The Whispering Muse

IX

I SHOULD THINK TODAY, Saturday 16 April, has been the most remarkable of the voyage so far. From early this morning till late this evening we have experienced one novelty after another. On the dot of six the rumbling and clanking began as every machine and winch on deck, fore and aft, ground into action as the loading was resumed with urgent haste. There was little chance of sleeping while this was going on so I got out of bed.

I put on my dressing gown and went out into the saloon, where I found the crew who had been turfed out of bed so that the loading of the ship could progress with all speed. Although the industriousness of the Norwegian dockers should have been cause for optimism, there was a subdued atmosphere among the deckhands at the breakfast table. Not that this was surprising. Many of them had caroused until nearly two in the morning and inevitably some had continued in their cabins, a few passing out in their bunks with a bottle tucked under their cheek — not that it bothered me.

What did come as a surprise was that the purser’s lady friend should say good morning to me. She seemed to do so on impulse, quite cheerfully. I returned the greeting dryly, though with perfect civility, and waited all through breakfast for the sting in the tail. But no, she merely finished her breakfast, took her leave of me in the same amiable manner and went off to start her chores; she had to work for two that day for, as she put it wittily, the purser was working in bed.

I was still scratching my head over the woman’s change of heart when the first engineer accosted me and invited me to go skiing with him. He had borrowed a car and planned to drive an hour or so up a fairly long valley to a place with ski slopes and a winter hotel for wealthy guests. There I would have a chance to try out something new, especially with regard to ski runs, with which he assumed I was little acquainted. He was sure we would be given a royal welcome at the hotel and had booked a table so we could lunch with the thirty other guests who were staying there. We could expect to sit down to eat with stockbrokers and politicians from Sweden and Norway, not to mention industrialists, ski-jumpers, actresses and shipping tycoons.

I patted the engineer on the shoulder, saying it was a kind invitation and a kind thought on the part of a fit young man to an old-timer, but unfortunately I didn’t feel I could accept. I was here as a guest of my benefactor Magnus Jung-Olsen and did not wish to abuse his hospitality by preferring a Norwegian ski hut to the fine amenities offered by the flagship of the Kronos line.

The engineer said he perfectly understood; he himself had never before sailed on such a well appointed ship as the MS Elizabet Jung-Olsen, although he couldn’t boast such princely quarters as I who lodged in two spacious cabins with an en-suite bathroom. And with that we parted company.

All afternoon I watched the loading of the ship. It was an impressive sight as the white blocks of raw paper came swooping over the ship like banks of cloud before descending with a loud whine into the hold. A young person would no doubt find this pastime a touch monotonous but I managed to see something new in every block. I watched the loading from various angles thanks to the solicitude of the deckhands who shifted me hither and thither around the deck so I wouldn’t be in any danger. There I stayed until the first mate came over and asked whether I would like to be his guest on the bridge, which afforded a good view of the operations, saying he would also like to take this chance to introduce me to the innovations in navigation equipment that were to be seen there, for at this point wartime inventions had begun to flood on to the general market — to the benefit of us all.

Yes, the ship was certainly well equipped and there had been many innovations since I rowed out to the fishing grounds with my father seventy years ago. The mate’s seat, for example, was a leather upholstered armchair, which could be tilted back and forth, spun in a circle or raised and lowered at will. Then there was the gallon-capacity coffee machine, divided into two compartments, which could also hold hot water for tea. It was bolted on to a waist-high hardwood cupboard in one corner of the wheelhouse, and let into the worktop beside it was a pewter tin full of English shortbread. The first engineer invited me to sit in the armchair, then brought me coffee and shortbread on a tray that he clipped to the right arm of the chair. And before leaving to attend to his duties he handed me a pair of binoculars and turned on the wireless: Turalleri, Pumpa lens and Hut la ti tei — Norwegian sailors’ ditties performed in poignant and heart-felt style by the much-loved Magnus Samuelsen.

