Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac.
Tonight, an island so lovely that a god passing over it on an errand stopped in the air to look, and was glad. Seven years a man has lived there, kept by a goddess who loves him, and every day he walks down to the water and sits with his back to all that beauty and weeps, because it is not home. Tonight you will hear the one gift no mortal was ever offered twice, laid in his hands, and gently set down. You will hear a man tell a deathless goddess that his aging mortal wife is dearer to him than never dying at all. And you will watch him build his own way home with an axe and twenty trees, and steer it by a single star held all night on his left hand. Stay with it if you can, and you will know why, of all his adventures, this quiet one is the true heart of him.
There is a beach at the edge of the world, and on it there is a fire. It is the same fire, and if you have sat at it before, through the giant and the witch and the narrow water, then welcome back, and 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.
The fire is small, built of driftwood the sea gave back, and it burns the pale gold of old honey. Beyond it the water is dark, the deep wine dark of the sea at night, and it breathes against the sand, patient, asking nothing of you. The tide stands a little higher tonight than it stood last night, and the singer does not remark on it.
Last time, the singer says, I brought him through the hardest water of the road, and set him down alone, every companion gone, on the softest shore the sea owns. Tonight I sing you the seven years he spent there, and how at last he left it. It is the quietest night in all his wandering, for the man is worn to the bone, and so, perhaps, are you.
You do not have to do anything now. Settle into the sand. Close your eyes if they want to close. This story does not need to be watched. It only needs to be near you, the way the sea is near you, saying its one soft word against the shore. You need not follow every word, or keep any of it till morning. If you drift, the singer goes on without you, and does not mind.
And one thing, whispered across the fire like a promise. There is a storm in tonight's story. Near the end, the sea remembers this man, and breaks the little raft he built with his own hands. The fire will tell you so plainly, in a low voice, and will not paint it, and will not let it last, for help is already in the water before the raft is gone, a small kind goddess with a veil that cannot sink. He reaches the shore. He sleeps on solid ground. Hold only that, all night. Nothing here will startle you.
Before the singer begins, one small thing, and then we will not interrupt again. If this story carries you down toward sleep, subscribe now, while your eyes are still open, and the next night's tale will be waiting for you when you need it. A like helps other tired travelers find this fire on the beach. That is all. Now settle back, and let him begin.
We begin.
Chapter One. The Island Where Time Lay Down.
Far out in the middle of the sea, farther than any trade route runs, farther than any fisherman has ever been blown and lived to say so, there is an island, and it is called Ogygia, and it lies, the old songs say, at the very navel of the water, with nothing but open sea in every direction as far as the roundness of the world will allow.
No ship comes there. That is the first thing to understand about it, and the strangest, and once you have understood it, half of tonight's story is already in your hands. It is not that ships are forbidden. It is only that it is too far. The sea lanes, such as they are, all run along the edges of things, coast to island to cape, the way a cautious swimmer keeps one hand near the wall, and this island lies out past all of that, out in the great empty middle where the charts, if there were charts, would simply stop, and the mapmaker would write nothing at all, because there is nothing out there to draw, except this one green place that no one drawing a map would ever know was there.
And it is beautiful. The fire will take its time with this, because the beauty of the place is not a small thing in the story. It is the whole weight against which one man's longing is going to be measured, and you cannot feel the choice he makes unless you have first felt what he was choosing against. So let the singer show you the island the way a god first saw it, coming down out of the high air on an errand we will come to, and being brought up short by the sheer loveliness of it, the way you are stopped sometimes in a doorway by a room full of evening light.
There is a cave at the heart of it, a wide deep cave in the side of a green hill, and it is not a raw hole in the rock but a made and tended home, warm and dry and swept, and a fire burns in it always, of split cedar and of a fragrant wood the old songs call thyon, a wood that gives off a smoke sweeter than any incense, and that smoke drifts out of the cave mouth and hangs over the whole island and lays itself across the sea for a mile in every direction, so that a sailor, if any sailor ever came, would smell the island long before he saw it, and would think, in the middle of all that salt, that he had somehow sailed into a temple.
And in the cave, at a great loom, a goddess is singing. Her name is Calypso, and she is a daughter of the old Titan Atlas, the one who knows the depths of every sea and holds the long pillars that keep the sky and the earth apart, and she lives here alone, immortal and lovely and by herself, at the navel of the sea, and she passes her endless days weaving at her loom with a golden shuttle, back and forth, back and forth, and singing in a voice so sweet that the birds come down out of the trees to sit near her while she works. The loom is a sound you know by now, if you have been at this fire. It was the first sound the wanderer ever heard in his life, his own mother's loom above his cradle. It followed him to a witch's island a few nights ago. And here it is again, out past the end of the world, a woman's voice and the soft knock of the shuttle, the oldest lullaby there is.
Around the cave a wood has grown up, alder and black poplar and sweet cypress, tall and broad, and in the high branches of it the long winged birds roost and nest, the owls and the hawks and the sea crows with their business out on the water, and all day the wood is full of the small stir and murmur of them settling and lifting and settling again. Over the very mouth of the cave a single garden vine has been trained, and it has thrived out past all reason, and it hangs heavy and glossy with clusters of dark grapes, so that the doorway of the goddess is curtained in fruit.
And there are the four springs. This is Homer's own detail, and the fire loves it, and gives it to you whole. Four springs rise there, close together, four separate fountains of bright clear water welling up almost side by side out of the green ground, and then, having risen together, they turn, and each one runs away in its own direction, one to the north and one to the south, one east and one west, four bright threads of water braiding out across the island from a single source. And around and between them lie soft meadows, deep in violets and in wild parsley, the kind of grass that holds the shape of you after you have lain down in it, the kind a tired man could sleep in for a hundred years.
That is Ogygia. Even a god, coming upon it, would stand and gaze and feel his own immortal heart lift with the gladness of it. The fire has told you a great many islands on this long road. It tells you plainly that this is the loveliest of them all.
And a man has lived here for seven years.
Seven years. Hold the number gently, the way he had long since stopped being able to hold it, for after the first year or two a man stops counting, the way you stop counting the days of a long illness, and time simply becomes weather, one soft golden day laid on top of another with nothing to tell them apart, no winter to speak of, no harvest, no festival, no ship on the horizon to mark a season by, only the springs running and the vine bearing and the smoke rising and the loom singing, on and on, in a place where nothing was ever allowed to end because nothing was ever allowed to change. Time did not pass on Ogygia so much as it lay down, the way a tired animal lies down in warm grass, and slept.
