Valerio Manfredi: Odysseus: The Return

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 the 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.