*In the eighteenth century B.C. there was a thriving cult of the goddess Quickness, known for virginity, quick thinking, harsh laughter and an association with owls. Her particular enemy was Death, with whom she had fought a number of inconclusive wars, her object in which seems to have been eradicating his kingdom and ushering in an era of immortality. Her cult was immensely popular but such was the ruggedness of montane Greece that it soon speciated into a dozen subgenera. By the twelfth century B.C. her incarnation as Pallas Athena had displaced all others and is now remembered to the exclusion of her sisters. Quickness was a more lively goddess than Athena, open to human sacrifice and, in contrast with her sister, as much a user and a predator as a lover of heroes.
*At the time, Achaean men would marry around fifteen and Achaean women around twelve, so this would be well into his married life.
*Upon returning from the Trojan War, Agamemnon was murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra.
21
HELEN’S IMAGE
Years before the Trojan War, King Tyndareus decided it was time to marry off his daughter Helen and, as she was the same age, her cousin Penelope. Penelope was fair but Helen, who was actually the daughter of Zeus, though no mortal but her mother knew it, had beauty that broke men’s wills. Upon hearing of Helen’s impending introduction to society, the flower of Achaea’s bachelorhood descended on Tyndareus’s palace to court his favor and (since he was an indulgent father) his daughter’s. Odysseus, young and ambitious, came all the stormy way from Ithaca to win her, but when he arrived and saw the throng of suitors surrounding the girls he knew that for all his skill in war and presence of mind, his kingdom was small and poor, and more eligible princes abounded. Pensive, he haunted the periphery of the hall where Helen suffered gentlemen to wait on her and racked his mind for a stratagem. He was distracted by the braying laughter of Menelaus, a thick-headed bully whose ill breeding was evident in the offhand contempt with which he treated Penelope, who hovered near him, her eyes fixed on his face, filling his wine cup and laughing at jokes intended for Helen.
“I must have Helen or die,” Odysseus thought, “though she does not seem like the sort of thing that can be had. More like a raptor, bright-eyed, poised over the world, inaccessible, rarely descending, swiftly striking. It would be worth my life to get her.” Just then Mentor, Odysseus’s father’s man who had come with him from Ithaca, appeared as though from out of a mist and pulled him aside. Eyes shining, Mentor said he had noticed that though every man was smitten with Helen and could scarcely tear his eyes from her face, no two of them described her the same way. This effect was so pronounced that they might have been describing different women altogether. For Agamemnon she was wide-hipped, cow-eyed, faithful and slow. For Themistocles she was a wild thing of volatile moods and for Idomenos a giddy, vapid admirer of his seamanship, and so on.* Not only that but when she was not immediately before them her suitors were hard-pressed to remember anything about her at all—he had found that when Helen was out of sight her suitors could not even recall the color of her hair, although they accepted any suggestion given to them. Menelaus the Spartan was the only one who was not smitten with her—he seemed to desire her because she was considered desirable and only the best wife was consistent with his dignity. Odysseus, skeptical, tried to remember her face and failed. A plan formed and in his preoccupation he did not notice when Mentor vanished in a rushing of wings.*
That night Odysseus climbed up the wall of the palace garden through thick perfumed air and into Penelope’s bedroom. She regarded him morosely, dull-eyed and indifferent at the prospect of ravishment. Odysseus sat beside her on her bed, put an arm around her shoulders and asked in a conspirational whisper how would she would like to have Menelaus for a husband. Penelope replied with the clarity of depression that she would like it above all things but that no one could compete with Helen. Odysseus said, “I will get you what you want, and as for Helen she will get a husband who is a much better man than Menelaus.”
The next morning Tyndareus’s valet brought him a note that had been found in the banquet hall. It was from Helen, informing him that she had fallen in love with Menelaus, prince of Sparta, and had asked him to carry her away that night, this being the only sure way of getting the husband she wanted. In a postscript she conveyed her kindest regards to the other suitors. As the young men grumbled over this effrontery the rumor spread that Penelope, the plain one, had also eloped, going off with an obscure island-lord. Tyndareus sat fuming until he realized that both his wards were in advantageous marriages, that he had not paid a single copper in dowry and that no one could say a word against him.
