Welcome to The Sleeping Almanac.
Tonight, the hardest sea on the whole long road home. The singers in the flowering meadow, whose song no man has ever heard and sailed away from. The narrow water between a smoking cliff and a pool that drinks the sea three times a day and hands it back. The green island where the cattle of the Sun graze and never grow old, and the one rule is to keep your hands off what is not yours. A man passes all of it, some beaten and some only endured, for there are things on the sea no cleverness can beat, that can only be gone through. And when the water has taken all it was owed, it turns strangely gentle, and carries one man, alone, nine quiet days, to the softest shore it owns. Stay with it, and you will hear the thing this fire has told since the first night, that home was always in the prophecy too.
There is a beach at the edge of the world, and on it there is a fire.
It is the same fire. If you have sat here before, welcome back, and your place in the sand is where you left it. And if this is your first night at this fire, be welcome too, for the singer never begins a story that will leave a newcomer behind. By the fire sits the old singer, his hands worn and brown on his knees, his voice low and worn smooth, like a step that many feet have crossed. Last time, he says, I took you down to the grey edge of the world, and we sat with old friends past all harm, and came away with a map, and one warning. Tonight I will sing you the water that map was drawn for.
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, the way the world feels when you are almost asleep and perfectly safe. Close your eyes if they want to close. If you drift, the singer will go on without you, and will not mind. Out here, drifting is only another way of listening.
And one thing, whispered like a promise across the fire. There is more loss in tonight's story than in any night before it, and the singer will not hide it, and will not let it reach across the water to where you lie. Twice the sea takes what it wants. In the narrow water, a creature in the cliff takes six men from the benches, the six best, and they die. And at the end, in a storm promised long ago, the ship goes down, and all the crew are drowned, the old companions of ten years. The fire will tell you both things plainly, in a low voice, will not paint them, and will mourn them. Nothing here will startle you. The hard things are said and set down, and then the water turns kind, and the night ends in rest. You can trust this beach. That is what it was lit for.
The old singer turns a piece of driftwood in the coals. It settles. A few sparks go up and join the stars and are gone.
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 at this fire will be waiting for you when you need it, and the rest of the long way home will find you easily. 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 Shore Lore of the Goddess.
Begin on a bright morning on a wooded island, at the fire of a friend, in the last quiet hour before the hardest sailing of a man's life.
The island was Aiaia, and the friend was the goddess Circe, and you may remember them both, or you may be meeting them now for the first time. There was a house of dressed stone in a clearing in the woods, with a great loom in it that sang all day under a goddess's hands, and wolves and mountain lions lay about the yard as gentle as farm dogs, and the man who had come there an enemy a year before was leaving it now a friend. He had gone down to the country of the dead and come back, which few living men have ever done, and he had a map in his head now of the whole road home. But a map is only lines until someone who knows the water sits you down and tells you what the lines mean. And so, on his last morning, the goddess took him a little apart from the others, and sat him down, and told him the sea the way an old sailor tells it at dusk, slowly, in order, leaving nothing out.
Hear it the way he heard it, the singer says, and do not try to hold it. You are not being handed a chart to keep. You are being rocked by a voice naming the shapes of a coast, and you may float on the naming, and let the shapes drift by, for the fire will bring each of them round again in its own time.
First, she said, you will come to the singers in the meadow. They sit in a flowering field close by the shore, and they sing, and no man who hears that song ever rows away from it. He turns his ship toward the voices, and he never sees his wife or his children or his own roof again. He sits down in the flowers and forgets the sea, and forgets his name, and stays, and the meadow around the singers is white with the bones of the men who stopped to listen, the grass grown up through them, and the singing going on over them as if they were not there. So put wax in the ears of your crew, she said, that not one of them can hear a note of it, and row hard past. And if you yourself long to hear it, and you will long to hear it, then have your men bind you upright to the mast, hand and foot, and tell them beforehand that whatever you do, however you plead and command and struggle, they are only to bind you tighter, and row. She knew her man. She did not tell him he would wish to hear it. She only told him how to want it, and live.
Then, she said, the sea gives you two roads, and you must choose, and I cannot choose for you. One way runs among the wandering rocks, where the swell drives against the stone and the stone throws the sea back at itself, and the spray stands up off the water like smoke, and nothing that floats has ever come through there whole, save one famous ship in the old days, and she was lifted past the stones by a goddess who loved her captain. Do not take that road. Take the other. But the other is narrow, and it has its own price, and I will not lie to you about the price.
For the narrow water runs between two cliffs, close enough that an arrow could carry across from the one to the other. In the higher cliff, halfway up, dark and turned to the west, there is a cave too high for any bowshot to reach, and always trailing smoke, and a creature lives in it, and no sailor has ever passed below and been able to say his ship went by unharmed. Do not think you can fight her. She is no mortal thing that a spear can answer, but a deathless evil, and if you halt to arm and stand against her she will only reach again and take more of your men. Do not arm. Row past with all the strength that is in you, and call as you go upon her own mother, a power of the deep, to hold her daughter back from a second rush, and be content, she said, and here her voice was very gentle, to lose a few, and save the many. And in the lower cliff there grows a great wild fig tree, dark with leaves, and under its roots the sea itself has a mouth, that sucks the black water down three times a day, and spits it back up three times, and no ship must ever be over that mouth when it draws its breath, for not even a god could save you from it then.
You cannot beat either of these things, she said. You can only go by. And here is the one hard wisdom of the whole night, and the fire wants you to have it early, and keep it under your cheek. Some things on the sea are not beaten. They are passed. All a man's life he is taught to meet a trouble and master it, to set his shoulder to it and push until it moves, and it is good teaching, and it is true for most of the troubles a life contains. But not for all of them. There are a few, a very few, that will not move for any pushing, that are simply larger than you are and always will be, and the brave thing before those, the only thing, the hardest thing of all for a man like this to learn, is to keep your hand off your sword, and hold your course, and go through, and let the water be larger than you, and come out the far side still sailing. He would spend the rest of the night learning it. So, in a way, will you.
And last, she said, beyond the narrow water you will come to a green island, and you will hear the cattle before you ever see the land. They are the cattle of the Sun, and his sheep, and they are like no herds you have ever seen, and I will tell you of them when you reach them. Only this now. Whatever else you do, whatever hunger finds you there, do not touch them. Leave them be, and hard as the road will be, you may all still come home. But harm them, she said, and here she looked at him a long moment, and I tell you plainly what I see. I see your ship broken, and your men in the water, and you yourself coming home late, and alone, and a stranger in your own hall.
He listened to all of it the way he listened to everything, without flinching and without pretending, turning each shape over in his mind and setting it down where he could find it again. And he thought, though he did not say it, that he had heard this last warning once already, only days before, in the grey country of the dead, from an old seer with a golden staff who had told him the very same thing, the cattle of the Sun, the one rule, the one danger above all the rest. Two voices now, the living goddess at her morning fire and the dead prophet at the edge of the world, had named him the same single peril out of the whole wide sea, the same one thing he must not do. When a thing is told to you twice, from two sides of the world, by the living and by the dead, a wise man writes it in the very front of his mind, where he cannot help but see it every hour. He wrote it there. And then the morning was over, and it was time to go down to the ship.
Chapter Two. The Wind She Sent.
There was only the one ship now.
