Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac.
Tonight, the gentlest kingdom in all the old world, and the night a long story folds quietly in two. A girl goes down to a river at dawn to wash her father's linen, finds the sea's last castaway asleep in the leaves, and does not run. Tonight there is a garden that bears in every season at once, pear behind pear and fig behind fig, forever. There are ships that need no steersman, that know the way by thought alone. And in a bright hall, a blind singer sings a certain war so truly that a stranger weeps into his cloak, and is asked, at last, the one question he has not answered in twenty years. Stay if you can, down to the naming and past it, to a sleeping man carried home over dark water. For this is the night the wanderer stops wandering, though he does not know it yet.
There is a beach at the edge of the world, and on it there is a fire.
It is the same fire. Perhaps you have sat at it before, and heard the old singer tell of a witch on her island, and a country of the dead, and a raft built by hand at the very edge of the world. If so, welcome back. Your place in the sand is where you left it. And if this is your first night here, be welcome too. The singer never begins a story that will leave a newcomer behind, and everything you need will be given to you as you go.
The fire is small, built of driftwood the sea gave back, and it burns the pale gold of old honey. Beyond it the water breathes against the sand the way it always has, deep and wine dark, in no hurry, asking nothing of you.
Last time, the singer says, I left a man asleep in a bed of fallen leaves, under two olive trees grown together, banked down like a coal under ashes. Seven years a goddess had kept him, and he had refused to live forever in order to go home. Tonight the sea sets him down on one last gentle shore, and tonight, at long last, someone asks him his name.
You do not have to do anything now. Settle into the sand, and let the fire be warm on one side of you and the cool night on the other. Close your eyes if they want to close. If you drift, the singer will go on without you.
And here is the promise for tonight, and it is an easy one to keep. There is no danger anywhere in this story. No giant, no storm, no shore that means you harm. This is the kindest kingdom on the whole long road. The one hard thing tonight is a man's own tears. Twice he will weep, quietly, into his cloak, at a song, and the fire will not hurry those tears and will not hide them, for they are grief and not danger. Nothing will startle you. And by morning, inside the story, this man lies asleep on his own shore, home after twenty years, carried there by kind hands over quiet water. Hold that one thing, and let the rest drift.
Before the singer begins, one small thing, and then we will not interrupt again. If this fire is a place you would like to find again, subscribe now, while your eyes are still open, and the next night's story will be waiting for you when you need it. A like helps other tired travelers find this beach in the dark. That is all. Now settle back, and let him begin.
We begin.
Chapter One. The Wagon at Dawn.
Begin, tonight, not with the man at all, but with a girl waking in a bright room above a harbor, on the finest morning of her life, and not yet knowing why.
Her name was Nausicaa, and she was the daughter of a king, in a kingdom you have not heard of yet, at the far edge of the sea. She had gone to sleep an ordinary princess, and she woke early, before the household stirred, with a strange lightness in her, the way you sometimes wake certain of a thing you cannot name. A dream had come to her in the night. It had worn the face of her dearest friend, a girl her own age, and it had stood by her pillow and spoken to her softly of a very ordinary matter. Nausicaa, it had said, how can you be so careless of your lovely clothes. Your wedding is not so far off now, and you will need fine linen for yourself, and fine linen to give to those who lead you to your husband's house, and all of it is lying dirty in heaps. Let us go and wash it, you and I, at the first light of day.
You and I already know who sent that dream, for we watched her send it, at the close of another night. It was no friend at all. It was the grey eyed goddess, walking into a sleeping palace across the water, and laying a small errand about laundry into a girl's mind like a coal laid gently into ash, so that the whole rescue of a drowning man could be arranged, in advance, by kindness, while everyone slept. But Nausicaa did not know that. She only knew that she wanted, this morning, more than she had ever wanted anything, to go and wash the linen at the river, and that a warmth had come into her cheeks at the word wedding that she did not quite examine.
So she rose, and she went to find her father, to ask for the wagon and the mules. And here is a small true thing the old songs keep, and it is one of the tenderest in all of them, and you may smile at it. When she found the king, she did not say a word about weddings. She was too shy for that, and no girl in the world has ever asked her father for a wedding wagon straight out. She said only that the good clothes of the house had gone unwashed too long, that his own robes for the council should be clean, that her brothers liked fresh tunics for the dancing. And her father, who was no fool, and who loved her, understood every word she did not say, and smiled to himself, and gave her the wagon and everything in it, and said nothing either. That is a whole family, in one exchange at a doorway, at dawn. Two people being kind to each other by not quite saying the thing.
The high wagon was brought and the mules were yoked, patient beasts, glad of a morning's work. And the folded linen was carried out and heaped in the wagon bed, all the bright cloth of a wealthy house, and the queen her mother came out too, and packed a basket with food for the day, and good things to eat, and filled a goatskin with wine, and set a golden flask of smooth olive oil beside it, so that the girls might anoint themselves after their bathing. Then Nausicaa took up the shining reins, and touched the mules, and they went clattering out and away, and her maids walked along beside, a whole flock of them, and the wagon went down through the still town in the early light, out the gate, and down toward the river.
The river came down to the sea through a wide green place, and there were washing pools there, hollows in the rock where clear water ran the whole year, enough and to spare to wash the dirt from anything. And there the girls unyoked the mules and let them loose to crop the sweet meadow grass by the water, and they lifted the linen down from the wagon in armfuls and carried it to the dark pools, and trod it clean underfoot in the running water, racing each other at the work, laughing. Then they carried it all out and spread it along the shingle of the shore, on the clean stones the sea had washed, to whiten and dry in the climbing sun.
And when the washing was done, they bathed themselves in the river, and rubbed the smooth oil into their skin from the golden flask, and sat down by the bank and ate their meal in the sunshine while the clothes dried on the stones. And then, because they were young, and the morning was theirs, and there was nothing left to do but wait for the linen to dry, they threw off their veils and played at ball.
They tossed it back and forth in a ring, calling to each other, and Nausicaa led the singing, her voice going out over the water, and if you had come upon them from the hills you would have taken them for something more than mortal, a company of the wild goddesses at play, so bright and glad they were. The morning turned. The clothes whitened on the shore. And it was almost time to fold the linen and yoke the mules and drive home, and none of them knew, none of them could have known, that they were not alone in that green place, and that everything in all their lives was about to turn on a single thrown ball.
For the queen of them threw the ball to one of her maids, and threw it a little wide, and the girl missed it, and it went past her fingers and into a deep eddy of the river. And all of them cried out at once.
And the cry carried up the bank, into the trees, into a heap of dead leaves under two old olives, where something had been sleeping a long time, and had heard no human voice in longer than that, and it stirred.
Chapter Two. The Stranger from the Leaves.
He came up out of sleep the way a diver comes up out of deep water, slowly, and then all at once.
You know who he was, and the fire knows, though not one soul in that green river valley did. He was the last of twelve ships, and the last man of all of them, the king of a rocky island so far away it was hardly more than a rumor here, a man the sea had carried for years, and worn down to salt and sinew, and set ashore the evening before on this unknown coast half drowned, to crawl up into the trees and bury himself in fallen leaves like a coal a careful man banks under ashes against the morning. He had slept a whole night through, deep and unbroken, and on past the dawn into the morning. And now a girl's clear cry had reached down into that sleep and touched it, and he woke.
And he lay there a moment in the dark of the leaves, and did what he always did first, in any strange place. He thought. What land is this. What voices are those. Are they wild men, cruel to strangers, or are they people who fear the gods and are kind to those the sea throws up. It was a young voice, and there had been laughter in it. That was something. He would go and see.
