Collected Stories

Concerning the Greek Tyrant

1.

Homer has a fever.

His bedclothes have fallen. His face is contorted. His whispering mouth is like a small rose in a sea of soft chamois leather. His blind eyes look like the eyes of old statues that have lost their paint. His ageing naked body is soft and white with baby-creases where the arms and legs meet the body. The floor beside his bed is a mess of tangled clothes, as if the turbulent sea had spilled out of his raging mind and been left to run wild and crash around the room.

His dreams rage against the white walls and he curses them petulantly, telling them to go away.

But Echion won’t go away.

He can see Echion and Diomedes quite clearly. They are lying on a beach in a foreign land. It is unlike any land he has ever seen: a hot, humid tropical place left over from an old legend. Homer’s mind is a mass of old legends. They wind around each other like the bedclothes on his floor and in his confusion he tries to untangle them but succeeds only in winding them closer together. For a week this battle has continued and it shows no signs of abating.

Now there’s this damn Echion again. Echion on an unpleasantly beautiful tropical beach. The landscape is full of gaping white holes that Homer is desperate to fill in. Through the white holes are the fragments of landscape he cannot immediately imagine and now, from habit, he begins to work at them like a cunning old stone mason, patiently filling them in tree by tree, cloud by cloud, grain of sand by grain of sand. The work gives him no pleasure or satisfaction. It is merely one more problem to be solved.

The beach is lined with great tall trees that resemble palm trees but they are not palm trees at all. They bear large orange fruit the size of a man’s head. When the orange fruit fall they split open to reveal purple seeds and bright red flesh. These seeds now litter the beach like beads from a broken necklace and Echion lies talking to a native girl who doesn’t understand his words.

Echion is stocky and squat and his body comprises a wild landscape of bumps and bulges that runs from his huge knotted calves to his wide powerful shoulders. His nose has been broken, a portion of his left ear is missing, and his black curling hair is beginning to bald, right in the centre of his great head. These marks are the result neither of battles nor of age, but of small spiteful injuries inflicted on him by Homer — repayments for imagined slights against a master Echion doesn’t even know exists. For Echion is a worrier. He worries at the reasons for his dreams, questions the logic of his terrible battles. He has nagged at Odysseus, asking him continual questions about the blind oracle he is known to consult.

The time has not yet come to kill Echion for the last time. When the time comes his death will be used to achieve a certain effect. Echion is an annoying small coin, but he will not be spent lightly. He is also a dangerous coin to keep. Sooner or later his infuriating questions will contaminate Diomedes and then the other men. Echion is the seed of the mutiny which Homer dreads.

But Echion is wearing down. His black eyebrows almost meet across his perpetually furrowed brow and his eyes look like windows onto a windswept sky, one instant the most brilliant blue and the next grey with heavy clouds. He looks like a man who has fought too many battles and wants nothing more than to lie down and die amongst his friends.

Homer looks along the beach, walking his mind past the twenty-eight other men who are also there. Some sleep under the tall strange trees. Others recline under large wooden structures that have been built for them by friendly natives. In the shade of these shadow factories they retell old legends and bawdy stories. Others, like Echion, lie with women who are puzzled and afraid of these hairy light-skinned strangers.

The laughter on the beach is loud and coarse. There is a grim determination in it, as if the men were committed to being happy at any cost. They are soldiers on leave. They wish to behave like soldiers on leave but at the same time they cast silent glances at the palm trees and their giant orange fruit and examine the seeds carefully while they caress their girl or tell their story or pretend to gaze out at the misty sea. The girls accept the caresses silently and offer their strange companions rich drinks from goblets shaped like pigs’ heads and the soldiers laugh and play at being happy.

For the thousand things they talk and joke about, they say nothing about their most recent experiences. They say nothing of the lands they have visited, driven on the seas of Homer’s fever, a great yellow storm which has washed them onto impossible shores where they have met threat and horror and deprivation.

They are suffering from the shock which is the necessary protection for those who are the victims of dreams. Their memories of their roles in Homer’s dreams seem simply to be recollections of nightmares too horrible to mention.

Thus they remember but dismiss the time that Odysseus was set alight and ran amongst them in panic, setting each of them alight in turn. Likewise Diomedes’ castration and decapitation. Likewise a thousand other horrible things.