The singer says it plainly, so that you will feel the size of it, and then he will let it rest. Once there had been twelve. Twelve black ships had gone out together from a little island kingdom of stone and goats and grey light, loaded with grain and bronze and men whose fathers he knew, men whose weddings he had danced at, whose quarrels he had settled. And the long road home had taken them, one loss at a time, a shore here and a storm there, until only this single hull was left, drawn up on the beach of Aiaia in the morning sun, and the men who could crowd onto its benches were now all the men he had in the whole world. He did not dwell on it, going down to the water that morning, and neither will the fire. But he knew the arithmetic, the way he knew everything, and he carried it quietly, the way you carry a small stone in a pocket, not looking at it, always feeling it there.
They ran the ship down into the shallows, and stepped the mast in its box, and set the white sail, and took their places along the benches at the oars. And Circe, who was a friend now, and a friend to the very end, did a friend's last kindness. She sent them a wind. A good wind, a following wind, a fair companion for a sail, that came up over the stern and filled the canvas and held it drawing full, so that the ship needed no rowing at all, but leaned into the water and went, steady and true, out past the last green headland of Aiaia and onto the open sea. A fair wind is a thing you cannot buy, and cannot earn, and cannot command, the one gift on all the sea that must be given, and this one she gave them freely, and they sat with their oars drawn up and shipped and let it carry them, and for a little while the sailing was pure ease, one small ship on the wide bright water, going exactly where it was pointed, asking nothing of anyone.
And because he was who he was, the captain did not spend that easy hour resting. He spent it getting ready. For he knew that the first hard thing was coming, the singers in the meadow, and he knew the goddess had told him how to pass it, and he was not a man who waited until the danger was upon him before he made his plan. He stood up amidships where all of them could see him, and he told them the truth, or as much of the truth as tired men can use, for he had learned by now the exact weight a crew can carry, and would not load them past it. Friends, he said, it is not right that only one or two of us should know what the goddess told me on the island. So I will tell you, and then we will all go on knowing, and no man among us will be taken by surprise. Ahead of us there are singers in a meadow by the shore, and their song is death to any man who hears it. She has told me how we pass them. Your ears I will stop with wax, so that you cannot hear a single note. But I myself she has bidden to listen, and so you will bind me to the mast, standing, hand and foot, with good stout rope, and this is the thing you must fix in your minds now, while your minds are still your own. If I beg you to let me go, you will not let me go. If I command you, if I threaten you, if I weep, you will not loose one turn of the rope. You will tie me tighter, and you will row.
They did not like it, and the fire will not pretend they did, for it is a fearful thing to be told you must hold your own captain against his will. But they trusted him, for he had brought them a very long way through a very hard world, and if he said a thing was the way through, then it was the way through. And here the singer will slow right down and show you the making of it, small step by small step, because it is a quiet homely craft, this bit, and there are few things gentler to hear in all the world than the careful making of a small thing by patient hands in a warm and unhurried hour. He took a great round wheel of beeswax from the ship's stores, pale gold, the color of this very fire. And he cut it into pieces with the bronze edge of his sword. And he worked the pieces in his two strong hands, kneading them the way a baker leans his weight into dough, turning and folding and pressing. And the wax that had been hard and cold grew soft between his fingers, and then softer, warmed by the working of his hands and by the bright steady weight of the sun coming straight down on it out of a clear sky. And when it was soft as new bread he went to his men one by one, and pressed the warm wax gently into their ears, filling them, sealing them close, until each man in turn sat in a silence as deep and complete as the bottom of a well, hearing nothing at all, not the sea, not the wind in the sail, not the man beside him, not his own name if you had shouted it. And when they were all sealed, the two strongest, who could still feel his hands upon them though they could hear nothing, took a coil of good rope and bound their captain upright to the tall mast, his back against the wood, his hands behind him, the rope going round and round his chest and again about his feet, snug and sure, and they tested it twice, and made it fast. And he stood there tied to his own mast, and looked ahead at the water, and waited, the only pair of open ears on the whole bright sea.
And then, out ahead of them, the wind that Circe had sent them dropped. It did not gust, and it did not veer or turn. It simply stopped, all at once, the way a held breath stops, and the white sail that had been drawing full went slack and fell in against the mast, and the little ship lost her way and slowed and settled, and the whole surface of the sea went flat, and shining, and utterly still. Some god had smoothed that water like a hand smoothing a cloth, so that the song would carry far and clear across it. The men felt the ship come off the wind and lose her drive, and they unshipped the long oars and ran them out, and bent their backs, and began to row across the flat and silent calm, in their sealed and perfect silence, toward the low flowering shore that was coming up green ahead, while their captain stood bound at the mast above them, and listened, and waited for the first note.
Chapter Three. The Meadow of the Singers.
The calm lay on the water like poured oil, and the low green shore drew slowly nearer under the still bright sky, and then the man at the mast heard it begin.
It came to him first across the flat water the way the smell of a garden comes to you over a high wall, before you have seen so much as a single flower, and you stop where you are on the road, and lift your head. A voice, and then more than one voice, women singing somewhere in the meadow, and the singer at our fire will not try to give you the song itself, for no living voice that was ever made can carry it, and it is not, in any case, a thing you should want to hear. He will tell you only what it did, and what it offered, so that you will understand the ropes, and be glad of them, and go on sleeping safe behind them. The song was the most beautiful thing the man had ever heard, or would ever hear in the whole of his long life, and it did not knock politely at the doors of him and wait. It went straight past his cleverness, and past his memory, and past his long hard patience, past every wall and gate he had ever built inside himself, straight down to the deep quick of him, and took hold, and pulled. And it knew his name. That was the terrible part, the part the fire wants you to feel from the safety of the sand. The singers called to him across the water by his own name, and bade him stop his ship and come near and listen a while, and they told him, singing, that no man had ever yet rowed past them without staying, for they knew all things that are.
They knew, they sang, everything that had happened in the long war at Troy, every grief and every glory of those ten hard years he had lived through with his own body and could not, to this day, stop dreaming of in the dark. They would sing it all back to him, they promised, and make sense of it at last. And more than that. They knew everything that happens anywhere at all on the whole wide fruitful earth, all of it, every hidden thing, the answer to every question a curious man has ever lain awake and ached over in the small hours. Stay, the song said, only stay, and come and sit among the flowers, and you will know it all, and nothing, ever again, will be hidden from you.
Understand what was in that offer, the singer says, before you are too quick to think you would have done better than he did, tied to that mast. It was not a general bait, cast wide for any passing fool. It was made for him, exactly, cut to the shape of his own particular soul the way a key is cut to a lock. To another man, a hungrier or a lonelier or a wearier man, they would have sung of something else, of gold heaped up, or of a woman's arms, or simply of rest, of never having to strive again. But to this man, the most curious mind that ever crossed the water, the man who had once put out his own bright life on a gamble just to see whether a clever thing would work, they sang the one bait in all the world he could not laugh off and row past with a shrug. Everything. All knowledge. The whole war explained, and the whole world explained, and no more not knowing, no more of that small constant ache of the unanswered question, never again. And he wanted it. The fire will tell you plainly, because it is the truth, and the truth is the thing this fire keeps. He wanted it with his whole body. His heart leapt up in his chest and strained out across the water toward the voices, and he tried to speak to his men, to tell them to turn the ship in, to land, to stop, only to stop, and because his hands were bound fast behind him he could do only the one thing left to him. He worked his face at them. He frowned, and jerked his head toward the shore, and knotted his brows, the whole of his face begging them, let me go, put in to land, loose these ropes, I must, I must hear the rest of it.