However, the greatest pleasure for me was to see the blocks of raw paper gliding past the wheelhouse windows. Now that I was on a level with them I could see how far the raw product fell short of the quality book paper that was shortly destined to preserve the words of the Prophet or the speeches of Atatürk. With the help of the binoculars I could distinguish the discolouration of the half-worked pulp, for although the blocks had appeared snow-white from a distance, I now saw that they were shot through with bark-coloured fibres that sometimes had a greenish tinge. The best opportunity to examine this came when the workmen in the hold failed to keep up with their counterparts on shore, for then the block would stop swaying and hang still for a decent interval before my eyes.

On one such occasion I spotted something unexpected: one of the deceased workman’s hands was trapped in the outer layer of the paper pulp. The little finger and half the ring finger were missing but a wedding band still encircled the stub, and the bones were visible through a gaping wound in the palm.

Before I could alert the workers, the block was lowered into the hold and I thought to myself that it would be a hopeless task to find the hand in the gloom below. So I decided to keep the knowledge to myself; the crew were superstitious enough as it was. And even I had my doubts that fortune would favour any ship that carried a dead man’s hand.

Indeed, I had grave doubts on this score.

Mate Caeneus listened for an unusually long time to his woodchip that Saturday evening in Mold Bay. For, as it transpired, it had some peculiar things to impart. Certainly Caeneus was frowning when he lowered the chip from his ear and replaced it in the inside pocket of his officer’s jacket. He drained his coffee cup in one go, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said in a low voice:

‘When I began my account of the Argonauts’ sojourn in the realm of doe-eyed Hypsipyle, I told you that we sailors got into some tight spots at times, and once I only narrowly avoided killing myself through sheer recklessness — during our shore leave on Lemnos, as it happens.

‘After more than three months on the island a few of us younger deckhands had the bright idea of organising a race in the chariots left behind by our mistresses’ former husbands. These were solidly built, showy vehicles, inlaid with gold leaf and engraved with images of the swiftest-flying gods and fabulous creatures of antiquity: wing-footed Hermes, rosy-fingered Eos, Pegasus of the shining mane and shimmering Iris — all sprinting hell-for-leather across the wide fields of heaven.

‘My mistress at the time was called Iphenoa. She was in her thirties and had been married to a lieutenant, for by this point in time the crew of the Argo had finished with the smartest district of the town and we were now servicing the needs of the women in the soldiers’ and artists’ quarter. Iphenoa had two nubile daughters. On the day of the race she accompanied me to the starting line and knotted a blue brocade scarf around my neck for luck. Her daughters harnessed the racehorses to the chariot, referring to one as Cat and the other as Death. These were giant beasts that the poets would have described as snorting fireworks, for Cat was of the same stock as Bucephalos, Alexander the Great’s steed, with toes instead of hooves, while Death was grey, with eyes of blue.

‘During the weeks I had spent in the women’s home, both sisters had tried in turn to entice me into bed, but unlike many of my shipmates I refused to serve more than one woman from each family, and never young girls. The maid servants were another matter — and here the daughters felt I was rubbing salt in the wound — for I was quite willing to roger the servants when the mistress was away from home. So I should have been on my guard. When Iphenoa had kissed me on the mouth and was leading the lieutenant’s daughters to the stands, the girls glanced back over their shoulders, smiling at me most oddly.

‘We raced five at a time, and in the second heat my fellow charioteers consisted of: Peleus, father of Achilles; Acastus, son of Pelias; Staphylus “bunch of grapes”, son of Dionysus; and the huntress Atalanta.

‘The latter competed on behalf of those celibates who took no part in the womanising but remained on board the Argo and guarded the ship under the command of Heracles.

‘The judge raised his arm. He let it fall.

‘The horses leapt into action. The charioteers yelled.

‘Then the sky was blue over Lemnos. Then the waves lapped the shore, then the limestone threw back the sunlight and the men’s skin shone until they seemed as insubstantial as immortals. Everything sang to the same tune; no ear could distinguish between the hoof-beats, the creaking of the wheels and the shouts of the charioteers.

