The Adventures of Ulysses (8 page)

Teiresias came silently to the trench, knelt, and drank. He drank until the trench was empty and the misty bladder of his body was faintly pink.

“You honor me by your visit, Ulysses,” he said. “Many men sought my counsel when I was alive, but you are the first client to make his way down here. You have heard these others tell you of certain petty dangers that you will do well to avoid, but I have a mighty thing to tell.”

“Tell.”

“Your next landfall will be a large island that men shall one day call Sicily. Here the Sun-Titan, Hyperion, pastures his herds of golden cattle. Your stores will have been eaten when you reach this place, and your men will be savage with hunger. But no matter how desperate for food they are, you must prevent them from stealing even one beef. If they do, they shall never see home again.”

“I myself will guard the herds of the Sun-Titan,” said Ulysses, “and not one beef shall be taken. Thank you, wise Teiresias.”

“Go now. Take your men aboard the ship and go. Sail up the black river toward the upper air.”

“But now that I am here and have come such a long and weary way to get here, may I not see some of the famous sights? May I not see Orion hunting, Minos judging? May I not dance with the heroes in the Fields of Asphodel? May I not see Tantalus thirsting, or my own grandfather, Sisyphus, rolling his eternal stone up the hill?”

“No,” said Teiresias. “It is better that you go. You have been here too long already, I fear; too long exposed to these bone-bleaching airs. You may already be tainted with death, you and your men, making your fates too heavy for any ship to hold. Embark then. Sail up the black river. Do not look back. Remember our advice and forget our reproaches, and do not return until you are properly dead.”

Ulysses ordered his men aboard. He put down we helm. There was still no wind. But the sails stretched taut, and the ship pushed upriver. Heeding the last words of the old sage, he did not look back, but he heard the voice of his mother calling, “Good-bye … good-bye …” until it grew faint as his own breath.

T
HEY SAILED OUT OF
darkness into light, and their hearts danced with joy to see blue water and blue sky again. A fair west wind plumped their sails and sped them toward home. “If this wind keeps blowing,” said Ulysses to himself, “perhaps we can skirt the dangerous islands they spoke of; sail right around these Sirens and these tide-drinking, man-eating monsters and find our way home without further mishap. True, it was foretold differently, but what of that? How reliable are such prophecies, after all? Ajax and Achilles were always better at fighting than thinking—why should they be wiser dead than alive? And Elpenor—my most inept hand? Must I take his word for what is going to happen? Why, that fall from the mast must have scattered the few wits he had. Besides, they were all ghosts down there, advising me, and ghosts are gloomy by nature, as everyone knows. They like to frighten people; it’s the way they’ve been trained. No! By the gods, I will not accept all this evil as inevitable but will stretch my sails to the following wind and speed for Ithaca.”

At that very moment he heard a strange sound, not a sound the wind makes, nor the water, nor the voice of man or gull. He looked about, searched sky and water. He saw nothing. Then he turned over the helm to one of the sailors and climbed the mast. There he could see for miles over the dancing water. And far to the south he saw tiny black things floating, so small he could not tell whether he was imagining them or not. But they grew larger even as he watched. And as they came near, the strange, moaning, grinding sound grew louder and louder.

“What are they?” he said to himself. “They look like rocks, but rocks don’t float. Can they be dolphins? Not whales, surely—whales spout. And all fish are voiceless. What is it then that comes and cries upon the silence of the seas? Another evil spawned by the stubborn god who pursues me? But what?”

By now the objects were close enough to see, and he saw that they were indeed rocks. A floating reef of rocks. Jagged boulders bobbing on the waves like corks. Rubbing against each other and making that moaning, grinding sound. And coming fast, driving purposefully toward the ship.

“Port the helm!” roared Ulysses.

The ship swung northward as the rocks pressed from the south.

“Floating rocks,” said Ulysses. “Who has seen their like? This is a wonder unreported by any traveler. We see a new thing today, and I should like to see the last of it. Are they following us? Are they driven by some intelligence? Or are we caught in a trick of tide that moves them so? I shall soon see.”

