Electra (37 page)

'The weed that came up with him. It's black mossweed, the fishermen dredge it up in their nets from the bottom. It doesn't even grow within a fathom of the surface.'

'Trust a healer to know herbs,' muttered Eumides, as we dripped water patiently into the sailor's mouth.

'Lady of Ocean, Thetis, please ask Poseidon to speak to me,' Odysseus murmured, closing the wide-pupilled brown eyes again as if he was very weary.

Kelp-crowned, salt drying on the set mouth, Poseidon stared at the impudent mortal, Odysseus, Prince of Ithaca, who had resolutely refused to die and had never begged for mercy.

'Lord,' said the mortal, coughing, 'let us deal.'

'Deal? You bargain with a God?' bellowed Poseidon in a voice like a monstrous conch shell, blown by a giant.

'Of course,' the shade of Odysseus sat up, pushing back wet red hair. 'What else can I do? I am Odysseus of the Nimble Wits.

'Consider, Lord Sea-God. I have been missing for years. All that time my faithful ones have been praying to you, sacrificing to you. How would it look to all those devout worshippers if your unrelenting hatred was revealed?'

'They would fear me,' said Poseidon complacently, stroking his beard.

'Fear, yes. But respect, no. Does it befit a great God to pursue a petty man with such vindictiveness?'

The mortal seemed to think that he had made a point. He smoothed down his wet tunic.

'You said you would destroy my altars,' Poseidon reminded him, and Odysseus smiled and made a wise gesture with long, beautiful hands.

'A moment of anger, Lord - sailors have hasty tempers; redheads even more so. How could I, a mere man, express my agony except to curse the Gods, the Fate which could have been kind and was not?

'Consider me justly punished, Lord. And let me go home. Men ring my palace who know no Gods, and will utterly abolish all devotion. I will destroy them if I can but come there.

'And there is this, Lord, if my other arguments have not convinced you. The miraculous return of Odysseus out of the waters will cause sacrifices to burn on your altars all over Achaea. Men will say, "There is no God greater than Poseidon, Earth-Shaker, Lord of the Sea. Who else could have saved Odysseus?"'

Aphrodite smiled.

The Sea-God raised his hand. Taller than a sea-cliff, he loomed over the shipwrecked man, the beard parting over teeth like pearls.

'Poseidon has forgiven him,' I said, with absolute certainty. Far away, Eleni echoed my sureness. Odysseus of Ithaca, if we could get him there, was at last going home.

He did not really wake, though our journey took two days. At last we rowed around the point and found the island he had been seeking for so long. Where had he been, I wondered, as we carried him carefully ashore and laid him under a tree, piling his boxes and bundles around him. He had retained, through all his travels, one box at least of loot from Trojan Apollo's temple, the gold plates from the walls, and that, perhaps, was like Odysseus of the Nimble Wits and the even faster fingers.

We rowed out again, catching the providential current, and the rowers shipped oars with a sigh of relief.

'Nothing more until we find the channel which will take us past the Peloponnese,' said Eumides.

Chryse and I looked at each other.

'For Iolkos?' I asked.

Eumides smiled and shook his head, so his golden earrings flashed.

'For home,' he said.

Walking through the pines over dry thorny ground, I, Odysseus of Ithaca, long since given up as dead, now most strangely returned, heard a feeble 'wuff!'

Three creatures had never despaired at my absence or ceased to wait for me.

One of them crawled to my feet, licked my hand, and barked, wagging her tail. She died as I caressed her, tears spilling from my eyes onto her brown and white fur. She was terribly ancient, toothless, all bones. She had fought off death, waiting for her master to come home.

The other two waited for me in the house, ringed with importunate suitors. I evaded those watchers easily; I would kill them in the morning.

I opened the door. Patient, beyond all hope, was Penelope my wife, nurturing in my son, Telemachus, for whom his father - red-headed Odysseus, traveller and Prince of Ithaca - was but an idea, a man who would, some day, return.

They saw me. They knew me. I staggered forward into their arms.

As
Waverider
ploughed laboriously up the coast of Euboea, I tried to extract from Eumides some idea of where we were going.

'I woke up knowing it,' he claimed, drawing in his line with a large fish attached.

