David Malouf - Ransom

Their adventure is nearly over. In no time now, he tells himself, I will be back in my own life. And he thinks, with a burst of joy, of the little girl, his grand-daughter, now fully recovered; how she will come running on her fat little legs to meet him when he rounds the big rock at the bottom of their hill and begins the slow climb to the village. Somewhere along the way he must find something to bring her. Then tomorrow he will go as usual with his cart and his two mules and wait to be hired in the marketplace.

Behind him, Priam falls silent. After a little he comes round to the step of the wagon and without speaking reaches his hand up to be helped.

They go on. Nothing is said. The sun grows warmer. The hot damp smell of earth comes to their nostrils.

After his moment of turmoil Priam has settled. The air is fresh and clear. The cart rolls along at a good pace now, lighter than on the journey out. This is triumph.

It is only a provisional triumph, of course; the gods are not to be trusted when they tilt the balance momentarily in your favour. And what sort of triumph is it to be bringing home the body of a son? But he has done something for which he will be remembered for as long as such stories are told. He has stepped into a space that till now was uninhabited and found a way to fill it. Not as he filled his old role as king, since all he had to do in that case was follow convention, slip his arms into the sleeves of an empty garment and stand still, but as one for whom every gesture had still to be hit upon, every word discovered anew, to say nothing of the conviction needed to carry all to its conclusion. He has done that and is coming home, even in these last days of his life, as a man remade.

Look, he wants to shout, I am still here, but the I is different. I come as a man of sorrow bringing the body of my son for burial, but I come also as a hero of the deed that till now was never attempted.

He does not think of this as a beginning; or not, anyway, of something large. How could it be? What lies ahead is the interim of the truce, a time for ordinary life to be resumed, one day then the next; no more than that can be counted on. But in his present mood it is enough.

They arrive again at the slope that leads down, through sycamore figs and holm oak, to the fording place with its two channels, one milky, the other leaping clear over sunlit stones; between them the sandbanks with their clumps of flowering bay.

They lurch into the stream, and the driver gets down to urge his mules through the waist-high current, then onto the gravel and humped sand of the island midstream. Back in the cart, he takes them more easily through the second current, which is fast-running but comes barely to their hocks. Then up the gently sloping bank.

The screen of tamarisks stirs and shimmers but they do not stop there, and no god is lounging in the shade. They are coming home. No need this time for a guide or safe-conduct.

But Priam thinks with affection now of that earlier occasion. Of the water, and how it cooled his feet when he sat with his robe bunched in his lap and let them soak. And of the fishlings. And how good the little griddlecakes had tasted, and of the young woman who made them — well-favoured, he had a god’s word for that, even if she did go limping. All this as warm in his memory as some moment recalled from childhood, with a whole life lived between, though in fact it happened just hours ago.

They are almost home now. As they emerge from the treeline that marks the course of the river, Troy, with its walls and battlements — far off, but not so far — is visible on its bluff. Tiny specks, which are swallows, weave in close circles round its towers and in larger circles in the air above it, soaring to the pure blue heavens.

Riding towards it, the earth swarming and singing to the horizon, the wheels of the cart rumbling and the feet of the mules making a regular clopping sound on the road, which has by now become a highway, Priam thinks how those walls, in the days of King Laomedon, his father, had been raised to music struck from the hands of a god, and feels his homecoming now as the coming home to a state of exultant wellbeing in which he too is divinely led as by music.

In his hut Achilles too is visited by a lightness that is both new and a return. Bodily action, the dance of the blood in the play of hand, foot, eye, seems once again the exercise of spirit in him. His heels glow. His sword, when he lifts it, is metal from the depths of the earth made solid flame. In the instant warmth and energy that fills him, the end, which is so close now, seems to have been miraculously suspended.

It has not.

The boy Neoptolemus is no longer in his grandfather’s house in Scyros being spoiled by women. The bronze-haired avenger of his father’s death, already filled with the fierce light of the future, is at sea and sailing fast for Troy.

A child of time, he knows already that the last days of this story belong to him. He cannot wait to burst through the doors and come hurtling into the honeycomb, the maze, the hundred rooms of Priam’s palace, to where the old man standing dazed beside the altar at its centre turns an assenting gaze upon him. The rest is headlong and bloody but unfolds with the effortlessness of trance — that is how the youthful hero sees it, and how he has lived it through long days of training in boyish dreams. But the moment, when it arrives, is not at all like that.

Priam has tripped in flight on the hem of his robe and lies sprawled on the palace floor. He casts a terrified glance behind him as the furious boy descends, flame-headed, enraged, his body a furnace pouring out heat, a round mouth shouting. What the mouth proclaims is instant night.

The youth himself can barely stand, he is already so drunk with slaughter, and a panicky fear assails him that in the excitement of the moment he may fall out of his wrathful dream. ‘Father,’ his soul whispers towards a figure he barely recalls. To be son to the great Achilles is a burden.

All scrag and bones, the old man he has fallen upon, like a dog that has to be put down and refuses to go quietly, half-rises and wrestles in his grip. He wrenches sideways, resisting the blade, and the boy, for all his ready strength and sinew, and the hardness and agility of youth, grunts with the effort and grows breathless. His heart is racing. His palms are slippery with sweat.

Awkwardly aspraddle, he cries out like a child in his frustration — this is ridiculous! — and tugs the head back hard in his locked forearm, his right hand hacking at cartilage. He repeats the cry and hacks and hacks. Warm blood jerks over his fist.

‘Father,’ he whispers again, and to his horror — he feels the short hairs bristle on the back of his neck — the old bundle he is grappling to his chest, out of some other occasion, or some other life or history, turns upon him a ghastly far-off smile; then, with a last spasm and a hollow, hideous rattling of his breath, subsides, and the air is filled with the stench of shit.

Still panting, the boy sits up. Thrusts the old man from him. Glances fearfully about. At least there is no one here to see it. To see the botch he has made of things. Still in a daze, his gorged heart pounding, he pushes slowly to his feet.

The paving all around and under him is slick with blood. He hangs upright, shoulders drooping, hands thick and heavy at the ends of his wrists. The rush of exhilaration that had claimed him has leaked away. In a sudden swift reversal is replaced by crushing disappointment; heartsickness, animal sadness, despondency. Nothing here has gone cleanly or as he wished. All botched! All scramble and boyish hot confusion. His chin sunk on his breast, ‘Pardon me, father,’ he whispers. Hot tears sully his cheeks.