The Oracles of Troy (The Adventures of Odysseus) (5 page)

‘Silence!’ commanded the newcomer. ‘The gods speak only to those whom they choose, and I have not left the halls of Olympus to waste words with you, Diomedes, king of Argos. I have come to talk to Philoctetes.’

The archer lurched forward to lay across a boulder, from where he could scrutinise the figure in the mist.

‘Heracles!’ he exclaimed after a moment, his eyes growing wide with shock and wonder. ‘Then you did become a god after your death, just as the priests declared. And now you’ve come back to save Philoctetes from these liars and cheats! See, lord: he’s looked after your bow and arrows for you; everything just as when you gave them into his care.’

‘Looked after them?’ Heracles scoffed. His features were impossible to discern, but the outline of his famous lion’s pelt was visible on his head and over his shoulders, as was the thick club that hung menacingly from his fist. ‘You’ve no more looked after them than if I had entrusted them to one of the sheep you were tending that day you lit my funeral pyre! You’ve used it for nothing more than shooting down seagulls, when it should have been on the battlefields of Ilium killing Trojans. And when Odysseus and Diomedes offer you the chance to use them for your own glory – and for mine – what do you do? Complain and bemoan your lot!’

‘Forgive your faithful servant!’ Philoctetes groaned, burying his face in his hands. ‘Command him, lord, and he will repay your trust.’

‘Philoctetes,’ the booming voice ordered, ‘you know full well what you have to do. Take my bow and arrows to the killing fields of Ilium. Use them as the seer, Calchas, directs you and reap the glory that is rightly ours. Go with Odysseus and do not hold on to your hatred for him, but be thankful that he saved your life and returned for you.’

With that, having spoken more words than Eperitus could remember him putting together in all the ten years he had known him, Polites slipped away into the mist and headed back to the boat.

R
ECONCILIATION AND
H
EALING

O
dysseus must have known they would fail to persuade Philoctetes to give up his hatred and return to the army. He must have known it from the moment he had heard Calchas’s prophecy, hence his plan to disguise Polites as Heracles using an oversized club and Agamemnon’s lion’s pelt. He must have planned every detail during his whispered conversations with Polites on the voyage to Lemnos, knowing that the one man whom Philoctetes revered and respected above all others – and whose command he would obey – was Heracles. Eperitus realised all of this the moment Polites had been swallowed up by the fog, and though the deception did not sit easily on his conscience he could not deny that Odysseus’s foresight had saved their lives. What was more, it had ensured Philoctetes would come back with them to Ilium and bring the end of the war one step closer.

Philoctetes was the first to speak after Polites had gone. He pulled himself up to lean against the nearest boulder, and as he turned to the men below it was no longer the face of a man half deranged by pain and loneliness that stared down at them. Suddenly his eyes seemed full of life, lifted from their despair and given purpose and meaning once more.

‘Odysseus,’ he began, ‘will you help a cripple down from these treacherous rocks? And will one of your men fetch the rest of Philoctetes’s arrows … no,
my
arrows from the cave above? It is the god Heracles’s command that
I
return with you to Troy, and it is with pleasure
I
will fulfil his wish.’

Odysseus and Diomedes ran forward to help him, followed closely by Eperitus and Antiphus. As the kings took Philoctetes by his arms, Antiphus picked up his bow and the clutch of arrows he had brought with him – handling them with reverence – while Eperitus sprang up the rocks towards the mouth of the cave. He passed Eurylochus on the way, still hiding behind the large boulder where he had fallen, though whether out of fear of Philoctetes’s arrows or Odysseus’s wrath Eperitus could not say. He ignored him and quickly reached the entrance to the cave. Here the stench was at its strongest, where Philoctetes had holed himself away for so many years, gnawing on his bitter memories as he waited between the bouts of pain that would paralyse him for long moments at a time. For Eperitus, whose sensitive nostrils were almost overwhelmed by the stink, he felt as if he were standing at the entrance to the Underworld, that place of deepest misery where a man’s soul was condemned to spend infinity in loneliness, forgotten by the rest of the world. Indeed, that was where Philoctetes had been the last ten years of his life. How had he endured such an existence without hurling himself onto the rocks below, Eperitus wondered? And the answer had to be hope – hope of rescue and returning to the world of men. To have taken his own life would have been to have damned himself to an eternity in the halls of Hades, where even hope did not exist.