He took the helm himself then and sailed the ship in a circle to give the rocks a chance to pass by. But to his horror he saw the rocks begin to circle also, keeping always between him and the open sea to the south. They held the same distance now. He sheared off northward; they followed, keeping the same distance. But when he turned and headed south, they held their place. He saw them loom before his bow, jagged and towering, ready to crush his hull like a walnut. And he had to swing off again and dart away northward, as the crew raised a shout of terror.

So he set his course north by northwest, thinking sadly: I see that I can avoid nothing that was foretold. I cannot bear southward around the Isle of the Sun where lurk the demons and monsters I have been warned against but must speed toward them as swiftly as toward a rendezvous with loved ones. These rocks shepherd me; they herd this vessel as a stray sheep is herded by the shepherd’s dog, driving me toward that which the vengeful gods have ordained. So be it then. If I cannot flee, then I must dare. Heroes are made, I see, when retreat is cut off. So be it.”

He set his course for the Isle of the Sun-Titan, which men called Thrinacia, and which we know now as Sicily.

All through the night they sailed. In the darkness they lost sight of the rocks. But they could hear them clashing and moaning, keeping pace with the ship.

I
N THE FIRST LIGHT
of morning Ulysses awoke and called his crew about him.

“Men,” he said. “Listen well, for your lives today hang upon what I am about to tell you. That large island to the west is Thrinacia, where we must make a landfall, for our provisions run low. But to get to the island we must pass through a narrow strait. And at the head of this strait is a rocky islet where dwell two sisters called Sirens, whose voices you must not hear. Now I shall guard you against their singing, which would lure you to shipwreck, but first you must bind me to the mast. Tie me tightly, as though I were a dangerous captive. And no matter how I struggle, no matter what signals I make to you,
do not release me,
lest I follow their voices to destruction, taking you with me.”

Thereupon Ulysses took a large lump of the beeswax that was used by the sail mender to slick his heavy thread and kneaded it in his powerful hands until it became soft. Then he went to each man of the crew and plugged his ears with soft wax; he caulked their ears so tightly that they could hear nothing but the thin pulsing of their own blood.

Then he stood himself against the mast and the men bound him about with rawhide, winding it tightly around his body, lashing him to the thick mast.

They had lowered the sail because ships cannot sail through a narrow strait unless there is a following wind, and now each man of the crew took his place at the great oars. The polished blades whipped the sea into a froth of white water and the ship nosed toward the strait.

Ulysses had left his own ears unplugged because he had to remain in command of the ship and had need of his hearing. Every sound means something upon the sea. But when they drew near the rocky islet and he heard the first faint strains of the Sirens’ singing, then he wished he, too, had stopped his own ears with wax. All his strength suddenly surged toward the sound of those magical voices. The very hair of his head seemed to be tugging at his scalp, trying to fly away. His eyeballs started out of his head.

For in those voices were the sounds that men love:

Happy sounds like bird railing, sleet hailing, milk pailing.…

Sad sounds like rain leaking, tree creaking, wind seeking.…

Autumn sounds like leaf tapping, fire snapping, river lapping.…

Quiet sounds like snow flaking, spider waking, heart breaking.…

It seemed to him then that the sun was burning him to a cinder as he stood. And the voices of the Sirens purled in a cool crystal pool upon their rock past the blue-hot flatness of the sea and its lacings of white-hot spume. It seemed to him he could actually see their voices deepening into a silvery, cool pool and must plunge into that pool or die a flaming death.

He was filled with such a fury of desire that he swelled his mighty muscles, burst the rawhide bonds like thread, and dashed for the rail.

But he had warned two of his strongest men—Perimedes and Eurylochus—to guard him close. They seized him before he could plunge into the water. He swept them aside as if they had been children. But they had held him long enough to give the crew time to swarm about him. He was overpowered—crushed by their numbers—and dragged back to the mast. This time he was bound with the mighty hawser that held the anchor.

The men returned to their rowing seats, unable to hear the voices because of the wax corking their ears. The ship swung about and headed for the strait again.

