Ithaca Read online

  No news of Odysseus. The disappointment leaves me numb. I’m tired. We’ve just escaped drowning. Ithaca feels a long way away. For a moment I wish I’d never left home. Even the olive groves smell strange in this new land. The priests' robes are different from the robes on Ithaca. There’s an odd perfume coming from the fire, some kind of incense, and the line of mountains above us is nothing like Mount Nirito at home. Everyone looks threatening. One of the fighters is missing an arm. Another has a scar where his left eye should have been. Feeling lost and scared, I watch the group by the fire break up as mules are led forward. The altar is packed into a wooden crate. Four soldiers lift Nestor’s litter on poles. Polycaste mounts her mule, waving aside the soldier who steps forward to help. I find myself heaved onto a saddle and clutch the wooden pommel.

  Servants raise torches of flaming pinewood to light the way, and slowly the procession moves off into the olive groves behind the beach. My mule rocks from side to side, brushing trees as it climbs the narrow path. Ahead of us, chains of torches lead up the hillside. I’m so tired I can hardly keep my eyes open. Two or three times I doze off and wake clutching at the saddle. Branches loom out of the darkness, framing a star-studded sky that might have been cut from purple velvet. Bats flicker across it. I hear the gentle hoot of an owl out in the olive groves. Cicadas shrill around us. In front, Nestor’s litter sways on brightly painted poles. I drift in and out of sleep. Sometimes I think I’m still on the swooping deck of Mentor’s ship, then wake to the mule beneath me.

  The last time I wake, it’s to the bustle of orders being shouted. We’re outside a large house—bigger than our house in Ithaca—with whitewashed walls and soldiers on guard at the gate. Torches hang in brackets on the walls, casting a flickering glow across a forecourt of beaten earth, where Nestor is being helped down from his litter. People are dismounting their mules. Yawning, I follow my host into a wide courtyard of raked gravel, where Nestor stops me.

  “You need to rest,” he says kindly. “We won’t eat straightaway. Come to the hall when the bell rings.”

  All great houses are supposed to be laid out the same way, but I’ve only ever seen the house at Ithaca. Everything here seems unfamiliar: the color of the walls, the height of the corridors, the carvings on the gateposts. I follow a servant down a corridor to a small room with a ceiling of wooden beams, its walls decorated a warm earth-red. A delicious smell fills the air. Under the window there’s a hip bath half-full of water—Nestor must have sent servants ahead to prepare it. A slim servant girl comes in through a door carrying a steaming pitcher, which she empties into the bath. Opening a wooden chest, she throws handfuls of rose petals, sprigs of rosemary, and crushed bay leaves into the bath. After the terror of the storm, it feels as if I’ve been transported to heaven.

  “Clothes.” Her accent is foreign. She has a dark, delicate face, and her black hair, tightly curled, is braided on her head with a ribbon. She tugs at her light green dress to show she means clothes and opens a painted wooden chest to point out stacks of neatly folded gowns. Suddenly I’m aware of my own filthy clothes, still damp from the sea, of my hair caked with salt, my skin itching from two days’ journey. When she’s gone I peel everything off, step into the bath, and sink down into warm, perfumed water. It comes up to my chin, rose petals and sweet herbs revolving on the surface. I breathe in the deep, warm fragrance and close my eyes, feeling days of anxiety, of anger, of fear all soaking off me along with the salt that crusts my skin.

  The girl comes back in, carrying another steaming pitcher. I do what I can to cover myself, but she just laughs.

  “Close your eyes.”

  I close my eyes, bow my head, and feel a delicious stream of hot water cascade over me.

  “Sit up.”

  I smell sweet soap and feel her strong fingers massaging it into my scalp, combing through the tangle of hair.

  “What’s your name?” I ask.

  No reply. The soothing touch of her fingers is almost sending me to sleep, so I sink back and close my eyes. Drowsily I ask, “Where are you from?”

  She doesn’t answer immediately, so I repeat the question. When I open my eyes, she’s over by the door, holding the empty pitcher, but there’s something in her face, something wrong. She looks desolate.