Eperitus stepped into the darkness and immediately felt something crunch beneath his sandal. Another step brought the same sensation, as if he was walking on small, brittle sticks. Looking down, he saw that the cave floor was carpeted with bones, the scattered skeletons of countless birds that Philoctetes had shot and eaten to eke out his squalid existence. It was like the lair of some ancient beast, and there was no way through except to tread on the littered bones. He carried on, one step at a time, deeper into the gloom until the ceiling of the cave forced him to stoop. Eventually he was able to pick out a pale circle on the floor ahead of him. It was Philoctetes’s bed, made entirely of seagull feathers. They had been compacted down by his weight over the years and the pus from his wound had permeated them so that the stench in that confined space was now unbearable. It took all of Eperitus’s self-discipline not to turn back. Finally, just when he thought he could not bear to take another step, he saw the leather quiver lying on the edge of the bed. Eperitus snatched it up and ran out of the cave.

He stood atop the cascade of boulders and took several lungfuls of the clean sea air. On a clear day he would have been able to see far across the Aegean, and the approach of the Ithacan galley would have been obvious a long time before its arrival. But the fog had shrouded everything, leaving only the tips of treacherous rocks, appearing and disappearing among the white billows like the humps of great sea monsters. Below him, barely distinguishable in the mist, were the figures of the others gathered on the rock shelf. Eperitus swung the quiver onto his shoulder and picked his way down between the tumble of boulders.

The array of expressions he met at the bottom was almost amusing, and were it not for the fact he wanted to vomit from the smell of Philoctetes’s wound, Eperitus would have smiled. Eurylochus looked like a whipped child, his usually ruddy jowls now flushed crimson and his eyes fixed firmly on his sandals. Odysseus, who was normally able to prevent his feelings from spilling out into his features, wore a rigid look that was as much to do with the foul stench of Philoctetes – who he was carrying on his back – as it was his anger with Eurylochus. As for Philoctetes, the archer’s face was as bright as a breastplate as he clung to Odysseus’s shoulders, staring around at the dark cliffs that had been his home for a decade and beaming triumphantly. Antiphus was passing the length of Heracles’s bow up and down through his fingers, his wide eyes oblivious to everything else, while Diomedes was almost green as he tried manfully to hide his nausea in such close proximity to Philoctetes’s foot.

‘Come on,’ Odysseus said as Eperitus joined them, and set off at a jog.

With Philoctetes calling out the best path through the rocks and little pools, they would have made quick progress back to the boat had they not been stopped by the sudden screeching of their guide as a fresh wave of pain attacked him. Odysseus laid him down and the others stood by helplessly as Philoctetes thrashed about on the rock, crying out almost gull-like and cursing each of them in turn before turning his ire on the gods. When it was over, it was as if nothing had happened and Philoctetes urged Odysseus to pick him up again and press on.

As they reached the boat, Polites sprang to his feet and hauled on the rope a little too sharply, causing the small vessel to bang against the edge of the rock. Philoctetes eyed him closely, and the others could not disguise their anxiety as they turned and paused.

‘I
know
you,’ Philoctetes said. ‘Yes, I know you. You were with these others when they abandoned me here all those years ago.’

A look of momentary relief crossed Polites’s face, but was quickly replaced by shame as he lowered his eyes.

‘Sorry, my lord.’

‘Did you hear that?’ Philoctetes crowed, turning to the others and half pulling Odysseus around with him. ‘He called me “lord”! Me, the most wretched creature that has ever dwelt beneath the face of the sun. Lord Philoctetes!’