Only Echion ponders on these matters. His brows knot continually as he tries to put down his memories.

Odysseus, of course, is excepted from all this. It is necessary that he collaborate. He alone is not protected and will clearly remember the pain and the hardships and soon he will come in search of Homer and accuse him once more of neglect and mismanagement.

Homer turns wearily in his bed, attempting to turn his back on the beach. If only he could remember where he was sending these men he could put everything to rights. But he’s lost. His memory has broken its anchor and is drifting loose and he’s stuck with this contingent of soldiers who lie on a foreign beach and drown the noises from their dreams with false laughter.

The seas shimmer.

A large white fluffy cloud in the sky threatens to solidify, to become granite. Homer, moaning, tastes the rock between his teeth.

Diomedes leans on his elbow. His flesh is smooth and unmarked. His wounds have been healed by Homer. Diomedes is a good soldier, tough and strong, delighting in discipline and comforting himself in the superiority of his leaders. Homer’s spite has not been visited on him. He is a strange contrast to the battle-scarred veteran who lies by his side.

“Are you awake?” he asks the veteran.

“Yes,” says Echion, “I’m awake.” He is staring at the granite cloud.

“Do you like your girl?” Diomedes’ voice is uneasy. He wishes to be continually assured that everything is excellent. He is young and Echion is old.

Echion smiles. He finds his friend’s concern for the quality of the girl amusing. “Yes, I like my girl. Do you like yours?”

Diomedes doesn’t look at his girl. It seems as if he wasn’t asking about the girl at all, that he wanted to know something more important. “Yes,” he says, “I like my girl.”

He picks up one of the purple seeds and examines it minutely. For a moment it seems that he is about to ask another question, the real question.

“Tell me,” Echion says gently, “tell me what’s on your mind.”

“Nothing,” says Diomedes, “I was just thinking how good it is that we both like our girls.”

2.

Later, while Diomedes was asleep, Echion dug sullenly in the sand and puzzled at his problem. His problem nagged at him continually. It was something so stupid it made him angry to think about it. But he couldn’t leave it alone.

Echion’s problem was that he had forgotten the purpose of their mission. It was stupid of him. It was so stupid he couldn’t even ask any of the others. He had once made the mistake of broaching this subject with Diomedes and Diomedes, his closest friend, had flared into a wild temper and called him a traitor and a weakling and many other things which, his eyes brimming with tears, he came later to apologize for. He had, he said, been having bad dreams. They had upset him. He was sorry. Echion had forgiven him instantly but they had not discussed the matter since.

As for the matters of the dreams, Echion had considered talking about that but he thought better of it. He had also been afflicted by these dreams. He had mentioned them to Odysseus, who had taken such a keen interest in them that he had become suspicious.

Echion now abandoned his sand-digging so that the girl could scratch his back more easily. He gazed out at the small flotilla of canoes from which brown bodies fell into the water. Probably, he thought, probably they are collecting food for a feast. The voices of the divers wandered across the water like memories from a hundred years ago and Echion was suddenly homesick and yearned for the voice of a wife he could hardly remember and the arms of a child whose name he had forgotten.

“Where did he go?” It was Diomedes again.

“Who?”

“Odysseus.”

“I thought you were asleep.”

“I was thinking about Odysseus. I wondered where he was.”

“I suppose,” said Echion, “that he’s talking to the blind man.”

Diomedes sighed. “Do you like your girl?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Echion, “I like my girl. Do you like yours?”

“Yes, yes I do. Do you want to swap?”

“I don’t care. Do you want to?”

The sky was full of clouds like a melted jigsaw puzzle, “I don’t know,” said Diomedes, “I was just thinking about Odysseus.”

3.

Reality returns to Homer’s fever only to take his sight and go away again. Light falls on his blind eyes like coloured rain on a tiled roof.

He is walking down a street in the country of his fever. Odysseus is pursuing him. The street is uneven and littered with small stones. He stumbles continually. He worries about his dignity. The street is full of unseen foreigners. Hands touch him. It is difficult to understand the intention of the numerous small pinches and sharp tugs he is assailed by.

He fears that Odysseus has passed the limit of his endurance and gone mad, that he carries the knife that will kill them all, Homer and the battle-weary population of his mind.