  “Troy,” she says. Then she’s gone, door closed.

  And suddenly I’m wide awake.

  Troy. How often have I heard that name? The Trojan War is part of my life—it’s part of all our lives. How often, crammed into a corner of the tavern, have I heard storytellers describe the city the Greeks hurled themselves against year after year? How often have I closed my eyes as the thrum of their instruments quickened pace and their voices tumbled over the words, picturing hordes of Trojan soldiers bursting from its gates? Troy, the city that emptied Ithaca of men and filled it with widows’ black. Troy, from which my father was meant to return.

  But in all this time I’ve never seen a Trojan.

  She isn’t a servant girl, I realize suddenly. She’s a slave. We don’t have slaves on Ithaca, but they exist all over Greece. Prizes of war—high-born women, some of them, laboring in their conquerors’ houses, and sometimes in their beds. There aren’t many male slaves. When a town is sacked, the men are slaughtered. It’s the women who become possessions, machines, trophies.

  That explains the look of desolation. Who has she lost? A father, brothers. She was there—that’s the thought I can’t get over. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the story of Troy’s last night, imagined the shrieks and the crackle of fire, seen flames leaping from houses and burning temples, pictured oil blazing in the streets from smashed shops, piles of bodies, soldiers breaking down doors and dragging Trojans out into the streets. She was there. A child, maybe, but that last night is still in her mind, seared there forever. She was there, dragged out into the street with her mother sobbing and the body of her father, slashed by Greek swords, slumped on the floor of a home she’ll never see again.

  She was there. And so was my father.

  In the great hall of Nestor’s house, two massive pine logs smolder on the hearth. Beyond it a table is spread with dishes of meat and baskets of bread. Servants—slaves—are pouring wine from pitchers. Cooks turn fat little sausages on a griddle.

  A young man, a fighter with hair oiled and his arms covered in tattoos, greets me and pours me wine. “Are you really Odysseus’s son?” He sounds eager, almost shy. “What was he like?”

  “I never met him. He left Ithaca before I was born.”

  “What do you think happened to him?”

  Bewildered, I stare at him. “That’s what I came to find out.”

  “Are you Odysseus’s son?” A girl in a long robe. And there are others behind her, a whole crowd pressing around me. “Do you know what happened to Odysseus? Where is Odysseus?”

  Nestor rescues me. The crowd parts for him, and I find myself clasped in a weak embrace that leaves behind it an old man’s smell and the feathery brush of Nestor’s parchment lips.

  “Telemachus. And Mentor. So great a pleasure. I am only sorry I can give you no news of Odysseus. No fresh news. Let me tell you about the last time I saw him . . .” Nestor leads me to the high table and settles himself comfortably against a pile of cushions, waving to a servant for wine. “On the beach at Troy, in fine spirits . . . as we all were, you can imagine. He had a bandage on one arm, his left, a wound from the night Troy fell. His men were stacking treasure in the ships. There is nothing left of Troy, you know, not even a village. No one to live there. It is gone as if it never existed, a graveyard, even the temples of the gods destroyed . . .” He frowns suddenly. “I fear that is the source of Odysseus’s trouble. A vengeful god punishing the man who planned Troy’s fall, for it was Odysseus’s stratagem, you know, his plan, explained to us in council two nights before, that caused Troy’s downfall. I can’t say no one added to it. I myself made some helpful modifications, which, I flatter myself, contributed to its success . . . perhaps ev
en ensured its success. Odysseus, though, was the guiding spirit. A clever man, which is why hope must still remain. If anyone could get himself out of some scrape or danger, it would be your father . . .

  “Where was I? Standing on the beach, then. We embraced. ‘Nestor,’ he said, ‘I will visit you in Pylos on my way home.’ That may be significant—do you see? He had no plans for a detour. Home to his wife and his baby son . . . Oh, yes, he knew all about you. Messages traveled between Greece and the camp at Troy. ‘Telemachus!’ I remember the night he got the news. A great feast on the beach, sheep slaughtered, jars of wine looted from one of the little villages around Troy. We all toasted you, my dear boy, and here you are in the flesh, as it were, a young man. You don’t, if I may say it, look like your father. Yes?”