And his men, who could hear nothing at all in their sealed silence, only saw their captain writhing and straining at the mast with his face twisted, and knew at once, exactly, what it meant, for he had told them plainly it would happen, and had told them what to do. And two of them stood up from the benches, calm in their great deafness, and came to him, two men whose names the old song keeps, Perimedes and Eurylochus, and instead of loosing him they took up more rope, and bound him tighter still, more turns around his chest and the mast, drawing him snug against the wood so he could not so much as lean toward the shore. And then they went back to their benches, and took up their oars, and leaned their backs into the work, and rowed. And the little ship went on across the flat and shining water, on past the green meadow and its beautiful and terrible voices, and did not turn in, not by a hand's breadth. And little by little the low shore began to fall away behind them, and the song began to grow fainter, reaching out after the ship across the widening water, thinning on the still air, until at last it was only a single thread of sound, and then not even that, and there was nothing at all over the sea but the steady knock of the oars in their leather loops, and the wide flat shining emptiness, and the quiet.
When they were well and truly past, and safe, one of the crew kept his eyes on his captain, watching for the sign they had agreed upon before the wax went in. And the captain gave it at last, no longer a wild jerk of the head, but a slow calm nod, himself again. And they came to him then, and took the soft wax first out of their own ears, so that they could hear his voice, and then they loosed the many turns of the rope and let him down from the mast. And he stood a moment on the deck, rubbing the deep red marks the rope had pressed into his arms and his chest, and he looked back once, only once, at the low green shore already sinking away behind them, and he said nothing for a long while. He had heard it. He was the only man in all the long history of that sea who had ever heard the song of the singers and rowed away from it living, and he had bought that one strange victory by being tied like a captured slave to his own mast, stripped for one hour of all his power, unable to lift a single finger to save himself from what he most wanted. And there is a lesson folded up small inside that, the singer says, and he will hand it to you softly now, across the fire, and let you turn it over slowly in your hands as you drift.
For there are two kinds of singing in this world. There is the kind that holds you so that you cannot leave. It sings you in toward the rocks, and the flowers, and the white bones lying in the grass, and it calls what it is doing knowledge, or love, or truth, but the thing it truly wants is only to keep you, to have you sit down and never rise again, to make of you one more still shape in the meadow with the song going on over your head forever. And there is the other kind of singing, the older and the kinder kind, the kind that holds you so that you can let go. It sings you gently down and away from the hard bright day, and it asks nothing of you at all, not your staying, not even your listening, and it loosens every knot in you one by one, and lets you drift out at last wherever the soft tide of your own sleep would carry you. The song in the meadow that day was the first kind. It bound a man in order to keep him. This fire, and the low voice at it, is the second kind. It sings, it has only ever sung, in order to loose you. And you may judge for yourself, before this night is over, which of the two kinds of singing you would rather have near you at the tired end of a long day, and which one, exactly, it is that you are hearing now.
Chapter Four. The Choice of Roads.
Ahead of them now, though they could not yet see it, the sea came to its very narrowest place on the whole road home, and there the two roads that Circe had named to him parted, one to the left hand and one to the right.
He had chosen between them already, in his own mind, back on the bright morning at the goddess's fire, the way he chose almost everything, quietly and in advance, long before the moment of choosing actually arrived. There was the road that ran in among the wandering rocks, where the sea is never once still, where the great swell drives in against the stone and the stone hurls the whole weight of it straight back, and the spray stands up off the water like the smoke of a burning city, and the very birds cannot cross there in safety. Even the shy grey doves, the goddess had told him, the timid doves that carry the gods their food up to high heaven, cannot fly through that gap unharmed, for the smooth rock always snatches one of them out of the air as they go, and the father of the gods must send another dove up to make the number whole again. Think of that a moment, the fire says, the way he must have thought of it in the dark. A road so hungry that heaven itself pays it a toll, one small dove at a time, forever. Only a single ship built by mortal hands has ever run those rocks in all the years of the world and come out the far side whole, one famous vessel of the old days, and she was not saved by any skill of her crew, but was lifted bodily past the stone by a goddess who loved her captain, the way a mother lifts a small child over a threshold too high for its legs. No goddess, Circe had told him plainly, will be lifting you. So he steered away from that road, and left it out there at the edge of the story, unsailed, the road not taken, and the fire is glad to leave it there too. He steered instead for the other road, for the narrow water between the two cliffs, the road that could be passed, and had its price.
But as they drew on toward it, and the sea ahead began to change its color and its mood, and a low steady booming came to them across the water like something enormous breathing, and a haze of spray showed up ahead where no honest land had any business smoking, the men grew afraid. They heard the roar, and they saw the mist standing up off the sea, and the oars faltered and dragged in their hands, and the ship lost her way and swung, because frightened men at the oars cannot pull together, and a ship is only as brave as the weakest bench in her. And their captain, seeing it, did the thing he always did, the thing that was as much a part of him as his cleverness, and mattered more. He went among them, from bench to bench, down the whole length of the rocking ship, and he steadied them one at a time with his voice and his hand on their shoulders. Friends, he said, we are not men who have never met trouble before. We are not children. Have we not seen worse than a little noise and smoke? This is no worse than the cave of the giant, where I was shut up in the dark with a monster, and we came out of that, all of us, by my wits and by your strong backs together, and one day we will sit by a fire at home and make a good story of this one too. Only do exactly as I tell you, and trust me one more time. Bend to your oars, and pull, and you there, at the steering oar, keep her hard away from the smoke and the surf on that side, hug the other cliff close, and do not for anything let her wander out into the middle of the channel, or you will drown us all.
That much he told them, and it was true, and it heartened them, and they took up the stroke again. But there was one thing he did not tell them, and the fire will tell you now what it was, and why he kept it back, and will forgive him for it, and ask you to forgive him too, from the warm safety of the sand. The goddess had warned him of the creature up in the high cave, the one that would reach down and take some of his men as they passed below her rock, and she had told him plainly that there was no defending against her, that she could not be killed by any weapon that men carry, that if he stopped to arm and fight he would only lose more of his crew to her second reaching, and that the one mercy, the one wise course, was to row hard and fast beneath her and lose the few and save the many, and to call as he went on her own mother, a power of the deep sea, to hold her back. He had heard every word of it. And he chose not to tell his men that the creature existed at all, so that they would not look up in terror at that black smoking cave and drop their oars and doom the whole ship in the very moment they most needed to row. That was wisdom, and it was mercy of a hard kind, and it cost him, because it meant he alone stood there knowing what was coming, and could tell no one, and share it with no one.
