We attacked at night, by preference. We put many towns to the torch, speared men in night-dress fumbling for their bows and filled our holds with stolen silver. We struck and sailed on, trying to stay ahead of our reputation, but nothing travels faster than bad news and the day came when we saw grim armed men patrolling the walls of the city we had chosen. We could barely have fit another tripod aboard anyway, so it was time to sail for home.
It was nearly winter then, the tag end of the sailing season, and flocculent grey fogs covered the sea. We could easily have found an island somewhere, someplace out of the way, unlikely to be visited, and spent the winter there fishing and letting idleness smooth off our keen edges, but we were tired of our own society and of our rootless wartime existences and so we did not wait. We would have preferred to sail within sight of land but were afraid of well-armed ships cruising for revenge so we took the straight route over open sea. There was many an old sailor in my crew and none of them had ever made a blue-water crossing of the Middle Sea but I scorned adversity and risked it.
The days crept by, undifferentiated durations of mist and whitecaps. We kept course as best we could by dead reckoning but the sun and moon rarely peeked out—when they did my mates and I would jump on the opportunity and make our measurements but our calculations were never in agreement. Three ships went missing one night and were not to be found however much we called into the whiteness but it was no great matter, I thought, they could find their own way home.
On the seventh day of the journey the look-out shouted (his disembodied voice floating down from the fog-enveloped crow’s nest) that he saw orange lights floating above us close ahead, too far up to be a ship. The fog shifted and we saw them from the deck, bright flares drifting high above us. It was hard to be certain if it was the cloud bank or the lights that were moving. The more superstitious men invoked the Hermes of Travelers and made the sign against the evil eye. I noticed that the lights were spaced evenly and seemed roughly rectangular and told the men to cheer up because we were looking either at the windows of a house on a high island hill or at some unusually symmetric ghosts. Within minutes we found the shore, steep and rocky and covered with short twisted pines. There was a cove and in it a neat little dock. It occurred to me to pass it by—we had treasure enough and supplies to get us home even if we wandered until spring, so why go looking for trouble? But with the impending reality of homecoming and the reversion from warriors to the conditions of husbands, sons and townsmen, the crew were determined to have a holiday. Reluctantly I permitted them to dock and followed as they jumped from the ships, swords in hand.
The island was small but very steep, really just a small mountain protruding from the sea, its flanks covered with a dripping tangle of redolent pines. A single path zigzagged upward, its stairs cut in the stone and lit by paper lanterns spaced out like stepping-stones so that on reaching a new one the glow of the next was just visible through the fog. Up we hiked, full of uncertainty. At the top we emerged into a clearing before a house with a high roof and an open door. Evenly spaced windows glowed with firelight. As we looked around doubtfully, moved by the house’s beauty and unsure if we were pirates, pilgrims or travelers passing by, the lady of the house emerged and from her doorway greeted us with a warmth and composure that were shocking in light of the savage spectacle we must have presented. In retrospect, that should have been a warning. She said that we were welcome on her island, Aiaia—she and her women rarely received visitors and would gladly offer us their poor hospitality. Abashed, the men sheathed their weapons with pantomimes of discretion and entered her hall, meek under her magisterial smile. The lady’s maids emerged to take our hands and seat us at a long table before a fire burning in a great pit large enough to roast ten bulls. Above the pit was a mantel carved with men chasing wolves or perhaps being chased by them. I wondered about the extravagance with firewood but thought it impolite to ask.
The lady, who said her name was Circe, sat me at her right hand and said that we were clearly heroes returning from some great struggle, she could see it in our keen faces and the strength of our sword-arms, and I had the air of a captain about me. Who were we, then, and what deeds had we done? This was against the law of hosts—guests were to be allowed to eat and drink before they were asked to account for themselves, but she and her maids had a wanton look about them and I suspected they were prostitutes as much as gentlewomen so I did not stand on politesse. I gave her a not entirely accurate history of the war, distorted more for the sake of a good story than self-servingly. I glossed Helen’s death and said little of Agamemnon and his brother. I did let slip that I was the favorite of a goddess and that my counsel had often been sought by chiefs. She was an excellent audience, thoroughly enjoying the tale and prompting me to continue when I was afraid I had talked too much and fell silent.
