Lindsay Clarke - The Return from Troy

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain as part of The Return from Troy by HarperCollins Publishers 2005

Copyright © Lindsay Clarke 2005

Map by Andrew Ashton © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

Cover illustrations © Shutterstock.com

Cover design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2019

Lindsay Clarke asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008371104

Ebook Edition © September 2019 ISBN: 9780008371098

Version: 2019-09-25

For Phoebe Clare

Contents

Cover

Title Page THE RETURN FROM TROY Lindsay Clarke

Copyright

Dedication

Map

The Pledge Redeemed

The World Turned Upside Down

Zarzis

The Young Lions

Nobodysseus

The Wind-Callers

A Game of Shadows

Telemachus

The Mysteries

Menelaus

The Homecoming

The Winnowing Fan

Glossary of characters

Acknowledgements

Also by Lindsay Clarke

About the Publisher

‘A Prayer to Odysseus’

(Inscription found on a terracotta fragment in ‘the Cave of the Nymphs’ on Ithaca)

Whoever finds these papyrus scrolls will see from the inscription on their urn that they are offered in prayer to Odysseus. They contain a reliable account of the ordeals and initiations he underwent on his journey home from Troy, along with the story of the fate of the House of Atreus and the other Argive heroes. By the end of the day I shall have concealed the whole collection of scrolls in the Cave of the Nymphs, hoping that they will be found in better times when men may be ready to listen to tales other than those sung in praise of war. Meanwhile, they must stand in fulfilment of the pledge I made one winter night in Ithaca when Odysseus sought to make peace with his own turbulent past.

‘You are an honest man, Phemius,’ he said to me that night, ‘if not always as wise as you believe yourself to be. You are also my bard and the time has come for me to share with you things that I have told to no-one else except my wife. I do so trusting that one day you will make a fine song of my story – a song by which the world will come to know what kind of man Odysseus truly was. And it will be a song unlike all the other songs because it will show that the ordeals he endured on his long voyage home from Troy were more marvellous, because more human, than all the extravagant inventions of the poets.’

When Odysseus asked me if I would do him this service, I vowed that I would. So now, remembering the solemnity of that moment, it is my earnest prayer that his revered shade will believe that, in the many words written in these scrolls, the pledge I gave to him that night has been faithfully redeemed.

A brand from the burning city of Troy was used to light the triumphal beacon fire on Mount Ida. Within minutes the signal was spotted by the picket of Argive scouts camped on a mountain peak sacred to Hermes on the island of Lemnos. From there the fanfare of flame leapt across the Aegean to the rock of Zeus on Mount Athos, and thence down the mainland, from summit to summit, through Thessaly to Locris, from there into Boeotia and Attica, and on across the Saronic Gulf until at last a beacon was lit on Mount Arachne. That blaze was seen by the watcher on the crag at Mycenae, and there the fiery signals stopped.

Having all the information she needed, Queen Clytaemnestra was possessed by no urgent desire to share it further. So the western kingdoms of Argos would have to wait for runners to bring the news; and Ithaca must wait still longer, for the Ionian Sea was tormented by gales throughout that wintry month, no ships were putting out, and we might have been as distant from the Peloponnesian mainland as we were from Troy itself.

Then the winds abated and the seas calmed down. A Phoenician merchantman, damaged by the gales and blown off course for the island of Sicily, put in for repairs at a haven on Zacynthos. Two days later an Ithacan fisherman who had been stranded there returned to our island with the news that the Phoenician captain had heard about the fall of Troy just as he was putting to sea again from Crete. It was rumoured that the Trojans had been completely wiped out and that the Argive host had taken a stupendous quantity of plunder.