And then, having been so wise, he did the one thing the goddess had told him not to do, and the fire loves him for it, truly, because it is the most human thing in the whole long night. He could not stand it. He simply could not bring himself to go through that narrow water with his two hands empty, waiting for something to come down out of the dark and take his men while he stood by and did nothing at all. Every counsel of wisdom he had was overruled, in the end, by something older and less clever and much harder to argue with. So he forgot the goddess's hard command, or set it aside, and he put on his bronze. He buckled on his armor, and took up his two long spears, one in each hand, and he climbed up forward onto the half deck at the very bow of the ship, and he stood there, braced against the pitch of her, watching the smoking cliff above, ready to strike at the creature the very instant it showed itself. He knew, even as he did it, that it was useless. Some cool clear part of the cleverest man in the world knew perfectly well that the goddess had told him the exact truth, and that no spear ever forged could touch what lived up in that cave. And he armed himself anyway, and stood his watch anyway, and stared up at the dark anyway, because there is a kind of love that simply cannot bear to face the loss of the people in its care with idle and empty hands, even when idle hands are the only thing wisdom allows, even when the standing and the watching can change nothing at all. Even he, the fire says softly. Even the man who out planned every hall and every giant and every king could not out plan this one strait, and in the end he did not really try to. He only stood up there at the bow in his useless flashing bronze, and kept his watch, and let his heart do the single thing that was left for it to do, which was to be there, looking, when the moment came.
Chapter Five. The Toll of the Strait.
So they rowed at last into the narrow water, and the fire will take you through it once, plainly, and will not take you through it a second time, and will hold your hand the whole way.
On the one side of them rose the lower of the two cliffs, and out of its face leaned the great wild fig tree the goddess had named, dark and thick with leaves, its branches trailing down toward the water. And beneath its roots, in the base of that cliff, the sea had its terrible mouth. And as the ship came level with it, the mouth drew in its breath, and the black water all around began to go down, and down, sucked away into the deep in a huge roaring funnel, spinning, until the bare grey sand showed at the very bottom of the sea where no sand should ever be seen. And the men who looked at it went pale to the very lips, and well they might, for it is a fearful thing beyond most things to see the naked floor of the ocean laid open like an emptied grave, and to know that your own small ship is riding on the lip of it. Three times in every day it did that, the goddess had said, drank the whole sea down and gave it back again, and they had timed their passage against it as best they could, watching for the moment of its breathing out. And still it roared beside them as they passed, and still the ship shuddered and slewed in the great pull of it, and the man at the steering oar set his whole weight and all his strength against the sweep to hold her off, hugging the far cliff, keeping her clear of that drinking mouth, exactly as his captain had told him to. And every eye aboard was on it. That was the thing. Every eye aboard was turned toward the swallowing pool, watching the water fall away, braced against the roar, willing the ship past.
And that was the trap the whole strait had been built to spring, and it could not be avoided, and the captain had known it could not, and that was the knowledge he had carried alone. For while every last man in the ship had his face turned the one way, toward the pool, no one at all was watching the high dark smoking cave in the other cliff. And out of that cave, in silence, in the one unguarded moment when all their faces were turned the wrong way, the creature reached down over the passing ship. And it took six men. It took them from the benches, from among the rowers at their oars, the six strongest hands aboard, the best of all of them, and it lifted them away, up and into the dark of the cliff, and they died there, and the fire will tell you that they died and will not tell you the manner of it, for the manner of it is not a thing you are meant to carry down into your sleep, and it would only lie in you like a cold stone all night and do no good to anyone, least of all to them. Six men. Six of the companions who had rowed this same ship through the giant's sea, and off the witch's shore, and up out of the very country of the dead, taken in a single heartbeat, in the one place in all the world where their captain could neither prevent it, nor avenge it, nor even, at the last, so much as reach them. He had stood the whole passage at the bow in his flashing bronze with his two spears ready, and he never once struck a blow, because there was no blow in all the world to strike, and it was over before ever he could have thrown, and the goddess had told him at her fire that it would be so, and it was so, exactly.
He kept their names. He carried them the rest of his life. And the fire keeps their names too, in the place where it keeps such things, and it does not say them aloud tonight, for names spoken out over deep dark water in the middle of the night can become a grief, and this is a night for the setting down of griefs, not for the taking of them up. Six men. That is the toll of the narrow water, the toll it takes from everyone who passes, and the old song does not soften it by so much as a word, and neither will this fire, for to soften it would be to lie about them, and they are owed better than a lie. They had come so far. They were so very nearly through. And the strait took its six, the way it takes its six from all who dare to pass it, and there is no passing it for less, and the man who had brought them there knew that better than any man alive, and knowing it did not make the loss weigh one ounce less in his hands.
But hold now, the fire says, hold fast to the promise it made you at the very start of the night. That is the whole of the hard thing in the narrow water, and it is behind you now, and it will not come again. The ship came through. The creature does not follow beyond her own rock, and the pool cannot reach past its own cliff, and the two dark cliffs fell away astern of them, and the water widened out ahead, and opened, and calmed, and there was clean open sea before the bow again. The men rowed on in a long silence, the way sailors have always rowed after such a thing, not speaking of it, each one bent low over his own oar with his own grief held down tight inside him where it could not spread from man to man and unman the ship. And their captain came down at last from the bow, and put off his heavy useless bronze, and laid down his two spears that had never been thrown, and he took up an oar himself and sat down among the benches, and pulled with them, stroke for stroke, and that was his mourning, and theirs together, the plain hard silent work of the living going on because it must. And the sea that had taken six of them widened out empty and kind under a long westering sun, and there was nothing worse coming now that any man could fight, for from here to the end of the whole night there is no more startle anywhere in the story, none, only the slow and certain keeping of an old, old promise, and the fire will walk beside you through every step of it, close, with a low and steady voice, so that you need never once be afraid.
Chapter Six. The Green Island of the Sun.
They heard the island a long time before they ever saw it.
Out across the wide evening water, while the land was still only the faintest green line low under the setting sun, there came drifting to them a sound that every man aboard knew in his bones, knew from the fields and the farms of his own far home that he had not seen in twenty years. Cattle. The lowing of cattle in a meadow at the close of the day, that soft, heavy, contented sound, and woven under it the higher, gentler bleating of sheep coming down to fold, drifting to them out over the empty sea, homely, and peaceful, and unspeakably strange to hear so far from any coast that any living man had ever set upon a chart. And their captain heard it, and his heart went cold and small in him, because he alone knew exactly what it was he was hearing. This was the green island the goddess had warned him of at her fire, and the dead seer had warned him of at the edge of the world, the two of them with one voice. This was the last named danger on the whole long road, the one they had both set above every other. And here was the cruelty of it, the trap folded inside the trap. It did not look like a danger at all. It looked like home. It sounded, across that darkening water, exactly like home, like the evening of a good day in a green safe country, and that was the whole of the snare.
The cattle of the Sun, the singer says, and now he will tell you of them the way the oldest songs tell of them, slowly, in a quiet count, so that you may feel in the rhythm of the telling how they were no ordinary beasts of any earthly field, and so that you may float on the naming of them and let it rock you. There were seven herds of cattle grazing on that island, and seven flocks of sheep, and fifty head in every single herd, and fifty in every single flock. And they never bred, and they never died. No calf was ever born among them, not once in all the ages, and no old cow ever stumbled and fell in the grass, for they stood entirely outside of time, the Sun's own creatures, as many now, this evening, as they had been on the very first morning of the made world, and as many as they would still be on its very last. You may picture their coats the deep glowing red of the low sun at its setting, and their long horns the bright gold of the high sun at noon, though the old song itself never names their color. And two herdswomen kept them, two shining nymphs, daughters of the Sun himself and of a nymph mother, and their names were Phaethusa and Lampetie, the bright one and the shining one, and they walked all day among the deathless changeless herds with their long staffs, and wanted for nothing at all, on that green island at the very edge of the sailed and known world. Seven herds of red cattle, and seven white flocks, and fifty in each of them, and the two bright daughters of the Sun to keep them. Let the count of it rock you gently. You need hold no number of it in your mind at all. The fire holds all the numbers. You have only to float.
