Tag: Greek

The first thing that struck me was the silence. Voices breaking off, the eerie quiet of the oars ceasing their pounding, the sea stopping its rhythm, nature itself stilling. Or, perhaps, the stillness was only in me, like that feeling of being watched. For, watched we were.
       “Dromon!” a voice uttered, and eyes followed it – at first only a shadow in the early morning, and then the colours of a war galley splitting the waves.
       Peiratai, one whispered. And then, scurry broke the stillness.
       Poor though my Greek was, I knew what these were: pirates. Plague of every sea, the bloodthirst and greed of mankind. Vikingar, in my tongue.
       I knew of battles at sea, how attackers pursued in agile oared boats, how quickly they turned into skirmishes as the ship was run aground or hooked and boarded. In vain did our phortēgon try to swerve its heavy lumbering body carrying marble and foods. The shore was still small on the horizon, too far to reach on time with sails alone. The dromon closed in until we could see them: Saracens and Greeks both, over a dozen, free-booters by trade, all armed and ready.
       The whistling of arrows came next. Most skewered but water, driving fear more than hurt. But the next wave hit harder: one splintered the fir of the mast, another shattered an amphora beside me; a man slipped with pierced calf, red trickling into the gold of the olive oil across the deck. Only two among my shipmates – my peers by circumstance – were geared as guards; the rest, merchants and sailors. A seax hanged at my belt and, in spite of my young years, I was perhaps a better warrior than most of them; but they had a stake, wares to protect, a ship. I had none. Merely a passenger, on a ride to a destination never to be reached. Far but, perhaps, within reach, white cliffs stretched ahead. I jumped.
       The sea engulfed me, colder than I remembered it, not soothing as I knew the Mediterranean to be. Sound muffled to my ears, the noise of the ensuing fray, the cries. Was I being pursued? Shot at? I could not tell. My arms pushed onward.
       The water was deep, abyss under my belly, and a chill shot through my limbs as I looked beneath. So often I had swum in deep gulfs of a dozen faðmr where turtles foraged, water always bearing that azure tinge, a sign the seabed was not far beneath, still catching glimpses of the glaring Greek sunlight. But now it was dark like creeping night. Against reason, the darkness and the fright whispered with endless possibilities: anything could be beneath me.
       I pushed on and on until my body ached, and then I pushed further still towards the nearing limestone walls. A cry cut across the water. I paused to see a figure swimming against the silhouettes of the ships. I slowed to let him catch up, but he did not; he merely yelped, foam spraying around as he thrashed. Waves were higher now, returning from the rocks ahead.
       “Hold still,” I reached out, but he grabbed my shoulder and pulled. I shoved him away, yet fingers clenched in my hair. Saltwater flooded, my nose and chest sore with them. So often I had played a sport of wrestling underwater, common in my homeland, but never had true panic struck like now as the mirror of the sea closed in above my head and my lips sucked water in place of air.
       His arm caught my throat and, at that moment, he became my sworn enemy. My legs kicked and elbows bashed and still he clung, he clung, so I pushed him under as if I could use his body to climb, hands and knees weighing him down, down – down into the blue chasm – until his grip finally loosened and air flooded my lungs anew. Limp and still his body lay face down, and I turned him over with caution lest he lunged at me again; but all that greeted me was his gaping mouth and a pair of dark incredulous eyes staring at me reproachfully.
       The swim along the limestone walls to a secluded cove was a blur and, as soon as warm pebbles crushed against my palms and knees, I closed my eyes, seeing only the Greek sailor dragging me down, down into the bottomless blue.
       Thirst woke me. It was late morning, and birds circled overhead to nests in the cliffs. A seagull carried something in its beak, and I could swear it was the dark eye of the Greek sailor. I walked. My bones ached from the bed of rocks where I had lain, my skin stung where the man’s fingernails had dug and dragged, and my lips burst with salt longed for sweet water. No sign of boat or wreckage was in sight, not even from the height of the headland, as if it all had been a dream.