And the man for whom all of it was a prison was, at that very hour, exactly where he was every hour of every one of those seven years that he could manage it. He was down at the shore, with his back to the springs and the meadows and the sweet smoke, looking the one direction the beauty could not follow him, out over the empty water, toward home.
Chapter Two. The Man at the Shore.
There is a particular place on the shore of Ogygia, a low headland of rock above the beach, where the grass is worn thin and the stone is worn smooth, and if you had come to the island in any of those seven years you would have found a man sitting there, and you would have known, before he said a word, that he had been sitting there a long time.
He sat there every day. That is the whole picture, and it is the truest picture of him in all his wandering, truer than the giant's cave or the witch's hall, and the fire wants you to see it plainly and hold it, because everything else tonight grows out of this one still shape. A man on a rock at the edge of a perfect island, his elbows on his knees, looking out at the sea, and weeping. Not loudly. Not the storm weeping of fresh grief. The quiet steady leaking of a sorrow so old it has become simply the weather of a face, the eyes never quite dry, the salt of his own tears and the salt of the sea spray drying together on his cheeks all day, and he not bothering to wipe either away, because what would be the point, when tomorrow he would only be here again.
His life was running out of him like water. The old songs say exactly that, and it is a hard true thing said gently. He was not dying. He could not die, here, not while she wished him to live. But the life in him, the sap of him, the thing that had once made him the quickest and hungriest mind in all the world, was ebbing away day by day into that grey water, spent on longing, poured out toward a small rocky island he could not see and could not reach and could not stop seeing. Ithaca. His wife at her loom. His son, who had been a baby in his arms and who must be, by now, a grown man with a beard, a man his own father would pass in a marketplace and not know. His old father in the orchard. The bed he built with his own hands around a living tree. He turned it all over and over in the worn place in his heart, the way you worry a smooth stone in your pocket, and he looked at the sea, and he wept, and the sun crossed the sky, and in the evening he rose stiffly from the rock and went back up to the cave, because there was nowhere else on the whole island to go.
For the nights were not his. The fire will tell you this plainly, and briefly, and without either winking at it or looking away from it, because it is part of the true shape of his captivity. By day he was his own, out on his rock, alone with his grief. But when the dark came he went up to the cave of the goddess, and there, in the deep warm firelit dark, he slept beside her, an unwilling man beside a willing goddess, because that was the shape of the bargain he had never agreed to and could not refuse. She loved him. That is the thing that makes this island so much stranger and so much sadder than any monster's lair. He was not held by a chain or a wall or a spell of forgetting. He was held by love, by the plain fact of a lonely immortal heart that had found, washed up half drowned on its shore seven years before, the one mortal man in all the world worth keeping, and could not, would not, bring itself to open its hand and let him go.
Understand her, for the fire will not let her be a villain. She was not cruel. Everything she did for him was kindness, the food she set before him sweeter than any mortal food, the fire always warm, the cave always dry, her voice singing all day at the loom for his ear as much as her own. She had saved his life. When his last ship went down and his last companions drowned and he came drifting, alone, half dead, clinging to the broken keel of everything he had lost, it was her shore he washed up on, and her hands that pulled him from the surf, and her care that brought him back to life. She had wanted, more than she had ever wanted anything in her long deathless years, to keep him, and to make him what she was, ageless and undying, and to have him beside her at the navel of the sea forever. It was not a wicked wish. It was only a wish that could never come true, because the man it was aimed at was already, entirely, promised elsewhere, and no amount of love, not even a goddess's, can make a home out of a place that is not home.
And the strangest cruelty of it, though no one meant it as a cruelty, was that the sweetness of the place never once wore off, and so it never once stopped hurting. On a hard shore a man can at least be miserable in a plain and honest way. But here every single morning was beautiful. The smoke smelled of cedar. The vine bore. The springs ran bright. The goddess sang. And a man who is grieving inside such perfect loveliness grieves twice, once for what he has lost, and once more because the whole shining world around him keeps insisting, falsely, that he has everything a heart could want. She saw it, and she tried, over the years, to comfort him, in the only ways she had. She would sing to him. She would set the sweetest food before him. She would show him some new lovely corner of the island, a hidden pool, a slope of flowers, as you might show a sad child a bright toy. And he would thank her, gently, for he was never once unkind to her, and then in the morning he would go back down to the rock and look at the sea. There is no comfort for the one wound that homesickness is, except the one thing she could not give, and both of them knew it, and lived beside the knowing for seven years.
So there they were, the two of them, in the loveliest place in the world, caught in the gentlest and most hopeless stalemate in all these stories. A goddess who could give a man everything except the one thing he wanted. And a man who could refuse her everything except the nights. Seven years of it, the springs running and the loom singing and the smoke rising sweet over the meadows, and every single day a man on a rock at the edge of it, looking the wrong way across the water, at nothing, at home. It could have gone on for a hundred years. It could have gone on forever. Something had to reach in from very far away to break it. And, at last, very far away, in the high clear air over the roofs of the world, something did.
Chapter Three. The Council in the High Air.
Lift your eyes now, off the sea and the weeping man, all the way up, past the birds and the smoke and the highest clouds, up to where the air goes thin and bright and cold and clean, to the hall of the gods on the top of the world, where the great ones sit, and decide things, and where, on this particular morning, one goddess had finally had enough of a good man's grief.
Her name was Athena, the grey eyed one, the goddess of every clear and clever thing, of the loom and the olive and the well made plan, and she had loved this wanderer for a long time, loved him the way a master loves the one apprentice whose mind moves like her own. She had watched him plow his beach and win his wife and gather to the war. She had watched him blind the giant and outlast the witch and go down living to the country of the dead and come back. And then she had watched, for seven long years, while he sat on a rock at the edge of the world and wept, and no one lifted a finger, because the one god who could have carried him home was the very god who had sworn he never would.
For you remember, if you were at this fire a few nights ago, what the wanderer did to the giant in the cave, and whose son the giant was. The lord of the sea had not forgotten. He was a god, and gods have long memories, and this one had bent the whole ocean to the task of keeping one clever mortal from ever seeing his island again. And so, while the sea god's back was turned, while he was away at the far edge of the world feasting among a distant and blameless people who lived out past the sunrise, Athena stood up in the high bright hall, before her father, the king of the gods, and she spoke for the man that everyone else had let the sea forget.