And their captain, hearing that homely lowing come across the water, and remembering with his whole cold heart the twin warnings, did a hard thing, and the fire wants you to see clearly that it was hard, and to give him that. He told his exhausted men that they must not land. He stood up among them, as bone weary as any of them, and he told them the truth of it. A seer among the dead, he said, and a goddess on her island, have both, with one voice, warned me of this one green place above every other danger on the sea, and told me that the safe course, the only safe course, is to row straight on past it, out into the falling dark, and put it well behind us before the morning comes. Row past, he said. For all our sakes. Do not set one foot upon that shore.
And here the fire asks you, gently, to be tender with the men now, as the fire itself is tender with them, for they were not wicked men, and they were not fools, and the thing they wanted was only the thing that any worn out person in all the world wants at the end of a long and grieving day. One of them answered his captain, a man named Eurylochus, and the fire asks you to mark him and remember that he was no traitor, whatever came of this, but only a man worn clean through to the end of himself, and he spoke, that evening, for every tired soul aboard. You are hard, he said, harder than the rest of us are, and your strength never seems to fail you the way ours fails. But we are made of weaker stuff, and we are worn down to nothing, and now, look, you would drive us on past solid ground, in the dark, out onto the open sea in the night, where the cruel sudden winds come up without warning and smash the ships that had no shelter. No. Let us land, this one night, only this one. Let us make our supper on the firm dry earth, and lie down, and sleep the sleep of men and not of hunted animals, and at the very first light, with the sun up and the wind seen and known, we will launch her again and sail on. And the others heard him, and murmured low that he was right, and their captain looked round at all their faces in the dusk, hollow and pleading and past arguing, and he saw that he stood one against many, and that to force them on now, by will alone, would break something in the crew worse even than the breaking of a rule, and so he gave way.
But he gave way carefully, the way he did every single thing. Before one man's foot touched that green forbidden shore, he made them swear. He made every last one of them lift a hand and swear a great and binding oath, that whatever herds they should find upon the island, whatever fat cattle, whatever white sheep, no man among them would lift so much as a finger against a single one of them, but that they would be content to eat only the food the goddess Circe had put aboard for them at her parting, and would touch nothing, nothing at all, that belonged to the Sun. And they swore it, gladly, every man of them, hands raised in the last of the light, for they still had food enough in the ship, and there was no thought at all in any of their heads that night but the one soft thought of rest. So they brought the ship into a good harbor, beside a spring of sweet running water, and they came ashore onto the firm ground, and they made their supper. And when they had eaten, they remembered the six who were gone, the six that the strait had taken from the benches that very day, and they wept for them a while, quietly, there in the dark on the solid earth, as the living must. And then sleep came down over them, one by one, and they lay down beside the ship, and slept. And who among us would not, the fire says. Who would not have done exactly the same. One single night of rest on the firm dry ground, after all of that. It is the smallest and the most human thing in the whole world to want. Remember that, the fire asks you, in the chapters that are coming. It began with nothing worse in it than that. It began with tired men wanting only to sleep on solid ground.
Chapter Seven. The Second Becalming.
In the last dark watch of that first night, while the tired men slept beside the ship, the wind changed. And it did not change back.
It came up in the small hours out of the south, and it brought a storm on its back, and by the grey of dawn they were up and hauling the ship high out of the water into the shelter of a deep hollow cave above the beach, a cool green cave where the old tales said the island nymphs kept their dancing floors, and there they made her fast with good ropes against the weather. And their captain, when the storm had blown itself over, gathered them together again, and warned them again, gently, patiently, that they still had food aboard, the good food the goddess had given them, and that they must be content with it, and keep their sworn oath, and leave the Sun's bright herds well alone. And they said yes to him, of course, and easily, for it still cost a man nothing at all to say yes.
But the south wind that had brought the storm did not blow itself out and set them free. It settled in to stay. Day after day after day it blew steadily out of the south, and on the few days when it was not the south wind it was the east, and never once, not for a single morning in all that long time, did it come round at last to the one quarter of the sky that would have filled their sail and carried them off the island and away toward home. And the fire will tell you now exactly how long the wrong wind held them pinned there, and it is a number you have heard before at this very fire, on another night, in another bay far away. A month. For a whole slow turning month the wrong wind blew, and the one small ship lay drawn up in its cave, and the men waited, and the grey sea outside stood closed and sullen and would not open any road for them at all.
You have slept through such a stillness before, the singer says, very softly, and you may remember it now as a thing that turned out, in the end, to be a mercy, and you may let that memory steady you. For once, long ago, at the very beginning of all these troubles, before ever a single ship set sail, a great gathered fleet lay becalmed in a narrow bay and waited a whole month together for a wind that would not come, and the waiting there, you will remember, was the gentlest and the golden season of the entire war. Men swam in the flat warm shallows in the long evenings, floating on their backs like boys. Music carried across the still water from ship to ship at night, and the old men told the whole of their long lives twice over, and nobody was harmed, and nothing at all happened but rest. The world stood still that time, too, for want of a wind, and it was very nearly a blessing. But a stillness is one thing to a thousand great ships with their holds still full and the whole strength of the world at their backs, and it is another thing entirely to one small worn out crew on a lonely island with the bottom of the food barrel already in sight. And that was the cruelty hidden away inside this second becalming, waiting. The food gave out.
While there was still bread in the ship, and wine, they kept their word, and kept well away from the cattle, and it was easy, and they were good men keeping a good promise. But a month is a very long time, and the ship's stores had never been meant to feed a hungry crew for a month at anchor, and there came a day when the last of the grain was scraped from the jar, and the last of the wine poured from the skin, and there was simply nothing left aboard the ship to eat. And then the hunger came upon them, and it was a true hunger, the deep kind, the kind that hollows a man slowly out from the inside and then sits down in the hollow it has made and will not be talked out of it by any reason in the world. They roamed all over the island with bent pins and lengths of line, catching whatever poor thing they could, a fish here, a seabird there, anything at all that swam or flew, holding their aching stomachs, growing thinner and greyer by the day, and watching, always watching, the fat sleek deathless herds of the Sun move slow and shining across the green meadows all around them, so much good meat, right there, close enough to touch, and forbidden. And still they held. For days, and more days, hollow and shaking with hunger, they held to their oath, and the fire wants you to know that clearly, and to give them that much, before it tells you what came after. They were not quick to break their word. They were slow to it, terribly slow. They suffered first, and long, and honestly.
And their captain suffered right along with them, and at last he did the one thing he knew to do when a trouble had grown too large for any cleverness of his to reach, which was to take it up to the gods. He went off alone, away up the island by himself, away from the hungry sight of the others, to find a quiet place out of the wind where a man could pray, and he washed his hands in clean water, as was right, and he lifted them up, and he prayed to all the gods of the wide heaven to send them a wind, any wind, to open the closed road, to bring them off this beautiful and terrible island before the hunger finished what the strait had begun. And the gods heard his prayer. And the gods answered his prayer. And their answer was to pour down over his eyes a sweet and heavy sleep. There on the hillside, in the very middle of his praying, sleep came down over him like a warm slow tide coming in over sand, and he could not hold it off him, strive as he might, and he sank down, and he slept.