'What did you wake up knowing?' asked Chryse, taking the fish, killing it and re-baiting the line.

'Suppose I said that there was a land which was originally settled by the people who later became Trojans,' he said, dropping the line over the thwart again.

'Yes?'

'And that later it was settled by your people,' he said to Chryse.

'So? One would conquer the other.'

'But supposing it was only a little place, and very isolated, and they had a strong king,' he continued, in the most irritating manner possible.

'Eumides,' I threatened, but Chryse put a hand on my arm.

'We're listening,' he said deliberately.

'That king would allow his subjects to intermarry, wouldn't he?' Eumides said slowly.

'Of course, especially if it was a little place, far from anywhere,' I agreed, reining in my temper. Throwing Eumides overboard might be temporarily satisfying, but would delay the climax of his tale.

'And if the Trojan men married Argive women, they would each want to keep to their customs, wouldn't they? And if the same number of Argive men married Trojan women, the same would apply, wouldn't it?'

'I suppose so,' agreed Chryse.

'Well, then,' concluded Eumides, drawing in another fish.

He would not say any more, even when we seriously threatened to throw him overboard.

I thought we were going to Skiathos, and was about to complain that we had already been there and did not want to go again, when we struck east, for a rocky shore which seemed to have no inlets.

The weather turned gusty and the sea became rough. Chryse brewed his infusion for sea sickness and even the rowers began to complain. More than usual, I mean. Rowers always complain if they have to row.

We were flung from trough to trough, the oars useless, and I began to wonder whether Eumides had really taken leave of his senses, and meant us to live with Hades after all. In which case he could have drowned us comfortably in the Acheron and not brought us all the way into Ocean to die.

We bounced and bucketed along, acutely uncomfortable, the horses whinnying and the rowers calling on Poseidon, and I shouted, 'Eumides? Have you a destination in view or are you just weary of living?'

'Watch,' he said, and in one moment the storm turned to calm. We were in a harbour, wide and flat. The inlet was almost invisible from the sea. I looked back and saw the waves gnashing their teeth against the headlands.

'A king called Staphylos came from Minos' Island when the volcano destroyed it,' said Eumides.

'They told me about him when I was a boy, learning to sail my first little boat. They said that he sailed through smoke clouds black as night and falls of hot stones light enough to float. He was lost and called on Dionysos, and the God sent dolphins, his children. Staphylos was close enough to follow them, fin by fin, as they turned into this harbour. Few people have found it. Some Achaean settlers came, but the Trojan law held. Since he died they have modified it with Argive ideas, but it remains an amalgam of both cultures.'

I saw a hill with a cluster of little white houses roofed in blue stone. I saw lofty olive-clad hills on either side, one crowned with a temple. I saw a deep harbourage, a sea-wall ancient as time, and heard voices calling, in Argive and Trojan, asking for news of the outer sea.

'It's called Staphylos' Island, the blue-green isle,' said Eumides. 'They have women healers here, and men. There is no temple of Asclepius, though. I thought we might build it over there.'

He pointed to a bare patch of ground on the opposite side of the bay. My last flash, perhaps, of God-sight showed me a small temple with red-gold pillars and a stone floor, and a house behind it for the Asclepid and the Trojan healer and an itinerant sailor.

We landed and walked through a crowd of welcoming people to the nearest tavern. The tavern-keeper was a woman, unique in Achaea. She sold us sweet wine made of the divine King Staphylos' grapes, dark as blood.

I saw a woman in a working tunic with wood-shavings in her hair. I saw a man in the garments of a priest of Apollo sitting by the waterside, talking to a woman sailor, who was cleaning fish, perched on the bow of her little boat. I saw a veiled woman carrying water chatting in a strange dialect - a mixture of Argive and Trojan words - to a man dragging an amphora from the well on a sledge.

An unveiled woman walked easily up from the quay, leading a goat and a kid. A herb-gatherer from the temple of Gaia laid her sungold and nettles and Mother's-leaf to dry on the clean pavement near the tavern, sitting cross-legged on the ground under her straw hat.