My heart is torn for him, she said, and the fire keeps her words close to the way she said them, for wise Odysseus, the unlucky one, who lies far from everyone he loves, suffering, on an island in the middle of the sea, in the halls of a goddess who keeps him there against his will. He has no ship. He has no oars. He has no companions left alive to row him over the wide back of the water. His son is a grown man now searching for a father he cannot remember, and his wife is wearing out her life with waiting, and the man himself sits on a foreign shore and longs only to see the smoke going up from his own chimneys, and then to die. And you gods do not care. He ruled his own people, once, as gently as a father rules his children, and not one of them remembers it now, and neither, it seems, do you. If this is how the wide world repays a good and gentle king, then let there be no more good kings. Let every ruler from this day be harsh, and cruel, and careless of what is right, since being just and kind has won this one man nothing at all but a lonely rock at the edge of the sea, and seven years of tears. Father, does no kindness a good man ever did you count for anything at all?
And the king of the gods, who had never truly meant the man such endless sorrow, who had only let the matter drift the way great powers let things drift when no one before them is willing to plead, looked at his grey eyed daughter, and relented. It is decided, he said. He shall go home. Not by any easy road, and not all at once, for the sea god's anger is real and must be allowed its say. But he shall go. And here is how it shall be done. He shall build himself a raft, with his own hands, and sail it alone, without one god or one man to help him, and after long labor on the water he shall come at last to a kind and gifted people who will honor him like one of the deathless ones and give him a ship at last and carry him home to his own country, with more treasure in the hold than he would ever have carried back from the war.
And then the king of the gods turned to the one who carries messages between the worlds, the quick god of the golden sandals, and gave him the errand. Go down, he said, to the island at the navel of the sea, and tell the goddess our will. The waiting is over. Let the man go home.
And so, in the high clear air over the roofs of the world, on an ordinary bright morning that the weeping man far below could not have imagined, the thing that seven years could not move was moved, in the space of a few sentences, by one goddess who would not let a good man be forgotten, and by a father who, asked plainly at last, found that he had never really meant to say no.
Chapter Four. The God on the Wide Water.
The messenger of the gods bound onto his feet the golden sandals, the immortal ones, that carry him over the water and over the boundless earth alike, as fast as a breath of wind, and he took up in his hand the wand with which he charms the eyes of men to sleep and wakes the sleeping again, and with that in his grip he stepped off the bright threshold of heaven and went down the sky.
His name was Hermes, and if you have been long at this fire you know that his errand tonight was, in a quiet way, a family visit. For this quick god was the same one whose blood, generations back, ran down into the wanderer's own line, down through a sly old trickster on a mountain named Autolycus, the grandfather who gave the boy the name that meant trouble. And this was the third time in all the long road that this god had reached down toward his own far off mortal blood. The first was the oldest gift of all, the quick and clever wit handed down the line through Autolycus, the family cunning that had been Hermes in them from the start. The second was on the witch's island, where he put into the man's hand the little white flower with the black root that broke her magic. And now, the third time, and the last, he came skimming down the sky to open the door of a seven year prison. The family god came down to the water for the man of his own blood, the third and last of his three great kindnesses, and he would not come down for him again, and he came the loveliest way any god in these stories ever travels.
For when he came down to the level of the sea, he did not walk upon it, and he did not fly high above it. He went low, skimming the tops of the waves, the way a seabird goes, a gull or a long winged sea crow hunting the troughs of the swell for fish, dipping and gliding just above the moving water, close enough that the salt spray wets its beating wings. So the god went over the endless heaving back of the sea, mile after mile of empty water, out past every coast and every sea lane, out to the great green loneliness in the middle of everything, until the sweet cedar smoke of the island reached him first, the way it would reach a sailor, and then the green hill rose out of the water ahead of him, and he came in over the meadows and the four bright springs and lit down at the mouth of the cave.
And there he stopped, this god who had seen everything there is to see in heaven and on earth, and he stood a moment in the doorway of fruit, and he looked, and even his ancient heart was glad. The fire told you this island would stop a god in his tracks, and here is the god, stopped. The cedar fire glowing. The clear water welling and running away four ways. The tall trees and the roosting birds. And within, the loom, and the shuttle going back and forth, and the goddess singing.
She knew him at once. Gods always know each other, however far from home they meet, and she rose from her loom and welcomed him in the old proper way, and set him on a shining chair, and put before him the food of the deathless ones, the ambrosia and the red nectar, for even between immortals with hard news to trade, the guest is fed first. And only when he had eaten did she ask him, gently, why the messenger of heaven had crossed so much empty water to a shore that no one ever visited.
And he told her, plainly, for it was not his to soften. The king of the gods commands it, he said. There is a man here, the unluckiest of all the men who fought at the great war and the last of them still kept from home, and it is the will of heaven that you let him go. Not keep him. Not hold him. Send him on his way, this day, toward his own country.
And here the fire will give the goddess her turn, and let her be heard fairly, because her grief was real and her complaint was not without justice. Oh, she said, and there was a hurt in it as old as she was, you gods are the cruelest and the most jealous beings there are. You cannot bear it, can you, when one of us takes a mortal man to love. It has always been so. When the rose fingered Dawn once loved the hunter Orion and took him for her own, you gods could not rest until one of you had struck him down. When the goddess of the grain loved the mortal Iasion in a thrice plowed field, the king of heaven himself found them out and killed the man with a single bolt of lightning. And now it is my turn to be envied and undone. I saved this one. I found him alone, clinging to a single broken plank in the middle of the sea, when the storm had shattered his ship and drowned every man he sailed with and left him with nothing in all the world but his own two hands and the water. I took him in. I loved him. I fed him and warmed him and cared for him, and I meant, yes, I will say it, I meant to make him deathless and unaging, to keep him young and beside me forever, so that neither of us would ever be alone again. And now, because it is decided in a bright hall very far from this shore, I am to open my hand and give him back to the sea that will do its best to kill him. And I have no ship to give him, and no crew, and no way to send him but to watch him build his own frail raft and sail off alone into the exact danger I once pulled him out of.