And the fire will pause here a moment, just for one long breath, upon that one sleeping man alone on the hillside, because it has seen him sleep at exactly the wrong moment once before on this very voyage. Once before, you will remember, near enough to his own home at last to see the smoke rising from his own hearth fires, he had let his weary eyes fall shut at just the wrong hour, and while he slept his tired suspicious men had undone everything he had won, and the whole hard sea had been lost again and had to be won back a second time. And now, once more, at the second worst possible moment in the whole of his wandering, the same soft irresistible weight came down over him and lifted him clean out of the story just exactly when the story had the most desperate need of his open, watching eyes. There is no blame to be laid for it. A man can no more fight against the sleep the gods send down than he can fight against the wind those same gods choose to hold back in their hands. But it is a hard thing, the fire says, one of the hardest things there is, to be the one who wakes, and comes down the hill, and finds the thing already done, and no way at all to undo it. And down below him, in the hollow by the ship, while their captain lay dreaming on the grass, Eurylochus was talking, low and urgent, to the starving men.
Chapter Eight. The Hunger That Broke the Oath.
The fire will tell this part with its whole heart wide open, for it is the saddest turn in the whole of the night, and there is not one single villain anywhere in it. There is only hunger, and tired good men at the very end of their strength, and an oath grown far too heavy for empty starving bellies to go on holding up.
Eurylochus spoke to the others while their captain slept up on the hill, and the fire asks you to hear what he actually said before you are quick to judge him for it, for it is not, when you truly listen, the speech of a wicked or a greedy man at all. It is the speech of a man who has come to the very last of himself, and the fire has real sympathy for it, and asks you to keep back a little sympathy of your own. Listen to me, brothers, he said. All the ways there are of dying are hard, and hateful to us who love the light of the sun. But of all of them, the very worst, the most pitiful, is to die of hunger. To grow weaker and weaker with every day that passes, in plain sight of all this meat, and to starve to death at last upon a shore of plenty. Why should we do that? Why? Come. Let us take the best of the Sun's cattle, and let us offer them up properly to the gods, all of them, with every honor and every rite that is due. And if we come home safe to our own dear island one day, we will build the Sun a rich temple there, and fill it with fine and costly gifts, and so make the whole thing right again. And if he is angry for his cattle, and means to wreck our ship for it, why then, better by far to die all at once, in a single gulp of the sea, than to waste slowly away by inches here on this empty beach, day after starving day. And the men, hollow eyed and desperate, heard him out, and it sounded to them like plain good sense, because hunger, when it is deep enough, can make even a terrible thing sound like plain good sense, and they agreed to it, every one.
So they went out into the green meadows, and they drove off the very best of the Sun's cattle, the finest of that deathless shining herd, and they did it as reverently and as rightly as ever they could, and that, the fire says, is the part of it that truly breaks the heart. They were not brutes about it. They did not fall on the beasts like robbers. They tried, even in the very breaking of their sacred oath, to do the thing properly and keep some faith with heaven. Having no barley left aboard for the holy sprinkling that every offering needs, they went and plucked fresh green oak leaves from the trees, and used those instead. Having no wine left for the libation that must be poured, they poured out clear water in its place. They cut the thigh pieces in the old right way, and wrapped them in the fat, and burned them for the gods with all the proper ancient words spoken over them, doing the whole of the sacred rite as well as ever starving men on a bare island possibly could, trying, even now, even in the wrong they were doing, to keep hold of the hem of something holy. And the wrongness of it hung over them the whole while like a cloud, and they felt it, every man, and they went on and did it anyway, because they were so terribly hungry, and the fire will not pretend to you that they did not feel it, nor pretend to you that the feeling of it saved them from what was coming. It did not.
And high above them all, one of the two bright daughters of the Sun, Lampetie of the long robe, looked down and saw what was being done to her father's beloved cattle, and she went up, up the long bright shaft of the daylight, all the way up to her father, to tell him. And the Sun heard, and the Sun grieved. And the fire wants you to hear his grief now for what it truly was, and not to mistake it, for he was not only a great offended power of heaven demanding his due. He was a herdsman who had lost his beasts. He cried out to all the other gods that his lovely cattle had been killed, the cattle in which he had taken a quiet joy every single morning as he climbed up the sky, and again every evening as he went down into the sea, the deathless shining herd that had been, in all the turning ages, his own particular gladness, and he asked, simply, that it be paid for. It is, when you strip the godhead away from it, the oldest and the plainest grief there is, the grief of one who has lost a thing he loved and tended and cannot ever have back again, only dressed up in the great size of a god. And the father of heaven heard him, and promised him that it would indeed be paid for, and that the ship of the men who had done it would be broken to pieces on the wide sea in payment. So the debt was written down. But it was not yet called in.
And their captain woke, up on his hillside, and rose, and came back down toward the shore, and he smelled the sweet fat of the roasting meat drifting up to him on the wind before ever he came in sight of the fires, and he knew, in one cold instant, the whole of it, the way you sometimes know a disaster is upon you by its smell alone, before your eyes have found it. And he cried out aloud to the gods in his grief and his helpless anger, that they had lulled him to sleep only to ruin him while he lay there. But it was done. It was long done, hours done, and no crying of his could reach back and undo one moment of it. There was nothing left in the world to do but the one thing there had ever really been to do on this whole hard road, from the very first day of it, which was to go on.
And here, before the chapter closes, the singer will tell you the one strange sign, plainly, once, and then leave it strange, exactly as the oldest song leaves it, for it is not the fire's place to explain it, and it could not if it tried. For six days the men feasted there on the cattle of the Sun, because the wind still held them fast to the island, and there was nothing else to be done. And in those six days the gods showed them a wonder, a quiet and a dreadful wonder, that told them without a single word what it was they had done. The hides of the flayed cattle crept and crawled along the ground of their own accord, slowly, as if they were still somehow alive. And the meat upon the spits, both the roasted and the raw alike, lowed softly over the cooking fires, with the low of living cattle in a field. The dead herds spoke. And the men heard it, and they saw the hides move, and they ate anyway, for hunger is stronger even than wonder, and there was no unmaking it now, no giving it back. The fire does not explain that sign to you, because it cannot, and would not even if it could. It only tells it to you, once, the way the old song tells it, and lays it down there gently in the firelight between us, strange, and unexplained, and passes quietly on.
Chapter Nine. The Sea Keeps Its Word.
On the seventh day, the wind fell.
It came round at long last into the right quarter of the sky, and the sea that had held them shut in for a whole month opened its road before them, and they ran the ship down into the water, and stepped the mast, and set the white sail, and pulled out of the harbor of the green island and onto the open sea. And for a little while it was ordinary sailing, the island sinking slowly away behind them, the water running past the hull, the sail drawing full and steady, the men glad in a hollow, hunted sort of way to be moving over water again at last. And the fire will move gently now, and low, and not linger, because what comes next is not a thing to be lingered in, only a thing to be told truly, once, and then set softly down.
