The Return from Troy. Lindsay Clarke

The ship idled at last in a calmer swell. Eurylochus could make out two other vessels some distance away, but of the rest of the little fleet there was no sign. When land was sighted and the crew found the strength to row their battered vessel ashore, they had no idea where they were.

      ‘But I think we’ve discovered the Happy Isles,’ Eurylochus grinned at him now.

      ‘Certainly we’ve been lucky,’ said Baius, who had recovered more quickly than his captain, ‘and I thank the gods for it.’

      ‘And for the pleasures of this place,’ added Demonax, who was captain of the Swordfish.

      Odysseus glanced at the half-naked dancer who sat glistening in her sweat with her thighs protruding from the fringed folds of her vermilion skirt. A number of brightly coloured leather bands were fastened about her legs.

      He said, ‘The women, you mean?’

      ‘The women, yes,’ fat Grinus smiled, ‘the women are very good, but …’

      ‘And you can tell which are the best at making love,’ put in young Elpenor, ‘by the number of anklets they wear.’

      ‘Each of them is a tribute from a satisfied lover,’ Demonax explained. ‘So the more she has, the better!’

      ‘As long as you like your women well-used,’ Odysseus said. ‘However, my own thoughts incline more towards food right now, and this fruit of theirs …’

      ‘The lotus,’ Eurylochus supplied.

      ‘Well, whatever it’s called, I find it a touch sweet on my tongue. I gather that beef isn’t eaten hereabouts, but I was hoping that Procles might roast me a sucking pig.’

      ‘They don’t eat pork either, I’m afraid.’ Eurylochus was grinning as he spoke.

      ‘Yet you call this the Happy Isles! Is there nothing to eat but this cloying apology for a fruit?’

      The men smiled at each other in amused conspiracy. ‘You mustn’t speak ill of the Lady Lotus, Captain,’ said Eurybates, whose black head was still bandaged from the wound he had taken at Ismarus. ‘We’ve all become her devotees.’

      It had been a long time since Odysseus had seen his crew in so mellow and benevolent a mood. A little perplexed by it, aware that he was being teased, he said, ‘Then you all have even coarser palates than I thought.’

      ‘Not at all,’ Demonax tapped a finger at his pursed lips. ‘It’s an acquired taste.’

      ‘But it’s what happens when it’s made into wine,’ Grinus offered in explanation. ‘You’ve already tasted quite a lot of it, Captain, but perhaps you were too sleepy to remember. Here, let me pour you some more.’

      An hour or two later, having eaten well on squid and barbecued goat’s flesh and a sticky dish made from the lotus fruit, Odysseus was sitting with his companions watching a huge sun sizzle like molten metal where it sank into the western sea. To the north a pale moon lay on its back with a single star hung in attendance. The Fair Return, the Nereid and the Swordfish lay side by side on the strand, all in need of repair, their holds only lightly guarded by a dozy watch of sailors. Egrets flashed their white wings in the evening sky. Not far away a string of camels recently arrived from a desert journey coughed and snorted as they lapped at a spring, while a solemn-eyed boy wearing goatskins soothed them with his pipes. In the distance, where the olive groves gave way to a rocky scrubland of juniper and tamarisk, they could hear a jackal yapping to the moon.

      Not since they had been at home on Ithaca had the men known such a blessed time of peace. Strangely, however, none of them were thinking of home, not even Odysseus who had thought of almost nothing else in the last days of the war. The lotus had quietly worked its spell on him. Time had collapsed into a passive sequence of moments on which the past had no pressing claims, and where the future, with its prospects of anxiety and desire, was a matter of no enduring interest. And the war itself seemed to have dissolved into a wry anthology of stories that were, by this serene Libyan moonlight, curiously painless and often downright funny.

      When Glaucus, the captain of the Nereid, dryly remarked that the yapping of the jackal put him in mind of that scurrilous dog Thersites, his words occasioned more hilarity than they merited. They led on to a happy remembrance of the way Odysseus had silenced Thersites’ foul-mouthed rant against him. Then they found they could laugh at the ridiculous quarrel between the insufferable Achilles and that vacillating bullfrog Agamemnon, and they were all helpless with mirth after fat Grinus reminded them of the truly awful stink of Philoctetes’ wound.

      ‘I see that the Lady Lotus has made you merry this evening,’ Hanno smiled as he came up beside them.

      Odysseus made a wide gesture of welcome. ‘Come and join us. We’ve got plenty more in these rather handsome jars we lifted from Priam’s palace.’ But when Hanno politely declined the offer, his presence had a subduing effect on their jollity. Glaucus began to hum a song that was dear to him. Young Elpenor, whose head of blond curls now rested in a young woman’s lap, made only a poor effort to suppress an attack of giggles. Otherwise the group was silent for a time beneath the moon.

      That casual reference to the sack of Troy had briefly lent a gloomy cast to Odysseus’ mind; yet he had no sooner observed the change than he seemed to float off into a more tranquil zone some distance away from his still weary body.

      And it was not at all the same experience as being drunk with wine, for there was a startling clarity that came with it – a heightened sensitivity to every small sound chivvying the quiet air: the high-pitched shrilling of the cicadas, the choral belch of bullfrogs, the swishing murmur of the surf. He could also pick out the quite distinct scents of the salt-breeze off the sea, the sweet smell of the lotus and the nocturnal fragrance of jasmine and moon-flowers. Then he became fascinated by the burn-marks scarring the skin of Hanno’s temples as though the man had once been branded there. With uncharacteristic forwardness he asked about them.

      ‘The marks are customary among my people,’ Hanno diffidently replied.

      ‘As a sign of dedication to a god?’ Odysseus pressed. ‘Nothing so mysterious, I’m afraid. Our mothers burn their infants here and here,’ Hanno indicated the marks on his own head, ‘with a smouldering piece of flock from a sheep’s fleece. We believe that it induces clarity of mind in later life.’

      ‘A pity that Agamemnon wasn’t born in Libya,’ Demonax muttered. ‘The war might have been over years ago.’

      ‘It might never have begun at all,’ said Odysseus. Then to stave off the shadow once more, he asked Hanno to tell them more about the various peoples among whom he had travelled and the customs that distinguished them.

      And so, as the moon mounted the sky, he was taken on a voyage of the imagination across the wide regions of Libya, through countries where the women wore bronze leg rings, where men had mastered the art of harnessing four horses to their chariots, and where the dead were buried seated upright in their tombs. Hanno told him about his own people, the Garamantes, who took no interest in the arts of war, and of another tribe who were defeated in a war with the south wind which left them buried deep beneath the sands.

      ‘Meanwhile, to the west,’ he said, ‘around Lake Tritonis, can be found a cult of warrior maidens who serve the one you call Athena. She has her shrine and oracle there.’

      Among the many marvels he listed, Hanno spoke of a spring called the Fountain of the Sun that was known to run both hot and cold according to the time of day; of oxen which walked backwards as they grazed because otherwise their long horns would get stuck in the earth; of an obscure race of troglodytes who fed mostly on serpents and spoke a language like the screeching of bats; and of a tribe of bee-keepers who painted their skins bright red and feasted on monkeys. He spoke also of a city he had seen that was built from blocks of salt – some white, some purple – by a people who were never visited by dreams.

      ‘Their land stretches to what you Argives call the Pillars of Heracles,’ Hanno declared, ‘but beyond that realm I have not travelled