But she did not refuse. That is the measure of her, and the fire marks it. She was a goddess, and no god, however grieved, may cross the settled will of the king of heaven, and she knew it, and being who she was, she did not rage or scheme or delay. She grew quiet. And in the quiet, something in her that was better than her loneliness took over, and she said, at last, that she would help him herself. Let it be so. I will send him off, and I will send him off well. I will show him how to leave, and I will give him what he needs to do it, and I will not send my heart's one companion out onto that hard water with nothing. And the messenger god, his errand done, rose, and thanked her, and went back up the sky the way he had come, low over the bright water, a gull going home, and left the goddess standing alone in her doorway with the sentence of her own long loneliness just spoken over her, gathering herself to go down to the shore and tell a weeping man the thing he had prayed to hear for seven years.
Chapter Five. The Choice Offered Once More.
She found him where she always found him, on the worn rock above the beach, looking out at the water with the day's tears already dried on his face, and she came and stood beside him, and for a while she said nothing, and the sea said its one soft word against the sand below them, over and over, the way it is saying it now beyond this fire.
Then she told him. Unlucky man, she said, and there was no anger left in her voice, only a great and gentle sorrow, you need not sit here and grieve any longer, and you need not waste your life away on my shore. I am letting you go. Look. She showed him the tall trees at the far end of the island. Go and cut the timber, and build yourself a broad raft, and I will stock it with bread and water and red wine, and I will dress you warmly, and I will send a fair wind behind you, and if the gods who hold the wide sky are willing, you will come home to your own country at last.
And he did not trust it. That is a true and human thing, and the fire keeps it. Seven years is a long time to want one thing, and a man who has wanted one thing that long does not simply believe it when it is finally offered. He looked at her sideways, this clever careful man, and he said that he would not set foot on any raft until she swore him a great oath, by the powers that even the gods fear to break, that she was not setting some subtler trap, that she did not mean to see him drowned the moment he left her protection. And she smiled at that, a little sadly, because it was so exactly like him, and because his suspicion was itself a kind of proof of how badly he wanted to be gone, and she swore the oath he asked, whole and binding, that she meant him nothing but his freedom and his road home.
And then, that evening, back in the cave, with the good supper set out and the fire warm, she made him the offer. She made it once, plainly, and she put everything she had into it, because it was the last time she would ever be able to, and because she truly believed, with all the long wisdom of a deathless thing, that if he understood what she was really offering he could not possibly refuse.
If you knew, she said, if you truly knew in your heart how much suffering the gods still have in store for you before you ever reach that rocky island you love so much, you would stay here. You would stay with me, and keep this house, and be deathless. Think of it. I am offering you what no man in all the history of the world has ever been given and kept. Never to grow old. Never to die. To stay young, here, in this beautiful place, at my side, while the centuries go by like afternoons and every grief you have ever carried is worn smooth and forgotten by the sheer soft endlessness of the years. Your wife is a mortal woman. I do not say it to wound you. I say it because it is simply true, and you know it is true. She will grow old. She will die. Whatever you go back to, you go back to lose. And I am standing here offering you forever. Can you truly look at that, and choose the other thing?
And the man was quiet a while. And then he gave her the answer that is the reason, three thousand years later, we are still telling his story at fires in the dark. He gave it gently, and with great courtesy, because he was not a cruel man and she was not a cruel goddess, and he did not want the last true thing between them to be an unkind one.
Lady goddess, he said, do not be angry with me for this. I know all of it. I know, none better, that my wise Penelope is less than you to look upon. She is a mortal woman, and you are a deathless goddess who does not age, and set beside you, in plain truth, she is smaller, and plainer, and she is growing older even now while we speak. I know it. And even so. Even knowing all of that, every day, all my days, I want and I long for nothing in this world but to go home, and to see the morning of my return. If some god wants to wreck me again out on the wine dark sea, then let him. I have a heart in me that has learned to endure. I have already suffered so much, and worked so hard, and lost so many things, out on the water and in the war. Let this be one more. But let it be on the way home.
There it is. The summit of the whole season, and there is not one raised voice in it, not one drawn sword, not one wave. Only a tired man in a warm cave, offered the one thing every human being who has ever lived has secretly longed for, offered it truly, offered it by someone who loved him, and setting it quietly down, because it was not home. He chose the aging wife over the ageless goddess. He chose the small rocky island over the paradise at the navel of the sea. He chose to grow old, and to lose the people he loved in the ordinary order that mortals lose them, and to die at the end like every other man, rather than to keep any of it forever somewhere that was not his own. The fire does not need to explain why that is the heart of him. You feel it in your own chest, in the dark, half asleep. It is the most human thing anyone in all these stories ever does. And the goddess, hearing it, did not argue. She had her answer. She rose, and they turned to the supper that waited warm, and sat down together across the fire from one another, the way they had sat a thousand evenings. And the food was set before them. And here the old songs keep one small quiet picture, and the fire keeps it too, because it holds the whole distance between these two in a single homely image. Before the goddess was set the food of the deathless ones, the ambrosia and the red nectar, which no mortal mouth may ever taste. And before the man was set the plain food of men, the bread and the meat and the dark wine. And so they ate together, side by side, the last meal of seven years, she eating the food that keeps a body young and bright forever, and he eating the food that a body lives on for a little while and then lays down. And neither of them spoke of what the two plates meant, because there was nothing left to say that the two plates had not already said. And when the eating was done, the fire was warm, and outside the four springs ran on into the dark, and in the morning the work would begin.
Chapter Six. The Axe and the Trees.
Morning on Ogygia, the last kind of morning he would ever have there, and the goddess kept every word of her promise, and she began by putting into his hands the two things a maker loves most in all the world, which are good tools and permission to use them.
She gave him a great axe first. The fire will linger on it, because he would have. It was a fine heavy axe of bronze, sharpened on both edges so that it bit true whichever way it fell, and it was fitted with a handle of olive wood, smooth and close grained and beautiful, the best handle for such a tool that there is, and he took it and felt the weight of it settle into his palm and his whole grieving body must have woken up a little, the way a craftsman's body always wakes to a good tool. And she gave him an adze as well, planed and polished, for the finer shaping. And then she led him away to the far end of the island, to the place where the tallest trees grew, and left him to it.
And now the fire is going to do a thing on purpose, and you should let it, because it is one of the sleepiest things in all of Homer and it was put here for exactly this hour. It is going to watch a man build a boat, slowly, step by careful step, the way you would watch a fire, or rain on a window, not for what happens next but for the plain steady rhythm of the thing itself.
