Peter Carey - Collected Stories

“I’m sorry you told me,” says Odysseus, “always.”

“I’ve been watching this Echion,” Homer insists. “He’s a good soldier?”

“Yes, yes he is.”

“I have a plan for him. Did you bring the writing materials?”

“I said so, yes. Are you still lost?”

“Homer is never lost,” says Homer. “We have made a few minor explorations and now it’s time to get back to the main story. I’ve been thinking, Odysseus, that if Echion wants to know the meaning of his dreams, we might as well tell him.”

And then the blind man begins to speak in a curiously soft voice which rises and falls in a steady rhythmical pattern. Odysseus writes down his words, sitting at the blind poet’s feet like a servant in front of his master.

4.

“Your girl has a wart on her hand,” said Diomedes.

“Has she?” said Echion. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“She’s got a wart on her left hand, just near her little finger. Why don’t you look?”

Echion looked instead at Diomedes and smiled, in spite of himself, at the earnestness of his friend’s face. He wondered what was really bothering him. “Do you have funny dreams?” he asked.

Diomedes looked embarrassed. “I wasn’t criticizing her,” he said. “Do you think she has a lover? She’s very beautiful.” The girl smiled at Diomedes and he began to play with her long black hair.

“Do you have funny dreams?” said Echion. “I have funny dreams.”

“I have beautiful dreams,” Diomedes smiled at the girl, “about love.”

“You don’t have strange dreams about battles?”

“No.”

Echion caught his friend’s gaze and held it hard. “Is that the truth?”

“Yes,” Diomedes averted his eyes, “of course it’s the truth.”

“I had a dream,” Echion began very slowly, as if remembering with great difficulty, “that we had all been captured and we were assembled in a great courtyard. The walls of the courtyard were like giant staircases and our captors were women. For some reason they chose me. They selected me and took me to the centre of the courtyard and pulled my arm, this arm, off. All the time I was there I was watching you. You were weeping. And …” Echion stopped, his voice breaking. “Did you have that dream, Diomedes?”

“I don’t know.” Diomedes had turned on his stomach and hidden his face in his folded arms.

“I know you did.” Echion now spoke very calmly. “I know you had that dream, Diomedes. I know we all had that dream. And all the other dreams. I don’t think they were dreams. I think these terrible things have really happened and Odysseus has used magic to make us forget.”

Diomedes looked at his friend’s serious face and suddenly burst out laughing. “Who put your arm back?” he said.

“I don’t know,” said Echion, “I don’t know. Do you want to swap?”

“All right.”

Echion suddenly felt very tired. “You don’t mind about the wart?”

“There isn’t a wart,” said Diomedes. “I only said it to make you look at her. You haven’t looked at her since we came here. I think she’s offended.”

Diomedes leant across and took the girl’s hand and Echion looked at her for the first time. Yes, she was a beautiful girl. So was Diomedes’ girl. They were both beautiful. They seemed to Echion to be almost identical with their long blue-black hair and high foreheads and small noses. Only the colour of their simple garments which they tucked so shyly around their breasts separated them from each other in his mind.

His girl had been blue.

He held out his hand towards the red girl and she came, reluctantly, he thought, to his side. She touched his ear, the ear with the piece missing from it. She touched the cut edge with her finger. It tickled. She said something questioningly in her own language and Echion answered in his: “It’s all right,” he said, “it was long ago, a long time ago.”

Diomedes stood up with the blue girl and walked slowly towards the mountains.

Left alone with this young girl, Echion felt very old and very lonely. “Are you happy,” he asked her hoarsely, “do you have a lover?”

The girl raised her thick black eyebrows.

“Lover,” he said, “do … you … have a … lover?”

The girl stood and pulled him up slowly, a great bulky parcel of bad dreams with a piece missing from his ear. “Are you happy?” he said as he followed her reluctantly towards the mountains.

Up and down the beach, men were gathered in groups, some sleeping, some talking, some with girls. Somewhere Odysseus was talking to a blind man.

As they left the sand and began to walk along the path to the village, Echion caught a glimpse of their craft: a wooden horse with its head poking out above the strange trees. It looked sad and lonely, like some creature lost in a dream.

5.

It is dark in Homer’s room and the inside of the wooden horse is like a huge barn in midsummer. The heat is stifling. The horse was not designed for the tropics and the air is heavy with the smell of the men who left it this morning: it seems to ooze from the wood as it exhales in the daytime what it has inhaled in the night.

But now Echion is here. He is puzzled and guilty to find himself doing this, but he is reading Odysseus’s papers. The papers he had always assumed to be navigation charts and calculations now reveal themselves to be merely pages of verse. Why should Odysseus spend so many hours reading these verses as if they were maps or instructions? Perhaps Echion has found the wrong thing. Perhaps he is mistaken.

His dark eyes scan the pages hurriedly, and then a little more slowly, and then very slowly indeed.

Because Echion has just stepped inside the blueprints for his own bad dreams.

Each page of verse has a thick line drawn through it diagonally, as if it were some kind of mistake, but the words on these pages describe, in more detail than Echion had remembered, the details of his bad dreams. The verse records the incident with the female warriors, tells how Odysseus was set afire by mechanical monsters, how Diomedes was castrated and then decapitated. The verse contains more battles than a man could fight if he lived for a hundred years and Echion is in every one. As he reads them he feels a great weariness, the weariness he has been trying to deny, sweep over him. His dark eyes fill with huge tears as he reads of the pain and death of his dearest friends. The pages seem cruel and hard to him, the work of merciless gods who have been playing with his life. The handwriting sweeps on and on, seemingly never ending. He begins to skip through the thousands of pages until he comes, at last, to those at the end. These have not been crossed out.

These later pages appear more normal. There are no monsters. Instead they talk about a city called Troy and a wooden horse and a battle in which thirty men will fight against the Trojans, assisted by others who will come in ships. There is a roughness about the verse, as if it were not quite finalized. Small alterations have already been made. Words have been crossed out and not replaced. Echion reads this with relief and then his eye catches his own name near the bottom of a page.

He reads quickly and then, suddenly, lets out a great bellow of rage.

The verse tells how Echion is so eager for battle that he is the first to emerge from the horse at Troy. He is so keen that he falls and breaks his neck. Echion doesn’t know what he has stumbled into. He knows only that he feels a greater rage than he has ever felt in his life. Someone is playing tricks with him. His whole life has been controlled by some evil practical joker who has manipulated him, tortured him, and killed him a thousand times. And now it seems that they wish to kill him one more time.