       I walked on towards the mountains, a wide arid expanse of golden grass and evergreens, no settlement or freshwater in sight. My pouch had been lost, perhaps ripped by the unwitting sailor during the scuffle, my shirt was tattered and one of my sandals – draped over my hands as I swam – had come undone, lost in the water. The sun glared overhead. My skin turned red and sore, and my sole lacerated by the rough ground left red drops in the dirt; I wrapped it in a torn cloth and walked on. No shade was in sight as vegetation uphill dwindled, soon only shrubs and briars in my path. I walked and walked, the sun moving like a slug across the sky.
       From the highest point, more dried grass and pines stretched down to the sea, but it looked engulfed in water, a shimmering mirror on the horizon. My head swam with ache and sunlight, so much that I could barely follow my own thoughts, as if that to and fro motion of the sea had not left me.
       And there, in the water, I saw my parents’ house, sunken in the endless mud of Iceland’s rainy seasons, and I walked towards it nearly tumbling downhill, the house pulling me towards it. Deep in my soul I knew that inside it would find the answers I sought, the mystery around my father’s death which had been erased from my mind like a drawing in the sand. But as I neared the house, I found it had been destroyed and abandoned, and a feeling of immeasurable sadness and loneliness gripped me, as if there was no one left in the world but me.
       I let myself fall upon the grass, in the peppery scent of a bush scattered with white clusters, the skies above me still and deep. And then I thought of the Greek sailor, limbs limp atop the bottomless blue, all alone, sinking or adrift, prey to seagulls or creatures of the sea. I had left Iceland behind where I had known death, dozens of tylptir away across land and sea, only to come here and sow more death; I had killed the only other soul alive. And as my lids closed, all I could see was his eyes. Those dark, ever judging eyes, wide with horror at the callousness of man. For there is no difference between the will to live and the will to kill.
       I woke up under a ceiling of some sort, not the long and high wooden house of my parents, but amid rough walls carved into rock. A cave made into a living space. 
       Feeling my seax missing, I sprang up, only to find it beside me on the floor. My shirt, too, had been laid aside and my sandal had been replaced with a pair of crude ones of rawhide. Oil coated the sores and scratches on my skin, its faint olive scent sending my mind back to something I had hoped was only a dream: the ship and the shattered amphora.
       Rough bread, goat cheese, olives and a jug of water sat laid upon a rudimentary table, and I devoured them like a wolf and still was not sated. A covered basket on the ground held more bread and cheese – the owner’s meal, perhaps – so I finished it as well, like one who had never known scarcity.
       The sky was soft purple, heat waning now. A pomegranate tree spread its branches over bushes scented like wild thyme and marjoram, pale-red fruits hanging over a stone mouth in the ground, darkened with long moisture. I lifted the flat slab; in the opening, a cistern filled with rainwater. As I drew up the clay bucket, my own dark reflection stared back, and I distorted it quickly to wash my face and drink until my belly felt full.
       The house I had thought, in my phantasm, to be my parents’ home in Iceland, was a stone ruin of peculiar shape, a rectangle surrounded by four symmetrical arms. The roof had collapsed almost entirely, but the walls and a room still stood. It lay in the distance downhill, close to the shore.
       “Ekklesia,” said a voice. An elderly man stepped behind me, barefoot, long hair and beard unkempt, fingernails dirty, bringing a whiff of old sweat with him. I understood: it was not a house, but a place of worship, perhaps dedicated to that god of the Christians – the one on the cross who died and was reborn.
       A benevolent smile was on the old man’s face, warm but reserved, the smile of a life free of any excitement. With gestures and words I did not know, he asked how I had come there. Dromon, peiratai, I tried to explain, moving my arms with vigour. Are you alone? he motioned, and the hollowness in my stomach awakened.
       “Yes,” I said. “I am alone.”
       It was then that I remembered my vision of the piece of land I was on, a small patch in an endless sea, and startled:
       “Is this an island?” I asked, one of the few Greek words I knew.
       “Island,” he repeated.
       “I need to get to Patras as soon as possible,” I explained. “Where is it?” The old man shook his palm towards the horizon, ample motions indicating something far, far away beyond the bejewelled sea now tinged with sunset. A hill or mountain stretched from the sea not far away, the shore of another land.