He chose his trees. He chose the alder, and the black poplar, and the fir that runs up tall and straight toward the sky, and he chose them dead and dry and long seasoned, the wood that has given up its water and will float high and light on the sea. And he began to cut. Twenty trees he felled, in all, twenty, no more and no fewer, and he took his time about each one, and as each came down he trimmed away the branches and stripped it clean, and then, with the adze and with a chalked line stretched taut, he planed the trunks flat and squared them true, so that every timber was straight and even and would lie snug against its neighbor with no gap for the sea to work at. That is how a man who trusts his hands builds a thing. The way his old father in the orchard trimmed a vine. The way, years before, he had squared and smoothed a living olive trunk into the corner post of a marriage bed. Slowly. Attentively. Talking to the wood, perhaps, under his breath.
And here the fire says a quiet thing aloud, because you have been at this beach long enough now to have earned it. This was the third time in the whole long tale that this man built something great with his own two hands, out of trees, to carry a life across a danger. The first was a bed, built around a rooted olive that could not be moved, to hold a marriage safe through anything, and that bed is far away tonight, holding still, keeping his place. The second was a horse, a vast hollow horse of fir planks, that carried a handful of held breaths through the gate of a city and ended a ten year war, and you heard that made at this fire two nights ago. And the third is this one, tonight, a raft, to carry one worn out man home across the last of the sea. A bed, a horse, a raft. The same patient hands, the same true joints, the same low voice talking to the wood. Remember all three, the fire says, and then let them go, and watch him build.
Calypso brought him augers, and he bored the timbers through, and he fitted them together with pegs and with morticed joints, driving them home snug, until the whole floor of it was one tight bound raft of twenty trees. And he laid it out broad and flat and roomy, as wide across the middle as a skilled shipwright lays out the floor of a broad merchant ship, so that it would ride steady on the swell and not tip. He set close ribs across it and decked them over with long planks laid edge to edge, so that a man could stand and walk the length of it dry footed. He fenced the sides with long gunwales for strength. He raised a mast upright in the middle of it, and stayed it fast, and cut a yardarm to cross it and carry the sail. And he shaped a great steering oar and hung it off the stern, so that he could hold his course through the nights. And all around the outer edge he wove a fence of willow branches, a low green wall of wickerwork against the reach of the waves, and heaped brush inside it for a little shelter and a little weight to steady her. Four days it took him, working from the first grey light to the dark, and the goddess came and went and watched him, and said little, and on the fourth evening it was done, and it was good, and he knew that it was good in the plain deep way a maker always knows.
Then she brought him cloth for a sail, good close woven cloth, and he cut it and made the sail well, and fitted it with all its lines, the braces and the halyards and the sheets, so that he could set it to the wind and take it in again. And with levers he worked the whole finished raft down over rollers to the edge of the bright sea, and floated it, and it rode high and true on the water, just as he had built it to.
And on the fifth day she sent him off, and she did it kindly, the way she had done everything. She bathed him, and dressed him in clothes that smelled of cedar and of her, and she stowed the raft for him with her own hands, a great skin of dark red wine, and a bigger skin of water, and a leather sack of food, bread and meat and many good things to keep a man's strength up on a long crossing. And she called up a wind for him, a warm gentle following wind out of the right quarter, that would push him steadily on his way and ask nothing hard of him. And he raised his sail to it, glad, and it filled, and the little raft began to move, out from the shore of the island where time lay down, out onto the open sea, and the man sat down at his steering oar and did not look back, because he had spent seven years learning not to look at that island, and everything ahead of him now, at last, was water going the right way.
It had been very nearly twenty years since a sail with no business on it first appeared off his own harbor and carried him away to the war, almost the whole of the long span the old warning had promised him, back at the beginning, in another life. The count was nearly run out now. He did not let himself dwell on it. He only set his hand on the steering oar, and pointed the little raft toward the quarter of the world where home was, and let the wind do the rest.
Chapter Seven. The Stars on His Left Hand.
And now comes the loveliest sailing in all the old songs, and one of the gentlest passages the fire knows, seventeen days and seventeen nights of a man alone on the wide sea with nothing to do but hold his course, and the only company he had, and the only road sign, and the only thing to keep him awake and pointed true, was the stars.
For he did not sleep. Sleep never fell upon his eyes through all those long nights, and it was not fear that kept him waking, it was the steering, because a man alone has no one to take the oar while he rests, and if he slept the raft would wander, and so he sat, hour after hour after hour, one hand on the great steering oar, and he watched the sky, and he steered by it, the way sailors had steered since the very first boat went out past the sight of land.
Calypso had taught him the way of it before he left, the one piece of sea lore she gave him along with the wine and the water, and it was this, and it is true, and it is older than any story. Keep the Bear on your left hand. That was the whole of it. Hold that one star pattern always off your left side as you cross, and you will hold your line, and the sea will not turn you around in the dark. And so he did, all seventeen nights, and the fire is going to name the stars he watched now, slowly, in the old rocking way, and you are not asked to learn a single one of them or to hold them in the morning. You are asked only to float on them, the way he floated under them, a long quiet list of lights turning overhead, a current of names to drift down.
There were the Pleiades, first, the little clustered sisters, the small close knot of stars that a sailor's eye goes to without trying, seven faint lamps huddled together like a handful of sea foam flung up onto the dark. He watched them rise, and wheel, and set into the sea ahead of him, night after night.
And there was Bootes, the one the old songs call slow to set, the great slow figure of the sky that goes down late and lingers at the edge of the world long after the others have gone under, so that a waking helmsman on a long night comes to know him well, the last bright company before the dawn.
And there was Orion, the great striding shape with the bright belt of three stars in a row, the hunter of the winter sky, wheeling up out of the sea in his season and standing tall over the water, the most unmistakable pattern there is, that even a landsman knows, that even you may have found some cold clear night from your own doorway without knowing his name.
And there was the Bear itself, the one that mattered, the great slow turning wheel of stars that some call the Bear and some call the Wagon, the seven bright stars that swing forever around the still point of the northern sky and never, ever go down. That is the wonderful thing about the Bear, the thing that made him the sailor's friend for three thousand years. Every other star in the whole turning sky rises out of the sea in the east and sets into the sea in the west, dipping down to bathe in the great river of Ocean that runs around the edge of the world. The Bear alone never does. He wheels and wheels around his fixed place, high and cold and constant, and he never once sinks under the water, never bathes, never leaves, and so he is always there, all night, every night, the one light you can trust to always be in the same quarter of the sky. And a man who keeps that one wheeling constant thing off his left hand is a man who cannot get lost, and so the wanderer kept it there, off his left hand, all seventeen nights, and did not get lost.