But there was a difficulty, and the fire will tell it to you plainly and without any awkwardness, for the old songs handle it with perfect grace and so will we. The sea takes everything. He had come ashore with nothing at all, not a rag, not a thread. And out there in the sunlight was a company of young women. So before he stood up, he reached out with one strong hand and broke off a leafy branch from the thick brush, a screen of green leaves, and held it before him, and only then did he stand, and step out from the trees.
They saw him, and they scattered.
Understand what they saw. A big man, gaunt and salt scarred, caked with the dried brine of the sea, his hair matted, his eyes wild with long trouble, rising up suddenly out of the wild wood with a branch in his hand. Any girl in the world would have run, and they ran, all of them, this way and that, along the jutting spits of the shore, into the sand hollows, wherever fear sent them. All of them ran.
All of them but one.
Nausicaa stood where she was. She did not run. The grey eyed goddess had put courage into her heart that morning and taken the trembling out of her knees, and she stood her ground on the open shore and faced the terrible stranger from the sea, alone. And the fire will say that plainly, because it is the whole reason her name has lived three thousand years and will live three thousand more. Every other soul on that beach ran, and a king's young daughter stood, and because she stood, a man came home. That is what one steady person is worth, on the right morning. The songs do not remember the ones who ran. They never learned their names. They remember the girl who stayed.
And the man, seeing her stand, was wise enough, even now, even like this, to know exactly what to do, which was nothing sudden and nothing near. He did not rush toward her. He did not fall down and clasp her knees, as a suppliant properly should, because he was in no state to lay a hand on a young woman and he knew it. He stayed where he was, at a careful distance, and he spoke to her from there, across the safe stretch of sand between them, and he made his rough voice as gentle and as courteous as a man can make a voice, and he began to speak, and the speech he made is one of the loveliest in all the old poems.
I am at your knees, my queen, he said, though he did not touch them. Are you a goddess, or are you a mortal woman. If you are one of the gods who hold the wide sky, then surely you are Artemis, the daughter of great Zeus, for your face and your height and your bearing are hers. And if you are a mortal, and live here on the earth, then three times blessed are your father and your honored mother, and three times blessed your brothers, for their hearts must warm with gladness every time they watch so fine a flower step into the dance. But blessed beyond all of them, in his deepest heart, is the man who will one day win you with his gifts and lead you home as his bride.
And then he told her the thing he had crossed the whole sea to have the words for, and it was true. Never yet, he said, have I set eyes on the like of you, in any man or any woman. I look at you and a kind of awe holds me. Once, only once, I saw a thing that stopped me the way you stop me now. It was at Delos, at the holy island, by the altar of Apollo, and I saw a young palm tree, a new shoot, springing up straight and slender out of the ground, and I stood and gazed at it a long time, for no such tree had ever risen out of the earth before. And I gaze at you the way I gazed at that young palm, in wonder, and in fear to touch.
He was, you understand, a man who had talked his way past kings and monsters and gods, and he had never in his life put those gifts to a kinder use than this, standing naked behind a green branch on a strange shore, choosing every word so that a frightened girl would not have to be frightened anymore. He did not ask her for much. Only for a rag to put around himself, and for the way to the town, and he blessed her as he finished, wishing her all that her own heart wanted most, a husband, and a home, and a house at peace, for there is nothing finer in the world, he said, than a man and a woman keeping a home together with one mind between them, a grief to their enemies and a joy to their friends, and the truest joy of all to themselves.
And Nausicaa, standing on the shore, looked at the salt worn stranger with the branch and the beautiful voice, and was not afraid at all anymore.
Chapter Three. The Walk Behind the Mules.
Stranger, she said, you do not seem to me like a low man, or a foolish one. And when Zeus gives out fortune to men, the good and the bad alike, he gives each man his share, and yours, it seems, you must simply bear. But now that you have come to our land, you shall not go without clothes, or without anything a poor wanderer needs when he meets those who can help him. I will show you the town, and I will tell you the name of the people. This is the country of the seafarers, and I am the daughter of their king.
Then she called back her scattered maids. Stand still, she cried to them, where are you running. Did you think this was an enemy. There is no living man who could come as an enemy to our land, for we are dear to the gods, and we live far off in the wash of the sea, at the world's edge, and no other people come among us. This is only some unlucky wanderer, and we must care for him, for all strangers and beggars come to us from Zeus, and a small kindness is a precious thing. So give the man food and drink, and wash him in the river, in some place out of the wind.
And they came back, shamefaced and giggling, the way young people do when their fear turns out to have been foolish, and they set out a tunic and a cloak for him to wear, and they gave him the golden flask of oil, and they told him to go and bathe himself in the running river. But he would not let the young women wash him. Stand off a little, girls, he said, and let me rinse the salt from my own shoulders myself, for I am ashamed to stand bare among you. And they drew away, and told the princess, and he went down into the river alone and washed the crust of the sea from his skin and his hair, all the brine of many days, and rubbed himself with the smooth oil, and put on the clothes a king's daughter had given him.
And then a small quiet wonder happened on the riverbank, the kind the grey eyed goddess loved to work. She poured grace over him, over his head and his shoulders, the way a skilled craftsman washes gold over silver and makes a fine thing finer. She made him taller to look upon, and stronger, and she set the curls of his hair falling thick like the dark bloom of the hyacinth. And he went and sat down apart on the shore, by himself, gleaming with the oil and the grace, and he was, all at once, beautiful to see.
And Nausicaa looked at him, and looked away, and said softly to her maids the thing that young people say, and the fire will give it to you lightly, exactly as light as the old songs give it, and then let it go. A little while ago, she said, this man seemed rough to me. Now he seems like one of the gods who hold the wide sky. If only a man like that might be called my husband, if only it might please him to stay here. But she said it to her maids, and to the morning, the way you say the shape of a wish out loud once and then fold it away, and she never said it to him, and it never came to anything, and that is exactly right, and the fire loves her for it. She was young, and he was kind and suddenly fair, and she let herself think it once, and then she called for the food, and they gave the stranger meat and wine, and he ate and drank like a man coming back to life, for he had not eaten in a very long time.
Then she folded the dry linen and packed the wagon and yoked the mules, and she gave the stranger her plan for coming into the town, and it was clever and careful and kind all at once, and it tells you what sort of girl she was. Follow the wagon with my maids as far as the edge of the town, she said, while we are out in the fields. But when we come near the walls, hang back, and let me go on ahead alone, and wait a while in a grove of poplar trees you will see beside the road, a grove sacred to the goddess, with a spring in it and my father's garden near. Wait there, and give me time to reach the house. Then come into the town yourself, and ask for the house of my father the king, which any child could show you, for the houses are not alike, and his is the finest. Go straight in through the hall, and do not stop for the men, but go to my mother. You will find her by the hearth in the firelight, leaning against a pillar, spinning yarn dyed the purple of the sea, with her women behind her, and my father's chair beside her where he sits and drinks his wine like one of the immortals. Go past him, and put your hands to my mother's knees. For if she looks on you kindly in her heart, then there is hope you will see your own dear ones again, and come to your own high house, and your own land.
Why her mother, and not the king. Because in that house it was the queen whose word settled things, and the girl knew it. And why must the stranger not walk into town at the girl's side. And here she blushed a little, and told him the truth, which was that the people of that place were sailors, and sailors have sharp tongues, and if they saw the princess coming home with a tall handsome stranger they had never met, they would talk, and she would rather spare her own good name and his. It was wisdom past her years, and it was courtesy, and it was, underneath, a small brave sadness, a girl arranging with her own hands to walk into her own town apart from the one man she had wished aloud she might keep. She did it well, and she did it cheerfully, and the fire honors her for that too.
