Ithaca (16 page)

His daughter, Nausicaa, didn't understand about interruptions. She was forever breaking in on him with dramatic problems that required instant attention—usually a torn dress or lost hairpin, sometimes a hurt bird she had found in the orchard. And she always brought with her a crowd of girls, chattering, gasping and shrieking, who didn't understand about interruptions either.

Even for Nausicaa, though, this latest interruption went too far. When Alcinous looked up, the din of voices having penetrated a complex calculation involving seashells and Egypt, he found her standing in the middle of the hall, clutching a man.

The spinning wheel slowed and stopped. Alcinous stared at the man.

He didn't like him. The man was a fighter—he could see that straightaway. There was something in the set of his jaw and the bunched muscles of his shoulders; something about the scars on his bare arms and the way he stood like a dancer on the balls of his feet. His face was tanned to the color of walnut, and his beard was tangled. His eyes were a startling blue, and he was wearing Alcinous's shirt.

The Phaeacians were merchants and traders. They didn't fight. A generation before, they had departed their old home and settled here, at the end of the world, as colonists, precisely to avoid the aggression of warlike neighbors, horse-riders who preferred sacking cities and plundering to buying purple fabric, the Phaeacians' specialty. With relocation had come peace and abundant seashells, but also a need to develop the navigational skills necessary to access the markets they had left behind. Phaeacian sailors were the best in the world. Their ships, long
and sleek, rode out storms. Their captains read stars and currents the way shepherds knew their pastures. Phaeacian ships could be seen in any port in the world. Some had even dared to voyage beyond the known world, out into the green oceans whose waves touched the clouds and whose mists shrouded islands of unknown men, demons, and monsters. The Phaeacians had traveled farther than any people before them.

But they didn't fight.

Alcinous knew about fighters, though. Violent, rapacious, and cruel, and—the thing that infuriated Alcinous and all trading men the most—so arrogant as to claim that their unabashed viciousness, their rape and murder, their burning of cities and desecration of temples, their plundering of warehouses and ransacking of treasuries, was not criminal but heroic—
heroic
, by all the gods—and worthy of being celebrated in poetry while sensible men who actually accomplished things were dismissed as dull.

Dull victims for fighters to kill and pillage, whose poverty and deaths were put in poems to entertain people. Storytellers were forever arriving at Phaeacia on returning merchant ships. They wasted evening after evening singing stories of war and love to a rapt audience. Nausicaa adored them.

Nausicaa opened her mouth to say something. Her eyes were shining. But before she could speak, the stranger limped forward, dropped to his knees in front of Arete, and clasped her ankles.

The traditional way of seeking help. It made him a supplicant, a guest. A duty.

“Our house is your house,” said Alcinous, sighing.

“I found him in the reeds,” Nausicaa said. “He was shipwrecked. He's got a cut all the way up his thigh.”

Alcinous didn't want to know. The last thing he needed was a fighter sprawled all over his house, cut thigh or no cut thigh,
with Nausicaa mooning over him. Half-healed, he would be picking quarrels with his sons, then leading his best sailors off on some voyage of rape and pillage. The man might be growing old—his hair was mostly grey. But he was still dangerous.

“What's your name?” Alcinous asked. “Where are you from?”

Still kneeling, the man looked up at him through his startling blue eyes. He didn't answer. He simply shook his head. That was a guest's right. You should be welcomed just as a guest, not for who you were. And since the tangled webs of kinship and old feuds, rivalries, oaths, blood brotherhoods, and ancient quarrels linked almost every family in Greece in ways so tortuous no one could begin to untangle them—even if they could remember them all—any traveler, arriving innocently in a town, might find himself hosted by a man whose cousin had killed the uncle whose blood brother had once saved his father's life, and would therefore be obliged to murder him. Many guests preferred to claim their hospitality anonymously.

“You're none the less welcome,” Alcinous said drily.

This needed time to think through. Time to think through in private, not in a crowded hall with the young men casting admiring glances at the stranger's scarred arms, and the women hanging on his every word.

“You look tired,” he said. “You must rest.” He raised his voice, turning his next words into an announcement. “Tonight's feast will be postponed until tomorrow. Our guest needs time to recover.”