And beyond the named ones, over the whole arch of the dark, there was the rest of it, the countless uncounted stars, the great faint river of them spilled across the middle of the sky from edge to edge, so thick in that clean far ocean air, so far from any lamp or hearth smoke of men, that they seemed less like separate lights than like a single glowing dust, a road of pale fire laid down the black.
And here is the thing that a man alone under all those stars comes to, on the third night or the fourth, and it is a comfort, and the fire will give it to you softly. These were the same stars. That was the whole of it, and it went into him like warmth. The little clustered sisters, the slow late figure at the edge of the world, the great wheeling Bear that never sets, they were not the stars of some foreign country. They were the very ones that stood, at that same hour, over the roofs of Ithaca. Over the harbor where the fishing boats leaned together. Over the orchard where his old father slept. Over the house with the loom in it, and the bed rooted to the island, and the wife who might, if she too lay awake, be looking up at this very same Bear from the other end of the same sea. The sky is the one country that has no borders. And a man who has lost every landmark on the earth and every companion he sailed with can still look up, on the loneliest water in the world, and find the exact lights that hang over everyone he loves, and steer by them, and know that following them faithfully enough, night after night, would bring him at last under his own dark hills again. He sat under all of it, one small man on a raft of twenty trees, on the wide back of the empty sea, with the warm wind pushing him gently home and the whole turning wheel of heaven overhead, and he held his one star on his left hand, and steered, and the nights passed over him like slow bright water, one, and another, and another, seventeen of them, and every dawn the sea was a little emptier behind him and a little nearer home ahead.
And on the eighteenth day, far off, low on the edge of the sea, something that was not water rose up out of the haze. Blue and dim and shadowed, no more at first than a smudge on the rim of the world, the way a shield lies dark on a misty plain when you see it from very far away, it lifted slowly out of the swell and stood there ahead of him. Land. The mountains of a country. The gentle kingdom the king of the gods had promised him, where kind people would take him in and carry him the last of the way home. Seventeen nights of steering, and there at last, at the very edge of seeing, was the shore. And the tired man at the steering oar, who had not let himself hope for anything in a very long time, felt his heart lift, just a little, the way you let a held breath go.
Chapter Eight. The Sea Remembers.
And it was exactly then, at that softest and most hopeful moment, with the shore in sight and the worst of the journey seemingly behind him, that the lord of the sea, far away at the other edge of the world, turned his head, and saw.
The fire promised you this at the very beginning of the night, and the fire keeps its promises, so hear it plainly now, and stay soft while you do, because the help is already on its way. The sea god had been away all this while, feasting among that distant blameless people out past the sunrise, which is the only reason the man had gotten as far as he had. Now, his feasting done, he was coming home across the sky, and from the high mountains at the far margin of the world he happened to look out over the water, and he saw, small and dark on the bright sea, a raft, and a man on it, near the shore of safety. And he knew him. The sea has a long memory, and this was the man who had blinded his son in a cave on a far island years before, and the old anger woke in him all at once, cold and total. So, he said to himself. The gods have changed their minds behind my back and mean to bring him home. Well. He is not home yet. And there is a great deal of sea between him and that shore. Let me give him his fill of trouble first.
And he took up his three pronged spear, and he gathered the clouds together, and he stirred up the sea. The fire will tell this the way it happens and no more, and no wave in it will be taller than the sentence it lives in. He roused all the winds at once, the east wind and the south wind and the hard north wind and the west, and drove them together against the little raft, and he pulled night down out of the sky in the middle of the day, so that the sun went out and the sea and the air went black together, and the great waves reared up on every side. And the man alone on his twenty trees felt his heart go to water, and for one moment, one honest human moment, his spirit broke, and he said to himself the bitter thing that frightened men say. Three times and four times blessed, he thought, were the men who died back there at Troy, in the daylight, on solid ground, with their friends all around them and their names remembered. If only I had died there too, on the day the fighting was thickest, then the whole army would have buried me, and my name would have been carried home. Instead it is my fate to be caught like this, alone, in the dark, with no one to see it and no one to tell it, and to be swallowed by a nameless sea in sight of the very shore that was to save me. That is a true thing a frightened man thinks, and the fire does not hide it from you. But hold the promise. Help is already in the water.
For a wave, a great one, struck the raft and spun it, and flung the steering oar from his hand, and the mast cracked, and it looked, for a breath, like the end. And in that very breath, rising up out of the wild grey swell beside him, light as a seabird settling on the water, came a small kind goddess.
Her name was Ino, and once, long ago, she had been a mortal woman, with a mortal woman's speech and a mortal woman's sorrows, and she had died into the sea and been given a new life there and a share of honor among the powers of the deep, and now she was called by another name, the White Goddess, a gentle spirit of the salt water who pities drowning men. She had seen him tossed there, and her heart went out to him, and she rose up and perched on the edge of the raft like a bird, and she spoke to him, quickly, over the noise of the wind, the way you would speak to someone you had only a moment to save.
Poor man, she said, why does the lord of the sea hate you so? But he will not kill you, however hard he tries. Now listen, and do exactly as I say, for you are no fool. Take off those heavy clothes the goddess dressed you in, and leave this raft to the winds, and swim. Swim for that shore with your own arms. And here. She unwound from beneath her own breast a veil, a band of shining immortal cloth, and she held it out to him. Take this. Tie it around your chest, beneath your arms, and while it is on you, you cannot drown, you cannot die, no matter how deep the water or how long the swim. And when your two hands touch dry land at last, untie it, and cast it back into the sea, well away from the shore, and turn your face away as you do. And with that she slipped back down into the heaving water and was gone under it like a diving bird, and the shining veil was in his hands.
He hesitated, being who he was, mistrusting the sudden gift, wondering if it were another trap. And then another great wave came and answered the question for him, and shattered the raft the way a strong wind scatters a heap of dry chaff and sends the straws flying every way, and all his twenty trees came apart at their joints and were gone. He caught one single timber, and got astride it a moment like a man on horseback, and stripped off the heavy clothes, and bound the White Goddess's veil around his chest, and threw his arms wide, and let go of the last plank, and gave himself to the sea, swimming.