Louder now, and clearer, the tormenting voices came to Ulysses. Again he was aflame with a fury of desire. But try as he might he could not break the thick anchor line. He strained against it until he bled, but the line held.

The men bent to their oars and rowed more swiftly, for they saw the mast bending like a tall tree in a heavy wind, and they feared that Ulysses, in his fury, might snap it off short and dive, mast and all, into the water to get at the Sirens.

Now they were passing the rock, and Ulysses could see the singers. There were two of them. They sat on a heap of white bones—the bones of shipwrecked sailors—and sang more beautifully than senses could bear. But their appearance did not match their voices, for they were shaped like birds, huge birds, larger than eagles. They had feathers instead of hair, and their hands and feet were claws. But their faces were the faces of young girls.

When Ulysses saw them he was able to forget the sweetness of their voices because their look was so fearsome. He closed his eyes against the terrible sight of these bird-women perched on their heap of bones. But when he closed his eyes and could not see their ugliness, then their voices maddened him once again, and he felt himself straining against the bloody ropes. He forced himself to open his eyes and look upon the monsters, so that the terror of their bodies would blot the beauty of their voices.

But the men, who could only see, not hear the Sirens, were so appalled by their aspect that they swept their oars faster and faster, and the black ship scuttled past the rock. The Sirens’ voices sounded fainter and fainter and finally died away.

When Perimedes and Eurylochus saw their captain’s face lose its madness, they unbound him, and he signaled to the men to unstop their ears. For now he heard the whistling gurgle of a whirlpool, and he knew that they were approaching the narrowest part of the strait, and must pass between Scylla and Charybdis.

U
LYSSES HAD BEEN TOLD
in Tartarus of these two monsters that guard the narrow waterway leading to Thrinacia. Each of them hid beneath its own huge rock, which stood side by side and were separated only by the width of the strait at its narrowest point

Charybdis dwelt in a cave beneath the left-hand rock. Once she had been a superbly beautiful naiad, daughter of Poseidon, and very loyal to her father in his endless feud with Zeus, Lord of Earth and Sky. She it was who rode the hungry tides after Poseidon had stirred up a storm and led them onto the beaches, gobbling up whole villages, submerging fields, drowning forests, claiming them for the sea. She won so much land for her father’s kingdom that Zeus became enraged and changed her into a monster, a huge bladder of a creature whose face was all mouth and whose arms and legs were flippers. And he penned her in the cave beneath the rock, saying:

“Your hunger shall become thirst. As you once devoured land belonging to me, now you shall drink the tide thrice a day—swallow it and spit it forth again—and your name will be a curse to sailors forever.”

And so it was. Thrice a day she burned with a terrible thirst and stuck her head out of the cave and drank down the sea, shrinking the waters to a shallow stream, and then spat the water out again in a tremendous torrent, making a whirlpool near her rock in which no ship could live.

This was Charybdis. As for Scylla, who lived under the right-hand rock, she, too, had once been a beautiful naiad. Poseidon himself spied her swimming one day and fell in love with her and so provoked the jealousy of his wife, Amphitrite, that she cried:

“I will make her the most hideous female that man or god ever fled from!”

Thereupon she changed Scylla into something that looked like a huge, fleshy spider with twelve legs and six heads. She also implanted in her an insatiable hunger, a wild greed for human flesh. When any ship came within reach of her long tentacles, she would sweep the deck of sailors and eat them.

Ulysses stood in the bow as the ship nosed slowly up the strait. The roaring of the waters grew louder and louder, and now he saw wild feathers of spume flying as Charybdis sucked down the tide and spat it back. He looked at the other rock. Scylla was not in sight. But he knew she was lurking underneath, ready to spring. He squinted, trying to measure distances. The only chance to come through unharmed, he saw, was to strike the middle way between the two rocks, just beyond the suction of the whirlpool, and just out of Scylla’s reach. But to do this meant that the ship must not be allowed to swerve a foot from its exact course, for the middle way was no wider than the ship itself.

He took the helm and bade his men keep a perfectly regular stroke. Then, considering further, he turned the helm over to Eurylochus and put on his armor. Grasping sword and spear, he posted himself at the starboard rail.