  The sulky-looking girl is tugging at her father’s arm. “The food’s ready.” She doesn’t pay any attention to me.

  “And I have been talking . . . but we won’t talk any more tonight.” Nestor lays a light hand on my sleeve. “As I say, I have no hard news, but there are rumors. I know where you can find news. All that must wait for tomorrow, though, when heads are clear and we are both rested from our exertions. For now, we will celebrate your arrival in Pylos. We will feast.”

  It’s quite a feast, I have to say that. I’m used to the chaos of our house at Ithaca, where rooms stay unswept for days, guests drift in and out of the kitchen, and servants come and go without warning. At Nestor’s home, dishes are served and then whisked efficiently away. When I drop a cushion, unseen hands seize it from the floor and stuff it behind my shoulder. The slave girl who bathed me keeps stepping forward to fill my cup with wine.

  I’m sitting next to Nestor, with Polycaste, his daughter, beyond him. Most of the talk is a monologue by Nestor that rambles wherever his mind wanders: his sons, now scattered across Greece . . . the old days . . . feasts of Poseidon . . . the harvest . . . the pictures on the walls of the great hall, copied from some he saw on a voyage to Egypt years ago. Most of the stories are about himself. I soon realize that Nestor’s fusty charm hides a strong streak of vanity. And I notice something else. The doddery impression he gives—a pleasant but scatterbrained old man living happily in the past—isn’t the whole story. He’s cleverer than that. His rambling, impossible to interrupt, has a purpose: so long as he’s talking, no one else can. Once, I ask a direct question about Odysseus, and he brushes me off. I ask something about the war—same reaction. Each time, he waves his hand and we’re back on stag hunts in the hills of Thessaly or craftsmen who make rings of solid silver in Athens. It doesn’t take a genius to get the message. Nestor will talk about my father when he’s ready. For the moment, Odysseus is off-limits.

  Polycaste, his daughter, looks bored and doesn’t say much. Sometimes she tightens her lips at some story of her father’s she’s obviously heard a thousand times. The other guests get slowly drunk, which is what always happens at feasts. Eventually Nestor raises his hand, and the hall falls silent.

  “We will have a story,” he announces. “Tonight, in honor of our guest, we will have the story of the fall of Troy.”

  It’s hardly new to me. Or anyone else—everyone in Greece can tell you about the fall of Troy. After eight years of slaughter under Troy’s impregnable walls, with the Greek leaders squabbling, soldiers dying of disease, and the great Trojan adventure starting to look like a fiasco, Odysseus—my father—came up with the trick that finally pried open Troy’s bronze gates.

  The Greek armies retreated to the beach. With Trojan soldiers watching from the ramparts, the Greeks struck tents, sacrificed to the gods, then clambered back onto their ships and rowed away over the horizon. Several hours went by. At last a wary Trojan reconnaissance band, heavily armed, came out from a side gate to see what was going on. They found all the mess of an army that had been encamped for eight years: abandoned tents, piles of rotting food, stinking latrines . . . and the Greeks’ final offering to the gods, the gigantic wooden statue of a horse.

  They found something else as well: a half-crazed soldier hiding in a trench. When they dragged him out, beat him, and hauled him before Priam, Troy’s king, the soldier babbled out the whole sorry tale—of aristocratic infighting, illness and indiscipline, mutinous, half-starved troops and adverse omens—that led to the Greek capitulation. That was when it came home to the Trojans that their nightmare was finally over. Heaving open the gates for the first time in eight years, they all flooded out onto the plain of Troy—soldiers, old men in litters, women and children, priests and slaves. They picked through the abandoned camp, traced the furrows of Greek ships that still marked the beach, kicked out the ashes of their enemies’ campfires. The horse, chocked up on tree trunks, they hauled back across the plain to the great temple of Troy, where garlands of victory were already being hung and fires were lit as the town gave itself over to celebration.

  Odysseus was inside the horse.