‘Half an eternity passed in this manner.

‘I had driven no more than ninety feet when the spokes in the left wheel of my chariot gave way. As if by a miracle, Cat and Death broke free from the yoke and suffered no harm, but the chariot and ground collided with such colossal force that all I can remember is being hurled into the air in a forward trajectory and landing on the undercarriage, where I danced a brief tarantella before everything went black.

‘When I came to my senses Jason was standing over me, looking very grave. He said I had broken both my legs. I’m told that I smiled back at him as if it was nothing to make a fuss about. Then I swooned again and had no idea that my life was hanging by a thread. Next I woke to discover that my clothes were being cut off, and I was vaguely aware of a girl drawing splinters of wood from my chest, for which I was grateful. But when the wounds were stitched up without an anaesthetic, the pain was so great that I blacked out. I must have surfaced from my deathly coma like this several times during the first days after I was brought to the hospital.

‘I was in such a bad way that it’s a wonder Captain Jason bothered to have me patched up at all. For broken legs were not all that ailed me after the accident: on closer examination it turned out that I had been grazed on the hands and across the breast, a great wound gaped from my right eyelid to the nape of my neck. My diaphragm had burst when my lower intestines were thrust upwards, putting so much pressure on my lungs that I had difficulty breathing, on top of which I had bruised five of my ribs. My right ankle had shattered, my foot was twisted back and my thighbone had snapped at the ball joint on the left-hand side. This in turn had been stirred together in such a tangle that broken shards of bone had sliced through the muscle. The bones of my left hand had snapped, as had the fingers of my right. Both calves were also broken and split up to the knee joints; altogether, eleven bones were broken in twenty places. My left wrist and shoulder joints were sprained, and so were several other joints. And a large patch of my scalp had been flayed from my skull.

‘Now I owed my life to the fact that Jason son of Aeson had been fostered and tutored by the centaur Cheiron, the greatest physician of his age. As there was a risk of my healing in a deformed posture, being so soft and mangled, he resorted to “crucifying”me: nails were driven through both my legs and straps were tied to them, then belayed around two blocks on a pole at the end of the bed, and Jason tied a heavy sandbag to the end of each strap. Next, slings were placed under my knees which were then hoisted up, each weighed down by a sandbag. It took me two weeks to get used to the “cross” from which I was to hang for four months altogether. All that time I suffered from a nagging ache in the nail holes, though this was alleviated when I drank the wine that Iphenoa brought me every morning.

‘Before Jason could crucify me he had to bore holes through my legs below the knees, using a fairly hefty drill for the job. Apparently I told Jason that it would prove hard to drill through the bones of a man who had been granted the gift by blue-haired Poseidon of being impervious to sharp weapons. This proved correct, for the drill got stuck for an age in the bone, and one handle after another snapped off, but Jason broke through in the end and immediately started on the other leg.

‘But it was not only the toughness of my legs that betrayed my past. During the struggle to heal myself my body reverted to the shape it used to have before my metamorphosis sixteen years earlier. I myself wasn’t aware of this until one of the girls who helped me to breathe held up a mirror below my belly. I saw that my penis had shrunk until it exactly resembled the penis of a five-year-old boy, both in size and behaviour, and its proportion to a man’s body was like what you would see on a Renaissance sculpture (at last I understood why the nurses had been giggling at me). Moreover I had moulted like a wolf in spring. My chest was white and soft again — with the swell of maidenly breasts.

‘Yes, once I was a girl. My name was Caenis and I did as I pleased. We lived in Thessaly. My father, Elatus, was king of the Lapiths. He was a conventional man and the day I reached marriageable age he began to pester me to wed. It would certainly have been an easy task for the king to find me an eligible bridegroom — such as a hero who was both heir to a kingdom and a monster-slayer to boot — for I was famed throughout the lands for my intellect and radiant beauty. Indeed, I was so intelligent and fair that my half-brother Polyphemus used to call me Thena or Dite in an attempt to get a rise out of me. But as is often the case with independent girls, I paid little heed to my father’s talk of marriage: like the grass that bears hermaphroditic flowers and fertilises itself, I bloomed for myself alone.