He is assailed by strange smells, rotten fish mixed with acrid smoke. Someone is burning something foul and the strangeness of the smells and the impudent touches of these unknown hands cause him to panic.

He turns, first left, then right, and then sits, quite suddenly, in the middle of this foreign street.

The hands are trying to drag him up. He is angry and afraid and also irritated that these ignorant people should dare to touch him, Homer. The voices in his ears are uncultured and angry. They shriek curses at him. He cannot understand the language but knows what they are saying. They know of his mistreatment of Odysseus and the men. They have a list. His crimes are all numbered. They plan to kill him.

He curls up on the ground, as helpless as a child, and waits for the first rock to strike him.

And then he hears the sound of Odysseus’s voice speaking in the language of the country of his fever. That Odysseus should have learned this language without his knowledge seems a vicious betrayal. Odysseus is shouting. Slowly Homer realizes that he is ordering the people to leave him alone.

Odysseus is going to rescue him.

“I am blind,” says Homer suddenly. “I am blind. I can’t see.” He pretends that Odysseus is not there. The prospect of being rescued by Odysseus is humiliating. Homer pretends to rescue himself. “Get away from me,” he says, “I’m blind.”

“They can’t understand you.”

Homer composes himself and attempts to look as if he is totally in charge of the situation, sitting in the middle of this filthy street in his good clothes.

“Who’s that?”

“You know who it is.”

“Oh, Odysseus, is it? Sit down, Odysseus, I’ve been expecting you.”

“You’re stopping a funeral procession,” says Odysseus. “Come over to the side and let them get through.”

Homer doesn’t like the sound of his voice. It’s made from steel, like a dagger.

When they’re sitting by the side of the street, Odysseus says, “You’ve been running away.”

“Don’t talk nonsense. I’ve been waiting for you for hours. Have you brought everything?”

He hears a rustle of cloth as Odysseus squats beside him. “Are you still ill?”

Homer can feel the face peering closely at his. He puts a hand out and pushes the face away. For an instant he is in a room in Greece and the smell of hot broth is under his nose.

“I’m better now,” he says. “Fever is not a very pleasant thing for a man.”

“It’s possibly worse,” says Odysseus, “for the creatures of his imagination.”

“It’s been a hard time for all of us,” the poet says, “for me, for you, for the men. Is Echion still causing trouble?”

“He was never causing trouble,” Odysseus speaks patiently. “I’ve explained it to you before. I don’t know why you want to misunderstand me.”

“I can’t have men who spread rumours.”

“He remembered his dreams, that’s all. He wanted to talk about his dreams.”

Homer thumps his staff on the street. “I won’t have men talking about their dreams. I can’t afford the risk. You can’t either. Once they know, they don’t want to do what they’re told,” he sighs. “Sometimes I’m sorry I told you.”

“I’m sorry you told me,” says Odysseus, “always.”

“I’ve been watching this Echion,” Homer insists. “He’s a good soldier?”

“Yes, yes he is.”

“I have a plan for him. Did you bring the writing materials?”

“I said so, yes. Are you still lost?”

“Homer is never lost,” says Homer. “We have made a few minor explorations and now it’s time to get back to the main story. I’ve been thinking, Odysseus, that if Echion wants to know the meaning of his dreams, we might as well tell him.”

And then the blind man begins to speak in a curiously soft voice which rises and falls in a steady rhythmical pattern. Odysseus writes down his words, sitting at the blind poet’s feet like a servant in front of his master.

4.

“Your girl has a wart on her hand,” said Diomedes.

“Has she?” said Echion. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“She’s got a wart on her left hand, just near her little finger. Why don’t you look?”

Echion looked instead at Diomedes and smiled, in spite of himself, at the earnestness of his friend’s face. He wondered what was really bothering him. “Do you have funny dreams?” he asked.

Diomedes looked embarrassed. “I wasn’t criticizing her,” he said. “Do you think she has a lover? She’s very beautiful.” The girl smiled at Diomedes and he began to play with her long black hair.

“Do you have funny dreams?” said Echion. “I have funny dreams.”

“I have beautiful dreams,” Diomedes smiled at the girl, “about love.”

“You don’t have strange dreams about battles?”

“No.”

Echion caught his friend’s gaze and held it hard. “Is that the truth?”

“Yes,” Diomedes averted his eyes, “of course it’s the truth.”

