Homer’s Daughter (26 page)

Agelaus answered, grinning: “Ctesippus is in merry mood. Pay no attention to his practical jokes, which reflect a lively and generous nature. You must remember, kinsman, that we have absented ourselves from the town festivities in honour of Apollo—after witnessing the introductory prayers and sacrifices—at your personal invitation. You promised that today the Princess Nausicaa will clearly name the man whom she intends to marry, as she has been urged to do for a couple of years at least. Once she does so, this series of banquets will end, and there need be no recurrence of unpleasant scenes, which I deplore no less profoundly than yourself, but for which I hold you largely responsible.”

Only one of my suitors, the Sican Theoclymenus, had
noticed that no arms were hanging in the cloisters; nor did the whitewashing of the single wall deceive him. He cast a keen glance of enquiry at Clytoneus, who raised the butt of his spear a handsbreadth from the ground in warning, and pointed to the side door.

Theoclymenus rose shivering from his stool. “My eyes are darkened,” he said. “The court is full of ghosts, and I hear a sound of mourning in the air. Forgive me, comrades, if I leave you and invoke the God Apollo in the market place.” He crossed the court at a run.

Everyone stared. But Antinous hiccuped: “Upon my word, that was the neatest excuse I ever heard! To cover his confusion when he had been taken short at table and disgraced himself…” A yell of laughter drowned the rest of his disgusting speech.

I paced up and down my bedroom for a while. Dolius the gardener had stumbled on Ctimene's dead body hidden by long grass in a corner of the orchard, by the melon patch. I ordered him to say nothing to anyone and leave her where she lay—explaining that we could not attend to the funeral rites until I had announced my choice of a husband. I may say at once that we never discovered who killed Ctimene, or why. Her throat was cut from ear to ear and someone had evidently dragged her to this place of concealment. My own view is that, suspecting Melantho of a love affair with Eurymachus, she had joined the party of maids, none of whom realized, in the half-dark, who she was. She then followed Melantho, and either cut her own throat when these suspicions proved to be well founded; or perhaps Eurymachus (who never stuck at murder) cut it for her. It does not matter. The curse of the
amber necklace had drawn Ctimene down to join my brother Laodamas in loveless Hades.

The news animated me with a calm rage. I went into the empty throne chamber and sat unobserved on a chair immediately behind the front door, from which I could hear everything. When, by the sound of drunken laughter—at my orders Philoetius and Eumaeus were assisting Pontonous to keep the cups and goblets filled to the brim—it was at last clear that the time had come for action, I slipped out again and called Eurycleia.

“Eurycleia,” I said, “the key of the storeroom, please!”

She accompanied me, and I remember that when, having undone the thong attached to the knob, she unlocked the door and pulled it open, the hinges gave a great vengeful groan, as loud as a sacred bull who sees trespassers venturing across his paddock. I read this as a good sign. On days of critical importance one watches for every possible indication of the Gods' will; but must be careful not to be deceived by the ambiguity in which they love to cloak their designs.

I took up the fourteen well-stocked Sicel quivers that Clytoneus had secreted here, found a box of brass and iron quoits used for our palace game of ringing the peg, and then with trembling hands reached for the nail where hung a tall, curved, glittering gold case engraved with ancient pictures. My dear friend Procne had fortunately come to stay at the Palace, now that her father had sailed for Elba. She and Eurycleia between them managed to lift the long heavy box of quoits, while I carried the golden case and the armful of quivers. “Come,” I said, and we filed through the silent throne chamber and into the thronged banqueting court, very
slowly, not looking about us. I came to a halt beside the main pillar that supported the cloister roof, and to my surprise remained perfectly self-possessed.

The suitors, startled and pleased to see me wearing my bridal robe and a garland of fresh flowers, beat on the tables with their knife handles and raised a lusty cheer; which I acknowledged with a slight nod before setting down my load and addressing them. “My lords, the Prince Clytoneus decided to make no choice of husband for me that might prove disagreeable to the King, and prudently left the decision to myself. Finding this an invidious task, I appealed to the Goddess Athene, who appeared to me in a dream last night and spoke as follows: ‘Child, choose the man with the steadiest hand and the keenest eye of all who sit at table in your inner court; and since tomorrow is the feast of Apollo the Archer, remember the bow of Philoctetes!' What could be plainer? Homer describes how Isander and Hippolochus contended for the kingdom of Lycia in an archery match; and though the prize here is a smaller one, more than one hundred noblemen dispute it bitterly—passionate rivals for my love.”