When the green island was well behind them, and there was no other land to be seen anywhere at all, only the wide grey circle of the sea and the wide grey circle of the sky closing round the little ship, the sky above them darkened. A single black cloud came up out of nowhere and stood still over the ship, and under it the water went dark and troubled, and then the storm came out of the west, all at once, a sudden white squall, and the sea rose up. This was the storm that had been promised. This was the debt of the Sun's cattle, come at last to be paid in full. For the Sun had gone up to the father of the gods and asked justice for his beloved herd, and the father of the gods had given him his word that the ship of the men who killed them would be broken to pieces upon the wide sea, and now, the fire says quietly, that word was being kept. The gale took the mast. The stays parted, and the great mast went over the side. And then a single stroke of fire came down out of the darkened sky onto the little ship, the Sun's debt called in at last by the hand of heaven itself, and the ship was broken open, and the sea came pouring into her, and she was finished. And there is no soft way at all to tell the next of it, and the fire will not go looking for one, because to look for one would be a kind of lie, and the truth is what these men are owed.
Every man of the crew drowned in that sea. All of them. Every one. The companions of ten long years, the men who had rowed this ship out of the giant's dark cave, and off the singing witch's shore, and up out of the very country of the dead itself, the same men who had wept together over their six lost friends only a month before, all of them went into the water in that storm, and the water closed over them, and they did not come up again. The fire says it once, and plainly, and in its very lowest voice, because it is the truth, and the truth is owed to them. They drowned. And then the fire mourns them, in one long honest breath, the way you mourn the good and the faithful dead, and you may mourn them along with it if you are still awake to do so, or you may sleep on through the mourning if sleep has you, and either way, the mourning will be done, fully and rightly, and you yourself need carry none of it. They were good men. They came so very far. The sea kept its word, and its word was a hard one, and they paid the whole of it, down to the last coin. The fault was theirs, for they broke an oath they had sworn, and the fault was hunger's too, for no full and rested man would ever have broken it, and both of those are true together, and the fire says both of them gently. Their names are kept. The fire keeps them, where it keeps such things, and it will not lose a single one of them, not ever, and that is the one thing, the only thing, that can still be done for the drowned, and the fire does it, faithfully, and will go on doing it.
But one man did not drown. One man was left, alone, on the whole wide and empty heaving sea, and it was the man that the warning had always, from the very beginning, been about. For at the start of all of this, before ever the first ship was launched, a word had come to him out of a holy and a deep place, and the word had said that if he sailed away to the war across the eastern sea, he would not come home for twenty long years, and that when at last he came, he would come home alone, every ship lost and every last companion gone from him. He had carried that hard word with him across the whole width of the world. He had watched it come true, slowly, piece by piece, harbor by harbor, loss by grinding loss. And now, here, in this storm, on this empty sea, its very worst and its final word arrived at last, and stood up in front of him, whole and complete. Alone. He was alone now, truly and entirely alone, the last living man of all the many hundreds who had once sailed away with him, exactly, to the letter, as the warning had said that he would be.
But hold, the fire says. Hold on to the other half of it, the way that he held on to it, the way a man in dark and deadly water holds on to the one single thing that still floats. For the very same word that had promised him the twenty years, and all the losses, had promised him, in the same breath, one thing more, and that one thing was the thing that mattered above all the rest. It had promised him home. Home was in the prophecy too. The sea could take his ships, and it had taken them, all twelve. The sea could take his men, and it had taken them, every one. But the sea had never, not once, been promised the last of him, and he knew it, he had always known it, and so, there in the very wreck and ruin of absolutely everything, he did not lie back in the water and let it have him. He caught at the broken ship as she came apart around him, and he found the mast where it had fallen, and the keel torn loose beneath, and with a length of oxhide backstay that the storm had left him he lashed the two great timbers together into one, and he climbed astride that rough raft of ruin, that single floating spar made out of everything that he had lost, and he held on. One man, on two joined timbers, on the whole vast dark and moving sea, holding on. Because home was in the prophecy too, and he meant, whatever it cost, to be there to see the promise kept.
Chapter Ten. The Grip on the Fig Tree.
The wind that had wrecked him did one last cruel thing before its work was done. It turned.
The west wind that had broken the ship dropped away, and up out of the south the wind came again, the very same wrong wind that had pinned him and his men so long to the island. It took hold of the man on his little raft of timbers, and it drove him back, all night long, north again over the black water. Back the way he had come, back toward the narrow strait that he had already paid six of his best men to pass through once. And the fire will tell you plainly that this was the lowest hour of the whole long story, lower than the giant's cave, lower even than the grey country of the dead, and it will tell you, in the very same breath, that it holds. That the man holds. That the story holds all the way through. So that you may hear it lying down, and unafraid, and let it carry you toward sleep and not away from it. For the wind bore him back through the dark to the two cliffs, into the narrow water again, and it carried him toward the lower cliff, toward the great wild fig tree and the drinking mouth of the sea beneath its roots. And he came to it just exactly as the mouth was drawing in its terrible breath, just as the black water was beginning to go down into the deep. And the pull of it caught his little raft, the joined mast and keel, and began to draw it down, down with all the rest of the water, toward the bare floor of the sea.
So he did the one thing, the only thing, that a man could do. As the raft went sliding down and away beneath his feet, he gathered himself, and he sprang up, and he caught hold of the great wild fig tree that leaned out over the water from the cliff, and he clung to it. He clung to it the way a bat clings to the roof of a cave, flat against the rough bark, with no place at all to set his feet and no way at all to climb any higher, only his two arms and his two hands wrapped hard around the branch, hanging there over the roaring open mouth of the sea while below him it drank his raft all the way down into the dark. And there he hung. And here is the very thing the fire loves in it, the thing about him that is so entirely, so beautifully like him. He did not thrash, and he did not cry out, and he did not despair. He simply hung on, and he waited, patiently, the way a man waits for a thing he knows for a certainty is surely coming, the way a patient man will sit and wait out the whole long afternoon in the marketplace for the hour when the judge finally rises at last from his bench and goes off home to his supper. That patient. That quietly, stubbornly sure that it would come. He was waiting for the sea to breathe out again. For it always breathed out again. Three times in each day it drank the water down, and three times in each day it gave the whole of it back, and he had only to hold on to the tree, over the dark, through the long slow terrible middle of the waiting, until the mouth should spit the sea back up.
And at the last, it did. The deep gave a great groan, far down, and the black water came surging and boiling back up out of the pit, and up on the flood of it, tumbling and turning, came his own timbers again, the mast and the keel that he had ridden, thrown back up whole to the surface of the sea. And in the very instant that he saw them break the surface beneath him, he let go of the tree, and he dropped, and he came down with a great splash into the water right beside the spars, and he threw his arms over them, and dragged himself astride them once again. And then, with no oar, with nothing at all in the world but his own two hands, he rowed. He rowed with his bare hands, palm after palm after palm of it, digging and pulling at the water, driving the little raft out of the narrow water at last, away from the drinking mouth and away from the high dark cave above it, out, and out, and out, until the two dark cliffs fell away behind him a second and a final time, and the strait let him go. And this time it let him go with nothing. It took no toll at all from a man who had already lost every single thing he had, and he came out the far side of it, one man on two lashed timbers, still afloat, still holding on, out onto the open and the merciful sea, alone, and spent, and alive.
