King of Ithaca (Adventures of Odysseus)

Odysseus propped his sword against the outside wall of the temple and walked in. The doorway was so low he had to dip his head to enter, and once inside he saw it was little more than a simple, unadorned country altar. There were no anterooms, no columns supporting the broken, sagging roof, no elaborate murals on the flaking walls and no rich ornaments to lend it the required sense of divine majesty. It was perhaps a quarter the size of the great hall in his father’s palace and boasted nothing more than a pitted stone altar at the far end. This was watched over by a badly formed midget effigy, which he could only assume was meant to represent Athena.

The stub of a torch had been lodged in a groove upon the wall to his right. It was sputtering its last as Odysseus entered, but by its wavering light he could tell that the chamber was empty. A bunch of early spring flowers lay to either side of the altar, which along with the torch were the only signs that the temple had been visited in months. Even they were probably the work of a lone peasant or local holy man, whose daily duty it was to light the single room and attend to its altar.

Odysseus knelt before the clay figurine and eyed it, making a mental comparison between its stunted, grimacing features and the matchless glory of the goddess it represented. But for all its rude art and rough edges he sensed something of Athena had been caught in the representation; compared with the voluptuous, richly curving statuettes of Aphrodite and Hera he had seen in other temples, the figurine’s long body, straight hips and crude breasts reminded him of her boyish masculinity; the jutting brow and the straight nose that shot down from it were every bit as stern as the face of the goddess herself. And as he looked he sensed a new presence filling the temple. Suddenly fearful that the spirit of Athena might be watching him through the thumbed pits of the figurine’s eye sockets, he threw his glance to the base of the altar and closed his eyes.

‘Pallas Athena,’ he said aloud, his voice filling the dusty confines of the temple. ‘The journey you sent me on is over. Now the time has come to prove myself in the final battle, as I know you always intended me to. Tomorrow I embark for Ithaca.’

Damastor stood in the shadows at the back of the temple, the torchlight gleaming dully off the drawn blade of his sword. He had removed his sandals and left them outside so that he could enter the temple without making a noise, and now, as his prince knelt before the effigy of the goddess, he took two steps nearer.

Odysseus continued. ‘Mistress, you’ve always guided my spear in battle, as in the hunt. You’ve kept me safe from harm. It was you who saved me from the boar that tore open my thigh, and you who sent Eperitus to aid me in my trials. You made him swear service to me in your presence, after you gave me the gift.’

Damastor had crept two paces closer and was bringing his sword up to hack down on Odysseus’s neck when he heard the strange words. What gift could he be talking about? Was Odysseus suggesting he had seen the goddess? Damastor had heard of such things, though the tales were treated with scepticism and the tellers often mocked. But Odysseus had no one to lie to here.

‘And it is your gift I’m concerned about, mistress.’ Odysseus pulled the clay owl from his pouch and held it up before the figurine. ‘I’ve carried it with me everywhere, and it’s here with me now, but the time is near when I’ll use it to summon your help. Tomorrow I take my men to Ithaca, to win back my father’s kingdom. But you know how weak we are, mistress, how few compared to Eupeithes’s hordes. That’s when I intend to break the seal and pray for your help.’

Damastor looked at the clay owl and his quick mind half-guessed what it was. In an instant he had questioned whether it would work for himself; he considered the possibilities it might offer him after he had plucked it from its dead owner’s fingers; and in his black, ambitious heart he saw himself as the new king of Ithaca, divinely appointed by no less a god than Athena herself.

‘So I ask now that you will be swift to honour your promise to me,’ Odysseus continued. ‘Come quickly into the battle when I call you, mistress, unless every plan and every hope you ever pinned upon me be cut down by a Taphian spear.’

‘Or an Ithacan sword,’ Damastor said, and raised the weapon high over his head.

Eperitus stood up and left the circle about the fire, and as soon as he was out of earshot of the camp he began to run. Following the sound of the river on his left he stumbled like a blind man over the pitted and rock-strewn road, constantly looking up and to his right for sight of a temple on a hill. The light was failing fast and he was beset by fears that he had already passed it, until, after some time of doubt and increasing panic, he was ready to turn back and retrace his steps. Then he saw it.