Arete nodded. For a moment Nausicaa looked outraged, then gave a resigned shrug.

“He could never have danced on that leg anyway,” she said.

Alcinous raised one hand, dismissing them all. He had bought himself some time. He knew what his strategy had to be. He must show the stranger every courtesy that the laws of hospitality demanded. And more. He would offer the stranger
all possible assistance. Everything in his power—ships, men, gold—to help him travel wherever he was going when he was shipwrecked. To his home, to his friends, to whatever war he was planning to start. To the ends of the earth, if need be . . . just so long as it was far from Phaeacia.

Without, of course, being rude. He didn't want this man coming back with a shipload of vagabonds to sack the town, burn the house, and fill his ships with all the wealth he had glimpsed in Phaeacia's storerooms. Alcinous shuddered.

The stranger spent the rest of the day, and the morning following, lying in the courtyard on a low chair with his face up to the sun. His arms dangled on either side of the chair. On his left wrist was a thick leather bracelet stamped with the image of a boar.

Nausicaa and her friends clustered around him like hummingbirds around a flower, bringing him apples carefully peeled and cut into slices, cups of water, cushions. Once, when Alcinous crossed the courtyard, he found Nausicaa kneeling next to the chair, trimming the stranger's fingernails. Another time, to his extreme displeasure, she was combing his hair. The fighter seemed happy to let her do so. He whispered something to her as she combed, talking so low and fast no one else could hear.

Most of the time he slept, though. Or seemed to be asleep. Once Alcinous thought he saw a gleam between the man's closed eyelids. That was exactly what he would have expected from a fighter: guile, cunning, ruthlessness. Fighters were liars—he knew that well enough.

A couple of hours before the feast, Alcinous's sons and their friends arrived in the courtyard with a ball and began kicking it around. By then Nausicaa and her friends had disappeared upstairs to dress, otherwise they would have stopped them. From the office where he was checking accounts with
his steward, Alcinous watched his son, Halius, go up to the stranger and shyly ask if he wanted to join in. The stranger simply shook his head and went on sleeping.

After a time, the boys tired of their ball game and, instead, started shooting arrows at a row of barrels at the far end of the courtyard. As always there was a lot of laughter, but most of the arrows missed. Archery was not a sport much practiced by the young men of Phaeacia. Again, Halius went up to the stranger, who this time seemed a bit impatient at being disturbed. Again he refused to join in the game.

When the boys were bored with archery, they started throwing spears instead. The courtyard of the big house at Phaeacia was rectangular, twenty paces wide and forty long. The boys had been shooting arrows the length of the courtyard, but none of them could throw a spear that far. Instead, they clustered in the corner where the stranger sat and threw their weapons at the wooden wall of the shed opposite. Not many of them managed even that. Most of the spears missed or, at best, hung for a second in the woodwork before sagging and drooping to the ground. Again, Halius eyed the stranger for a while, then went up to ask if he wanted to join in. The scarred, suntanned guest fascinated him. But again the stranger shook his head.

“Perhaps you're not much of a fighter, sir,” said Halius. Alcinous could just make out the words from the window where he stood watching.

Halius didn't mean it rudely, but his words appeared to strike a raw nerve. Rage seemed to froth up inside the stranger like water spouting up through a geyser. One moment he was lying in the chair; the next he ripped the spear from Halius's hand, wound himself back, and hurled it. He threw it not at the wall but at the barrels at the farthest end of the courtyard. It hit the middle target dead center. The barrel exploded in a
shower of splintered staves. Wine splattered the wall behind. In the bloodred stain that flowered across the whitewash, the spear stood quivering, not drooping but erect from the wall, haft buried deep in the plaster.

There was a moment of shocked silence. No one on Phaeacia threw a spear like that. Then the stranger clutched his thigh and sank to the ground, groaning. A shriek sounded from the gallery upstairs. Nausicaa came running into the courtyard.

“What have you done to him?” she shouted at Halius.

Together she and her brothers helped their guest back into the chair, his eyes closed and his face sheened with sweat. Alcinous turned away from the window, deeply troubled.