Chapter Eleven. Nine Days on the Kind Current.
And now, the fire says, gently, the hard part is over. All of it. Every startle and every loss and every fear that the whole night held is behind you now, and behind him, and there is nothing at all left ahead but the sea being kind, for a long, long quiet while, the way it can be, sometimes, when it has finally taken every last thing it ever meant to take.
For nine days the current carried him. Nine long days he drifted on his little raft of two joined timbers across the wide and open water, alone, with no land anywhere in sight and no danger left in all the world that could still reach out and touch him. And the strange thing, the tender and the almost unbearable thing, is that the very same sea which had spent all of its long cold memory and all of its terrible patience to break him utterly, now turned, and gathered him up, and carried him, softly, as though it had clean forgotten how to be cruel. The wind fell away to the merest breath. The swells came long, and low, and slow, lifting the raft up and setting it gently down, lifting it and setting it down, the oldest and the kindest rocking there has ever been in the world. The sun crossed over him by day, warm on his salt stiffened shoulders, drying the sea out of him. And the old stars wheeled over him by night, the same old faithful stars, keeping their steady watch above the one small drifting man on the great dark sea. And he lay along his timbers in a kind of half sleep, past all grieving now, past all planning, emptied right out of everything in him except the simple holding on, and he let the water carry him wherever it would, because there was nothing else at all left to do, and, for the first time in longer than he could remember, nothing else at all that needed doing.
Rest here with him a while, the fire says. You have earned it, the both of you. There is no more story to brace yourself against tonight, none, only the long soft drift. Think for a moment what it is to have come at last all the way through the very worst of a thing, the exact part of it you were the most afraid of, the part you were sure you could not survive, and to find yourself out on the far side of it after all, tired to the very marrow of your bones, but through, and whole, and with nothing left ahead of you now but quiet. That is precisely where he is now, drifting on the kind current. And that is precisely where you may let yourself be, too, here in the warm sand. The prophecy's hardest word is all kept now. Down to the very last of the twelve ships, and the last of the many men, every loss it foretold so long ago is suffered through at last, every one, and paid to the last coin. And for these nine quiet days the water has nothing more that it needs to take. And so it simply carries him, day after day, and night after night, kind at the very last, and unhurried, and saying against the timbers just beneath his ear the one same soft word that it says against this beach of ours, over and over and over, the low word that means only, now, rest now, and rest now, and rest.
Nine days of it. And on the tenth night, far ahead of him, low down on the dark rim of the sea where the water met the stars, there began to be a shape. Not a danger. The fire promises you, and it has kept every promise it made you all night long, there is no danger in it, not now, not anymore, not ever again tonight. Only a shape upon the water, a darkness a little firmer and a little surer than the soft darkness all around it, and a smell beginning to come to him off it on the night air, faint, and green, and sweet, the smell of cedar smoke, of woodsmoke and growing things, of a warm fire burning quietly somewhere on a sheltered shore. Land. A small green island, far out at the still and secret center of the whole sea, farther from any other coast than any island in all the wide world. And the tired kind current, having carried him so unimaginably far already, carried him now the last little way of all toward it, gently, easily, while he drifted in and out of his half sleep upon the timbers, in, and in, toward the softest shore the sea owned.
Chapter Twelve. Goodnight. And the Softest Shore the Sea Owned.
The island was called Ogygia, and the fire will only bring you up onto its shore tonight, and let you lie down and sleep there, and keep all the rest of it for another night, because the rest of it is a whole long story all of its own, and this one is very nearly finished now, and you are very nearly gone.
The kind current laid him up on the beach in the dark, and he crawled up out of the last of the shallows on his hands and his knees, more tired than any man has ever been, and he lay a while on the dry sand above the waterline, feeling the good ground stay still and steady beneath him for the first time in longer than his mind could reach back to hold. And up the shore a little, through the dark trees, there was a light. A warm gold light in the mouth of a great cave, and the sweet smell of cedar wood burning, and around the cave a soft wood of alder and of poplar and of dark sweet cypress, and quiet meadows, and, faint through the trees, drifting down to him where he lay, the sound of a woman singing. For a goddess lived on that island, alone, at the still green heart of the sea, and her name was Calypso, and she was singing to herself at her loom beside her own bright fire, the way a woman sings in the evening when the day's work is easy and the hour is calm and there is nothing anywhere in all the world left to fear.
And that night, she asked nothing at all of him. That is the whole of what the fire will tell you tonight, and it is enough, and it is kind, and it is true. Whatever that island would one day come to mean to him, whatever choice would one far day have to be faced and made upon its lovely shores, none of it, not one shadow of it, belonged to that first night. That first night there was only a broken, half drowned, worn out man come up at last out of a cruel sea with nothing left to his name in all the world, not a ship, not a single companion, not one possession, and there was a warm cave, and a good fire, and a gentle voice, and a soft dry place at last to lie down. She gave him warmth. She gave him something to eat, and something to drink. She gave him a soft place out of the wind, and she let him sleep. After the singers, and the strait, and the toll of the six good men, and the long slow hunger, and the storm, and the drowning of every last soul that he loved upon the water, and the nine days alone on the timbers, the sea's very hardest lesson came at last to its rest upon the sea's very softest shore, and the man who had lost every single thing there was to lose closed his eyes in the warm gold mouth of a cave, on a green island at the middle of the world, and slept, safe, and whole, and, against everything, alive.
And here the old singer at our fire lifts his head, and stops. That is where we leave him tonight, he says, quietly. Not lost. Not adrift. Not in any danger anywhere. Only asleep, at long last, on the softest shore the whole sea owns, with the very worst of the entire long road now behind him, and done. The singers are passed. The narrow water is passed. The green island of the Sun lies far astern. He came through all of it, the way that you come through a hard night, not without cost, never once without cost, but through, and out the other side, into the quiet. And what waits for him there on that green island, the long and the strange kindness of it, and the great choice that lies at the very heart of it, is a story for the next night at this fire, and it is a gentle one, and it will keep for you, safe, until you come again.
The fire is low now. It has done its work for the night, and it is banked down to a soft red glow that will hold and keep till morning, warm enough, and no more. The tide has come up close while we talked, a little higher on the sand than it stood last night, closer, and gentler, and it says against the shore the very same soft word that the sea said under the drifting man's ear on the kind current, the low word that means only, now, rest now, and rest now, and rest.
You do not have to carry any of it. Not the wax, nor the ropes, nor the narrow water, nor the storm, nor the six, nor the drowned. Let all of it stay here by the fire with the old singer, safe, where he keeps such things, and where he keeps their names against the dark. He will hold the whole hard sea for you through the night, every single wave of it, and it will all still be here, at rest, and unharmed, whenever you should want it again.
And far out on the dark water, farther out tonight than it has stood these last few nights, and harder now to see, a single sail waits at the edge of the morning for a wind that has not yet come. It is in no hurry at all. Neither are you. It will stand a little nearer, night by night, in the nights that are still to come. But that is not for now. For now there is only the warm sand, and the low banked fire, and the high kind tide, and the old stars keeping their patient watch, and one man asleep and safe at last on a far green shore, and your own slow breathing, easy now, and easier, going out with the waves, and coming back.
Rest now. The sea has kept its word, and it is quiet. The man is safe upon the softest shore. The story is kept.
Sleep well, traveler.
Goodnight.