Odysseus: The Return Read online

  TO CHRISTINE

  Neither Laestrygonians nor Cyclopes

  Nor bitter Poseidon will you ever meet

  Unless you carry them within your heart

  Unless your heart raises them before you

  CONSTANTINE P. CAVAFY, Ithaka

  Contents

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Characters and Places

  About the Author

  Also by Valerio Massimo Manfredi

  1

  TROY WAS STILL BURNING.

  A huge storm of fire raged. Blazing shafts plunged from the heavens with a deafening roar. The shades of fallen warriors still screamed their outrage amidst the smoke and flames; restless, anguished souls, teeming now at the gates of Hades. Troy would burn for days and nights, until she had turned to ash.

  The glare of the fires guided us back.

  Two men from each ship swam to shore, struggling against the strong current. They anchored the vessels to land by tying them to the solid oak stakes they drove into the ground. I ordered them all to wait aboard as I set off towards the city; no one was to go ashore for any reason. I still wonder why I didn’t stay with my men that night, why I went back to the scene of deceit and slaughter. I don’t have an answer.

  I could see, from on high, the ships of Agamemnon and the other kings who had chosen to remain. They were anchored at the sterns, their prows facing seaward – so they were on their way as well. Perhaps they’d understood that there were no sacrifices or hecatombs that could make amends for the horrors we’d committed. All that innocent blood spilled.

  I found the road that led to the city, passed between the scorched jambs of the Skaian Gate that we’d believed to be impregnable, walked up towards the citadel. I arrived just in time to witness the unimaginable: the horse I myself had built was collapsing, at that very instant, devoured by the fire. It had taken the flames this long to envelope the horse, so tall it had once towered over the city and the palace. It crashed to the earth in a vortex of sparks and white smoke. Its head was last to dissolve in the blaze.

  I heard, or thought I heard, the echoing shrieks of those the fire had consumed. They were gone, but their dried blood still clogged the cracks in the road. I continued to ascend, until I reached the vast porticoed courtyard where the sanctuary of my goddess still rose. The roof had caved in, and the blackened pillars now stood alone like silent guards.

  I went in.

  The sanctuary was empty. The pedestal where the glittering statue of Pallas Athena had stood was empty. The powerful idol had vanished. Who had taken it? Who would have dared to do such a thing?

  The Achaians, perhaps?

  I, myself?

  Had my mind erased this completely? Is this what had dragged me back inside the walls of sacred Troy? Questions without meaning and without answers that could not stop me from wandering like a spectre among the charred ruins. The rain sizzled and hissed as it met the flames that still burned with accursed energy. In the end, exhausted, I made my way back down to the battlefield. There was a strange, unreal light in the air, a luminescent vapour that transformed the objects around me, making everything unrecognizable. I found myself suddenly at the wild fig tree, without realizing how I’d got there. The familiar grey trunk, the green leaves, the bark so often wounded. I leaned against it and felt the scars of the immortal tree at my back, the only living thing remaining in the devastated field. I slumped, bone-weary, and fell asleep.

  It was the moon that woke me. It led me back to the promontory, lighting my path and then the high yards and sleek flanks of my ships. At dawn, a strong land wind scattered the clouds and carried the smoke out to sea, clearing the sky above us and leaving it luminous. We cast off the moorings then, pushed the ships out and raised the sails. The wind steered us towards the coast of Thrace.

  I knew those lands well. I’d gone there often during the long war to buy the wine that had so often consoled us during our many sufferings and gladdened our banquets. A strong, sweet wine that we diluted with water so it would last longer. It certainly wasn’t a job that required a king. Any of the merchants who had pitched their tents outside our camp could have seen to it, but it was a job that I liked. It made me feel alive again. I would walk through the fields, watch as the wine was poured out, have a taste, haggle over the price. Sometimes I would be invited to lunch, and I could linger at the table with the vine-dressers. It felt like I was home again, in a way.

  Now we were at sea, finally, and we were never going to turn back.

  How did I feel . . . tears fell from my eyes. I looked back and remembered my comrades, the friends I had lost, all those who would not be returning with us. And I looked forward, counting the days that separated us from our island home. It didn’t seem real. I was starting to think again like a man who inhabits his own house, grows his own crops, tends his own flocks. I let myself imagine joyful events: embracing my parents, the little son who had never known me . . . Penelope, who I had so keenly desired on all those long sleepless nights . . . We would lie together in the bed I had built and after we’d made love I would gaze at the beams over my head, breathe in the scent of the olive trunk, the scent of my wife. We would have so many things to tell each other, under the covers that my mother had embroidered . . . And Argus? Was Argus still alive?

  I thought of painful things as well: facing the families of my fallen comrades, listening to their inconsolable weeping, offering them the share of the booty that was their right in exchange for a son’s life. The news of our endeavour would have travelled from mouth to mouth, from village to village, from island to island and I would be making my return as the absolute victor, the destroyer of cities, the man with the mind who had plotted unimaginable stratagems. The trophies of my victory would be hung from the walls of my palace: embossed shields, bronze panoplies, baldrics of silver mail with gold and amber buckles that would astonish my father and all the visitors who came to call . . . But I couldn’t think any further than that. So many years of ruin and grief had taught me that you can’t make plans. The future is inscrutable; the gods are often envious of our happiness and enjoy watching us suffer. Only my goddess loved me, of this I was certain, but not even she could bend destiny.

