love were meaningless here. Here there was nothing but himself. A terrible self-obsessed loneliness consumed him, so that Omeros and Eperitus were strangers of whom he knew little and for whom he cared nothing at all. Worse still, he knew that he was here to learn the way home to Penelope and Telemachus, but he could not think why. In the Underworld, they were simply names. Nothing seemed to matter here but his own misery.
‘Odysseus? Odysseus? Weren’t we supposed to do something?’ Eperitus asked.
‘Who cares?’ Omeros said. ‘Leave him alone, why don’t you? In fact, why don’t you leave us both alone?’
‘I should have left you in that tunnel, crying like a baby.’
‘I’d rather be stuck in there than out here!’
‘Shut up, both of you!’ Odysseus snapped, pointing his sword at them. ‘I don’t know why in Hades’s name either of you came. You were supposed to help me, but I’m starting to wish the pair of you had fallen off that roof instead of Elpenor. At least if you were here with the dead you might have been able to tell me what to do now, rather than squabbling over nothing!’
He sighed and let the sword drop to his side, then fell to his knees and rested his chin on his chest. He wished the others were gone so that he could just lie down and sleep, though something told him that sleeping here would be as torturous as being awake. Then, through the dark despair that was clouding his mind and robbing him of his purpose, a thought emerged like a torch. Pray – he had to pray.
Don’t forget why you are here, said a familiar voice. You draw your strength from your love of Penelope and Telemachus, of your homeland Ithaca, and from the undying hope that you will return to them. But love and hope cannot exist here. That is why your resolve is failing. But I will not abandon you and Eperitus entirely, not in this place, though you turned your backs on me at Troy.
‘Athena!’ he whispered.
Summon the dead, Odysseus, offer them sacrifices and give them the blood of life they so crave. Learn what you must from Teiresias and from the other wretches who inhabit this place, some of whom it will pain you to see. Witness the horror of their existence if you have to, but remember you belong in the world of the living. Do not let despair keep you here. Isn’t it enough that one day you will leave your bodies behind and join the teeming ranks of the dead? But that time has not yet come. Think of me and live.
Odysseus opened his eyes and turned to Eperitus. His expression told him he had not been alone in hearing the voice of the goddess.
‘We must complete what we came here to do,’ Eperitus told him, ‘even though all hope of ever leaving this place has gone. You must summon the dead.’
Odysseus held up the palms of his hands and began calling on the spirits of the Underworld, promising them a barren heifer on his return to Ithaca. Naming Teiresias, he pledged the seer a separate sacrifice of a black sheep if he would present himself and answer his questions. When his invocations were done, he grasped the ram’s thick fleece and straddled it, holding it fast between his knees. The animal sensed its coming death and bleated loudly until Odysseus drew his blade across its throat. The blood gushed out into the trench below, steaming in the frigid air. Tossing the carcass towards Omeros, he beckoned for Eperitus to hand him the black ewe. The mist that had thus far clung to the far banks of the two rivers now began to writhe and roll towards the Ithacans. At the same time, Odysseus started to hear the voices Eperitus had spoken of, a maelstrom of whispers in which single words rose to the surface to touch upon his consciousness for an instant, before being forgotten again. And every word was a name, though whether it was the name of the speaker or a plea for a loved one he could not tell. Grabbing the black ewe, he held it over the trench and slashed open its throat with a quick movement. The blood flowed quickly and heavily, splashing into the shallow pit and on the dead vegetation around it. And wherever it touched the grass or the flowers he saw that the colour began to return to them.
Then a terrifying moan rose up into the stagnant air, and from the formless mist hundreds of translucent figures began to emerge, rushing towards the trench with open mouths and grasping hands. Defying the instinct to run back to the tunnel and claw his way back to the world of the living, Odysseus summoned the last of his courage and stepped across the trench, holding the point of his sword before him.
‘Stay where you are!’ he commanded. ‘Only those I permit can drink of the blood.’
He looked now at the teeming mass of i
nsubstantial forms, the sorrowful imprints of humanity still clinging to the shapes they had held in life. They crowded around him: rank upon rank, tier upon tier; men and women, greybeards and infants; a bride with withered summer flowers in her hair; a young girl with gashed wrists held towards him; a bruised, bloody child stumbling towards him on broken legs; and countless men in gore-spattered armour, their wounds gaping open and the stumps of severed limbs dripping with spectral blood. Their eyes were white orbs, and though terrible to look at, Odysseus instinctively knew it was a mercy, for to have seen the suffering in them would have been unbearable. As he fought back his horror at the sight of them, he realised they were uttering just one name now. His.