I let these words cut like a razor.

“Not only would it be tedious,” I went on, “for so many rivals to contend with the same bow, but I fear quarrels of precedence. Therefore, to limit the entries, I have designed a simple trial of manual skill. My brother Clytoneus will set up twelve pegs in a row, one behind the other, across the court: and no suitor may cast more than one quoit. Whichever three men ring the most distant pegs are permitted to take part in the archery match, which will consist of shooting arrows through axe-heads. The bow I shall lend them is an
heirloom; this bow of Philoctetes, the most famous hero-relic in all Sicily. It belonged to Hercules himself, who bequeathed it to Philoctetes as he climbed upon his pyre on Mount Oeta. With this very weapon Philoctetes shot Paris first in the hand, and then in the right eye, thus virtually ending the Trojan War.”

My speech provoked a deal of confusion, because they had expected me to choose one or other of the suitors whom my father had approved. Now, if the company as a whole accepted my means of deciding the issue, for which I claimed divine sanction, they too would have to stand by the result and change their plans. And the young men whose bride gifts had not been particularly handsome, thinking that here was a chance to improve their position, clamoured a full-throated assent. Clytoneus at once took a mattock and dug a long trench in the stamped earth of the court; then he fixed the pegs at three paces' interval along the trench, in accurate alignment, pressing the soil tightly around them with his shoe. Afterwards he drew a mark from behind which all competitors must cast their quoits. “You may begin, my lords,” he said, as he strode back to his seat.

Antinous, drunk though he was, thought of a clever objection. Reminding us that Apollo had once accidentally killed the boy Hyacinth with a quoit, he suggested that it would be courting death to institute a public quoit game on Apollo's own feast day. “One of us would be bound to meet Hyacinth's fate. But I cannot agree that the archery match would be tedious; and, as for precedence, we can compete in a circle, beginning from this wine jar and continuing sunwise, as the wine is served. There seems to be a sufficiency of arrows. Let
the mark be a quoit suspended from the door yonder—the one that leads into the court of sacrifice.” This meant that he and his friends would have the first shots and, to judge from the previous day's funeral games, the contest would degenerate into a farce.

Clytoneus, however, allowed him to have his way, despite my bitter protests. He took the golden case from my hands and, unfastening the clasps, pulled the bow reverently out. I had never, as it happened, seen it before—a terrible-looking weapon, standing as high as a man, and consisting of what must have been the largest pair of Cretan wild-goat's horns ever grown, fastened together with hammered bronze. Aethon had already examined it when he visited the storeroom, and provided a cord of twisted flax, four times stouter than an ordinary bowstring, with a loop at either end, and of exactly the right length.

The horns of a living goat have a certain suppleness, but in the course of years they harden somewhat, and after centuries set almost as hard as a stag's antlers.

Leodes came first. Being a junior priest of Zeus, he had presided at all the recent sacrifices, which gave him the place of honour next to the immense jar from which the wine circulated. He accepted the unstrung bow and an arrow while Eumaeus proceeded to nail up the quoit. Then Clytoneus shouted: “Hey, there, Philoetius, bar that door from the outside; someone might enter unexpectedly and get hurt.” Philoetius went round by the passage and did so.

Posted on the threshold, Leodes addressed himself to the bow, which he struggled to string, using both hands and knees; but succeeded only in ricking his back. “Friends,” he
groaned, “I am defeated by this adamantine weapon, and lay odds of ten to one in wine or beef that nobody else can master it. The pull is enough to break the strongest heart. Princess Nausicaa has played another trick on us.”