  Then we sighted land and in no time I was thinking like a warrior and predator again. It was like a disease, lurking deep inside me; after all, I’d done nothing else for ten years. I found myself pondering the thought that all the booty I carried with me was surely not a sufficient token of my great glory. My people would be expecting much more of me.

  From the sea we could see a city up on a hill and its inhabitants could probably see us. It was defended by a wooden palisade and had gates of stone.

  ‘Let’s seize it!’ shouted my men.

  They were like me. They knew they would be putting themselves in danger but they didn’t care. Perhaps they were already craving carnage, terror, violence. After all, this was the land of the Ciconians; they were Thracians and allies of Priam. It was only right for us to attack them. I ordered my comrades to take up arms and we put ashore. The men of the city must have been far off, in the fields or at pasture with their flocks. No warriors came out to challenge us. It wasn’t
until we had crashed through the main gate using the mast from one of our ships that we saw a single living soul. A hasty assembly of about a hundred men stood against us. We easily overcame them and poured into the city.

  Before long, the city of Ismarus was put to plunder and its most beautiful women were rounded up and dragged off. I walked into one of the richest houses and found a man who appeared to be terrified. He fell to his knees and begged me not to kill him. He wore the headdress of a priest and I spared him. In exchange he gave me a big skin full of wine, the best he had. The same fine wine that I had brought back to the battlefield so often for the banquets of the princes and kings.

  We loaded up the booty and I ordered the men to set sail immediately, but many of them had gathered on the beach and had started drinking while others had slaughtered and quartered a few sheep and had lit a fire. The strong wine and the women had gone to their heads. They simply would not listen to me; they were no longer the obedient, disciplined warriors I was accustomed to, I realized bitterly. I feared that it wouldn’t be long before they reaped their punishment. I went back to my ship alone, ate a cup of barley toasted on the brazier at the stern, and drank some water.

  Eurylochus approached me. ‘They’ve suffered for ten years,’ he said, ‘and they’ve always obeyed you, fought with great courage. They’ve lost more than two hundred of their comrades. Don’t begrudge them a little celebrating. Haven’t they earned it?’

  ‘No one deserves to enjoy what he can’t afford. They’re acting like fools and they’ll pay for it with their lives. Is any amount of revelry worth such a risk? Listen, don’t you hear anything at all? And those lights, up there on the hill, can’t you see them?’

  Eurylochus strained his ears and scanned the darkness. A distant roll of drums . . . fires up on the heights. News of the fall of Ismarus was flying from hill to hill, from village to village.

  We would soon be attacked and, in the meantime, my brave fighters and daring sailors were turning into a bunch of drunks, incapable of standing up straight. Fog fell over land and sea and I remained wakeful all that night, a solitary sentry.

  The grey, cold dawn roused me from a brief, fitful slumber and what I saw unfortunately confirmed my fears: thousands of Ciconian warriors were streaming down the hills, heading our way. I shouted out an alarm and I kicked my men awake. As they came to, they began to understand what was happening. They stumbled to their feet and into their armour but had no time to eat. I drew them up in front of the ships in close ranks as I had so many times in Troy. The enemy were just a couple of hundred paces away from us when they lunged forward at a run and pounded our formation like waves of the sea against cliffs. Hard as it was for me to believe, my men resisted the attack; they were holding their own, shield to shield, shoulder to shoulder. I tried several times to lead a counter-attack from the centre, in the hopes of frightening the enemy and routing them, but to no avail. As long as our strength held up, I knew we could manage to maintain our position but by afternoon, exhausted and hungry as we were, we started to lose ground. We had nothing but our ships and the sea at our backs. Where could we go? How could we hope to save ourselves?

  I ordered one crew at a time to push their vessel out into the water, climb aboard and take up oars, while all the others protected them on land. Once on board, they would be able to cover their comrades still on foot with a fast, steady rain of arrows until all the men could get back onto the ships. My battle plan worked, the men resisting until the last ship had gained the open sea. But by then more than forty of our own had been lost to the enemy.

  The sun had set. Eurylochus approached me and asked if we could give the final salute to the dead who had been abandoned unburied. It was traditional to shout out each man’s name ten times. I replied: ‘Thrice will be enough. They don’t deserve such an honour from us. They died as fools.’ It was my way of not crying.

  A STORM was in the air and it was getting very dark now. I took the lead with my ship, sailing close to the coast to avoid the freshening north wind. When I thought we had distanced ourselves sufficiently from the land of the Ciconians, I gave orders to haul in the sails and to row to shore. We dropped anchor forward, keeping the bows pointed towards the sea, and moored aft. I allowed the men to bivouac on the beach and to eat their only meal of the day, with sentries posted all around and close guard shifts established. We ate without speaking, because the loss of so many comrades was a dull ache in each of our hearts. Many men had tears in their eyes.

