Beware of Greeks

by Peter Tonkin

  iii

  ‘No,’ said Odysseus as we prepared to set sail next day aboard his ship, which he had named Thalassa in the same manner as Jason had named his vessel Argo. ‘When I am in my palace in Ithaca, you may call me “King”. When I am in my war chariot on the battlefield, then you may call me “General”. But here…’ he stamped his foot on the boards decking the rear of his ship, ‘here aboard Thalassa you call me “Captain”.’

  And I, so pleased and excited to be aboard at his side, was happy to do so. Even though I did not yet fully understand what it was he saw in me or what he had planned for me, in spite of my father’s suspicions.

  ‘Ah,’ he continued as his gaze moved down to the dockside to watch the last few men preparing to come aboard. ‘You may find you have some problems with your songs about Jason and Hercules in the immediate future, boy.’

  ‘How so, Captain?’ I asked.

  ‘You see that old man down there?’ he pointed to the forward gangplank at the far end of the ship.

  I strained my eyes to focus. Beyond the occasional flash of brightness at the edge of my vision, I could just make out the man the Captain was talking about. His thin white hair and thick white beard belied the upright figure, energetic movement and soldier’s commanding bearing.

  ‘That’s Nestor of Geronia, King of Pylos. High King Agamemnon’s chief advisor, wished on me for the duration of this mission. I don’t think Agamemnon really trusts me yet.’ He dropped his voice to little more than a whisper. ‘And, as you’ll soon find out, I’m not the only one with a problem.’

  I looked at him in surprise, eyebrows raised in mute enquiry.

  ‘Your problem is that King Nestor is among the last of a dying breed. As a young man he was one of Jason’s crew aboard the Argo. He knew Hercules, though he did not take part in his raid on Troy. But that won’t stop him telling you all about both Jason and Hercules at almost inexhaustible length.’ He paused, thought for a moment then continued, still in little more than a whisper. ‘My problem is that the High King thinks he’s a truly great advisor but for all the wrong reasons. He’s a good speaker, easy to listen to, persuasive. He’s widely experienced—knew all the great men of the earlier generations as I say; those who were adventuring before I was born, let alone you. He sailed with them, fought alongside them; outlived them for the most part. No matter what the problem he’s asked to advise on, he’s been in a position just like it which he’s happy to describe at great length. Then his advice is a mixture of how he and his companions handled the situation at that time, regardless of the actual outcome. That, and what he thinks the High King wants to hear.’

  ‘But surely,’ I said, ‘those are the very things by which a great advisor should be measured.’

  ‘No, lad,’ he said as King Nestor leaped aboard and waved towards the Captain along the length of the vessel. ‘The worth of an advisor should be measured by the results of his advice.’

  The elderly king came bounding up the deck. ‘My people are all aboard,’ he announced as he arrived beside us. ‘Cast off whenever you like. Who’s this?’

  ‘Ship’s rhapsode,’ answered Captain Odysseus easily. ‘I brought him aboard to entertain the crew.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Nestor. Then, hardly pausing for breath he continued, ‘of course on the Argo Captain Jason recruited Orpheus to entertain us as we voyaged to Colchis. Not, I may tell you, after a mere golden fleece, oh no! Orpheus. I wonder what happened to him…’

  ‘Stoned and drowned,’ said Odysseus helpfully. ‘Dismembered at some stage apparently because of his insatiable appetite for young boys. There’s a tomb on Lesbos where his head at least is buried. It’s an oracle I understand. It’s the sort of thing my father King Laertes keeps telling me about whenever we get together. He was aboard Argo as well, remember.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Nestor. ‘I see,’ though it was clear he didn’t see at all and despite his sharp mind, he had forgotten he was talking to an Argonaut’s son.

