Ithaca (14 page)

Menelaus shakes his head. “The word of the gods is good enough for me. Lector!” He turns to the old priest, who nods, disappears into the hut, and returns carrying a brazier, his hands wrapped in cloths to protect them from the heat. He sets it on a level piece of ground outside the hut and disappears inside for a round metal dish, which he sets on the brazier. Into the brazier he throws a handful of brown powder that he scoops from a small, enameled box.

“From this place.” The priest's voice is deep and sonorous, strongly accented. “The waters flow deep underground through caverns where no living man can follow them. This is the river Styx, the river of the dead.” He pauses and throws another handful of the powder onto the fire. Brown smoke coils up from the dish as it heats.

“All those who die come to the river's shores. Charon the ferryman awaits them. In his boat they cross to the underworld, the realm of Dis, never to see light again. They walk the shades forever as ghosts.” The priest bows suddenly, plunging his face into the reeking smoke and breathing deeply. When he straightens up, his eyes are closed and he sways, gripping the handles of the brazier so hard his knuckles whiten.

“Charon!” he moans. “Of those who left Troy's shore, who has crossed your stream into the realm of the dead?” He plunges down again, burying his face in the smoke. Polycaste has come forward to stand beside me. Menelaus is watching with narrowed eyes. I notice a little bird, a sparrow, bobbing and dipping on a rock at the black water's edge. A gust of wind blows the smoke toward us. It has a faintly acrid, sweet tang.

“Agamemnon!” The old man's face is running with sweat. His eyes have rolled upward until only the whites show. “Ajax!” He plunges his face back toward the dish. For a long time he breathes its vapors, but when he stands up again, he's silent.

“Odysseus?” Menelaus says. “Ask about Odysseus.”

The priest breathes slowly in through his nose. When he opens his eyes again, they're back to normal. “He said nothing of Odysseus.” He steps away from the brazier and drops to a crouch, hanging his head between his knees to recover. Gradually the smoke from the dish thins, replaced by the reek of scorched metal.

“Enough!” The priest stands, sweeps the dish from the fire, and drops it on the ground with a clang. Then he turns and disappears back into the hut.

“Now you've heard it for yourself.” Menelaus nods at me. “Your father is alive. Yes?” He glances down at the black, unrippled surface of the pool. “Now we go back to Sparta.”

“What are you going to do?” Polycaste says.

We found mules waiting for us at the foot of the track. Menelaus climbed into his chariot and rode ahead. Polycaste and I went back to the palace at a slower pace and washed away the dust of the journey. There was no sign of Helen. A servant brought us a message that Menelaus had been called away on business, and showed us a tray of bread and cheese set out on the table in the great hall. When we'd eaten, we retreated to the garden just as the evening began to cool. Over thickly flowering plants I can see the bare tops of the mountains we climbed earlier.

“Nothing.”

“Why?”

“I'll go home to Ithaca.” I don't look at her. “I'll build a tomb and say prayers for my father.”

“But the priest said Odysseus was alive!”

That makes me angry. “Has anyone seen him? Does anyone have any news of him? He's gone. A priest from Egypt . . . a fortune-teller . . . that isn't proof. If he's alive, why haven't we heard from him? Why hasn't he come home to Ithaca? Surely
someone
would have met him . . . a sailor in a port . . . Five hundred men don't just disappear. Even in a storm, wreckage is washed ashore . . . oars, timbers. If he was in Egypt, Menelaus would have heard. If he was in Africa, I'd have heard
from Mentes. If he's dead . . .” I shake my head wearily. “
Since
he's dead, it's better to move on. For me, for my mother, for everyone. I'll build a tomb for him in Ithaca.”

I can remember the funeral of Laertes, my grandfather. We built a pyre for the old man's body on the mountainside where he lived out his last years. Cedar logs, stripped of their branches and cut to equal length, were stacked first one way, then the other, with pine twigs crammed into every joint. We laid Laertes's body on top of it, washed, perfumed, and dressed in rich white robes. His old bronze sword, the blade nicked from many fights, was placed on his chest, and his spear, with its insignia of a boar, hung on the pyre beside him. We left the gold rings on his fingers. His women servants twined ivy in his scanty white hair.

I remember the way his hair—all I could see of him from the ground—was feathered by the mountain wind as we waited for the ceremony to start. Only when the sun touched the horizon did the priest step forward and thrust a torch into the pyre. It took a moment for the pine twigs to catch, then a roaring came from the base of the mound, a sudden crackling and a waft of heat that washed across the little knot of spectators: me, my mother, a dozen servants. Laertes's old friends were all dead. The young men in the big house stayed away.