  At the end of our meal, I decided the route we would take: we would go south, passing between Lemnos and Scyros and then between Euboea and Andros to reach Cape Malea.

  ‘We’ll sail both day and night,’ I said. ‘I don’t want what happened today to repeat itself. Each helmsman will ensure that the brazier at the stern of his ship remains lit at all times. I want to be able to count the vessels one by one at any hour of the night.’

  We all returned aboard the ships to sleep, leaving only the sentries on land. We rested rather well, all told, and halfway through the night the wind even seemed to die down, although the sea remained rough.

  Thoughts crowded my mind. I didn’t dare hope.

  Would my goddess come to my aid? Or was I at the mercy of Poseidon? Every drop of water, every creature and every weed, every cove and every gulf was his. I prayed in my heart that he might show us clemency and allow us to see our homeland and our families again after so many long years. At dawn we cast off the mooring lines and weighed anchor. We launched the names of our fallen comrades to the winds, three times for each one of them, and when the last echo was lost in the distance, I couldn’t hold back any longer. I went to the highest point of the prow as the other ships followed mine away from the shore and shouted out the triple cry of the Ithacan kings. I cried out as loudly as I could, to be heard over the wind whistling among the shrouds: ‘To Ithaca, men! We’re going home!’

  They answered in a single voice with the same shout, pounding their oars on the benches. Our true return voyage had begun. If the gods and the winds helped us, we would moor at the great port at the seventh dusk.

  As the day wore on, we spied the hills of Lemnos to our left. At times during the war, on a very clear day, we could make out their outline from the slopes of Mount Ida, where we would go with the woodcutters to chop trees. The clouds were moving quickly through the sky but they were not massing, and my most expert sailors felt that this was a good sign and that fine weather would accompany us.

  Sailing the open sea at night was a risky choice, but the desire to return was so strong in each of us that no one dared oppose my decision. All six of the ships following mine sailed at an equal distance from one another in an oblique line, so that each could see both the ships in front of and behind their own at any time.

  By the following midday, Scyros, the island of Pyrrhus, appeared before us at a considerable distance. We sailed past, leaving it to our right without attempting to go ashore. I had dark memories of that place. I wondered where the savage warrior was now, that brutal, bloodthirsty youth who would spare neither an old man nor a babe in arms. How would Peleus, king of Phthia of the Myrmidons, welcome his grandson when he returned preceded by such ill fame? I turned and watched at length as the island slowly vanished behind the billows, until the sea became purple and the air damp and cold.

  The moon finally appeared among the clouds. It was white, and cast a long silvery wake on the broad back of the sea. I imagined the other fleets that had already set forth over these waters. The hundreds of ships of Menelaus Atreides, of Nestor the Knight of Gerene, of Diomedes Lord of Argus. And Helen . . . where could she be? What was she thinking? Who was she thinking of?

  Sinon was sleeping wrapped in a blanket behind me, nestled in the coils of rope like in a serpent’s embrace. Without him, our trick would never have worked: he, small, practised liar. I smiled. Sham victim, feigned fugitive.

  I didn’t fall asleep until Orion was nearly touching the surface of the waves. In t
he distance, towards Asia, the sky was whitening. Eurylochus had taken my place at the helm. I slept in the shadow of the sail until the sun was high in the sky. My first thought when I awoke was for the men I’d lost, and I couldn’t understand why we had risked our lives for such meagre booty and a few skins of wine. Such an insignificant battle, against a trifling twin to Troy, against mere shepherds and hunters, could have been fatal for us: we, who bronze-clad had fought a hundred battles against the most powerful warriors in all Asia! I tried to force those unhappy thoughts from my mind but serenity escaped me. I could not push away those dead, abandoned, unburied comrades on the beach; the winds, so strong, that I could neither control nor tame; the last obstacles that I knew would be approaching, looming between me and my island, my wife, my son, my parents.

  Later that day a little bay appeared on our right and I decided we would go ashore before facing the straits between Euboea and the island of Andros. The men had been fighting the wind and the waves all night and all day. I had to let them rest. Mine was the first ship to beach. One after another, the others followed, making a complete turn so that our sterns were facing the shore.

  We had touched the land of Achaia, after ten years.

  The men fished. They found some big pieces of driftwood, lit a fire and roasted what they’d caught over the embers. It smelled inviting and I sat down on the dry sand with my comrades to participate in the frugal banquet. Those who had wine shared it with the others and it warmed our hearts.

  Food had never tasted so good to me. I thought of when, under the walls of Troy, the other kings had made fun of us islanders, calling us fish-eaters. Only a few days had passed since we’d taken the city, but they seemed like months. The memory of the furious fray around the wild fig tree was fading like a bad dream before dawn. The day was slowly coming to an end although the wind showed no sign of dying down, and the foam on the sea still blossomed whitely on the crests of the waves crashing against the rocks.