‘King Elatus found the situation most unfortunate, and the same could be said of the suitors who had waited full of anticipation for the day when the princess would be offered up for grabs. The greatest champions on earth had gathered there, bold men and true; I would get to know many of them in my new life as a man since several were destined to be my shipmates on the Argo.

‘I was allowed to have my own way. The host of heroes moved on to the next country and commenced wooing the king’s daughter there. My father turned to more agreeable tasks than bickering with his daughter. And who knows, my existence might have continued in this satisfactory state had news of the obdurate girl in Thessaly not carried beyond our mortal world.

‘Not far from the city I had a secret refuge, a small cove that I liked to visit at the kindling of the morning star. At that hour there was nothing more translucent under heaven than the shallow sea between the rocks. The seabed was everywhere visible and the water, blue as an eye, grew lighter the closer you got to the surface, until it turned green, then vanished — and I breathed it in.

‘It was there that the god found me.

‘The cove emptied of seawater. It was as if a wet quilt had been stripped from the ocean floor. There’s a pretty shell, I thought to myself and walked over to a sugar-pink snail’s house that lay on the sand. I bent down, picked up the conch and weighed it in my hand: well, I never, here’s a gift for Eurydice.

‘Then the heavy wave broke over me.

‘The surf raged in Poseidon’s deep, cold eyes as he flung me flat on my back and crushed me beneath his weight. I tried to scream for help but he forced my teeth apart with his blue fingers and spat a mouthful of raw wet seaweed inside. I tried to wriggle out from beneath him but at the slightest movement my flesh and skin were lacerated by the coral that covered his thighs, the barnacles that grew on his palms; it was better to lie still while the god laboured away on top of me, the shark oil oozing from his hair into my eyes. He did not cease until all the air had been knocked from my maidenly lungs and my veins were emptied of blood: then with a spasm of his hips he filled my body with seawater — his climactic groan echoed with the despairing cries of a thousand drowning men.

‘The briny sea flooded every inch of my body: my belly and heart, my joints and limbs, every sinew, every muscle, every lymph node and nerve — and wherever it went it felt like molten iron poured into the out-stretched hand of a child.

‘Poseidon was well satisfied with his rut, and in return for my maidenhead he offered me one wish. I curled up where I lay on the shore and whimpered:

‘“I wish I were a man so I need never again endure such an ordeal.”

‘These last words emerged in a deep masculine timbre, for the god had been as good as his word. And now that I was a man, Poseidon was generous to me, saying that from this time forth my nature would be such that no metal could harm me. He must have fore-seen that I would have to take part in many a duel to defend my honour against men and giants who doubted my prowess because I had once been a maid.

‘In my male shape I was given the name of Caeneus, and I remained in that form until the day war broke out between the Lapiths and the Centaurs, which was when the latter drank themselves into a frenzy at the wedding of Pirithous and Hippodamia. A great battle was fought that you can read about in many books for it was considered one of the mightiest clashes of antiquity. When the centaurs had given up trying to shoot me with javelins and arrows or run me through with swords and knives — and I had managed to kill their leader Latreus — they resorted to bombarding me with rocks and huge tree trunks. I don’t know whether tales of how badly I had been injured on Lemnos gave them this idea, but they piled so much of the forest on top of me that I was forced to change shape or perish.

‘Long afterwards the poet Naso quoted my brother-in-arms and former shipmate on the Argo, the seer Mopsus, as saying that a dun-coloured bird had flown up from the pile and soared high into the sky in a wide circle above the battlefield. There it mewed sorrowfully before flying away.

‘It was a young herring gull that had not yet acquired its adult plumage.

‘It was I, Caeneus.’