And the sea did its worst, and its worst was not enough. Two days and two nights he was in the water, held up by the immortal veil, driven and rolled by the great swell, and many times in those two days his heart looked plainly at death and did not find it, because the veil would not let him sink, however the waves piled over him. It was a long ordeal, and the fire does not pretend it was a small one. But it was never, for one moment of it, a hopeless one. The safety line was tied around him the whole time. He could not drown. And you knew it, and he knew it, and even down in the cold and the dark and the endless heaving of it, that one certainty was there, like a hand held in the dark, so that what he had to do was not survive, which was already settled, but only endure, and go on, and keep his face toward the far invisible shore, for two days, and two nights, until the sea had finished saying what it had to say.
Chapter Nine. The River's Welcome.
And on the third morning, when the dawn came up gentle and rose colored over the water, the wind fell.
The grey eyed goddess had seen to it. She reached down and shut away the other winds and told them to lie still and sleep, and she roused up only one, a brisk clean north wind, and set it to smoothing the swell in front of the swimming man, laying the great waves down flat before him so that he could get in to the land alive. And the storm was simply over. That is how these things end, in the old songs, not with a last great struggle but with a stilling, a hand laid on the water, the anger going out of the sea the way anger goes out of anything at last when it has spent itself, leaving only the tiredness behind.
He lifted his head, and he saw the land close now, the dark woods on the hills, and his heart came up in him. But there was one danger left, and it was a plain one, and the fire will name it and then take it gently away, because it is solved not by strength but by asking. All along that stretch of coast the sea was pounding straight onto rock, great smooth cliffs with no beach and no cove and no shelter, the surf smashing white against the stone, and a swimmer flung onto rock like that would be broken on it. He saw it, and his knees went weak under him in the water, and for a moment he did not know what to do.
And then he did the wise thing, the thing that a lesser man in the water would never have thought to do. As he swam along the coast, looking, he came to a place where a river came down out of the land and ran into the sea, a fair flowing river with a smooth mouth and no rocks, and he saw that here, if anywhere, was a way in. And he prayed to it. He prayed to the river itself, to the god of that particular quiet water, the way the old world knew you could pray to the small kind powers of a place, the spirit of a spring, the spirit of a stream, the little gods with no grand temples who nonetheless can save a life.
Hear me, lord, he said, whoever you are. I have come to you as a man running from the sea, from the anger of the lord of the deep. Even the deathless gods honor a wandering man who comes to them as I come to you now, worn out, at the end of my strength, to your stream and to your knees. Have pity on me, lord. I am your suppliant. I have nothing left but the asking.
And the river heard him. At once the river god stilled his own current, and held back his flow, and made the water smooth and calm before the swimmer, and drew him gently in, out of the killing surf, into the safe quiet of the river mouth. And the man came in on that stilled water and felt the land under him at last, and crawled up out of the river onto the bank, and it was over. He had reached the shore. The fire told you at the very beginning of the night that he would, and here he is, ashore, alive, and the whole hard part of the story is now behind us, and behind you, and everything from here to the end is rest.
He was spent, wholly spent, the way you can only be after a very great effort that is finally, truly finished. He knelt there on the riverbank with the water running from him and his breath coming back slowly, and for a while he could not move and could not speak, the sea had worn him down so far. But he was whole. Nothing was broken. And when a little strength came back into him, he remembered the one thing the White Goddess had told him to do. He loosed the shining veil from around his chest, and he let it fall into the seaward flowing water, and the river carried it back down to the sea, and away out in the swell the goddess reached up and took it back into her own hands, hers again, its kindness done. And then the man turned away from the water, and lay down in the reeds and the deep grass by the river, and he bent down and kissed the good dark earth, the grain giving earth, the solid ground, the plain dry land that does not heave and does not drown, and he lay there a moment with his lips against it, giving thanks in the oldest way there is, simply for the fact of it, simply for being alive and ashore. The road out from the giant's cave had been long. Here, on a riverbank at the edge of a kind country, it had run at last into stillness.
Chapter Ten. The Bed of Leaves.
He could not stay by the river though, and his tired mind, even worn as thin as it was, knew it, and turned over the problem the way it had turned over every problem all his life, and found the answer.
For the night was coming on, and by a river, in the open, the cold gathers. The chill breath comes up off the water in the small hours, and the frost settles in the low ground by a stream, and a man lying exhausted and unsheltered by the water through a whole night might have the last of his strength drawn out of him by the cold and not wake. He thought it through, lying there. He looked up the slope, away from the river, to where a wood stood on the higher ground, dry and dark and sheltered, and he understood that up there, under the trees, was where a wise man would sleep. So he gathered himself, and got up, and went up from the river into the wood to find his bed.
And what he found, the fire has been waiting all night to show you, and it will show it to you softly, because you have earned it, and because it is one of the tenderest small pictures in all his wandering. He found, growing up together from one spot of ground, close as two hands folded, a pair of olive trees. And they were not the same. One was a wild olive, the tough thorny kind that grows where it will and answers to no one, and the other was a true olive, a grafted, planted, cultivated tree, the kind a farmer sets in the ground on purpose and tends for its fruit. Wild and planted, thorn and orchard tree, and they had grown up so tightly intertwined, branch through branch, that they made a single close roof, and no wet wind could blow through them, and no blaze of the sun could pierce them, and no rain could get down through their leaves to the ground beneath. A little dry sheltered room, made of two trees that had chosen each other.
And the fire says the quiet thing, the thing you are already feeling, and then it lets it be. Two olive trees, one wild and one planted, grown together so close that nothing could come between them, sheltering a tired man through the night. It is a marriage of trees. And the man who lay down under them was the same man who once, long ago and far away, on his own island, built the whole heart of his house around a single living olive, and made from its rooted trunk the one corner of a bed that could never be moved, to hold a marriage that would not move either. He does not know these two trees. He has never seen this shore. But something in him, lying down under the twined olives at the edge of the world, is being sheltered by the very shape of the thing he is trying so hard to get home to. The fire will not press it. It only wanted you to see it, and to feel it lay itself gently over the sleeper like the leaves he is about to pull over himself, and then it lets it go.