On Ithaca, Odysseus’s bride was his delight and for her part she did not seem to mind him, though she would never let him see her undressed. In Sparta, Menelaus was happy because he had what everyone else wanted. For the first few months of their marriage his wife adored him, but soon even she found him odious. He reciprocated her dislike and, still loath to let anyone else so much as see her, kept her sequestered in his palace.
When the glib and handsome Prince Paris visited the Spartan court, Penelope, who was permitted out of the women’s quarters for state occasions, was easily seduced, absconding with him not so much for love as in hope of any other kind of life.
In due course Agamemnon and Menelaus came to Ithaca and demanded that Odysseus muster his forces to sail with them to recapture Helen. Odysseus longed to explain the joke and tell them to forget about their war and go home somewhat the wiser, but he saw their grim faces and their warships in the harbor and knew he would not long survive that revelation, so he went home and kissed Helen goodbye, waiting to see if she would kiss him in return (he had lived with her for years by then but had not yet made up his mind whether she liked him, nor had he learned to read her face), and then got his arms to go to the war that he hoped would end by summer’s reaping.
*Helen, though mortal, was more god than not. The ichor of her father Zeus had bred truer in her than in any of his other mortal scions; in consequence of her fractional godhead, no mortal man could look upon her without being burned away, until Zeus took pity on her (and perhaps on the Achaeans) and hid her behind a veil that occluded most of her nature—any man looking at her would see the epigone of feminine beauty as he conceived it, and almost nothing of who she really was (in so far as she was anyone at all).
*It is interesting to note that Odysseus’s description of Helen consists mostly of attributes characteristic of Pallas Athena. Mentor was one of Athena’s preferred manifestations—one wonders whether she was aware of what Odysseus saw and whether even her fortress-like heart was moved a little.
22
BRIGHT LAND
Pale* lived by the sea in an open house on high posts that the tide ran through. The house was full of light and while he had mother and sister, canoe, sun and sea he wanted for nothing but his father, who had been away at war in the East since time out of mind.
Every morning his sister dove for mussels in the shallows of the bay, his mother spun wool on her wheel, and he went fishing in his canoe. When the sun was straight overhead his mother put down her work and peered into the East in hopes of seeing her husband returning, but she only ever saw water and air. In the afternoon Pale and his sister walked in the forest or listened to their mother tell tales of the bright lands to the west where virtue flowed down from the tops of the mountains and evil washed in from the sea.
One day in an infinite succession of otherwise identical days, the sky turned dark and the sea was angry and the air was like smoke. Pale was fishing in his canoe and as he was a brave man he kept casting his net, though he could not see out of the troughs of the waves. A great swell came out of the east and bore him up and up till he thought all the water in the sea must be flowing beneath him, and then it dropped him down. When he and his canoe bobbed to the surface, an evil intuition sent him racing toward shore over water that ran black and full of weed. The beach where his house had been was swept clean, nothing there but smooth, dam
p, white sand. The forest above the house was gone too, dying fish and seaweed in its place, uprooted trees bobbing in the turbulent surf. He paddled frantically here and there looking for his mother and sister, thinking he saw hair floating on the surface and racing over only to find a tangle of kelp or a broken gull.
He was determined, but on the third day he gave up. He lay on his back and let the canoe drift, eyes closed, swimming in the blood-red light of the sun. At sunset he sighed and turned his back on the empty coast. He had heard that thirteen days’ paddle to the south was an island where one-eyed wild men lived in caves, and he had heard that inland a track led through the forest and over the hills to a city with a high round wall where the king had never seen the sea, but he let night fall and set his course by the stars for the bright lands in the west, for if his mother and sister had gone anywhere it would be there, to bathe in the springs at the top of the mountains. The water glowed blue with each paddle stroke and he sang a wordless song through the turning of the night.
