Lindsay Clarke - The Return from Troy

Telemachus and I were in town on the morning that the excited fisherman pulled his boat up on the strand, so we were among the first to hear the news. I jumped up and down in the sand and gave a little skip; then I turned and punched Telemachus in the shoulder. ‘Did you hear that?’ I shouted, amazed that he was not more excited. ‘We’ve won. It’s over. Troy’s done for. It can’t be long before they all come home.’

‘Be quiet, Phemius,’ he said, and he turned to the fisherman – his name was Dolon – asking whether there was any news of his father. Unfortunately, Dolon was not the brightest of men, and he was passing on what he had learned at third or fourth hand, so none of us could make much sense of what he had to say about the crucial role played in the fall of Troy by a cunning horse belonging to Odysseus. It wasn’t long before Antinous and Leodes, two of the young men of the island who had been drawn down to the strand by Dolon’s shouts as he drew his boat ashore, accused him of spreading fanciful gossip.

‘No, no, it’s true,’ Dolon protested. ‘They were dancing on Zacynthos when I sailed. Already they are feasting in Same. It’s true, I tell you. It’s all true.’

‘But my father’s alive?’ Telemachus pressed. ‘They said he was alive.’

‘Oh yes, Odysseus is alive,’ Dolon answered with a grin that exposed his few remaining teeth, ‘he’s alive all right and no doubt covered in gold these days. We shan’t know him when he comes back. He’ll be chiming like a herd of goats with all the gold dangling about his person.’

Antinous, who had been drinking wine, sneered at Telemachus, saying, ‘I can’t think why you’re so excited. You won’t know him anyway. And I can’t see Odysseus being at all happy about sharing your mother’s bed with you.’

Telemachus glared up at Antinous with his mouth open and his fists clenched, but this handsome lout was well over a foot taller and more than ten years his senior. If it came to a fight, there was no doubt which of them would win, and both of them knew it, which was why, in the absence of Odysseus, Antinous took malicious pleasure in keeping warm the bad blood between their two families.

Antinous was the son of a prosperous baron called Eupeithes who kept court in the north of the island on the far side of Mount Neriton. He was a distant kinsman of King Laertes, but there was little warmth between them, and Odysseus had not been surprised when Eupeithes contributed two small ships to the Ionian fleet but declined to go to the war himself on the grounds of ill health. Some years earlier the man had revealed a cowardly and duplicitous side to his nature when he came sweating into the palace late one afternoon seeking refuge from the wrath of his own people. Soon afterwards a band of shepherds were hammering at the outer gate demanding that he be handed over to them.

Things only came clear when a spokesman for the shepherds was admitted to the palace. He claimed that Eupeithes was in league with a gang of Taphian pirates who had recently despoiled several villages on the coast of Thesprotia. Some kinsmen of the northern Ithacans who had settled there a generation earlier had refused to pay these pirates for protection. Days later they had seen their crops and houses burned and their cattle and sheep run off. Three men who tried to resist the pillaging had been cut down. And when King Laertes demanded to know what any of this had to do with his cousin, the shepherd answered that cattle bearing the brand of one of the Thesprotian farmers had been found among Eupeithes’ herd.

Though Eupeithes at once denied the charge, his guilt had been immediately evident to Laertes and Odysseus. They were unconvinced, however, that he deserved to die for his unsavoury part in the affair. ‘Let me reason with him,’ Odysseus suggested, and Eupeithes soon found himself entangled in the devices of a subtle mind. Beguiled by his kinsman’s understanding manner and mistaking it for sympathy, he ended up confessing that he had been a fool to get mixed up with the pirates in the first place. Moments later, he saw the sense of it when Odysseus muttered that the only way that Eupeithes could now save his skin was by paying generous compensation.

Relations between the two men had been uneasy ever since, and when he was recruiting warriors for the fleet he would take to Troy, Odysseus had been in no doubt that he would rather leave such an unreliable character at home than have him fighting at his side. Briefly he considered drafting Eupeithes’ eldest son Antinous, but the boy was not yet twelve at the start of the war and Odysseus guessed that he would probably turn out to be more trouble than he was worth. So Antinous had stayed at home, where at every opportunity he took pleasure in humiliating Telemachus.

The two of them stared at one another now, Telemachus quivering where he stood, Antinous smirking down at him. Beside them Leodes gave a little snigger of contempt. Flushing, Telemachus turned on his heel and walked away. I was about to follow him when I saw our friend Peiraeus among the people hurrying down to the strand where the fishwives had begun to sing and dance. Anxious to divert attention from what had just happened, I called out the news.

‘Now you’ll really have something to sing about,’ he said as we caught up with Telemachus. ‘You’d better start working on a song for when Odysseus gets back. It can’t be long now.’ Then he took in the taciturn frown with which Telemachus was staring at the sea. ‘You don’t seem too cheerful about it. Why the long face?’

But though Telemachus flushed again, he failed to answer.

‘Antinous is a fool,’ I said. ‘Take no notice of him.’

‘What did he say this time?’ Peiraeus asked.

When Telemachus still said nothing, I muttered ‘It was nothing. Just some stupid remark about our not recognizing Odysseus when he gets back.’

‘But he’s right,’ Telemachus snapped. ‘I won’t know him, will I? I’ve no idea what he looks like. He’ll be nothing more to me than a glorious stranger.’

Again he turned away and walked on ahead of us, taking the path that led around the hill towards the southerly shore where the pale glare of a wintry sun shimmered across the sea. Peiraeus and I looked at one another, wondering whether to follow him, both of us aware that in his injured pride the boy might stay glum and sullen for hours now, even with us, his friends.

‘Aren’t you going to the palace to tell your mother?’ Peiraeus called after him.

‘She’ll find out soon enough,’ he said without looking back. ‘You can tell her.’

‘But she’ll want to share the joy with you,’ I protested. ‘What shall I say you’re doing?’

Telemachus stopped in his tracks for a moment. I watched him struggling with his feelings, a turbulent eleven-year old with a fearsome frown, who eventually pushed back the shock of tawny hair that fell across his brow and said, ‘Tell her I’ve gone down to the Cave of the Nymphs. Tell her I’m making an offering for my father’s speedy return. Tell her what you like. I don’t care.’

In the event, I discovered later, he did neither. Instead he walked to Arethusa’s Spring where he stood scratching the back of a fat sow that the swineherd Eumaeus had penned away from the rest of the herd while she suckled an early litter. From there he could gaze southwards across the sheer fall of Crow Rock to where the island of Zacynthos lifted its blue-grey blur on the horizon. A strait of water separated the island from the mainland, and it was through that strait that his father’s fleet of ships would sail on the day of their return.

Telemachus had been looking forward to that day for as long as he could remember; yet now that it was at hand he was filled with unexpected trepidation. What if he didn’t like the man? After all the marvellous things he had been encouraged to believe about him, wasn’t he bound to be a disappointment? Still worse, what if his father should take a critical look at him and form the same low opinion of his son as Antinous held? Again Telemachus flushed at the thought. Big as Antinous was, he should have bloodied his nose down on the strand and taken the punishment it brought, rather than turning away and saying nothing. What would Odysseus, sacker of cities, the hero of the war at Troy, make of a son who backed down before a bully’s jibes?