So they went up from the river, the wagon and the mules and the walking maids, and the stranger following behind at a little distance, up toward a city he could not yet see, in a kingdom whose whole strange nature the singer must now tell you, for it is the gentlest and most peculiar nation in all the old world.
They were a people of the sea, and they lived only for it, and their whole art, their one great gift among all the peoples of the earth, was the carrying of travelers home. Their city stood on a narrow neck of land with a harbor on each side of it, so that ships came and went from the town by two mouths at once, and every doorway you passed had oars leaning in it, and folded sails, and coils of new rope, and the men sat mending tackle in the evening light and talked of nothing but the sea and the ships. And their ships, the songs say, were like nothing else that ever floated. They needed no steersman at the helm, and no steering oar at all. They knew, of themselves, the thoughts and the minds of the men aboard them, and they knew every city and every rich field of every land in the world, and they crossed the deep gulfs of the sea at speed, wrapped in mist and cloud, and never once in all their crossings feared any harm, or any wreck. That was the kingdom the sea had brought him to. Of all the shores in all the world where a lost man might wash up, the sea, having taken everything from him, had set him down at last among the one people whose entire purpose was to carry a lost man home. Remember the ships. We will need them, gently, before the night is over.
Chapter Four. The Garden That Bore in Every Season.
He waited in the poplar grove as she had asked, and he prayed there, quietly, to the grey eyed goddess, though he could not see her, that he might come among these people as a friend, and be pitied. And when he judged the time was right, he rose and went into the town, and the goddess herself, unseen, wrapped a soft mist about him so that no idle sailor along the way would stop him or question him. And the songs say she met him on the road in the shape of a little girl carrying a water pitcher, and that he asked her the way to the king's house as a stranger asks a child, and that she led him to it and told him a thing or two about the house and its queen, and slipped away. And so he came, wrapped in his cloud, to the door of the king.
And he stopped on the threshold, and before he had seen a single face inside, the house itself stopped him, for he had never seen the like of it, and neither, most likely, have you.
The walls ran with bronze, gleaming, from the doorway to the far end of the hall, and along the top of them ran a frieze the deep blue of glaze. The doors were of gold, and their posts were of silver set in a threshold of bronze, and the lintel above was silver, and the door handle was gold. On either side of the doorway stood dogs, one of gold and one of silver, made by the cunning god of the forge himself to guard that house, and they did not age and they did not die, but stood forever, faithful, at the door. Within, along the walls, stood chairs, and over them were thrown light woven cloths, the work of women's hands, and there the lords of the sea people sat and ate and drank the whole year round in plenty. And on the great pedestals stood golden statues of young men holding blazing torches in their hands, to light the hall by night for the feasters. And fifty serving women worked in that house, some grinding the yellow grain at the mill, some weaving at the looms, their hands flickering like the leaves of a tall poplar, so that the finished cloth ran with oil, it was so closely woven. For as the men of that country were the finest sailors in all the world, so the women were the finest weavers, and the goddess had given them both these gifts together.
But it is not the bronze and the gold that the fire wants you to carry down toward sleep. It is what grew outside.
For beyond the courtyard, past the great gates, there was a garden, four measures of ground, and a hedge ran round the whole of it, and in it grew the most wonderful orchard in all the old world, and here the old singer will slow his voice right down, and lay the garden out for you tree by tree, the way you would lay out a memory you did not want to lose, and you are asked to hold none of it. Let it grow past you. Let it drift. A garden told slowly in a warm dark is one of the sleepiest things there is, and the singer knows it, and means it.
There were tall trees in it, in full leaf and full growth. There were pear trees, and pomegranate trees, and apple trees heavy with their shining fruit, and sweet fig trees, and olives in their grey green rows. And the fruit of them never failed, and never ended, not in the winter and not in the summer, but lasted the whole year round. For a soft west wind blew there always, gentle and warm, and it brought one fruit to ripeness while it was only just swelling the next, so that on the same bough, at the same hour, there was fruit ready to eat and fruit only forming, all the year, without a pause. Pear ripened upon pear, and apple grew old upon young apple, and fig followed fig, and cluster of grapes darkened above cluster, and nothing there ever knew a bare season, or a hungry month, or the death of the year. It was a garden that had never once heard of winter.
And there was a vineyard rooted in that same ground, and in the vineyard, at any moment you looked, you could see the whole life of the grape at once, spread out along the terraces like the hours of a single long day. Here was a level warm place where the cut grapes lay drying in the sun. Here, close by, men were gathering the ripe bunches into baskets. Here others were treading them in the press. And just beyond, on the next vines, the blossoms were only shedding their petals, and just past those, the small hard grapes were only beginning to darken toward their color. Flower and fruit and harvest, all of it living together on one hillside in one morning, the beginning and the middle and the end of the same sweet thing, growing side by side and never crowding, and the fire finds in that, if you want it, a small quiet lesson for a tired heart, that the ripening and the resting and the letting go can all belong to the same garden, and all be well, and none of them need be hurried.
And along the far edge of the garden grew the neat beds of herbs and greens, ordered and green all the year. And two springs rose in that ground. One ran in little channels through the whole of the garden, watering every root. And the other ran the other way, under the courtyard gate, toward the high house itself, and there the townsfolk came to draw their water. Such were the shining gifts the gods had set in the house of that king.
And Odysseus stood in the mist at the edge of that endless orchard, and looked at it a long while, and marveled in his heart. And the fire will tell you one small thing here, softly, and it is for the long listener, though it will not trouble the new one. Far away, on a poor rough island of stone and goats at the other end of the world, there was an old man, a king who would rather be a gardener, who had planted his own orchard with his own hands, and walked its rows counting his trees aloud the way another man counts his gold, and knew each pear by the week it would ripen. That old man will matter greatly, much later in this whole long story. And if that old gardener could have stood one morning where his son stood now, and seen this deathless garden that never knew a winter, he would have wept for the joy of it, and then he would have gone quietly to work among the vines, because that is what such men do in paradise. But that is far off, and it is not tonight. Tonight there is only a lost man at the edge of a perfect garden, gathering his courage to go in.
Chapter Five. The Queen's Sharp Eye.
He crossed the threshold and went into the great hall, still wrapped in the goddess's mist, so that he walked the whole length of that bright shining room, past all the seated lords at their wine, and no one saw him at all, until he came to the hearth at the far end, where the queen sat spinning her sea purple yarn in the firelight, with the king her husband beside her. And there, at her knees, the mist fell away from him all at once, and he was suddenly there, a tall stranger kneeling in the firelight with his arms around the queen's knees, and the whole hall fell silent, astonished, and stared.
And he made his plea, the plea he had carried across the sea, and he made it to her, as the girl had told him to. Arete, he said, for that was the queen's name, I come to your knees, and to the knees of your husband, and to these feasters, after long suffering. May the gods grant you all a good life, and may each of you hand down his house and his honor to his children. Only help me, I beg you, to a swift passage home to my own land, for I have been far from my own people a long and weary time.
And then he did the thing a suppliant does, the humblest thing. He rose, and he went and sat down in the ashes of the hearth, right in the cinders by the fire, on the ground, at the lowest place in that whole glittering room, and he said no more, and waited.