For under those trees the ground was deep in fallen leaves, years of them, drifted and heaped, more leaves than two or three men could have needed to keep warm through the worst storm of the hardest winter. And when he saw them his tired heart was glad, the way you are glad, coming in cold and soaked, at the plain sight of a made bed. He scraped together a great wide heap of them with his own hands, and he lay down in the very middle of it, and he pulled the dry leaves over himself, over his legs and his body and up to his chin, and burrowed down into the middle of the drift until only his worn face was left to the air, warm at last, and dry, and hidden, and safe. On solid unmoving ground, under a roof of two trees, on the near edge of a kind country, with the whole terrible sea finally behind him, and nothing left in the world that he had to do.
Chapter Eleven. The Dream Sent to a Princess.
And while he sank down into the leaves and into sleep, the grey eyed goddess, who had watched over all of it, was not finished being kind, and she went, quietly, that same night, across the dark to arrange the morning.
For the kind country he had washed up on had a city in it, a fair city of a seafaring people, and in that city was a palace, and in the palace, asleep in her own room, was the young daughter of the king. She was a girl on the very edge of being a woman, lovely and unmarried, with suitors beginning to come around, and she slept that night with no idea in the world that a storm tossed stranger lay in a heap of leaves down by the river, or that her own quiet life was about to open out into the largest story of her time. She only slept, the way you sleep at that age, deep and sound, with two maids asleep by the doorposts and the doors shut fast.
And into that closed dark room the goddess came, soft as a breath of air, and she leaned over the sleeping girl. She did not come as herself, terrible and bright, for that is not how you speak to a sleeping child. She took the shape of one of the girl's own friends, a girl of her own age that she loved, and in that friendly borrowed shape she bent close and laid a small dream into the princess's sleep, the way you might lay a folded note where someone will find it in the morning.
The dream was about laundry. That is the whole gentle wonder of it, and the fire loves it. Not a dream of the stranger, not a dream of destiny, nothing to trouble the girl or wake her with a start. Only a soft ordinary dream about washing day. How are you sleeping so carelessly, the dream friend chided her, fondly, while all your beautiful clothes lie unwashed and put away in the chests? Your wedding cannot be so very far off now. You will want fine bright clothes for it, for yourself, and for the ones who will lead you to your husband's house. That is how a girl builds a good name in a town, by seeing to such things. So in the morning, as soon as it is light, go and ask your father for the mule wagon, and load up all the household linen, and drive down to the washing pools by the river, and wash everything clean in the good running water. I will come with you, and help, and we will make a day of it.
And then the dream lifted away, and the goddess with it, back to the high halls, and the girl slept on, with the little errand tucked now into her sleeping mind, ready to wake with her in the morning and feel entirely like her own idea. And that was all. That was the whole of what needed doing that night. A worn man asleep in the leaves on the riverbank. A young girl asleep in her bed in the town, with a gentle plan for washing day laid quietly into her dreams. And a road between them, a river road, that the morning would open. Everything that had to happen tomorrow was already arranged, and arranged by kindness, and there was nothing left for anyone, in the palace or under the trees or here at this fire, to do tonight but sleep.
Chapter Twelve. Goodnight. And the Bed of Leaves Under the Two Olives.
So let the fire show you the sleeper one last time, and then let it lay its own oldest image over him, and bank itself down for the night.
There is a thing a careful countryman does, out at the far edge of his land, when the day is done and there is no other house anywhere near his own, no neighbor's hearth to borrow fire from in the morning. Before he sleeps, he takes a single glowing brand from his fire, and he buries it, gently, deep in the soft grey ash, and heaps the ash over it, and leaves it so all night. And in that dark warm hollow under the ash, the ember does not go out, and it does not blaze up, it only keeps, quietly, hour after hour, holding the seed of fire safe until morning, so that when he wakes he has only to breathe on it and his whole fire comes back to life.
That is exactly how the man lay, buried in his leaves under the two olive trees. That is Homer's own picture of him, and the fire at this beach bows to it, because it is the oldest ancestor of every fire in every one of these stories, a coal kept alive under ash through the dark. He lay heaped over in the dry leaves, holding his own last warmth in the middle of them, the seed of himself kept safe, banked down, waiting for the morning to breathe him back to life. And the grey eyed goddess, seeing him settled, poured sleep over his eyes, the deepest and the sweetest sleep, the kind that unknots a man all the way down, so that he might rest at last from all his hard labor, and let go, and be, for one whole night, simply a warm thing sleeping in the leaves, with the worst of everything behind him.
The river murmured beside him in the dark. The two olives held their close roof over him. And the sea, out beyond the river mouth, having taken at last everything it had come to take and finished its long argument, went quiet, and said only its one soft word against the shore, over and over, the way it says it here, beyond this fire, tonight.
And here the old singer lets his hands rest, for the hard part of the whole long road is done, and there will be no storm again.
The fire before us is low now. It has done its work. Look how it has settled to a bed of warm coals, glowing softly, banked for the night, the way the sleeper is banked in his leaves, kept and keeping. The tide has come up close and kind while we talked, higher on the sand than it stood when we began, and the beach is dim, and the sparks go up one at a time and join the old stars and are gone.
You do not have to carry any of it. Not the seven years, not the axe, not the twenty trees, not the star on the left hand, not the storm. Let it all stay here by the fire with the singer, where he keeps such things, safe. He will hold the whole quiet island for you through the night, and the raft, and the veil, and the leaves, and it will all still be here, whenever you should want it again.
Far out on the dark water, if you look for it, there is a single sail, waiting at the edge of morning for a wind that has not yet come. It stands a long way out tonight, small and faint, harder to see than it was on the earlier nights, the way things are hard to see across the deepest water. Do not strain after it. It is only waiting, as it has waited all along, and it knows how to wait, and so, now, do you.
And there is a small soft thing coming, the singer says, and he says it gently, the way you tell a child there is something good tomorrow, so that they can sleep on it. In the morning, on that riverbank, a girl is going to come down to the water with a wagon full of washing, and she is going to find the sea's last castaway asleep in the leaves, and be brave, where everyone with her runs. And after that, the last strange kingdom of the whole long road, a garden that bears in every season, and a blind singer in a bright hall, and a name that has been hidden for a very long time finally spoken out loud. But none of that is tonight. Tonight is only the leaves, and the river, and the rest that a good man earned the hard way and has finally, wholly, come into.
Rest now. The man is safe on the solid ground. The island is behind him. The story is kept.
The tide is in. The stars are old and kind. Your breathing has found the slow going out and easy coming back of the waves, and it will go on all night without you, faithfully, like everything else that loves you.
Sleep well, traveler.
Goodnight.