He was still laughing as they lowered him into the boat and rowed to the galley, only stopping to look back at Lemnos in a moment of contemplation. His reflections on ten years of misery did not last long though, and soon he was cackling again as he was handed up to the crew on the deck of the ship, their faces already pale from the stench of their new passenger. They fed him bread – he refused to eat anything else – and gave him wine weakened with five parts water, which quickly had him roaring drunk. Then, as the anchor stones were pulled up and the oars slipped back into the sea, he fell asleep savouring the simple texture of bread in his mouth, while Odysseus carefully – and with greater resolve than it took to charge into battle – removed the tattered dressing from his foot, bathed the wound and wrapped a new bandage about it. He was violently sick afterwards, but that single gesture of mercy earned him more respect from Eperitus than possessing the armour of Achilles could ever have done.

‘You knew I’d fail, didn’t you,’ Diomedes said.

He was standing between Odysseus and Eperitus as the three men waited at the prow of the galley, watching the humped shape of Tenedos growing ever nearer. Its rocky flanks had been given a coppery glow by the sun as it set behind them in the west, as had the low cliffs of the mainland of Ilium that lay in a thin line beyond it. Eperitus’s keen eyes could pick out goats hugging the steep hillsides, and the small white houses and olive groves of the few islanders who had clung on to their occupied homeland. A Greek warship and three merchant vessels lay at anchor in the harbour below, the same harbour that had seen Philoctetes claim victory over Achilles in the race from Aulis to Tenedos, which had provoked Achilles’s jealous anger and resulted in Philoctetes’s abandonment on Lemnos. The archer was sleeping in the stern, his snores still audible over the creaking of the rigging and the slapping of the waves against the hull.

‘Admit it,’ Diomedes insisted, turning to Odysseus. ‘Before we even left Ilium you knew how everything would turn out. You knew Eperitus and I wouldn’t want you to use your tricks on Philoctetes – not after the army had abandoned him so cruelly – and you knew we’d insist on doing the talking. But you
also
knew we wouldn’t stand a chance of succeeding. Am I wrong? And did you guess your own turn at persuading him would come, but that even your honeyed tongue would fail? You did, didn’t you?’

A glimmer of a smile crossed Odysseus’s lips, but no answer. Diomedes smiled, too, and shook his head.

‘Either way, you must have known we’d only get the poor cripple to come with us by tricking him.’

‘You make it sound as if that’s what I was hoping for all along,’ Odysseus protested. ‘You’re wrong, though. Polites and the lion’s pelt were a contingency, that’s all. I’d rather Philoctetes had responded to the call of the prophecy and come with us because he recognised his chance of salvation. And when he wouldn’t listen to you, I’d hoped that reason and good human logic would convince him to give up his anger. It nearly worked, too,’ he added. ‘As it was, I had to use the only means guaranteed to win him over – Heracles, whom Philoctetes worships above all else. You can call it a trick if you like, but without my foresight we’d all be back on Lemnos with poisoned arrows sticking up from our lifeless bodies.’

Diomedes shrugged his acknowledgement of the truth.

‘I thought you agreed to conquer Troy by honourable means,’ Eperitus said, his tone accusative. ‘You said your guilt over Ajax’s suicide was going to keep you from stooping to trickery.’

Odysseus turned his piercing green eyes on his captain.

‘Ajax would still be alive today if I hadn’t used deceit to win the armour of Achilles. He was my friend; I should have spoken to him rather than humiliated him, even if the gods wanted to see him humbled. Do you think with hindsight I wouldn’t have found another way? Do you think your father would have murdered King Pandion and stolen his throne if he’d known it would result in the death of his eldest sons and earn him your undying hatred? Of course not. Besides, when I swore not to act with such dishonour again, Eperitus, I never said I’d stop using my cunning. It’s the greatest gift the gods have given me and to reject it would be to disrespect them. It’d be like asking you to ignore your sense of honour, or Diomedes to cast aside his courage. On the contrary: I intend to use my guile at every opportunity I get, if it brings the destruction of Troy closer and opens the way for me and my friends to go home. And though I’d rather Philoctetes had chosen to come with us for his own sake, the most important thing is that he’s with us now and, somehow, he is going to fulfil the will of the gods.’