It got late and the fire burned low. Many amphorae lolled on the ground, empty of wine, ringing hollow when someone tripped on them. The women started trickling away with my men, who took care to avoid my eyes as they went off to their forest trysts. (I don’t know why—I never gave them cause to think of me as a moral exemplar.) Outside, torches went past the windows and the wind brought laughter. When everyone else had gone, Circe stood and took my hand and led me into her bedroom as the coals settled.
I woke later that night not knowing why but troubled and then it came again, a thin high keening. My first thought was that there had been a fight over a woman. I sat up in her bed and listened. I heard the wind in the pines, the distant waves, something like laughter and then a barely audible retching. Circe turned and muttered in her sleep. I crept out of bed and went to the window that opened over the mountain. Flashes of torchlight shone here and there among the trees. I watched for a long time, breath steaming and goose bumps rising. The sky was lightening in the east and I was about to go back to bed when I heard a long familiar ululation close by and saw a flash of bare skin through the restless boughs. This could have many meanings, some of them benign—in Athens the cult of the Bacchantes was an excuse for faintly licentious outdoor revels for well-to-do ladies. Then a woman walked naked out of the woods, her skin white and her tangled black hair whipped by the wind. Her face was blank and in her left hand there was a skinning knife. There were dark stains on her hands and stomach.
I drew my sword and put it to Circe’s neck, the tip moving with her pulse. She came slowly to her senses and regarded me with sleepy, slitted eyes as I stood menacing her. In a husky voice she told me to think—if she had wanted me to die she would have drugged me like the rest of my men, all of whom were gone by now. She said she desired me and had decided to keep me, called on my dispassionate mind and held out her hand for the blade.
They were only women and probably had no better armament than knives—even alone, I could cut my way through them, and there might even be a few of my boys left alive. It occurred to me then to wonder what they had done with the unguarded ship. I imagined stalking down the path with blade drawn, racing onto the dock unopposed and finding nothing there but the waves lapping at the pilings as lights flared in the house high above me. I imagined coming back up to the house, finding it empty, searching for a target for my rage, finding nothing. The sun going down again and distant wavering cries calling and answering from the forest. It horrified me that I should have made it through Troy, often avoiding death by the width of a spear blade, only to end up dying here, my bones turning to ash in her fireplace.
A way out will present itself, I thought, as I handed her the hilt. There was no hurry. She gestured for me to come back in beside her and I did. She whispered in my ear that she was sure we would be happy together for a long time and that I would be understanding when she had new guests.
8
ACHILLES AND DEATH
When he was drunk Achilles would take his knife and try to pierce his hand or, if he was very drunk, his heart, and thereby were the delicate blades of many daggers broken. Odysseus, who had seen more than one such de
monstration, rained praise on him for his extraordinary mettle, which made Achilles bridle like a puppy, but privately worried that a man immune to death must soon despise the mortals around him. Certainly Achilles thought little enough of the Trojans. Odysseus had seen him emerge from battle bristling with black arrows—as he undressed to bathe the shafts came away with his armor and he would loll in his bronze tub while Briseis* washed his unscathed limbs and Patroclus told jokes.
Wounds fascinated Achilles. When Patroclus got a scratch Achilles would fuss over him like an old nurse, endlessly bandaging and salving what could as well be left alone. But when a Greek was mortally wounded, even one of his own men, Achilles would not so much as look at him. When the bodies of the fallen were wound in orange sheets and burned on a pyre, Achilles was always elsewhere.
