Read Online Ithaca by Patrick Dillon - Free Book Online

himself out of some scrape or danger, it would be your father . . .
    â€œWhere was I? Standing on the beach, then. We embraced. ‘Nestor,’ he said, ‘I will visit you in Pylos on my way home.’ That may be significant—do you see? He had no plans for a detour. Home to his wife and his baby son . . . Oh, yes, he knew all about you. Messages traveled between Greece and the camp at Troy. ‘Telemachus!’ I remember the night he got the news. A great feast on the beach, sheep slaughtered, jars of wine looted from one of the little villages around Troy. We all toasted you, my dear boy, and here you are in the flesh, as it were, a young man . You don’t, if I may say it, look like your father. Yes?”
    The sulky-looking girl is tugging at her father’s arm. “The food’s ready.” She doesn’t pay any attention to me.
    â€œAnd I have been talking . . . but we won’t talk any more tonight.” Nestor lays a light hand on my sleeve. “As I say, I have no hard news, but there are rumors . I know where you can find news. All that must wait for tomorrow, though, when heads are clear and we are both rested from our exertions. For now, we will celebrate your arrival in Pylos. We will feast .”
    It’s quite a feast, I have to say that. I’m used to the chaos of our house at Ithaca, where rooms stay unswept for days, guestsdrift in and out of the kitchen, and servants come and go without warning. At Nestor’s home, dishes are served and then whisked efficiently away. When I drop a cushion, unseen hands seize it from the floor and stuff it behind my shoulder. The slave girl who bathed me keeps stepping forward to fill my cup with wine.
    I’m sitting next to Nestor, with Polycaste, his daughter, beyond him. Most of the talk is a monologue by Nestor that rambles wherever his mind wanders: his sons, now scattered across Greece . . . the old days . . . feasts of Poseidon . . . the harvest . . . the pictures on the walls of the great hall, copied from some he saw on a voyage to Egypt years ago. Most of the stories are about himself. I soon realize that Nestor’s fusty charm hides a strong streak of vanity. And I notice something else. The doddery impression he gives—a pleasant but scatterbrained old man living happily in the past—isn’t the whole story. He’s cleverer than that. His rambling, impossible to interrupt, has a purpose: so long as he’s talking, no one else can. Once, I ask a direct question about Odysseus, and he brushes me off. I ask something about the war—same reaction. Each time, he waves his hand and we’re back on stag hunts in the hills of Thessaly or craftsmen who make rings of solid silver in Athens. It doesn’t take a genius to get the message. Nestor will talk about my father when he’s ready. For the moment, Odysseus is off-limits.
    Polycaste, his daughter, looks bored and doesn’t say much. Sometimes she tightens her lips at some story of her father’s she’s obviously heard a thousand times. The other guests get slowly drunk, which is what always happens at feasts. Eventually Nestor raises his hand, and the hall falls silent.
    â€œWe will have a story,” he announces. “Tonight, in honor of our guest, we will have the story of the fall of Troy.”
    It’s hardly new to me. Or anyone else—everyone in Greece can tell you about the fall of Troy. After eight years of slaughterunder Troy’s impregnable walls, with the Greek leaders squabbling, soldiers dying of disease, and the great Trojan adventure starting to look like a fiasco, Odysseus—my father—came up with the trick that finally pried open Troy’s bronze gates.
    The Greek armies retreated to the beach. With Trojan soldiers watching from the ramparts, the Greeks struck tents, sacrificed to the gods, then clambered back onto their ships and rowed away over the horizon. Several hours went by.