Donkeys stood patiently as they were loaded with fish and oil and sand for cement to be delivered to the houses being built higher up the hill. Little crooked streets, paved with blue stone, threaded the town to a lookout and fortified place which dominated one headland, though I guessed it would be invisible from the sea.

I sipped the wine, listening to the voices. One man, kicked by a badly-loaded donkey, swore by Gaia that it was the four-footed spawn of the Dark Mother. A child, wrestling with another, tripped, fell and cried to his father. He was picked up and kissed better by a man in a Trojan tunic who murmured that Athene, Mistress of Battles, would take the pain away.

The crew of the
Waverider
had vanished into the waterfront in the way habitual to sailors. A stout woman, her arms stained to the elbow, whacked one with a dye-stick and yelled that he owed her five obols for the cloth she had coloured for him, and that he'd better pay, by various Gods I had never heard of before.

Three of the oarsmen had stripped and were lying in a wide shallow pool carved out of the cliff, where cold mountain water leapt down the slope.

I noticed that they each made a polite bow and said, 'Honour to the Earth-Shaker,' before they stretched out full length in the cool water and scrubbed off the grime of travel with handfuls of lychnis and barley meal, supplied by a strong-minded young man who demanded a kiss for his attendance - and got it. Old women sat at another table, gossiping ferociously about the loose ways of the younger people and how there was no respect for age - not like it was when they were young.

Chryse raised the cup to me, and Eumides raised his.

'Will this do, Princess?' he asked.

'Possibly,' I said, unable to believe that it was true.

Eumides carried his treasure, collected by Laodamos for safe-keeping, ashore and stowed it under his bench. It was enough to buy our plot of land and feed us for many a winter, to build our house and our temple, to secure our future as far as the future can be secured. If we could stay.

We were wary, shocked, unable to rejoice. It was not until we had talked to the priests of Apollo and the priestess of the Mother that we began to believe that we would both be accepted.

'It's a comfortable place,' said the priestess of Gaia, an old woman who reminded me very strongly of Tithone, my own teacher.

'Few people come here and most of them are either lost or running away. We harbour them all. The Staphylos deals with any bandits or pirates. The wine is good and the islanders as devout as you would expect. Some of our young women have taken to Argive ways - veils, indeed, as though they are too holy to be seen! But most of them are just young women, traders, farmers and makers of small crafts for the most part, though we have one very good woodcarver. She made the Goddess,' she said, and bowed slightly towards a free-standing wooden statue; the Mother in her most generous aspect, her breasts dripping milk, her rounded arms all wound about with vines and snakes.

'I would welcome another healer,' she said, smiling. 'I am getting old.'

Chryse reported from the temple of Apollo, where a balding, nervous man had said 'Welcome, brother! This is a pleasant place, except that the young men are taking on Staphylos' barbarian customs. Two of them have become weavers, and you will even see men spinning! Of course it is no use expecting island-born women to wear veils or carry water - not like it is in Achaea. There is no due deference here, no understanding of the divine authority of the husband. And we cannot sell or trade our women without consent, and some of them are so rich that they never marry.'

Chryse was about to suggest that the priest might consider returning to Achaea, where men were men, until he saw the priest's beautiful adopted children and his doting, veiled, male lover. Such an arrangement would not have been acceptable in Argive lands, where men were expected to marry.

'I am glad you are here,' said the balding priest. 'Fifteen of us were crippled last year in a blight which affected the genitals of men, and we could not allow the Mother's priestess to tend us. Apollo owns the land you want. He would want me to sell it to you, Asclepid.'

We reported to the Staphylos, an affable young man who appeared to divide his time between training his twenty shore guards and sleeping in the sun.

'Delighted and honoured,' he murmured as we presented our plan for a temple. 'It will put both the priestess of Gaia and the priest of Apollo's noses out of joint, and that will be amusing. You are welcome here, healers. And we can always harbour another sailor.'

We set a broken arm and promised some of Chryse's sea-sickness mixture to the shore guards, who were sitting in a row on the white stone wall between the Horns of Minos, eating grapes and spitting the pips at the Staphylos' chickens. It was the most relaxed place we had ever seen, but the shore guards were healthy, well-armed and alert, and pirates might get a surprise if they raided the blue-green isle.