It didn't take long for the flames to take hold. A tongue of fire split a cedar log. Black smoke curled up into the sky. As we watched, more flames appeared, licking around the ends of logs, exploring each crevice of the pyre until, as the sun finally disappeared behind the mountain's edge, the fire roared and crackled, bright orange flames and clouds of sparks rising up into the sky and thickening the night around us. The priest and his assistants stepped forward, shielding their faces from the heat, to throw incense onto the flames. Its sickly, rich perfume masked the stench when the fire reached Laertes's body.
Gradually we shuffled backward, driven by the heat. From the edge of the forest we watched until the flames slowly began to subside, charred logs gave way, and Laertes's pyre collapsed into embers.

The next morning I climbed the mountain again and found nothing but a mound of grey ash.

My father, Ithaca's chief, deserves something more permanent. “I'll build a tomb by the harbor,” I tell Polycaste, “near where he sailed away. A domed tomb of cut stones. I'll hang his bow in it, and his weapons, and burn a ship on the beach outside. I'll make a pyre of cedar logs and resin, and sacrifice to the goddess to protect Odysseus's soul.” I look down at my feet, scuffing the dust with my toes. “I've got to go home to Ithaca.”

“Stay with us at Pylos first.”

“I can't. My mother has no one to protect her. I've got to go home.”

Home. I think of Ithaca. But home doesn't mean comfort and safety. It means Antinous sneering at me and Eurymachus pretending to be friendly. It means young men washing in the courtyard, brawling voices and violence always waiting to break out. It means the clack of my mother's loom, her empty smile, her fingers plucking listlessly at the chain around her neck. And once I announce Odysseus's death—once the flames of his pyre have died to ash and the smoke has faded from the sky—it's going to mean something worse. I know that. I'm not under any illusions. Those young men want Penelope. They want Ithaca. They want me dead.

“What will happen there?”

“My mother will marry again. Someone will have to rule Ithaca. I suppose there'll be a fight.”

“We'll help!” Polycaste squeezes my arm. “My father will send men. I'll fight with you.”

I lay my hand over hers, where she's holding my arm.

“Are you all right?” she says.

“Yes.”

“I'll teach you how to fight on the way.”

I make myself grin. A sixteen-year-old fighting Antinous. Fighting Eurymachus and Agelaus, challenging the tattooed young men in the courtyard with their spears whose shafts are scored with notches—one notch for each life they've taken. And I have no choice, because I'm a fighter's son and must be a fighter myself, even if my only fight ends at the gateposts of my home.

“We'll leave tomorrow,” Polycaste says.

I nod. As I stand there with Polycaste, I know how my story is going to end. It can only have one ending. In a week's time, little more, women will shriek my name across the harbor at Ithaca, and my mother will kneel on the sand with her dress torn and ashes in her hair. The pyre by the harbor won't only be for Odysseus. It will be my tomb as well.

N
ausicaa loved stories.

Stories of fighters were the best of all. She loved the story of the Trojan fighter Hector and his wife, Andromache, when Hector was going off to the war to fight. Andromache came to say good-bye to him, and they were both in tears, and Hector played with his baby son, Astyanax, dandling him on his knee and putting his great war helmet on the baby's head.

It was just a shame Hector was horribly slaughtered a couple of hours later.

She loved—maybe best of all—the story of Helen and Paris, because Helen was so beautiful and they were so in love. Even
after the storyteller would finish his tale, at the end of a feast in the great hall of her father, Alcinous, chief of the Phaeacians, Nausicaa would go on imagining their lives—how Paris would come back from a day on the battlefield, grimy, sweating, and covered in blood, and Helen would wash him and bind up his wounds, then maybe cradle his head in her lap and sing to him.

Nausicaa would love to marry a fighter. Unfortunately most of the Phaeacians were sailors and merchants, most of them only interested in profit from the seashells they turned into purple dye in the stinking vats at the top of the town or in abstruse points of navigation, which they could discuss for hours on end, and frequently did at the feasts. Living at the farthest edges of the civilized world, the chances of her meeting a genuine fighter were practically zero.

Even though her father was chief, Nausicaa's life was dull, with nothing she actually had to do except lead the girls down to the river where they did the washing. Her mother was always busy weaving cloth for clothes, all of it dyed purple. Everyone in Phaeacia wore purple, thanks to the seashells, the source of their wealth. Phaeacian merchants kept the best cloth for export, though, so they all wore the cloth that had come out a bit wrong, ranging in shade from crimson to lavender. When the streets were thronged with people hurrying about their business, this variation in color gave the town a vivid appearance that visitors always remarked on, but Nausicaa was fed up to the back teeth with it.

She hated purple. She would have given almost anything for a glimpse—just one glimpse—of a man in white, wearing bronze armor and carrying a sword instead of a counting-frame.

Nausicaa sighed and rolled over in bed. It was washing day today—as it seemed to be pretty much every day. But today she resented the work slightly less than usual. Her favorite dress—green, with an embroidered pattern—had been out of action
for a month, awaiting mending, but was now ready to wash. She would slip it in among the interminable purple gowns of her brothers, the crimson tablecloths and lavender sheets, and win at least something back from the morning. She would wear it at tonight's feast, and the young merchants from the town would all fall in love with her.