“I had a dream,” Echion began very slowly, as if remembering with great difficulty, “that we had all been captured and we were assembled in a great courtyard. The walls of the courtyard were like giant staircases and our captors were women. For some reason they chose me. They selected me and took me to the centre of the courtyard and pulled my arm, this arm, off. All the time I was there I was watching you. You were weeping. And …” Echion stopped, his voice breaking. “Did you have that dream, Diomedes?”

“I don’t know.” Diomedes had turned on his stomach and hidden his face in his folded arms.

“I know you did.” Echion now spoke very calmly. “I know you had that dream, Diomedes. I know we all had that dream. And all the other dreams. I don’t think they were dreams. I think these terrible things have really happened and Odysseus has used magic to make us forget.”

Diomedes looked at his friend’s serious face and suddenly burst out laughing. “Who put your arm back?” he said.

“I don’t know,” said Echion, “I don’t know. Do you want to swap?”

“All right.”

Echion suddenly felt very tired. “You don’t mind about the wart?”

“There isn’t a wart,” said Diomedes. “I only said it to make you look at her. You haven’t looked at her since we came here. I think she’s offended.”

Diomedes leant across and took the girl’s hand and Echion looked at her for the first time. Yes, she was a beautiful girl. So was Diomedes’ girl. They were both beautiful. They seemed to Echion to be almost identical with their long blue-black hair and high foreheads and small noses. Only the colour of their simple garments which they tucked so shyly around their breasts separated them from each other in his mind.

His girl had been blue.

He held out his hand towards the red girl and she came, reluctantly, he thought, to his side. She touched his ear, the ear with the piece missing from it. She touched the cut edge with her finger. It tickled. She said something questioningly in her own language and Echion answered in his: “It’s all right,” he said, “it was long ago, a long time ago.”

Diomedes stood up with the blue girl and walked slowly towards the mountains.

Left alone with this young girl, Echion felt very old and very lonely. “Are you happy,” he asked her hoarsely, “do you have a lover?”

The girl raised her thick black eyebrows.

“Lover,” he said, “do … you … have a … lover?”

The girl stood and pulled him up slowly, a great bulky parcel of bad dreams with a piece missing from his ear. “Are you happy?” he said as he followed her reluctantly towards the mountains.

Up and down the beach, men were gathered in groups, some sleeping, some talking, some with girls. Somewhere Odysseus was talking to a blind man.

As they left the sand and began to walk along the path to the village, Echion caught a glimpse of their craft: a wooden horse with its head poking out above the strange trees. It looked sad and lonely, like some creature lost in a dream.

5.

It is dark in Homer’s room and the inside of the wooden horse is like a huge barn in midsummer. The heat is stifling. The horse was not designed for the tropics and the air is heavy with the smell of the men who left it this morning: it seems to ooze from the wood as it exhales in the daytime what it has inhaled in the night.

But now Echion is here. He is puzzled and guilty to find himself doing this, but he is reading Odysseus’s papers. The papers he had always assumed to be navigation charts and calculations now reveal themselves to be merely pages of verse. Why should Odysseus spend so many hours reading these verses as if they were maps or instructions? Perhaps Echion has found the wrong thing. Perhaps he is mistaken.

His dark eyes scan the pages hurriedly, and then a little more slowly, and then very slowly indeed.

Because Echion has just stepped inside the blueprints for his own bad dreams.

Each page of verse has a thick line drawn through it diagonally, as if it were some kind of mistake, but the words on these pages describe, in more detail than Echion had remembered, the details of his bad dreams. The verse records the incident with the female warriors, tells how Odysseus was set afire by mechanical monsters, how Diomedes was castrated and then decapitated. The verse contains more battles than a man could fight if he lived for a hundred years and Echion is in every one. As he reads them he feels a great weariness, the weariness he has been trying to deny, sweep over him. His dark eyes fill with huge tears as he reads of the pain and death of his dearest friends. The pages seem cruel and hard to him, the work of merciless gods who have been playing with his life. The handwriting sweeps on and on, seemingly never ending. He begins to skip through the thousands of pages until he comes, at last, to those at the end. These have not been crossed out.