On the field Achilles was haggard with rage, to all appearances pursuing a vendetta, as though the Trojans had plotted to steal his cattle or his standing. His style was uninformed by tactics or consequences. A high wave surging onto shore, breaking over a dune and washing the sand away in a foaming tumult—so it was when Achilles struck an enemy line. Odysseus often trailed behind him to pick off the wounded and terrified.
Odysseus noticed that although Achilles was indifferent to blows, he received very few, apparently because his enemies were too dismayed to attack him intelligently. Odysseus considered imitating him but decided that the enabling recklessness had to be deeply felt. He did, however, make a mental note to be cautious of men with nothing to lose.
Achilles barely suffered the presence of King Agamemnon—he would talk over him in council and walk past him in camp without so much as a nod. With uncharacteristic self-possession, Agamemnon put up with it, perhaps because it was not clear how he could retaliate. The aristocracy joined Agamemnon in hating Achilles but the rank and file loved him—when the mood took him he would beggar himself in generosity, giving away his gold and spears and slaves to some warrior whose smile he liked or who had done a brave thing in battle.
One night when innumerable watch fires burned on the Trojan wall, Odysseus was summoned to Agamemnon’s tent. There he found the High King with Nestor and Menelaus speaking darkly over a single candle. Nestor pulled Odysseus close and whispered that Achilles, only half drunk, had been talking mutiny, strutting around camp and proclaiming that he was nearer a god than a man and it was unseemly that a mere contemptible mortal should command him, especially when that mortal could not even take one city in seven years’ siege. His Myrmidons laughed and encouraged him. Agamemnon said that while Achilles was a terror to his enemies, he was nevertheless more boy than man and any enterprise of his which did not hinge on his sword-arm would end in disaster.
The discussion turned to the method of Achilles’ dissolution. Though he was proof against weapons and no one had ever known him to get sick, he could, they reasoned, be bound. He could be tricked into a mine and buried in a deep shaft under heavy stones where only bats would hear him calling. He could be immersed in molten iron and wrought into an ingot to be dropped into the sea, there to spend eternity listing in deep currents. He could be locked into a heavy chest and hidden in a secret compartment in a trader’s ship, itinerant, anonymous and never seen again. But besides the innate difficulty of inflicting these schemes on a man who was fearless, invulnerable and an exuberant killer surrounded by loyal and heavily armed friends, there was his mother, Thetis, a sea nymph who loved her son dearly and had the ear of Zeus the cloud-gatherer, who saw everything. Odysseus reflected on the problem for a while and told them not to worry, he would take care of everything.
Three nights later he went into Achilles’ tent in the small hours and crouched by his cot. “Achilles, wake up. I’m setting an ambush for the Trojans by the Scamander and I need you,” he whispered. Achilles shrugged off sleep and, laughing at Father Odysseus’s sudden boldness, buckled on his armor.
They went silently over the white starlit plains to a hive-shaped tomb on a hill over the river. The tomb’s door was open. Achilles reluctantly followed Odysseus into the low cool earthy room where pale bodies lay wrapped in flame-colored cloth, from which Achilles averted his eyes. “Wait here,” Odysseus said, “I will call like an owl when they’re coming.” “I will go with you,” said Achilles. Odysseus said, “No. You can break men but lack subtlety. I will go hide and watch and when the time comes for killing, then you join me.” Achilles’ eyes glowed like a cat’s in the faint light as Odysseus shut the tomb’s door and barred it behind him.
In high good humor, Odysseus walked into the hills to the camp he had prepared. For three days he stared out to sea and drank in the silence. On the third night he left his tent and returned to the tomb. Pausing in front of the tomb’s door, he envisioned pursuing spearmen—his breath quickened and he started to sweat. Unbarring the door, he said, “Achilles! Forgive me—I was taken unawares and only tonight managed to escape, I think,” and peered fearfully over his shoulder. He had composed a story in which he had been captured but made the Trojans think that he was a wanderer who had come to Troy to loot the battlefield dead. He had concocted a detailed description of the notional patrol that caught him and even a back-story for his character as a looter. These preparations proved unnecessary. Within the tomb Achilles sat with his eyes closed, concentrating on each slow, shuddering breath.