And the hall was quiet a long moment. And then an old lord spoke up, the eldest of all the sea people, a man full of years and old courtesy, and he said to the king, gently, this is not seemly, that a stranger should sit on the ground in the ashes of your hearth. Raise the man up. Set him on a chair. Give him wine, and let us pour to Zeus, who walks beside all suppliants and strangers. And the king heard the truth in it, and rose, and took the stranger by the hand, and lifted him up out of the ashes, and led him to a shining chair, and to seat him there he moved his own son from it, the son he loved the best, who had been sitting at his right hand, and set the stranger in the seat of his own dear boy. And they brought water for his hands in a golden jug, and poured it over a silver basin, and drew a polished table to his side, and the housekeeper brought bread and many good things, and he ate, and he drank, a stranger honored at a king's own hearth.
And here, once, the fire will braid two nights together, and then let the knot go. You have sat at this fire before, on other evenings, and heard of another host, in another season, on a wild and lonely shore, who took strangers into his house, guests who came to him from Zeus exactly as this one did, and who broke the oldest and holiest law there is, the law of the roof and the table, and did his guests a terrible wrong under his own roof. The fire has not forgotten that cave, and neither, I think, have you. Keep it beside this bright hall for just a moment, the broken law and the kept one, side by side. For here, tonight, in the house of the sea king, the law is kept, and kept perfectly. The stranger is fed before he is questioned. He is lifted from the ashes and set in a loved son's chair. His hands are washed, and his cup is filled, and not one soul asks his name or his errand until he has eaten. This is how the world was always meant to work. This is the whole thing the giant broke, made whole again. Hold the two together one breath longer, and then let the cave go back into the dark where it belongs, and stay here, in the warm and lawful hall, where a lost man is safe.
The king promised him, that night, a ship and an escort home, wherever his home might be, however far, and the stranger's heart lifted at the words. And then the lords drank their evening wine and went away, each to his own house and his own bed, and the stranger was left alone in the hall with the king and the queen and the quiet servants clearing the cups.
And now came the sharp eye, and it was the queen's.
Arete had been watching the stranger a long time, and saying nothing, in the way of wise women who miss nothing. And what she had been watching was his clothes. For the tunic and the cloak he wore, she knew them. She had made them herself, she and her own serving women, at her own loom, in her own house. She would know that weaving anywhere. So she waited until the men were gone, and then she asked her question, and it was a quiet one, and it went straight to the center of things, the way the best questions do.
Stranger, she said, I will ask you this myself, first of all. Who are you, and where do you come from. And who gave you those clothes you are wearing. For did you not say you came here wandering, lost, over the sea.
It was gently asked, but it was a trap of a kind, or could have been, for a lesser man. A strange man in the queen's own weaving, walking out of the wilderness. There was a young princess who might have to answer for that, if the stranger were clumsy, or boastful, or unkind. But he was none of those things, and he was the most careful man alive, and he answered her with the whole truth of the sea and the raft and the wreck, and told her of the goddess who had kept him seven years, and the raft he had built, and the storm that broke it, and how he had swum to this coast and crawled into the leaves. And when he came to the part about her daughter, he told the truth of that too, that a princess had found him at the river and given him food and clothes and kindness. But he was careful, so careful, to take onto himself anything that might have touched the girl's good name. It was my own doing, he said, that I did not come up to the town at her side. I hung back, out of respect, so that no tongue should wag, and no shadow fall on so fine a girl on my account. She did nothing but good, and did it wisely.
And so the small mystery was closed, kindly, and the girl was shielded, and the queen was satisfied, and more than satisfied, for she had seen exactly what kind of man sat in her hall now, a man who would take a scolding on himself to spare a young woman one. And the king, listening, was so pleased with the stranger that he said aloud the thing that pleased kings say, one light easy line, and the fire gives it to you as lightly as he gave it. By father Zeus, he said, if only a man like you, thinking the things you think, might settle here, and marry my daughter, and be called my son, I would give you a house and goods to keep you. But no. He said it and set it down in the same breath, for he was a good king. No man will be kept here against his will, he said, for that would anger the gods. Your escort is fixed. Tomorrow, or the day after, you shall have your passage home, and sleep the whole way if you like, though the way be long. And with that promise laid over him like a warm cloak, the stranger was given a soft bed in the echoing porch, and the king and queen went to their own rest, and the first night in the last strange kingdom came gently down.
Chapter Six. The Games and the Throw.
In the morning the king called an assembly, and the whole town came, curious, to look at the stranger the sea had brought, for word of him had run through the streets already, as word does in a town of sailors. And the king told his people plainly what he meant to do. This man has come to my house, he said, lost and wandering, from I do not yet know where. He asks for passage home, as suppliants have always asked it of us. Let us do as we have always done. Let us launch a black ship, new and swift, and choose two and fifty of our best young oarsmen, and send this stranger home, wherever his home may be, rejoicing, and quickly. And the people agreed, for it was their pride and their custom, and the young men went down to ready the ship and draw her into the bright sea, and then all came back up to the great house, where the king made a feast for the stranger, and the whole town filled the halls and the courtyards, young men and old, and there was meat in plenty, and wine, and gladness.
And when the feasting had gone on a good while, the king's own son and the other young lords rose up and said, let us go out and try the games, so that when this stranger goes home he may tell his own people what fine athletes we are. And they went out, the whole bright crowd of them, to the smooth ground of the assembly place, and there the young men of the sea kingdom held their contests, and the fire will give you their names, for they are a small joy in themselves, and you are not asked to keep a one of them.
For the young men who stood up to run and wrestle and throw that day had the names of a seafaring people, every one, names made of oars and ships and the sea, so that to call the roll of them was almost to describe the harbor itself. There stood one whose name meant the topmost, and one whose name meant the swift sailor, and one the broad sea, and one the ship driver, and one the sternman, and one who was named for the very rowlock the oar turns in, and one for the prow, and one for the running of a ship before the wind. There was the king's son, and his brothers, and a strong proud young man named Euryalus, broad and handsome, the best of them all at the wrestling, and after the king's own son the fairest of them to look on. Name after sea washed name, they stepped out onto the sand, and they ran their footrace first, dust rising under their heels, and then they wrestled, and leaped, and threw the discus, and boxed, the whole bright morning given over to the strength of young men showing off before a stranger. And you may let their names and their contests roll past you like the sound of the games heard from a hillside far off, pleasant, and meaning you no harm, and needing nothing from you at all.
And then the king's son, who was kind, and who had noticed the stranger sitting quiet and heavy eyed at the edge of it all, came over to him and said, come, father stranger, will you not try your hand at a contest too. You have the look of a strong man in the legs and the arms and the neck, whatever sorrows have worn you. Come and throw with us. It will lift your heart, and your ship is nearly ready.
And the stranger thanked him, and said no, gently. My friend, he said, my heart is not on games this morning. It is on my troubles, and on getting home. Let me sit, and be a guest, and ask only for my passage.
And that would have been the end of it, but for one young man who did not let it be. For Euryalus, the broad handsome wrestler, took the refusal wrongly, the way the young and the strong and the untried sometimes do, and he threw a taunt across the sand, meaning to sting. No, he said, and there was a sneer in it, you are right, stranger, you are no athlete. You have not the build of a man who competes. You have the look, more like, of a man who works a merchant ship up and down the coast, a master of sailors who are really traders, a man with his eye on his cargo and his greedy hand on the profits. No. You are no games man.
And a silence came over the young men, for it had been an ugly thing to say to a guest.
And the stranger looked up at him, and his eyes were steady, and when he spoke his voice had changed, only a little, but enough. Friend, he said, that was not well said. You have the good looks of a god, but there is no sense behind them, none. You have wounded my heart with a rude word. I am no stranger to contests, whatever you think, looking at a man the sea has chewed. I stood among the first of men once, when I had my youth and my strength unbroken. But I have suffered much since. I have come through wars, and through the hard waves of the sea. And even so, even worn as I am, I will try your game, for your words have galled me, and you have stirred me up.