  ***

  After an instant of hesitation, he continued, ‘But while Orpheus was rhapsode on the Argo…’ Then he went on to describe at some length the highlights of the voyage to Colchis, a voyage which by that time I had taken myself, alongside other merchants. As he told his story he added thoughts and comments about men he had known then whose reputations were generally fixed these days. Largely because most of them, like Orpheus, were dead. Captain Jason was crushed to death when part of the aged and rotting Argo fell upon him; Hercules ran mad in the end, killing two of his shipmates from the Argo the brothers Zetes and Calais, before he killed himself, convinced his clothes were magically setting his flesh on fire.

  But while I entertained these thoughts beneath his rambling story, I took the opportunity to compare the two kings in more detail. Slim and sprightly, Nestor seemed always on the point of vigorous action, held in place only because he was talking. Even so, his hands flew like strange birds as he emphasised the action in his recollections with dramatic gestures. The breeze stirred his hair which curled to the collar of his tunic at the back. Enthusiastic spittle flew from the pale lips recounting his adventures, much of it lodging in the bushy beard, untidy as a heron’s nest, that vanished down his neck and on beneath his tunic towards his chest. His eyebrows were as shaggy as the backs of mountain goats and as white as all the rest. Beneath them, his eyes gleamed a lively brown.

  Odysseus was taller, broader, his body and limbs fuller, more muscular. His hands and feet were large, the former spare of gesture—as his orders were concise and to the point. His crew were so well-trained that he hardly needed to speak. With the sail still furled, the oarsmen eased the ship out of the harbour and up to the northern neck of the bay, then into the narrows which opened there, just wide enough to permit careful passage north between two headlands into another enclosed bay. At the far end of this, a second set of narrows finally opened out into the long, thin waterway leading northward still towards the coast of Thessaly and the port of Phthia dead ahead. Thessaly, Phthia, King Peleus, Prince Achilles and his war-winning army of Myrmidons.

  As Captain Odysseus turned back from his impressively minimal ship handling, apparently paying the closest possible attention to King Nestor’s reminiscences, those sea-bright eyes were everywhere—on the rigging, the rowers, the coast, the course. Once in a while his gaze would alight on me and the skin edging the corners of those piercing eyes would crinkle in secretly shared amusement.

  Nestor’s story also gave me time to think. I had travelled to Phthia often, though I had never met the elderly king, his impressive son, or his wife. I was used to coming this way—along the inner channel instead of going south and rounding the southern cape of Euboea Island, which stood now on our right, between us and the wider Aegean. My father’s ships could reach Phthia in three days or so, depending on the wind and the current. But as my gaze followed the captain’s I was struck by a simple truth. Father’s vessels were fat, almost circular, with little difference between bow and stern. They had almost nothing in the way of oar power and relied on their sails. Captain Odysseus’ ship Thalassa was long, shaped like a sword blade, and designed for speed. Twenty-five oars a side powered her independently of the wind, though a great square sail was furled against the yard, ready to be deployed if a wind came in behind us. Her lean flanks were caulked with pitch, making her long hull black, strong and resistant to leakage, worm, barnacles and weed. Where my father’s ships were fully decked and designed with large storage areas below, this ship was only part-decked—the bow and stern were covered but a wide walkway rather than a full deck ran amidships past the mast, allowing the oarsmen light and air while they worked. But I reasoned there must be some storage room below as well, for arms, equipment, supplies.

  The burden of all this was simply that whereas my father’s ships would take three or four days to reach Phthia, I could confidently expect Odysseus, Nestor and the rest of us to be there some time tomorrow. I glanced back at the captain but his eyes were fixed dead
ahead, on the mouth of the second narrows as Nestor told us all about the clashing rocks and how Jason had conned the Argo through them with the help of King Phineas of Arcadia and a dove. King Phineas who died stone blind and helpless not so long ago, I thought, happy that I was able to see that the ghost of the smile which we had shared still lingered on my captain’s face.

  iv

  I soon found that Odysseus’ thoughts on royal advisors were not the only area in which he departed from popular perceptions. He continued to say little but think a lot and that shared smile was the first of many we exchanged behind King Nestor’s back. Not that he ever treated the old man with anything but respect and courtesy. Nestor was amongst the last, after all, of a legendary generation, many of whom, like Hercules, claimed direct descent from the gods themselves. But I knew he could see and share, perhaps, some of the frustration I felt when the first few lines of a song would be interrupted by a longwinded reminiscence that arose from them only tenuously but which silenced me and came close to driving my audience away altogether. Sometimes, as I listened, I imagined the crew leaping overboard rather than suffering any more—like Hercules’ companion Hylas, supposedly seduced by water nymphs but certainly drowned in some lake or other long ago.