“Have we a ship ready?” he asked Prymneus, his steward.

“The vessel that came back from Tyre last week.”

“To depart immediately?”

Prymneus pulled a face. “No food. No water. Repairs needed to the rigging and three oars missing.”

“Get her ready,” Alcinous ordered. “As soon as you can. Start now. Gather a crew. She'll be leaving within two days.”

“Destination?”

Alcinous sighed. “I wish I could tell you,” he said.

The guests arrived as soon as was decent for the feast in the great hall that evening. News of the stranger's presence had spread through town, along with the story that he had been seen riding back from the beach with Nausicaa and—a garbled account emanating from servants—that he had fought a duel with the chief's son, who was now lying at death's door. Halius's presence in the hall, pale but unharmed, was greeted by most of the arriving guests with evident disappointment.

As servants filled cups with wine and passed around trays of food, Alcinous sensed the excitement in the hall. The men kept turning to look at the stranger. The women shot covert
glances to where he sat between Alcinous and Arete. The stranger ignored all of them. He ate greedily from the heaped trays the servants held out to him—lobsters and grilled fish, squid stuffed with bread and prawns in rich sauces of saffron and cream. But he barely spoke. When he wasn't eating, he sat with his head sunk between his shoulders, staring at the food in front of him. From the other side of the table, Nausicaa tried to engage him in conversation, without success. When Alcinous asked polite questions about the wreck that had landed him on Phaeacia, and how long he had been at sea, he answered as curtly as possible.

“Sixteen days.”

“Where did you set out from?”

“An island.”

“Its name?”

The stranger simply shrugged.

“Did you have a crew?”

“I was alone.”

“Alone on a ship?”

“On a raft.”

“A
raft
?”

The stranger looked down at his calloused, torn hands. “I built it,” he said. “I made it from driftwood.”

“Where?”

He shook his head again.

“Who was the chief there?”

“No chief.” The stranger frowned, then looked at Alcinous through sea-blue eyes that suddenly seemed clouded. “A woman. It was
her
island.”

At last the food was finished. Alcinous stood up and clapped his hands for silence.

“Tonight,” he announced, “Demodocus will tell us a story from the great war.” Demodocus was a new storyteller, recently
arrived on Phaeacia. Alcinous reckoned that with a fighter present, and with so many rumors already swirling around town, he could hardly avoid one of the fighters' tales his daughter loved so much. He beckoned Demodocus forward. “We will have the tale of Odysseus and the wooden horse,” he announced.

There were gasps of satisfaction. Everyone loved the story of Odysseus. Benches were pushed back and cups replenished. Servants crowded the doorway from the kitchen. Children were hushed. Demodocus was a good storyteller. Taking up his place on the step of the hearth, he began to thrum his instrument, a low, unearthly drone to accompany his words. He began the story when the horse had already been drawn inside the citadel at Troy, and he told it well. He described the joy of the Trojans as they hauled the clumsy wooden statue to the temple steps—a tribute, they thought, from a vanquished enemy. He described the throwing open of the temple doors and the crowds thronging the square, the priests' chanting and the lowing of cattle led forward for sacrifice, the gusts of perfumed smoke that rose from the altars on the steps. He described Helen and Paris leading the celebrations, women dancing, young men drinking themselves to a stupor. He described King Priam, in his palace, looking out over the roofs of the city he thought he had saved. And meanwhile Odysseus and his men crouched inside the horse's wooden belly, clutching their weapons. As moonlight kissed the waves, the Greek ships returned to the beach and the fighters jumped down onto the silvery sand: Agamemnon and Diomedes, Ajax, Neoptolemus. In silence they marched across the dark Trojan plain, over the sites of so many battles, over the graves where they had buried their friends. He described Odysseus, the author of the stratagem, unlocking the trapdoor and peering down into the empty square, still littered with barrels and smashed cups.

“For Odysseus,” Demodocus said, “was the cleverest of the Greeks, brave in war, skilled in debate. Odysseus who had
sailed from faraway Ithaca, leaving his wife and unborn child, to fight alongside the armies of Agamemnon.”