A Thousand Ships(46)

‘Polydorus would not reproach you.’ Andromache spoke quietly but still everyone turned to hear her. ‘He was a kind boy, open-hearted and sometimes foolish, but not reproachful or cruel.’

Hecabe felt her eyes prickling, but she did not intend to cry again. ‘He was a kind boy.’ She nodded.

‘He would not be angry with you, Mother,’ Polyxena agreed. ‘Let us seek the Greeks’ permission to bury him.’

‘And what if they refuse?’ Hecabe asked. Her anguish was already shading into a quiet fury.

‘We shall throw dust over him now,’ Andromache said. ‘He will enter the gates of Hades, and he will dwell on the island of the blessed. The formal burial will come later, or it will not. But by then he will already be where he belongs.’

The women carried out their duty in silence. They washed Polydorus clean of his blood and of the sand and weeds which clung to him, and they cast handfuls of dust over his body and murmured prayers to Hades, and Persephone, and also to Hermes, who would accompany him to the Underworld and show him the way. The Greek soldiers were almost upon them, but Polydorus was safely out of their reach.





23


Penelope


My dear husband,

Another year gone, and still you are no closer to home. Or maybe you are. I heard a tale from one old man, some wandering bard in search of his supper, that you had earned the favour of Aeolus, god of the winds. And that thanks to him, you had sailed to within sight of Ithaca, our rocky outpost. Then your sailors did something foolish – disregarded some simple instruction – and the winds turned against you once again and blew you all the way back to the island of the wind-god. Even Aeolus will not aid the same weary traveller twice. He knows, as we all do, that such misfortune must be the result of divine disfavour. And who is he to argue with another god on behalf of some mortal?

I’ve no doubt that you believe Poseidon is simply toying with you for a while, forcing you to sail now this way, now that. But what if he is not, Odysseus? What if this is your punishment for the blinding of his son, the Cyclops? To a god, a human life is nothing more than the blink of an eye. He could keep you from home for one year or ten. To him, they would feel no different.

I worry about you, of course. The story of Aeolus and the favouring winds he tried to offer you is a frustrating one. To think you might have been only a short distance away from me, and I didn’t know it. I can almost taste the disappointment, sour on the back of my tongue. But compared with the other stories which have reached us here, it is a positively encouraging tale. If I believed even a tenth of what I had heard about your tortuous journey home, I would be certain that by now you were dead. Perhaps you are dead. I feel I may as well be scratching my message into the sand as the tide comes in, for all the certainty I have that you will one day know what I wanted to say to you.

I hope you have not lost every ship but your own, as the old bard claimed in his song. Be assured that I did not give him a comfortable bed to sleep in that night. He dined on hard bread and slept on hard stone. The next evening, he sang a sweet sequel to his tale, where you were safely beached on a shore somewhere. It was obvious that he had composed these new verses to appease me. It did not work.

I have already forgotten the name of your safe haven that he sang about on that second night. A strange word, but it will come to me. On the first night, he had you under attack by more giants. First the Cyclops, he sang, and then – after your audacious escape – the Laestrygonians. We had not heard of these giants before, but the poet assured us they were a gargantuan race of cannibals. I asked him how they differed from the Cyclopes, since Polyphemus (the name of the one you blinded, Odysseus, since you didn’t trouble to ask) had also been determined to eat you and your men. The bard had no answer apart from some half-hearted half-line about the number of eyes they have. No wonder I find it hard to believe much of what these poets sing.

Because really, how many cannibalistic giants can one Greek plausibly meet as he sails the open seas? Even I, expert in your ability to create trouble, think one set is probably sufficient for your story. But then, if you did not meet with the Laestrygonians, if you are not deprived of most of your companions, if you have not lost every ship but your own, then what is the answer to the question that is on my lips from the moment I wake every morning: where are you?

The bards all sing of the bravery of heroes and the greatness of your deeds: it is one of the few elements of your story on which they all agree. But no one sings of the courage required by those of us who were left behind. It must be easy to forget how long you have been gone, as you bound from one misfortune to another. Always having to make impossible choices, always seizing opportunities and taking risks. That passes the time, I would imagine. Whereas sitting in our home without you, watching Telemachus grow from a baby into a child, and now a handsome youth, wondering if he will ever see his father again? That also takes a hero’s disposition. Waiting is the cruellest thing I have ever endured. Like bereavement, but with no certainty. I’m sure if you knew the pain it has caused me, you would weep. You always were prone to sentiment.

Ah, the name of the safe haven has returned to me. Aeaea. I wonder where it is, or if it exists at all. The bard must have run out of man-eating giants to set upon you, so he created an even stranger story about what happened to you when you landed on Aeaea. After the Laestrygonians had hurled boulders at you, drowning most of your men, you and your crew sailed as far and fast as you could, then disembarked on the first island you saw. To have lost all those ships, Odysseus. All those men. I cling to the hope that the bard sings your story wrongly. Or how will you tell all those fathers and mothers, all those wives and sisters, that their menfolk survived Agamemnon’s war, but not Odysseus’ voyage home? How will I look them in the face, after visiting such horror upon them?