stamping his feet and clapping his hands, while the women called out, laughing as the pace quickened. The eyes of Telemachus brightened with excitement, and once the hall grew quieter, I struck my lyre and opened my voice in the song of praise to Lord Odysseus which I had been harbouring for many weeks, waiting for just such an exalted time as this.
The hall must have fallen silent around me but I was conscious of no one and of nothing there. As though I had taken a deep draught of wine, the god came into me and in those rare moments I was left with no sense of my body’s boundaries; with no sense of my self at all, if truth were told, for I was as much an instrument in the god’s service as was the lyre in my hands. Nor was there any space left in which to be astonished that such a thing should have happened in the company of others, even though the god had only visited me before when I sang alone in the high places of the island, looking down across the empty acres of the sea. And so, for a time that might have been no time at all, but a kindly gesture of eternity towards my mortal life, I and the god and the song were one; and I knew that my fate had come upon me and I could never again be quite the same.
The applause rang loud and long when the song was ended. I saw tears in the eyes of Eurycleia, the old woman who had nursed Odysseus when he was a boy. Mentor and the other lords of the island were beaming with approval. For a time my heart swelled with the pride and pleasure of that moment. Then the god went out of me as swiftly as he had come, and I was left empty and disarrayed like a soiled garment when the hot night’s dance is over and done.
I saw Telemachus looking at me with a kind of wonder from where he sat, fondling the ears of the dog Argus, but I could not hold his gaze. Only later when, with her customary tact and grace, Lady Penelope sought me out, not merely to commend but also to counsel me, did I begin to recover my senses.
‘Your song was a good song, Phemius,’ she said quietly. ‘The Lord Odysseus will be proud to hear it on his return, and your father will be prouder still … if the sea-gods have spared him.’ Then she crouched down beside me, right there at the edge of the hearth, and studied me with such tender concern that I scarcely knew where to put myself. Stammering out an awkward phrase or two of thanks, I made to stand, but was stopped by the gentle pressure of her hand. ‘I see what has been given to you,’ she said, ‘but there is always a price to pay for such gifts. I think you should go alone from the hall soon and make an offering to the god. And you would be wise to ask for his mercy as well as his strength.’ Rising gracefully to her feet, she rested the tips of her fingers on my head and added, ‘I feel sure that this is what your father would tell you if he was here.’
I was still not much more than a boy in those days, and I see now that I had less understanding of her words than I believed at the time. But I had a youth’s impatience to be taken seriously, and that, above all else, was the gift that those words conferred on me. I had loved Penelope before, as all the island did, with warm affection and regard; now I was lost in adoration of her. And so, as I stood alone under the night sky, making my solemn offering to the god as she had bidden, I truly had nothing more to ask of life than the right to sit for the rest of my days at my lady’s feet in the great hall at Ithaca and serve her with my gift.
Telemachus and I quarrelled around that time. Four years divided us, so his behaviour sometimes felt petulant and childish to me. For his part, he took my lapdog devotion to his mother as a rebuke to his own, sometimes cruel efforts to detach himself from her care. I suppose he was trying to accelerate his growth into manhood in order to ready himself for his father’s return, but the effect was to turn him into a cross-grained prig whose fractious moods drove his mother close to distraction. One day our exchanges became so vehement that I told him I would have nothing more to do with him until he apologized both to his mother and to me. But he was too proud and intransigent for that, so Telemachus withdrew into a tight-lipped solitude on which only the patient old swineherd Eumaeus was sometimes permitted to intrude.
The loss, as it turned out, was as much mine as his. I tried for a time to get along with Antinous, Eurymachus and the other young men who hung about the taverns of the town, but they were all older than me, and too much idle comfort had made them sophisticated in ways which left me feeling uneasy and gauche. By contrast, there had always been a bond of kinship between Telemachus and myself; our tastes were similar, our imaginations were fired by the same stories, we were both happier listening to the chime of goat-bells in the hills or the sound of the wind working off the sea than to the prattle of the town. So I missed my friend in those difficult days. Probably more than he missed me.
Yet if Telemachus and I were despondent, so too, as the weeks dragged by, was everybody else. Even though we knew our hopes unreasonable, the feast had generated an expectation that Odysseus would come sailing home with his fleet within a matter of days. Old men whose sons had gone off to the war, and boys much younger than Telemachus, began to gather on the cliffs to see which of them would first spot the mastheads crossing the horizon. There were dawns when I woke filled with the irrational conviction that this was the day when the ships would make port and my father Terpis would be there at the prow, alive and well, singing his vessel ashore. So I would run all the way out to Crow Rock and stand staring out across the blue-green swell with the birds lurching on the wind above my head. But there was nothing to be seen through the haze where sea became sky and the great world lay beyond our own small clutch of islands.
Late one afternoon, when all the others had long since lost interest in the vigil, I heard a sound among the rocks behind me. I turned expecting to find nothing more than a sheep tugging at the rough grass, and saw Telemachus staring at me, his mouth tightly drawn, his eyes uncertain. We both remained silent, neither quite ready to make the first conciliatory move. The wind bustled about our ears. The concussions of a stiff swell against the cliff shook the air.
‘There’s been news,’ he said at last, as if to the stones.
‘Of the war, you mean? Of the fleet?’
‘Does any other kind matter these days?’
‘But how?’ I demanded. ‘I’ve been here all day and I haven’t seen any ships.’
‘You were looking the wrong way,’ Telemachus scowled. ‘Amphinomus put in from Dulichion two hours ago. One of his merchantmen got back from a voyage into the Gulf of Corinth the day before yesterday. He says that more than half the Argive fleet was wrecked in a tempest sailing back from Troy. Hundreds of men were drowned. He says that King Agamemnon has been murdered in Mycenae and the son of Thyestes rules there now. He says that there’s fighting all over Thessaly. A new people with magic weapons have invaded. He says that the whole world has been turned upside down.’
I stood listening to this news dumbfounded. The last we’d heard was that Troy had fallen and the fleet must soon be sailing home in triumph. If the gods had granted us a glorious victory after ten years of war, surely they would spare the host the ravages of a storm? And Agamemnon was the King of Men – how could anyone possibly wrest his throne from him? So when Telemachus began to talk of magical weapons, I became convinced that he was out to make a fool of me.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and doubtless the sea will run dry tomorrow and these invaders will walk across the strait and we shall all be struck down by their magic.’
‘It’s true,’ he retorted. ‘It’s all true – not like your stupid songs.’
He turned away and would have left me there on the cliff but I had seen the distress on his face before the anger displaced it. ‘Telemachus, wait,’ I shouted after him. He stopped at my call, a scrawny figure in the fading light with the wind ruffling his hair. ‘Was there any word of your father?’
For a few moments longer he stood in silence; then without turning he said, ‘Nobody knows where he is. Nobody knows whether he’s alive or dead. The fishes might be eating him for all I know.’
King Laertes and all the elders of the island gathered the next day to hear what Amphinomus had to report, and the more we heard the more it seemed that the world had been turned upside down. We learned that the northern reaches of Thessaly and Magnesia had indeed been invaded by a foreign horde armed with weapons stronger than bronze; and that, even though Neoptolemus and his Myrmidons were fighting at his side, King Peleus had