And he rose, just as he was, in his cloak, and he did not even stop to strip it off, and he strode to the discus ring, and he looked at the stones the young men had been throwing, and he chose a larger one, and a heavier one, thicker and weightier by far than any the sea people had used among themselves. And he swung it back in his great hand, and let it fly.
And the stone hummed off his hand and sang through the air, and the young sea lords, the fine oarsmen, ducked their heads under its flight, and it flew, and flew, far out beyond every single mark that any of their throws had reached, and came down and dug into the earth well past the farthest of them. And a man in the crowd called out, a voice with something more than a man in it, for the grey eyed goddess herself had come in the shape of one of the watchers to mark the throw. Even a blind man, stranger, the voice said, could tell that cast from all the rest, just feeling for it with his hands, for it is not tangled in the crowd of the others but far, far out ahead of them all. Take heart in this contest. No man here will reach that mark, or pass it.
And Odysseus was glad, glad to his bones, to find one friend in that ring, and his heart lightened, and he spoke more easily then, and offered, courteously now, to match any man there at any contest they liked, the bow, the spear, the footrace, any of them, only not the king's son, he said, for he was his host and his friend, and no decent guest contends against the man whose bread he eats. And the young men were quiet, and impressed, and a little ashamed.
And here is the part the fire likes best, for it is how the whole small quarrel was mended, and it was mended gently, which is the only way worth mending anything. The king stood and smoothed it all over with grace. We are no great boxers or wrestlers, he said, laughing, we sea people, and we will not pretend to be. But we are runners, and above all we are sailors, and we love the feast, and the harp, and the dance, and clean fresh clothes, and a warm bath, and our beds. And he called for the dancers, and a harper played, and the whole sting of the morning dissolved into music and moving feet, the way a hard word dissolves when kinder people crowd around it. A light song went with the dancing, an old tale of the gods and one of their foolish tangles, sung for laughter, and it need not detain us. And then the king had gifts brought for the stranger, from all the lords. And Euryalus, the young man who had thrown the taunt, came to the stranger of his own accord, and he was sorry, you could see he was sorry, and he said, father stranger, if any word of mine flew out amiss, let the winds take it and carry it off. And he took a sword from his own side, a fine bronze sword with a silver hilt and a sheath of new cut ivory, and he laid it in the stranger's hands, an apology made of the best thing he had. And Odysseus took it, and blessed him, and forgave him, and it was done. Pride had risen, and pride had been set down again, and everyone was a little the better for it, and that is how the sea people healed a thing, and it is not the worst way in the world.
Chapter Seven. The Blind Singer.
They went back into the great hall when the games were done, and the feast was made ready again, richer than before, for the evening. And a herald came in leading a man by the hand, an old man, and led him carefully, and set a chair for him, a fine chair studded with silver, in the middle of the feasters, and leaned it against a tall pillar so he would know where he was. And above the old man's head, on a peg in the pillar, the herald hung a clear voiced lyre, and guided the old man's own reaching hand up to it, so that he would know it was there and could take it down when he wished. And he set beside him a basket, and a table, and a cup of wine, to drink whenever his heart moved him.
This was Demodokos, the singer of that house, and he was blind.
And the songs tell why, in a way the fire wants you to hear whole, for it is one of the truest things the old poems ever said about the trade of song. The Muse had loved this man, the goddess of memory's daughter, above all other men, and loving him, she had given him a gift, and with the gift a price, and she gave him both together, in the same hand, the good and the hard bound up in one. She took away the light of his eyes. And she gave him the sweetness of song. She darkened the whole seen world for him, forever, and in its place she set the power to make, out of nothing but breath and memory and seven strings, the shining shape of things he could no longer see, so truly that other men would weep to hear them. His eyes for his songs. That was the bargain, and no one asked him whether he would have made it, and he made the best of it that any man ever made, and sat now in a king's hall, honored above the lords, the price paid long ago and the gift still pouring out of him, undimmed.
And here the old singer at our own fire falls quiet.
He is quiet a moment longer than the story needs. His hands go still on his knees. And when he speaks again, and tells you of that bright hall, and the blind man in the silver chair with the lyre over his head, and the feasters hushing to listen, he speaks of it, if you listen closely, not the way a man speaks of a thing he read in an old book, but softly, and from very near, the way a man speaks of a room he has stood in himself, a long time ago, and never forgot. That is all. He does not explain it, and neither will the fire, and you are not meant to solve it, only to feel the warmth of it pass, like the green scent off the hills. Then the moment goes by, and he takes up the story again, and we are back in the hall, and Demodokos reaches up and takes down the lyre.
He touched the strings, and he lifted his voice, and he began to sing. And the song the Muse moved him to sing that evening, of all the songs in the world, was a song of the war at Troy.
He did not know, could not have known, blind and far off at the edge of the world, that there was a man in that hall for whom this was not an old story at all. He sang of a bitter quarrel that had once broken out at a feast among the best of the Greek captains before the walls of Troy, a famous falling out, two great men trading hard words, and the lord of all the host secretly glad to hear it, for an oracle had told him such a quarrel would mark the turning of the war. It was a good song, and a true one, and the sea people delighted in it, and called for more, and never once looked at the stranger in the seat of honor.
But the stranger had gone very still.
For the two captains in the song were men he had stood beside. The war in the song was his war, the ten years he had given his one life to, the road he was still, even now, trying to come home from. And to sit in a bright safe hall at the world's edge and hear a blind man sing his own lost years back to him, his own dead friends, his own younger self, sung as a story, sung as a thing finished and long ago, it was more than he could bear with a dry face. And so he did the only private thing a man can do in a crowded hall. He drew up the great cloak he was wearing, the wide cloak of sea purple wool, and he pulled its fold over his head, and he covered his face with it, and behind it, hidden, he wept.
And the fire will tell you softly what that cloak was, for the long listener, and it will only warm the story for the newcomer to know it. A long time ago, on a small stone island, on the last morning of a happy life, a woman had woven a cloak with her own hands, thick and doubled, dyed the deep purple of the wine dark sea, and pinned it at her husband's shoulder with a golden brooch, and sent him to a war with it across his back, saying almost nothing, meaning everything, come home to the loom this came from. He had worn it across the whole world, that cloak, through everything, all these years. And now, at the far edge of the earth, it was doing one last quiet service for her. It was hiding her husband's tears.
He wept behind it, and when the song paused, he drew the cloak down, and wiped his eyes, and poured a little wine to the gods as if nothing had happened. And when the sea people called for the song again, and the old man took it up again, again the stranger covered his head, and again he wept, silently, into the purple wool, so that no one in all that laughing hall should see.
No one saw. No one, that is, but one man. For the king sat close beside him, in the place of honor, and the king, being a watchful host, heard the small change in the stranger's breath, and caught, under the noise of the feast, the sound a man makes when he is grieving and trying with all his strength not to. And the king said nothing, and let it be, for the moment, and only turned it over in his own mind, and thought, quietly, that the time had come to change the evening.
Chapter Eight. The Song of the Horse.
So the king spoke up, lightly, to the whole hall, and said, we have had our fill of the feast and the lyre for now, friends. Let us go out again into the open air a while. And they did, and there was more sport in the cool of the evening, and dancing, and the young men showed the stranger the marvel of their dancing, two of the best of them tossing a purple ball high up toward the shadowy clouds and catching it again, leaping, never letting it touch the ground, while the others stood in a ring and clapped the beat, and the whole hall rang. And the stranger praised it honestly, and the king glowed. And then they went in again to the wine, and the mood was easy and glad.