Toward dawn, he came to an islet with a spring and beached there to sleep through the day. He flipped over his canoe, crawled into its shade and was closing his eyes when he heard a hoarse crying. He sprang up and found a small seal floating in the tide, moving weakly. “Perhaps your family misses you, seal,” he said and dragged it out of the water above the high tide mark into the shade of a surviving palm. He went to sleep and dreamed that he saw a slight woman with pitch black hair and bright black eyes smiling down at him. At dusk he woke and the seal was gone.
He filled his water jug in the spring, oriented by the dolphin constellation, and headed west. In the late watches of the night he thought he saw the seal again, keeping pace with him, but the seal, if there was a seal, soon dove and was seen no more.
By the tenth night he was out of water and bone-weary and there had been no land in a long time. Though it was hours till dawn he put up his paddle and rested, soothed by the swell and the wind. There was a splashing by the side of the canoe. He looked over and saw the young woman holding the side, smiling up at him, her mass of wet hair shining in the starlight. She said, “Where are you going, stranger so far from home?” “To the bright lands in the west,” he replied, in what voice he had left, “where virtue flows from the tops of the mountains.” “And evil flows in from the ocean,” said she. “I know the place well, and you’ll never get there in your little canoe. All you’ll find is ocean and sky and never a sight of an island though you break your back with paddling. But I know the way and I can take you there, so take my hand and come along.” He put down his paddle, which had grown very heavy, took her hand, and went over the side with her, disappearing into the warm sea with scarcely a ripple.
What happened then? In the end did his clean white bones float slowly down to settle on the abyssal plain, or did he marry her and become a prince of the seals, living in the deep and forgetting his life as a man, or did he one day drag himself through the surf onto what his heart knew at once for the bright lands? The sea does not tell.
*There is a tradition, albeit present in only a few fragmentary sources, that Odysseus’s son Telemachus was pale to the point of albinism.
23
ISLANDS ON THE WAY
Odysseus’s ship rose in the water as his men carried the stolen treasure of many cities from its hold to his new hall. Alcinous, the island’s king, stood by watching, well pleased with his son-in-law-to-be. As soon as Odysseus had unloaded the ship he hitched a team of oxen to it with strong cables and dragged it up onto the beach. He took a crackling pine torch and, heart sinking despite his resolve, held it to the beached ship’s flank, but the sea-worn timber would not catch and the sun was setting so he went home. The next day was his wedding day, and then it took weeks to set his new house and lands in order, and by then the wind had covered the ship with sand and it was easily ignored.
Staying on the island had been a natural decision, reached in the course of all the frigid nights guiding the ship by the faint luminescence of the waves and the occasional glimpse of the moon through ragged cirrus. Somewhere in the Middle Sea the stars Odysseus had relied on for navigation had changed like ships come unmoored and after that he was altogether lost. Privately terrified, Odysseus had confidently told his men that this ominous event was just the gods translating new heroes into the sidereal sphere after the war in Troy. He pointed up and pretended to recognize Patroclus and Achilles (their constellations intertwined), Hector and even great, sad Ajax of Telamon. Then there were the seasons that did not seem to come when expected, though no one managed to keep an exact count of the days—hash marks on the hull rotted, a jar full of white stones was shattered in a storm, knotted leather threads turned into damp-swollen, hopelessly entangled snarls.
They saw many islands and many marvels, most of them inimical. One evening a sickly green radiance passed below them, deep among the waves, and the lookout swore it had had the shape of a man. On another night all their fires went out and every light, from the stars to the moon to the glow of the waves, disappeared in an instant. In total darkness they tried to turn the ship around, botched it, and before an hour had passed they were expecting to drift forever. Odysseus tossed a coin over the bow and there was no splash. They held themselves together in the dark by sitting on deck and telling stories, each in turn. They were never more surprised than when the sun rose.