  In due course, Odysseus would discuss with me some of the implications arising from his reluctance to follow the old ways of thought and forge new approaches to the situations he found himself confronted by in stark contrast to everything Nestor practised or advised. Early in our associations I also wondered why he chose to share his thoughts so openly with me. My father had explained some of the reasons he might have had for bringing me aboard, but I wondered at this unexpected openness, this intimacy between a king and a half-blind rhapsode—especially one who so rarely got a chance actually to finish a song. And the answer, turned out to be Telemachus. I was a temporary replacement for the son he loved so much that he gave up his feigned madness and agreed to follow Agamemnon when the child’s life was threatened.

  Long before he got the chance to have that discussion, however, the Fates gave him an opportunity to demonstrate his new way of thinking and reasoning.

  It was approaching noon on the second day. We had overnighted ashore in a shallow bay on the west side of Euboea Island which we left soon after dawn and the oarsmen had settled into a good, easy rhythm a couple of hours earlier. They were powering Thalassa towards Phthia now despite the wind and an unexpectedly strong current running directly against us. The captain and King Nestor were at the stern looking back, discussing Agamemnon’s best route when he had assembled his fleet and wanted to move against Troy. For once they were in complete accord. If he assembled them off Aulis, as Nestor said he planned to do, then he could lead them through the two sets of narrows we rowed through yesterday. But the counter-current we were facing now suggested to both of them that the narrows could all-too easily become a dangerous tidal race. Agamemnon would never get a thousand ships through it either swiftly or safely. No, they concluded. He would have to go south, round the southern end of Euboea Island and then turn north again, steering well clear of the dangerous Cape Kafirevs, oar-powered warships leading the fat supply ships with their big square sails. But he would only be able to do this if the winds were kind, blowing steadily from the south west for seven days or so.

  The lookout on the forepeak broke into this lazy discussion. ‘Something in the water dead ahead,’ he called.

  The captain and King Nestor walked the length of the ship with a briskness I could never match, so when I caught up with them standing in the bows looking down, I arrived part-way through another discussion. ‘I do not advise it,’ Nestor was saying, ‘Think of the trouble Jason got into with bodies overboard as we escaped from Colchis with King Aeetes’ gold and the Princess Medea, who, I have to say, makes Queen Thetis of Phthia look like gentle Aphrodite in comparison. Medea was terrifying even before Jason abandoned her in Corinth and went off with that pretty little thing Glauce. Dropping bodies into the water to distract pursuers, fine. Pulling them out again, not such a good idea in my experience...’

  ‘…which is vast, old friend, yes I know. But there’s something about this particular body... And, besides, just because he looks dead does not mean that he actually is dead.’ Captain Odysseus raised his voice. ‘Back oars! Steersman, get me as close to that piece of wreckage as you can. I’m going down for a closer look at the man lying on it.’

  A few minutes later, as the ship heaved unsettlingly, the counter-current pushed what looked to me like a makeshift raft of splintered wood against her cutwater, just below the eye painted there. Captain Odysseus elected to go over and down himself. He looped a rope round his chest beneath his arms, tied it tight and Nestor reluctantly oversaw a team of crewmen holding onto it. Then, with easy athleticism, the captain swung himself out and over Thalassa’s side. Keeping his back to the water, he walked fearlessly downwards until he must have felt the spray from the restlessly pitching raft against the backs of his legs. Then he stepped down to stand upon it, riding its movement like an experienced horseman astride a fractious mount. He stooped over the splayed body, obviously trying to turn it over as green water washed over his feet and ankles. But this took a moment to do, for its belt was wedged under a sizeable splinter of wood. As soon as the body was free, the captain gestured and King Nestor threw him down a second rope which he looped round the body’s chest.