These later pages appear more normal. There are no monsters. Instead they talk about a city called Troy and a wooden horse and a battle in which thirty men will fight against the Trojans, assisted by others who will come in ships. There is a roughness about the verse, as if it were not quite finalized. Small alterations have already been made. Words have been crossed out and not replaced. Echion reads this with relief and then his eye catches his own name near the bottom of a page.

He reads quickly and then, suddenly, lets out a great bellow of rage.

The verse tells how Echion is so eager for battle that he is the first to emerge from the horse at Troy. He is so keen that he falls and breaks his neck. Echion doesn’t know what he has stumbled into. He knows only that he feels a greater rage than he has ever felt in his life. Someone is playing tricks with him. His whole life has been controlled by some evil practical joker who has manipulated him, tortured him, and killed him a thousand times. And now it seems that they wish to kill him one more time.

“The bastards.” He shouts the word. He doesn’t know who he shouts it at. Perhaps at Odysseus. He doesn’t know who it is.

The wooden horse now seems to him to be a terrible jail, a torture chamber from which he must escape before this next death can take place. He has no possessions. There is nothing to delay him. He will disappear for ever into the depths of this land. He would rather spend his life amongst strangers than be subjected to one more death.

He turns from the pages of verse with his jaw set hard and finds himself face to face with a frail old blind man with a pampered face. He has never seen him before. He dislikes him instantly.

“Excuse me,” says the blind man, “I’m blind. I can’t see.”

Echion remains still and doesn’t make a sound. He watches the blind man like a cat watching a snake.

“Put my hand on your shoulder.”

The old man looks so frail that Echion takes the hand and lays it on his shoulder. The hand is small and soft and his shoulder is hard and heavy. With his heart beating hard Echion begins to walk towards the trapdoor.

“Perhaps,” says the blind man, “it might be better to stay.”

“I’m going.”

“You are going … to Troy,” the blind man smiles. His hand is like a vice on Echion’s shoulder. Echion feels as if the marrow has been sucked from his bones. He is like a blown-out candle. He stands helplessly and looks at the rose petal mouth of this man. Finally he manages to speak. He says, “I read what Odysseus wrote.”

“My name is Homer,” says the blind man, “and you read what I told Odysseus to write and you read it because I permitted you to. This will be the last time for you. The other times were mistakes. But this business in Troy is what I needed you for, I need you to fall from the horse,” the poet says, “for the irony.”

Homer leads Echion to a place by the door where he ties his hands with leather thongs and binds them to a post. Echion doesn’t protest. He feels like an ox in a slaughter yard. The blind man ties on a gag to stop him bellowing.

6.

When the night came his companions returned to the horse to sleep. They had been told some story about Echion and no one, not even Diomedes, looked his way. It was as if he were invisible, already dead and buried in the pages of Homer’s verse.

When they had all drunk their wine Odysseus explained the nature of the battle to be fought the next day. He said nothing of how the wooden horse was to be moved to Troy. He mentioned “allies” and once talked of a “powerful friend”. The men’s minds, accustomed to living on the waves of Homer’s fevers, accepted all this without question and retired to bed early to be ready for tomorrow’s battle.

Echion lay in the dark and waited for Diomedes, but when he didn’t come to release him he began to work quietly on his leather bindings, gnawing on them with his broken teeth until his gums bled and his mouth was full of the sticky juices of his veins.

Around him the horse groaned and creaked like a ship weathering a heavy sea. Outside he fancied he could hear voices and hammering and the crash of masonry. His jaws ached and his arms twitched and it wasn’t until early morning that his bindings were finally undone.

He crept stiffly to the door and lowered the great trapdoor. The rope ladder flopped down in the dark. His arms were stiff and his hands so cramped that he could barely clench them. His head was strange from lack of sleep and as he lowered himself onto the first rung he was overcome with giddiness.

His foot slipped on the second rung, and he fell.

In the grey hours before dawn a giant wooden horse could be seen enclosed by the walls of Troy. The first Greeks who descended the rope ladder found Echion already there. He was lying on the dusty ground with his neck broken.

7.

Echion hadn’t died immediately. He had written some words in the fine clay dust with a bleeding finger. The words were as follows:

“KILL THE PIG TYRANT HOMER WHO OPPRESSES US ALL.”

But the words were erased by the blind feet of his companions as the whole incident concerning Echion was later erased by Homer, who no longer found the incident interesting enough to tell.