The next morning Odysseus told Agamemnon that Achilles had gone away, having concluded in the course of his imprisonment that he should alleviate suffering rather than cause it. This explanation was deemed suspect but Achilles’ absence, sorely felt, was a certainty.
Subsequently it was said that he had gone away into the East and become an ascetic or a sophist. Over the years stories trickled in, most of them hardly credible: Achilles had begged in the streets, preached to animals in the waste or spent a year in contemplation in the shadow of a tree. The Greeks neither credited these travelers’ tales nor thought that they diminished his lingering glory.
*A slave girl, the captive of his spear, of whom Achilles was fond.
9
ONE KINDNESS
Odysseus clung to his raft of sticks as he was washed through the breakers and onto the shore of another island in the sequence of islands that filled his days. On the narrow shore the cold rain hit him and he found himself missing the warmth of the sea. He saw firelight in a cave, pulled himself up and staggered toward it. It occurred to him to walk in and throw himself on the mercy of the occupants but instead he thought, “One more time,” and crept through the freezing, rain-soaked night to listen.
Within, three women sat around a snapping fire. The shadows on the wall behind them were the blurred silhouettes of sweet maiden, stout matron and bent crone, but as the firelight flickered the shadows took other forms—a long-armed ogre with grasping hands, a bird of prey with unfurled wings, a net with glass floats (their iridescence gleaming on the rough rock walls), or, sometimes, nothing at all. They debated loudly to be heard over the rain and the fire, which, for all the violence of its burning, made more smoke than light.
“Ten years is ten years, no matter how you cut it,” said one, brandishing a cooking knife. “You can interpret all you like but the facts are inescapable.”
“Mere simple-minded literalism,” said another, using a ladle to stir a tarnished copper pot on a tripod all but swallowed by the flames. “If it said he was to be brave like an eagle, would you have him plucking mice out of fields and climbing a tall tree to sit on a nest of sticks and guard an egg? It is understood to be a guideline, an indication to be fleshed out as required by the details of the situation, and not an exact recipe . . .”
“It is exactly a recipe, only far more binding,” said the first in a voice like a fast, cold wind.
“. . . unless you’re a blockhead,” finished the second.
“Blockhead yourself, Miss I-shall-do-as-I-please-for-it-is-only-a-guideline,” said the first. “I beg your pardon most humbly, great Madam. I never meant to imply that one as august as yoursel
f should be obliged to be bound by the iron chains of necessity.”
“Tut. There is some room to move within those chains, and I say he has suffered enough,” replied the second.
“He has not begun to suffer,” said the third, whom Odysseus now saw was the fairest and most terrible. “If he got home now he would be unmarked. His suffering, as you are pleased to call it, would be the stuff of tales to enliven the winter of his old age, stories for his grandchildren. Fie on you. We will draw him thin and fine.”
It began to hail. The ice stones clamored in the trees and off the stone and the cave filled with echoes.
“Bloodthirsty,” said one, he could no longer tell which.
“Then let none of his blood be spilled. We can hurt him just as much, even worse without it,” said another, cackling, her voice coming from no direction and every direction.
“What then, break his heart?” said another.
“Don’t break him—drain him. Take all his warmth and hope and make him empty as a clear cold night on the top of Aetna.”
“So be it.”
“So be it.”
“What next for him, then?”
“The witch Calypso, in solitude on her island. Her bed is cold and she longs for him, though she does not yet know it, for all that she studies the stars and suspects that the sea will soon bring her a gift.”
“And shall we make her a horror?”
The hail crescendoed and the fire was a red glow of embers. Odysseus gathered his courage (thinking that after all the shadows might only be shadows, the women only women) and in a high, rough voice said, “No, let her be beautiful and as kind as summer.”
“Such kindliness, sister!” said one.
The Lost Books of the Odyssey: A Novel Page 3