  ‘Is he dead?’ shouted the king.

  ‘Yes,’ answered the captain. ‘Very dead.’

  ‘Then I’d advise you to leave well alone,’

  ‘Too late for that now,’ shouted Odysseus. ‘There’s something about this particular corpse that interests me. Pull us both aboard!’

  ***

  A few moments later, Odysseus laid the corpse out, face up, on the boards of the foredeck. Brine leaked off the dead man and his sodden clothing, making a considerable puddle. Two otherwise unoccupied sailhandlers helped, but it was the captain who did most of the work.

  ‘Kings and heroes do not deal with dead bodies!’ said Nestor disapprovingly.

  ‘Except to create them,’ observed Odysseus. ‘And to take their armour as prizes in battle of course,’

  ‘Work for women, common soldiers and slaves!’ snapped Nestor and stamped away down the deck.

  ‘Order us under way again, old friend,’ called Odysseus after him. Then, dropping his voice and apparently speaking to himself, ‘though you’re right. We could probably use a woman or a house slave now.’ He looked up at me with that conspiratorial smile. ‘But as we have neither, I’ll have to do my best.’ He straightened and we stood shoulder to shoulder looking down. The sailhandlers stood back, ready for the captain’s next command as the ship moved forward once again against that counter-current, surging towards Phthia.

  The corpse was enough to give even a hardened soldier pause. It had only half a face. Dark hair swept forward over a pallid, wrinkled brow and over the stark white dome of a forehead half denuded of flesh. One eye and much of its nose were gone leaving great gaping pits. Its left cheek had vanished almost as far back as its ear, revealing a fearsome grin of yellow teeth poking out of ragged gums. Part of its chin was gone, giving another disturbing effect as the beard adorning what was left of the flesh on its right cheek swept forward over the naked left jaw like the fringe of its hair. The left side of its face was not all that was missing. Its left leg below the knee had also disappeared, the stump a pallid mess of waterlogged flesh and shards of bone. The rest was covered by a chiton tunic which seemed to be of good quality linen, cinched at the waist by a broad leather belt knotted firmly at the belly, though there were signs of strain both on the chiton and the belt itself. It was hard to tell much from the face, but the throat, arms and legs were all as white as marble—almost blue in tinge. It was a disturbing, unnatural colour. Odysseus crouched once more and began a minute examination of the dead man. He parted the remaining eyelid, opened both balled fists, examined the remaining leg and foot. T
hen he sat back on his heels deep in thought.

  After a few more moments, he rose and gestured to the sailhandlers who stooped to help him turn the body over so that the captain could examine the back. I was struck once more by that pale white, bluish flesh, especially in the crook behind the right knee. There was no crook behind the left knee—merely that shattered stump. Odysseus grunted and reached for the back of the dead neck. There, under a mat of grey hair, was the knot of a thong that I had not observed. After an instant’s hesitation he pulled out a slim-bladed bronze knife and cut it free. He tugged gently until two rings appeared from beneath the tunic through which the thong had been looped and looped again. He studied them thoughtfully for a moment then slipped them into the leather purse he carried at his belt. Apparently dismissing these from his mind, he leaned forward once more and it was obvious what had claimed his attention. There was a slit in the tunic, its edges frayed and lightly discoloured. He placed his knife so that the point was just inside the slit. ‘A blade of the same width,’ he observed. ‘And probably of the same length.’ The blade of his knife was perhaps twice as long as his hand. He glanced down at the one remaining foot with its worn leather sandal. Then he looked up at his silent helpers. ‘Take the chiton off,’ he ordered. ‘Carefully.’