Ithaca (8 page)

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.”

I say, “Why are so many of the men injured?”

It's something I noticed last night and again as we passed through the house. One of the men stacking tables in the hall had a scar under his eye. Others were missing hands. One man, who pushed open a door for us, had lost both legs and pushed himself around on a little trolley, his hands wrapped in bloodied linen rags.

Polycaste gives me a pitying look. “Why do you think? The war. They came back like this. Everyone was scarred by the war. What's wrong with you? Isn't Ithaca full of veterans too?”

I say, “No one came back to Ithaca. They all disappeared.”

“Oh.” Polycaste looks away. “I hadn't thought.” After a moment she goes on, “There are loads of them 'round here, veterans. All the villages are full of them, the farms. Lots of men took to the hills. Eight years fighting in Troy, they couldn't get used to ordinary life again. Seeing women, living with children. Some became bandits. Some just scratch a living out of the forest. You'll see them if we go to Sparta together.”

“Sparta?”

“That's my father's plan. Hasn't he told you yet? He will. There was a story last winter, of a war veteran living in a little village up there, a shepherd. They were snowed in for a month. When the snow melted they found he'd killed his whole family. Wife, three children, just killed them. I suppose it's still in their heads, killing people.”

Suddenly I realize how remote Ithaca is. I always thought it was the center of the world. It isn't. It's a backwater dozing in the far west, cut off from everything on the mainland. All over Greece people are living through the aftermath of the endless, bloody war. For us on Ithaca the war is just an absence—the absence of the men who never came back. Everywhere else, it's real and you can see its marks—in wounded limbs and scarred memories, in slave girls, in veterans pushing themselves around on trolleys, hands wrapped in bloodied cloth.

In things people don't know how to talk about.

We get back to the great hall about noon, as bells ring in the villages around the house and cicadas shrill in the olive trees. The sun has turned the courtyard into a furnace, but it's still cool in the hall. The fire has dwindled to a single sputtering log, kept aflame only for ritual's sake. A slave comes forward with a cool jar of water and a linen cloth to wash the dust from our hands and faces.

Nestor seems refreshed by his night's sleep. He lifts his cheek so Polycaste can kiss it, then gestures to a door in the side of the hall and leads me into a small office with a single window too high to see out of. Unlike the great hall, it contains no luxury. It's plain and simple, with no furniture but a couple of chairs and a wooden table.

“My thinking-room.” Nestor eases himself painfully into one of the chairs and gestures the servant to leave. “No clutter. We must talk.” But he doesn't. For a moment he just looks up
at the deep blue outside the window. Following his gaze, I can see swallows darting across the sky.

“You know how this will probably end?” he says at last. He looks at me, and there's something piercing in his filmy eye, a flash of the wisdom he's famous for. “It's more than likely your father is dead. You must know that. If you have a fraction of Odysseus's brains, you'll know that.”

He falls silent again, for a long time, then sighs. “We've heard rumors, of course. I'm sure you've heard rumors in Ithaca. Odysseus was seen in Africa. He drowned in a storm off Cape Tenaros . . . There are any number of fates one can imagine. A storm? A mutiny? A quarrel with people ashore? You would think, wouldn't you, that after eight years of fighting together, the Greeks would be united. Nothing could be further from the truth. There were jealousies and resentments in the Greek camp that will endure for generations. Leaders who felt they weren't shown enough respect, contingents who didn't get the booty they thought they deserved. In some ways, you know, winning is far harder than losing.”

Easy to say. I think of the desolate slave girl from the night before.

“So maybe Odysseus went ashore on some island for water and food, and ran into a fight,” Nestor goes on. “Or he was blown off course. Or he lost his way. There are as many possibilities as there are rumors: the sea holds many perils. But nothing worth acting on. You could spend a lifetime chasing rumors.”

“I know he might be dead,” I say.

“Good.” Nestor rubs his chin thoughtfully. “You're right to search, though. It's better to be sure. Nothing saps courage like uncertainty, and from what I hear of affairs in Ithaca, you will need all your courage. Who is looking after Penelope while you are gone?”

“The servants.”

His mouth tightens only slightly, but it's enough to make me wince. My mother, alone in her room. Antinous.

“Can you fight?”

“No.” I can't see any point in lying.

“A pity. Somehow you must learn. If any of my sons were here, they would teach you.”

I say, “Tell me about my father.”

“Are you sure you want to know?” I'm almost certain he expected the question. Again I sense that piercing gleam in the old man's dull eye. “I wonder if any of us can really know our fathers—really
know
them. We see them through veils of . . .” He lifts one withered hand. “Awe. Resentment. Love. We spend so much of our time trying to be different from them—”

“I don't know what he's like,” I interrupt. “I don't know how to be different.”