  He and twenty companions, sweating, teeth clenched, gripping breastplates and shields so no clink of metal would give away their presence. They crouched in darkness for twelve hours, unable even to relieve themselves in case the stink gave them away. They felt the jolt as the horse eased over the threshold of Troy’s main gate. They heard the Trojans singing and rejoicing, and smelled incense and roasting meat through the horse’s timbers. Only when the last noises of celebration had died away did they let themselves down from the belly of the horse and open the gates of Troy to the Greek army. Because the Greeks hadn’t really sailed away. They’d hove to beyond the horizon, and the moment night fell, they returned to the beach.

  No storyteller on earth could describe the slaughter that followed. The Trojans were bemused, befuddled, unprepared—they had no chance of organizing any resistance. And after eight years’ fighting, the Greeks showed no mercy. Women and children were killed, old men cut down in the streets. The Greeks hunted Priam and his children to the steps of the temple. Shops were set on fire, and fire spread across the doomed town, choking streets in oily black smoke, drowning children’s screams with the crackle of flames. By the time dawn broke, Troy no longer existed.

  I can still remember the first time I heard the story of Troy. It reached Ithaca via a storyteller on a merchant ship. The versions I’ve heard since have added detail—increasingly colorful—but to me, there’s one image that always sticks in my mind. My father—my father—crouching in the horse’s belly, doomed to almost certain death but feeling no fear. I remember what I felt the first time I heard it, and I’ve felt the same thing ever since: I couldn’t do that. The story doesn’t bring my father closer. It drives him further away. Odysseus the fighter, Odysseus the hero. Each time I picture my father’s jaw set, his hand sweating on his sword hilt, and I know—I know—that whatever blood runs in his veins doesn’t run through mine.

  The version told at Pylos makes a few changes. It turns out Odysseus originally suggested a dog, not a horse. The horse was Nestor’s idea. It was Nestor who modified the design to include a trapdoor and rope ladder. Nestor checked each man’s equipment, ran through the final orders with Odysseus, and rehearsed the actor the Greeks left behind to sell the story to the Trojans. Plus, at the last minute he ordered the horse’s head to be lowered slightly, otherwise it wouldn’t have fit through the gate.

  Apart from that, the storyteller at Pylos tells it well. Most of the changes are wasted anyway, because Nestor sleeps through it, waking only just in time to join the applause at the end. After that he rises unsteadily to his feet and says good night, ordering me not to get up too early in the morning.

  I do wake up early, though. I wake with the feeling I’ve let something slip through my fingers. There’s a conversation we’ve barely even started. About my father: about who he is, and where he might be now.

  In the great hall a table is laid with baskets of bread and dishes of yogurt and honey. Polycaste is already there, shredding a roll.

  “Apparently I’ve got to show you around.”

  “Show me
what?”

  “The house. The farm. Anything you want to see. Come on, you can eat while we go. That way we won’t have to talk.”

  I try to anyway. “I enjoyed the story last night.”

  “Did you? It makes a change. Normally we have Jason and the Argonauts. My father was one of the Argonauts. This is the storeroom. Wine. Oil.”

  “Did your father really meet Hercules?”

  “Yes. Amazing. Kitchen.”

  “You think people like that only exist in stories, and then you meet one of them.” It sounds pretty weak, even to me.

  “Maybe one day you’ll be a story yourself. Probably a really boring one. This is the office where my father does his accounts, meaning sleeps. This is the courtyard, which you’ve seen. Upstairs is like any other big house. Let’s go outside.”

  As we walk out into the sun-baked earth of the vegetable garden, I say, “Don’t you like your father?”

  Polycaste stops and turns on me, eyes blazing. “Of course I do! I love him! What’s that got to do with it? I suppose you wouldn’t understand if you don’t have a father yourself.” She pauses, anger ebbing away as fast as it came, and looks at me as if she hasn’t really noticed me before. “What’s your mother like?”

  “She’s not well.”

  “Ill?”

  “She’s very quiet.”

  “Everyone says how beautiful she is. Was. I suppose no one’s seen her for years, except you. This is the orchard.”