The Return from Troy. Lindsay Clarke

passage twisting into foam, where sky was indistinguishable from sea and both were inimical to the survival of his ship.

      Baius, who had sailed with Odysseus many times, had already divined his intention. The two men braced themselves together at the steering oar, looking to keep their vessel from being taken aback or swept broadside by the strength of the swell. A green light glittered about the masthead as lightning seared the sky. Over the noise of thunder Odysseus shouted to his men to ship their oars before they were snatched from their grasp. Then The Fair Return was running before the wind and there was nothing to be done but hang on to the straps and thole-pins while the cutwater of the frail craft plunged and climbed across tremendous seas.

      He woke to the sound of palm fronds rattling in a breeze off the sea. Swallows scudded through the high blue zone beyond the fringes of a thatched awning above his head. He could hear the sigh of surf breaking on the shore and, somewhere closer, the laughter of men and women chatting together over the reedy sound of a flute. The tune seemed to wobble on the hot, dry air. When Odysseus lifted himself on to his elbows to look around, his eyes were dazzled by the flash of sunlight off white sand. Then he made out the sinewy body of Eurylochus stretched out on a dune, wearing only his breech-clout, while a woman whose skin was black as grapes leaned her long breasts across his chest. Beyond them, more members of his crew clapped their hands as a drum struck up. Another woman began to sway to the tune of the flute while, further down the strand, a small boy carrying a catch of sponges smiled and stared. Odysseus closed his eyes, shook his head, looked round again, and only then did he see a small town with shining buildings and terraces and date-palms – all as it should be, in perfect detail, except that it was hanging upside down in the sky. After a moment it began to shimmer like the haze above a fire.

      He thought to himself, ‘I am surely dead and in the Land of Shades.’

      A voice behind him, thickly accented and throaty, said, ‘So you are awake at last,’ and Odysseus turned to see a neatly bearded man reclining in the shade. He wore a finely woven robe of deep-blue linen. His skin was as swarthy as his voice, an oily chestnut-brown, wrinkling under the high, turbaned overhang of his brow. His nose curved like a kestrel’s beak.

      Odysseus said, ‘Have I been sleeping long?’

      ‘For two nights and the better part of three days,’ the stranger nodded. ‘You were, I think, a truly exhausted man.’

      Remembering the long struggle with the worst seas he could recall ever having encountered, Odysseus merely nodded and sighed.

      ‘That town,’ he remarked vaguely, ‘appears to be upside down.’

      ‘Yes,’ the foreigner answered, ‘it appears so. In fact it is not there at all.’

      ‘Then my eyes are deceiving me.’

      ‘Not your eyes but the light. I know the place. It is perhaps forty miles from here. The desert air works such trickery. In a little while it will be gone again.’

      ‘In my island,’ Odysseus replied, ‘buildings prefer to remain where we put them.’

      ‘But then Ithaca is not Zarzis.’

      ‘Zarzis?’

      ‘You are in Libya, my friend, in the land of the Gindanes.’

      Odysseus frowned. ‘We were blown right across the Cretan Sea?’

      ‘So your men tell me. Your three ships are beached over there.’

      ‘Only three?’

      ‘In such a storm perhaps the sea was merciful to spare so many?’

      Odysseus tried to get to his feet, but his head swirled with a dizziness that was not entirely unpleasant. Like a drunkard puzzled by his condition, he sat back down again. Despite the calamitous news he was strangely untroubled. In fact, he felt oddly serene, with a degree of acceptance that was more dream-like than philosophical. Life came and went, men lived and died, ships floated for a time then sank, and if a town saw fit to shift itself forty miles across the desert air and then hang head-down like a bat as it snoozed in the afternoon sun, well that was fine by him. And the music too was mildly narcotic. In fact the more he thought about it, this languid country, of which, if truth were told, he had never previously heard, was a pleasant enough place to fetch up.

      ‘The Land of the Gindanes, you say?’ Odysseus studied the smiling, magisterial figure across from him. For the first time he noticed two dark patches at his temples where the skin might have been scorched by fire a long time ago. ‘And you are a king among these people?’

      ‘By no means,’ the Libyan smiled, ‘I am a king nowhere. Merely a wanderer filled with curiosity about the world.’ Relaxing back against a pile of fringe cushions, he told Odysseus that his name was Hanno, that he came from a peace-loving people called the Garamantes, who lived to the south of Lake Tritonis, and that he liked to travel wherever the desert winds blew him.’

      ‘Have you sailed to Argos then,’ Odysseus asked, ‘that you speak our language?’

      ‘You are not the first Argives to come to these parts,’ Hanno answered. ‘Your hero Jason was blown to Libya once. His ship became landlocked in Lake Tritonis a hundred miles from here. The goddess released him when he dedicated a silver tripod at her shrine in offering for his safe return. But some of his men chose to remain in Libya. I learned your language from their sons.’

      The music writhed like a snake on the sultry air. Odysseus looked back where his crew were loudly applauding the dancer. One of them, a stout-bellied fellow called Grinus, leapt to his feet and began wiggling his hips beside her.

      Hanno laced his fingers together at his chest. ‘They are happy, I think, to find themselves in a place where they are welcome – as they were not, I understand, in Phrygia and Thrace.’

      ‘They’ve told you about that?’

      ‘I had heard rumours of the war before you came. Now I know more, Lord Odysseus.’ He opened his hands in a mildly ironic gesture of obeisance. ‘I know, for instance, that your men love you fiercely. It has been hard to persuade them that you were merely sleeping from sheer exhaustion and should not be disturbed. They will be glad to find you awake when the dance is done. In the meantime, is there something more I can do for you?’

      ‘I am,’ Odysseus realized, ‘immensely hungry. If you have an ox to roast, I have room to devour it. Perhaps two even.’ He looked up, smiling, and was surprised to meet an expression of dismay on the other man’s face.

      ‘When you know Libya better,’ Hanno said, ‘you will see that none of the wandering tribes between Egypt and the Pillar of Heaven ever taste the flesh of cows. The beast is held sacred to the goddess.’ He rose to his gorgeously slippered feet. ‘In any case, it will be wiser if you do not eat too much too soon. Come, take more wine. It will help restore your strength. And you must try the local fruit. I think you will find it much to your taste.’

      His companions were overjoyed to find their captain recovered from his long ordeal at the steering oar of The Fair Return. Already exhausted from the long battle with high seas during the southward voyage around Euboea and Sounion Head, Odysseus had tried again and again to double the steep eastern bluff of Cape Malea. Once through that rough passage, they could make the home run for Ithaca. But both wind and current has been against him and the waves were riding higher than his masthead. At each attempt to round the cape the ship was forced back; yet he had given up the effort only when Baias, equally exhausted at his side, cried out, ‘Poseidon is against us, lord! Better to run with the wind than be driven onto the cliff.’

      With tears of rage and frustration mingling with the rain in his face, Odysseus had watched the savage headland fade into the flashing grey blur of the blizzard. Cythera became a ragged shadow drifting past his port bow and vanished. By the time the western coast of Crete smudged the horizon he was sleeping where he stood at the stern of the scudding ship.

      Vaguely he remembered Eurylochus relieving him at the steering oar; then, so cold and stiff that he could scarcely bend his joints, he had been led