And it was then that the stranger himself, of his own will, turned and asked for the one song in the world he most needed, and least should have been able to bear, and asked for it because some hungers are stronger than caution.
He called the herald, and had him carry a fine cut of roast meat over to the blind singer, the best portion from his own plate, the chine of the boar rich with fat, as a mark of honor, and he sent word with it. Give this to Demodokos, he said, with my respect. For a singer is owed honor above all men. The Muse herself has taught these men their songs, and loved the whole tribe of singers. And the old man took the gift, and was glad in his heart.
And then, when the eating had eased again, the stranger spoke to the singer directly, and paid him the highest compliment one man ever paid another, and it is a compliment that folds strangely back on itself, and the fire will let you feel the fold without pulling it apart. Demodokos, he said, I praise you above all mortal men. Either the Muse, the child of Zeus, has taught you, or Apollo himself, for you sing the fate of the Greeks so rightly, all they did and suffered and toiled through, as if you had been there among them yourself, or had heard it from one who was. Come now, and change your song, and sing the making of the wooden horse, the horse that Epeios built, with the goddess helping his hands, the trick that great Odysseus brought up into the citadel, filled with the men who would sack the city. Sing me that, and if you sing it true, I will tell the whole world that a god has breathed his song into you.
Now, feel the shape of what has just happened, gently, for you are meant to smile at it, not puzzle over it. A man is sitting in a hall, asking a singer to sing the story of a trick that he himself devised, praising the singer for singing it as though he had been there, when the one man in all the world who truly was there is the very man who asked. He is asking to hear his own cleverest hour sung back to him by a stranger who cannot see him. And you, if you have kept this fire before, have heard this very tale yourself, the horse and the hollow belly and the night of held breath, told at this beach two fires ago, by this same singer. The story has bent all the way around and taken its own tail in its mouth, softly, the way a sleeping cat does, and there is nothing to solve in it, only a kind of warmth, the warmth of a thing coming round again to where it began.
And Demodokos, moved by the god, took up the tale where the stranger asked for it, and he sang the horse. He sang how some of the Greeks had burned their tents and boarded their ships and sailed away, or seemed to, leaving the great wooden horse standing on the plain, and inside it, in the dark of its hollow belly, the pick of their fighting men, sitting utterly still. He sang how the Trojans dragged the huge thing up into their own citadel with their own hands, and sat around it, arguing, three ways divided, whether to split the wood open with the pitiless bronze, or drag it to the height and pitch it down the rocks, or leave it standing as a great gift to soothe the gods. And it was that last counsel that won, for it was fated that the city must fall once it took the horse within its walls. And the old man sang how the men came out of the horse in the night, and poured out into the sleeping city, and how the city was taken. He sang it plainly, and truly, the way the halls of kings have always sung it, as a thing long finished and far away, the fall of a great and famous city that had stood for a thousand years and held for ten, gone in a single night. And the fire tells it no further than the song tells it, and paints no more of it than that, for you have heard, at this fire, how the fire keeps that fall, whole and grieved and never gloried in, and it keeps it the same way tonight.
But the man who had asked for the song was weeping again.
He had drawn the purple cloak up over his head once more, the way he had done at the first song, and behind it his tears were running down, and this time they would not stop.
And here the fire will tell it to you plainly, because plain is the truest way to tell it, and it needs nothing added. This was the man who had held. Through ten years of war he had held, and through ten more years of the sea, keeping his face still and his counsel close while everything he loved was taken from him, one friend and one ship and one year at a time. He had wept before on that long road. He had never wept like this. And the thing that undid him at last, at the very edge of home, in the safest hall in all the world, was not a wound, and not a storm, and not a fresh grief freshly dealt. It was a song. A blind man he had never met, at the far end of the earth, was singing him his own life, his own war, his own lost friends, his own cleverest and most terrible hour, singing it gently, as an old tale, a finished thing, a story that people who had never been there could weep over for the sweetness of it. And the one man in that bright room who had truly been there could not bear it. The mind that had thought its way out of every trap on earth had no trick for this one. He put the cloak over his face, and he let the tears come, and he could not have stopped them if his life had hung on it.
That is the whole of it, and it is enough, and it asks nothing loud of you. The strongest man in the old world, the man who always held, sat in a bright safe hall and wept helplessly at a song, because the song was true, and because he was, at last, close enough to home to feel the full weight of everything it had cost him to get there. It is only grief, the honest grief of a man who has carried far too much for far too long and has finally found a safe place to set it down for a little while. There is no danger anywhere in it. You are quite safe. And you may let it move through you the way a slow wave moves through deep water, lifting everything gently, and setting it down again, and passing on.
He wept behind the cloak. And again, only the king saw. And the king had seen enough now, twice over, to know that a great grief sat at his hearth wearing a stranger's face, and that the time had come, gently, to ask.
Chapter Nine. I Am Odysseus.
So the king lifted his voice, kindly, and stopped the song. Let Demodokos rest his lyre now, he said, for his singing does not please everyone alike this evening. Ever since the good food was set before us and the singing began, our guest here has not once ceased from grieving. Some heavy sorrow has hold of his heart. Let the song be stayed, so that host and guest alike may take their joy together, for that is far the better way. All of this has been made ready for our guest's sake, the escort, the gifts, the feast. A suppliant and a stranger stands in a brother's place to any man with sense in him.
And then the king turned to the weeping stranger, and asked him, at last, the question, and asked it as gently as such a thing can be asked. And do not you, my friend, hide from me now, with any crafty purpose, the thing I am going to ask. It is better spoken. Tell me the name they call you at home, your mother and your father and the people of your town. For no one in all the world is altogether without a name, good or humble, from the day he is born. His parents give him one, when they bring him into the light. Tell me your land, and your people, and your city, so that our ships may set their minds toward it and carry you there. And tell me, why do you weep so, and grieve in your heart, when you hear the tale of the Greeks and of Troy. The gods made that, and spun the thread of ruin for those men, so that there might be a song in it for people yet unborn. Did you lose someone there, before the walls of Troy. A good kinsman by marriage, a wife's father, or a son in law, the nearest blood there is after our own. Or was it a companion, a dear one, a man of an understanding heart. For a true friend, a wise and loving one, is no less than a brother.
And the whole hall grew quiet, and waited, and the man wiped the last of the tears from his face, and set the purple cloak back from his head, and sat up in the loved son's chair, and looked around at the firelit faces of the sea people who had been so kind to him, and he opened his mouth, and he said the sentence you have been waiting for, some of you, for many nights, since the very first fire.
I am Odysseus, he said. Son of Laertes. Known among all men for the turns of my mind, and my fame goes up to the sky. My home is clear seen Ithaca. There is a mountain on it, Neriton, that shakes its leaves in the wind and can be seen from far off, and there are many islands lying close around it in the sea, near to one another, and my Ithaca lies low and last of them, out toward the dark of the west, while the others face the dawn. It is a rough island, but it is a good nurse of strong men. And I tell you, I know of nothing in the whole world sweeter to a man's eyes than his own country.
I am Odysseus. The name he had set down at a giant's door and become Nobody to save his life. The name he had hidden under a beggar's rags in Troy, and under a peddler's stoop, and would hide again before all his stories were done. The name a grandfather gave a baby on a mountain, that meant trouble, and had gone out and earned itself a whole ocean of it. He said it out, plain, in a bright hall at the edge of the world, to people who wished him only well, and it was, of all the moments in the whole long road, the gladdest. Say it to yourself once, softly, if you like, and let it be glad. I am Odysseus. I am he. After everything, still here, still himself, and nearly, nearly home.