“A fair point.” Nestor's chin sinks to his chest. He seems weary, suddenly. “What have you been told about Odysseus?”

“What the storytellers say.”

“There's truth of a kind in stories. Our greatest hero. A fighter. A strategist. All true.” He pauses, his voice fading. “But not the whole truth, of course.”

“Someone told me he was a liar.”

For a moment I can hear the swallows shrieking outside the window. The old man slowly shifts himself on his seat, like he's looking for a comfortable position and not finding it.

“Who?”

“Mentes, a friend of his from Africa.”

“Mentes? The African? I heard he died. But listen . . .” Nestor looks closely at me with a pained expression on his withered face. “There is no whole truth about a person. People are too complicated, they have too many sides . . . I will tell you the trouble with Odysseus. Your father was eloquent—a talker—and people distrust talkers. They distrust words, and Odysseus
was a master of words. A liar? Yes, some people called him that. I prefer to call him a storyteller, a spinner of yarns. That was how we survived eight years of hell . . . yes,
hell
. Can you imagine what the war was really like? Forget the storytellers. Agamemnon was no leader. Our best soldier, Achilles, refused to fight, and the rest of our men were no match for the Trojans. Odysseus kept us going, because he always had another idea, another tale that would save us all, a god who would come to our rescue, a spy who promised to open the gates for us. Scheme after scheme . . . Lies? Most of them, yes, but he believed them before we did.

“That mad scheme of the horse . . . there was only one chance in a thousand it would succeed . . . It was Odysseus's plan, of course—who else could have come up with it? We went along with it because to hear Odysseus speak, to see him in the assembly, you would feel all objections fall away. That was Odysseus's genius: people
believed
him.” Nestor shakes his head. “While they were with him. Afterward, of course, the doubts crept in . . . ‘Was that
really
true?' Your father was a complex man. Not everyone liked him. Not many trusted him. Brave? Yes, when he'd convinced himself of some harebrained scheme. At other times a coward for whom the rest of us had to cover up.” He sighs. “I'm assuming that, as his son, you're no fool yourself, which is why I am talking to you as if you were a grown man, not a boy of sixteen who has never learned to fight.”

Nestor falls silent. Questions crowd into my mind—a lifetime of questions. But one look at the old man's face stops me from asking them. Nestor is too exhausted to trouble with more questions.

“Why do you want to find him?” he asks after a pause.

“For my mother's sake.”

“Now I think
you
are lying.”

“For mine, then.”

“And what will you do if you learn nothing?”

“Declare him dead, raise a funeral pyre, and let my mother marry again.”

“The best thing, perhaps. But whatever happens, it won't be easy. Listen to me, Telemachus. Don't judge your father too harshly. Odysseus was just a man. Better than some, no worse than others.” He lifts one finger. It has a chief's ruby ring on it. “And here is another piece of advice. Don't set too much store by finding Odysseus. You think that finding your father will explain everything about you. It won't. I barely knew my own father. Hercules killed him . . . and later, Hercules became my friend. It's a strange world. I'm one hundred and ten years old—imagine that. For decades I enjoyed how people honored me for my age and wisdom . . . now I sometimes think I understand nothing at all. They still flatter me. I pretend to enjoy it. I'm too tired to explain it means nothing to me. But enough.” He lifts one weary hand. “Now I must tell you what to do next. Listen.” He reaches to a tray, pours a little water into a cup, and sips it.

“When Odysseus left Troy he was healthy and had good ships. He was planning to return straight to Ithaca, via Pylos. He would have had to sail around the south of Greece, where two capes jut into the sea, Malea and Tenaros. More ships are wrecked on Malea and Tenaros than anywhere else in the seas. I have sailed around them myself and always been fortunate . . . but if your father was wrecked, it was probably on one of those points. Both lie near Sparta, Menelaus's kingdom. You must go to Menelaus in Sparta.”

“Menelaus!” Menelaus is the brother of Agamemnon, leader of the Greeks. Since Agamemnon died, Menelaus is the richest and most powerful king in Greece. It was Menelaus who began the war after his wife, Helen, ran off with a Trojan prince.
When the war ended, he took Helen back to his palace at Sparta. If I go to Sparta, I'll meet Helen herself.

“Think,” Nestor goes on. “Menelaus and his family, the Atreids, control the whole east coast of Greece. If anything happens in the east of Greece, they know of it. Besides, Menelaus has traveled since he left Troy—to Crete and beyond, to Egypt. He has agents everywhere. News reaches Sparta. If anyone on earth knows Odysseus's fate, it's Menelaus.”