He leant the bow against the door, propped the arrow beside it and sat down again heavily. Antinous reproached him. “What nonsense! If Philoctetes could string it, his descendants can surely do the same? I never hold with the superstition that the men of old were stronger and more courageous than ourselves. The bow is a trifle stiff, that is all; it needs warming and greasing. Just because you were born on a moonless night—blame your mother—and are consequently slack-twisted, without strength in your wrists or shoulders, and take no exercise except backgammon and cottabus… Very well, I propose to take up your wager: two bullocks and two wine jars against twenty that I accomplish the task! Melantheus, put a panful of hog's lard to warm at the fire; when we have greased the bow, length by length, you will see how it recovers its spring. Age freezes, lard thaws.”

Melantheus obeyed, after which two or three members of Antinous's party took turns in trying to string the bow, but without the least success. I should mention here that archery is not an Elyman accomplishment; most of my suitors had never handled a war bow in their lives. Meanwhile, at a prearranged signal, Eumaeus and Philoetius went out unobtrusively by the side door. Eumaeus ran to the main gateway, where his son was waiting with an expectant group of loyal grooms and gardeners. “When you hear the sound of fighting in the hall,” he said, “attack the suitors' servants and
drive them from the court of sacrifice. Make a dash and clatter as though you were an army, and yell threats in the King's name.” Philoetius hurried to tell Eurycleia: “Lock the maids in their quarters, and keep them there.” Eumaeus then came back through the same door, which Philoetius made fast outside with a bar and a yard or two of Byblus cable, before regaining the hall by way of the throne chamber.

Eurymachus now snatched the bow from Noemon's hands, but though he turned it slowly round in the heat of the fire, and fairly smothered it with lard, succeeded no better than the others. “Hades curse the thing!” he cried. “Leodes was right. It will break any heart or back.”

Antinous laughed. “When I come to consider the question,” he drawled, “to string the bow on Apollo's feast day is even more of a mistake than to cast quoits. Hercules used this bow for numerous extraordinary feats during his Labours, but Apollo and he, being rival archers, were always at loggerheads. Indeed, their hostility once degenerated into an open brawl, when Hercules had pulled the tripod from under Apollo's priestess Herophile and carried it off to found an oracle of his own. Father Zeus was obliged to part them with a thunderbolt. I believe that Apollo himself has stiffened the bow—perhaps vexed at our abandonment of his public festivities. So let us adjourn the trial until tomorrow had propitiate the God by sacrificing certain fat goats which Philoetius has driven in for us. Tomorrow will not be a day of such peculiar sanctity, and may the best man win.”

Antinous was applauded for this pious and ingenious suggestion. I suppose that he had planned to take away the bow, which was now lying on a sheepskin by the fire at some distance
from the front door, and replace it next morning with a large but more manageable one.

“Apollo, Apollo, favour us!” he cried. All the wine cups and goblets were hastily filled again to the brim, and each man poured a libation to the God before draining his vessel to the lees.

At this point Aethon bent down and, clasping Clytoneus's knees, said: “A boon, my Prince! When I return home to Cyprus (may it be soon!) my friends and kinsmen will ask me: ‘What have you done? What have you seen?' And after recounting my adventures in Egypt and Palestine and Libya, I hope to add: ‘Then I made a voyage to Drepanum, where is stored the famous bow of Philoctetes the Phocian, which settled the Trojan War. The King's son took this wonder from its curved golden case, engraved with the Labours of Hercules, and allowed me to handle it myself.' Let me, I beg, make good this hope, although to string it will doubtless prove beyond my power, since I am not of Phocian blood, like many of your gallant friends.”

This was the cue for a pretended tiff between Clytoneus and myself. When he granted Aethon's boon, I was to round on him and say: “What, let a beggarman profane that holy relic with his foul fingers? Are you picking a quarrel? Replace the bow in its case at once and lock it up in the storeroom.”

Clytoneus was to shout: “I have every right to entrust this bow to whomever I please, and I resent your interference. Go to your quarters now, attend to your own work and see that the maids attend to theirs. Your task is done for today, and I am master here. Eumaeus, bring me that bow!”

We must have spoken our parts convincingly enough, because a shout of laughter arose, which increased to a roar when Eumaeus hesitantly picked up the bow and brought it across the court to Clytoneus. Clytoneus handed it to Aethon with a look of pretended defiance.

I stamped my foot and flounced out, slamming the door behind me as if in a rage.