Now and then they found an island set down on their map. Invariably it had just been visited by Phoenician or Cretan merchants, elements of the world they knew, and Odysseus and his men took heart, got directions and advice, and sailed off in the expectation of finding familiar lands that never, in the event, materialized. And so, gradually, the longing for Ithaca’s shores was supplanted by the wish for any kind of an end to wandering.
When Odysseus and his men washed up on Alcinous’s island he received them graciously, being particularly attentive to Odysseus—he mentioned in passing that he had a daughter but had not yet found the right husband for her. Odysseus weighed the benefits of a new marriage against the open trackless sea and, his spirit much eroded, asked to meet her. A wedding was soon arranged and consummated and not long after the rest of the Greeks followed suit. They had children, bought land, acquired standing and thought less and less and finally never of their wives in Ithaca. They told and retold their travel tales so many times that they became less memories than fables, even to the tellers. The hardness of their youth and of the War left them slowly, but it left them, and eventually there was not a head among the crew that was not white and their swords gathered dust on their mantels.
Like their wandering, this seemed as if it must go on forever but ended abruptly. One night Odysseus had a dream that Athena was standing smiling over him, leaning on her spear, her eyes like white coals. He could feel the chill radiating from her. She had been speaking but he could not remember anything she had said, though his mind was full of a confusion of demons haunting narrow sea-lanes, a witch in silver bowers praying in a wolf’s voice to the moon, and the echoing screams of men packed close in a low-ceilinged room as black arrows sprouted from their throats and hearts. She whispered, “It’s time to go.”
He sat up, wide awake—there was no one but his wife Nausicaa, asleep beside him. The moon shone full through the window and he was as alert as if it had been noon. Odysseus stood straight for the first time in years, throwing off the stoop that he now realized had been a concession to the expectations of age. He took his sword down from the wall, drew it and turned it in the moonlight, the metal flickering like water. He hesitated, enjoying the stillness of the house and regretting the warmth of Nausicaa’s bed. Then he went out, closing the door carefully behind him and, leaning into the strong wind blowing through the empty streets, walked out of the city and along the strand to the spot where the ship had beached. The racing wind that threatened to tear his cloak away had exhumed it and a loose pennant flapped wildly on its mast. His surviving men were there, standing straight as pine trees, and he cou
ld not tell if the white in their hair was age or moonlight. Without a word, they set their shoulders to the ship and pushed it toward the sea, wallowing in the sand, redoubling their efforts as her hull touched water. They clambered aboard as the tide took her and pulled her past the breakers and out to sea, bound, they thought, for Ithaca.
24
ODYSSEUS IN HELL
A man picks his way along a steel cable strung over a refulgent blue abyss, a ship’s oar over his shoulders for balance. The cable groans and sighs in the infinitesimal breeze. It is so narrow that the man is, when he thinks of it, surprised he is able to keep his footing. Miles in front of him the horizon is shrouded in bright clouds. It may well be the same behind him but he has never looked back. The cable sags, very slightly, just discernibly over the course of what may be hours, or days—he is descending.
Above him (he sees this out of his peripheral vision—to look up would be fatal) is an irregular dark massiveness suggesting mountains. There are iridescent patches that could be lakes or possibly cities. Below is open sky, gradations of deep featureless blue. Now a weariness comes over him and he stops to rest, squatting and balancing the oar across his shoulders, gripping the cable with feet and hands, peering down into the void in which he finds a measure of comfort.
He has been walking and balancing for a long time and his mind wanders. For the most part his reflections are vacant or circular recapitulations of the conditions of his confinement in this limitless open air. When a thought crystallizes it is this: Somewhere a judgment is being made. Even now advocates are striding in flapping robes through bleak arcades toward the ante-rooms where they will make their case before a judge, whose name he almost knows—Minos, or possibly Yama. This stirs something in his arid, empty mind—he wants to argue the case himself.
The Lost Books of the Odyssey: A Novel Page 9