And then, because the king had asked, and because the hunger to be known is one of the deepest hungers there is, and because he had held it all inside himself alone for so unspeakably long, he told them the rest. He sat in that firelit hall, in the seat of honor, with the wine going cold in the cups and no one moving, and he told them everything, from the beginning, in order, the whole road.
And the fire will lay it out for you now the way he laid it out for them, one soft piece after another, not so that you will hold it, but so that you will feel the whole vast weight of it gathered into one man's telling, and you may float the whole list down toward sleep. He told them of the first shore, and the wind that blew them wrong for nine days past the last cape on any chart. He told them of the honey sweet country where men forget their homes, and of the one eyed giant in the cave, and the name that was Nobody, and the terrible price of the door. He told of the king of the winds, and the ox hide bag, and the smoke of his own home seen and lost in a single sleep. He told of the witch on her island, and the men who were made swine and made men again, taller than before, and the long good year of rest. He told of the sail to the very country of the dead, and the old friends he met among the shadows there, and the map the old seer gave him. He told of the singers in the flowering meadow whose song no man may hear and leave, and of the narrow water between the cliff and the pool, and its bitter toll. He told of the island of the Sun, and the oath the starving men broke, and the sea keeping the word it had given. He told of seven years on a goddess's island at the navel of the sea, and how he refused to live forever there in order to come home, and of the raft he built with his own hands, and the storm, and the swimming, and the leaves. All of it. Everything.
Everything, that is, that you have heard, night upon night, at this very fire.
For he was, sitting there, the first singer of his own story. Before ever a blind man sang it, before it ever came to any other beach or any other fire in all the world, there was one man in a hall at the edge of the sea telling it out for the first time, in his own voice, to a room full of strangers who had become his friends. And the whole hall sat hushed in the shadows to hear him, spellbound, not a cup lifted and not a word spoken, held from one end of the shining room to the other, exactly, the fire thinks, the way you are lying now in the dark, held by the same story, three thousand years down the same long shore. And that, and not the giant and not the storm, is the true fold of the whole long night, and the telling of it was itself a kind of coming home.
Chapter Ten. The Gifts and the Farewell.
When the long telling was done, the hall was quiet a while, the good quiet that comes after a great story. And then the king spoke, warm with wonder. Now that you have come under my roof, Odysseus, he said, you shall not be sent wandering off again to find your home. You shall go home in honor. And he asked each of the lords of the sea people, the twelve great captains who ruled the land with him, the thirteenth, to bring the stranger a gift, a fresh cloak and tunic, and a bar of gold, so that he might go to his own house glad at heart and rich, loved like a returning brother. And they did, gladly, and more besides. They brought cauldrons and tripods of bronze. They brought fine woven cloth and gold. And all of it was gathered together, a great shining heap of it, more wealth, the songs say, than Odysseus would ever have carried home from Troy itself had he come home the straight way with his share of the spoils.
And the queen, Arete, had a great chest brought out, a fine one, and packed into it with her own hands all the cloaks and the gold and the good things, and told the stranger to look well at the lid himself, and bind it fast with a knot, so that no one might rob him of anything on the dark road home, sleeping. And he fitted the lid, and he bound it, quickly and cunningly, with an intricate knot. It was a knot a goddess had taught him once, long ago, on an island, in the days when a witch had become his friend, and no one else in the world could have untied it. A small thing, that knot. But the fire keeps it, because it is the kind of thing a man keeps, a skill learned in kindness on a hard road, put quietly to use at the end of it. Nothing good that happens to us is ever quite wasted. Even the strange gifts of the strange islands come home with us, folded into our hands, and do us some last quiet service when we least expect it.
Then they gave him a warm bath, the first true bath of ease he had had in longer than he could count, warm water, and oil, and clean clothes over clean skin, and he came from it eased and shining, and walked back toward the hall where the feasters were gathering for the last evening.
And there, by the great pillar of the hall, in the place where a girl might stand to see a man go by, stood Nausicaa. She had had no part in the feasting of the men, and she would have none in the sailing. This was the last time. She had found him in the leaves, a wild and salt scarred thing, and she had not run, and now he stood before her a king again, shining and honored, going home to a country and a wife she would never see, and she knew it, and she had come to say the one thing she had to say. And she said it simply, and with all her dignity, a young woman keeping her whole heart steady in her voice.
Farewell, stranger, she said. And when you are far away, in your own land, remember me sometimes, for it is to me, first of anyone, that you owe your life.
And he stopped, and looked at her, and answered her gently, and kept every word of it as clean and as chaste and as warm as the moment deserved, and the fire will keep it exactly so. Nausicaa, he said, daughter of great hearted Alcinous, may Zeus, the loud thundering lord of Hera, grant only that I come home, and see the day of my returning. And if he grants it, then there, in my own house, all the days of my life, I will pray to you as to a goddess. For you gave me back my life, girl. You, and no one else.
And that was all. That was the whole of it, and it was enough, and it was right. He did not linger, and she did not weep, or not where he could see. She had done a brave and generous thing on a bright morning, and it had saved a man's life, and sent him home to another woman, and she stood at her pillar and let him go, and she asked only to be remembered, and he promised it, and he kept it, for we are keeping it now, tonight, at this fire, three thousand years on. She is remembered. Of all the gifts the sea people gave him, and they gave him gold and bronze and a swift ship home, the one that has outlasted all the rest is a girl standing at a doorpost, asking a stranger not to forget her, and a stranger promising he never would. Sleep on that one, if you like. It is a good one to sleep on.
Then came the last feast, and it was gentle and full, and the blind singer sang again, and this time no one wept, and the stranger honored him once more with the best of the meat, and they poured the last of the wine to the gods, and the evening drew softly down toward its close. And as the light failed, the gifts were carried down to the ship at the water's edge and stowed carefully under the benches, out of the way of the rowers' knees, and a rug and a fine linen sheet were spread on the deck at the stern, in the hollow of the ship, so that a man might lie down there and sleep the whole voyage through. And Odysseus said his farewells to the king and the queen who had lifted him out of the ashes and made him whole, and he went down through the dusk to the shore, and to the black ship waiting on the quiet water, to be carried home.
Chapter Eleven. The Ship That Steered Itself.
Now the fire has been keeping a marvel for you, and here at last it may be spent.
You were told, at the start, what manner of ships the sea people had. They needed no steersman. They needed no steering oar. They knew, of themselves, the minds and the wishes of the men who sailed in them. They knew every land and every city in the world, and they crossed the wide gulfs of the deep hidden in mist, and never in all their swift crossings did they fear any harm, or ever come to any wreck. And it was into one of these that a sleeping man was about to be laid, and carried home.
He went aboard, and they made him his bed on the deck as they had prepared it, the soft rug and the smooth sheet in the hollow of the stern, and he lay down on it without a word, and was still. The oarsmen took their places on their benches, each in his order, two and fifty of the best young men of the sea kingdom. They loosed the cable from the stone that held it. They leaned back, and lifted the water with the blades of their oars, all together.
And the ship went.
She sprang forward the way a team of four strong stallions springs forward on an open plain when the lash falls, all rising together and stretching out and eating the road. So the ship's prow rose and ran, and the dark wave of the sea closed hissing and loud behind her stern, and she held her course, sure, and steady, and swift, so swift that not even the wheeling hawk, the fastest thing that flies, could have kept her company. She ran on into the night, cutting the waves, carrying a man who had done more and suffered more and lost more than any other man alive.
And a sleep fell upon his eyes.
The fire wants you to feel this sleep, for it is the whole reason the night has come to this shape, and it is the sweetest sleep in the entire long story, and you are welcome to borrow it. It was a deep sleep, and an unbroken one, and it settled over him soft and complete, the sweetest and the most peaceful sleep he had known in all his twenty years away. Think of what those years had been. He had not slept a whole night unguarded in as long as he could remember. On the raft, only a season ago, he had steered awake for seventeen nights on end, never closing both his eyes, holding the wheeling stars on his left hand hour after hour after hour, because if he slept, he died. Every rest of his whole long road had had one ear open in it, one hand near a weapon, one corner of the mind still on watch. And now, for the first time since he was a young man in a doorway on his own island, there was nothing left to watch for. No storm could touch this ship. No enemy could find her. No rock could wreck her. The men at the oars needed no orders. The ship needed no hand. The whole burden of staying alive, which he had carried without setting it down for twenty years, was simply lifted off him, all at once, by strangers, and he could let it go.
And he let it go.
He slept, and the ship ran on through the dark, and the fire will tell you the loveliest part, which is that it went on exactly as well without him. The rowers rowed. The prow rose and fell. The stars turned overhead, the same old stars, and he did not have to name a single one of them tonight. The sea, which had chased him and drowned his friends and worn him down to nothing across half a lifetime, now only rocked him, gently, the way it rocks a moored boat at the turn of the tide, and said its one soft word against the hull, over and over, the word it says against every shore in the world, and against this beach tonight, patient, in no hurry, meaning him no harm at all, not anymore. Everything that had ever wanted to keep him from home was behind him now, and the last stretch of dark water was crossing itself, of its own accord, while he slept. There is a rest like that waiting somewhere for everyone, the fire believes, a night when the watch is finally handed off, and the crossing goes on without you, faithfully, and you are allowed, at last, simply to sleep. He had earned his. You may borrow it. Lie still, and let the ship run. It knows the way.
Chapter Twelve. Goodnight. And the Sleeper Carried Home.
There is a certain star that rises brightest of all just before the dawn, the one that comes up to tell the tired world that morning is close behind it. And it was rising over the sea ahead of the running ship when the dark shape of an island lifted out of the water in the last of the night, and the ship, knowing the way, turned her prow in toward it.
It was Ithaca.
At the head of that island there is a harbor, an old, old harbor, named for a god of the sea, and it is the safest anchorage in all the world. Two long arms of rock reach out from the shore and curve toward each other, and they break the great waves outside, so that within them the water lies always calm, and a ship, once inside, may rest at anchor with no cable at all, and come to no harm. And at the very head of that quiet harbor there grows a long leafed olive tree, old beyond telling. And close beside the olive there is a cave, cool and dim and lovely, sacred to the nymphs of the sea, the gentle spirits of the springs. Inside it there are great bowls and jars of stone, where the wild bees store their honey, and there are long stone looms, where the sea nymphs are said to weave their sea purple cloth, a wonder to see. And water runs in it always, softly, finding its slow way down through the rock. And it has two doors. One faces the north wind, and that is the way down that men may go. And one faces the south, and that way belongs to the gods, and no mortal ever walks through it. It is the gods' own door.
And here the fire will keep, very quietly, the oldest promise it has made you, and you need not have kept every fire to feel it. For if you have sat here from the very beginning, from the first night of all, you have stood in that cave before. You heard, long ago, of a boy on this same rough island who loved that cool cave near the harbor head better than anywhere else on all his shore, who would go and sit in its green quiet as a young man with all the time in the world, and listen to the water find its way down through the stone, and did not know, could not have known, that of all the places on his whole island, this was the one the story would carry him back to at the very last, a changed and weathered man, set down asleep on his own shore after everything. Well. Here is the very last. Here is the cave. And here, tonight, is the man, come back to it at the far end of the whole long road, asleep, and not yet knowing where he lies.
The ship ran straight in, sure of the way, and drove up onto the beach with half her length out of the water, so strong were the arms that had rowed her. And the young men climbed out, and they came to the stern where the stranger lay, and they lifted him up, still on the rug and the smooth linen sheet, still fast asleep, and they carried him down over the side and up the beach, and they laid him gently on the sand, above the reach of the tide, and he did not so much as stir. And then they carried out all his treasure, the gold and the bronze and the fine woven cloth, and they set it down carefully by the trunk of the long leafed olive, a little off the path, out of the way, so that no one passing by should come on it and rob the sleeping man before he woke. And then they went back to their ship, and pushed her off the sand, and took their oars, and went away home over the sea, the way they had come, their kind work done. They asked for nothing. They said no farewell, for he was sleeping. They simply carried a lost man home across a night of dark water, and laid him down on his own shore, and left him there to wake in his own good time, in his own country, after twenty years. It is the kindest thing done in the whole long story, and it is done for a sleeping man who will never quite be able to thank them, and that is what makes it the kindest.
And so he lay, at the last, on the sand of his own island, in the grey before the dawn, with his treasure heaped beside him under the old olive, and the calm harbor before him, and the two doored cave of the nymphs at his back, and the whole island rising quiet and dark and dear around him, and not knowing, yet, any of it. Twenty years of sea, and the man is home. The war, and the wandering, and the giant, and the storm, and the seven long years, all of it behind him now, all of it crossed, and the last few miles of it crossed while he slept. He is home. He does not know it yet. He will know it soon. And the island holds its breath around its sleeping king, and says nothing, and waits, and lets him rest.
And there the fire will leave him tonight, safe on his own sand, and it is the softest place it has set anyone down in a long while.
The fire is low now. It has done its work. The singer banks it, as he does every night, careful of the coals, keeping it alive for the next telling, for the story is not quite over yet, and the fire will be wanted again. The tide has come up close and kind while we talked, closer tonight than last night, higher and gentler on the sand, the way it does a little more each of these turning nights. And far out on the dark water, where a single sail has waited at the edge of morning for a wind that has not yet come, the sail stands a little nearer to the shore than it has stood in many nights. It is nearer now. It has been coming nearer, quietly, for a while. It is not time yet. But it is nearer.
You do not have to carry any of it. Not the garden, not the games, not the song, not the name. Let it all stay here by the fire with the old singer, safe, where he keeps such things. He will hold the whole last strange kingdom for you through the night, the bright hall and the blind singer and the girl at the pillar, and it will still be here, riding quietly at anchor, whenever you should want it again.
And there is one more night's road, when you are ready for it, and only one small soft thing to say about it, and then rest. Tonight the man said his own name, out loud, gladly, at last. But tomorrow, on his own home shore, he must fold that name away again, and hide it one more time, the longest and the cleverest hiding of all, and walk into his own house as a stranger and a beggar, unknown, to set right, quietly, patiently, all that has gone wrong in twenty years. It is the last long game, and he will play it slowly, and well. But that is for another fire. And it ends, that night, in a poor warm hut in the hills, with rain on the roof, and a father and a son under one roof together for the first time in twenty years, and no danger anywhere in it. So there is nothing at all to keep you awake for. There is only more homecoming, coming.
Rest now. The man is home on his own sand. The island is keeping watch for him. The story is kept.
The tide is in. The stars are old and kind, and going pale now toward the morning that will wake him, though it will not wake you. Your breathing has found the pace of the waves again, or the waves have found yours. It does not matter which. It is the same slow going out, the same easy coming back, and it will go on all night without you, faithfully, like everything else that loves you.
Sleep well, traveler.
Goodnight.