       “I need to board a ship. Where is the nearest port? Village? Chorion?”
       He shook his head and smiled. No village. Small island, he showed.
       “What do you mean?” My pulse picked up. “Who else is on this island? Who else? Are you alone?” I remembered his question.
       Alone, he nodded. The island around me suddenly felt small, unnervingly so, and the vastness of the sea suffocating, as it was when I beheld its blue depths under me.
       “I need to borrow your boat, then. Where is it?” I looked around, but there was none in sight. I tried every word for watercraft I knew, but he simply shook his head, the same look on his face, unchanging. “No, no, you must have some kind of boat, how else do you travel? How do you fish?”
       There were bread and grains in his stores, so I struggled to ask whether someone was ever coming to this island to bring him food, some kind of friend or tradesman, and after arduous work he finally understood. He pointed to the sun to mimic a day, then counted: three tens.
       “Thirty days?” I nearly yelled. “No, no – I don’t have thirty days! You don’t understand: I need to be in Patras in a week to meet my uncle, or they’ll sail out of Greece and leave me here at the ends of the damned earth!”
       That smile, that benevolent smile was plastered to his face, like an old man looking at a feisty child. He must have been feeble in the head, surely so, for what kind of man would live cut off from the world and not even understand the urge to return to civilisation? The smile jarred me more than anything else.
       I grunted and kicked the dirt, and pebbles flew every which way. His filthy sticky hand touched my arm as if to comfort me, to show me I could stay there with him and wait. He held out a pomegranate, as if it could solve my quandary. He was senile, no doubt about it, and I hated it – I hated his pomegranate and his arid island and his acrid smell of sweat and that smile more than anything else, so I grabbed his shoulders with force:
       “No, you don’t want me here, you fool!” Some kind of perversion suddenly overtook me, and I looked in his eyes: “I killed the other man who escaped the pirates. And he’s not the first man I killed. Do you understand?” I touched the seax at my hip. His expression did not change; he had not understood. “I am a murderer,” I pointed to myself.
       “Yes,” he nodded. “Rus.” The name northerners in Byzantium were called.
       I groaned and released him, slapping the pomegranate out his hand. It smashed onto the ground, opened like a heart under a ribcage, smudging deep red into the dirt.
       The only things I took from the old madman were the pair of sandals he had left for me, a woodaxe and some rope, and I simply went away, determined to prove I could find my own path without the help his simple mind was unwilling to give. I had to be on the shore to signal passing ships and build my escape.
       At night, I slept in the ruined Christian temple, in the only chamber whose roof was intact. There seemed to be a door in the stone floor, but it was too large and heavy for me to move, as if sealed forever shut.
       The paintings on its walls were still visible, eerie faded images of men in robes, in boats or among grains, with arms stretched out to the sky where a bleached figure stood with open hands, the disc of a sun placed behind its head. I dreamed of the figures in the temple as men circling me searchingly. Now they were my uncle’s men sent to rescue me, now pirates seeking profit to sell me as a slave, now my fellow shipmates and the dark-eyed sailor, all dead.
       The next day, I began gathering branches and vines and felling saplings, aiming to build a raft and an oar. With it, I would reach the next shore and seek a port. The thought of my uncle worrying about me in Patras kept me hopeful.
       I foraged for capers, wild olives, fennel and herbs from the land, and from the shore I gathered seaweed, limpets and mussels from tide pools and sea urchins from rocks, but found the foraging left me more exhausted than nourished. So, when I discovered the old man’s fishing net discarded on the shore, I used it to catch bream.
       Sometimes, I would see his fire up on the hill, and imagine him cooking stew and tending to his goats and bees in his small olive grove, and in those moments I would have given anything for some cheese and milk and that balmy bitterness of olive oil. And, above all, my stomach ached at the memory of the pomegranate broken in the dirt, sweet juiciness wasted.
       What pushes one to choose exile? I wondered, watching him. For exile it surely was, living alone, cut off from fellow men, from society. Was it loneliness, the pain of some loss? Poverty? Or was it penance for some old deed? I knew Christians believed in sin, mistakes or flaws that need to be repented by a show of want and suffering. Was it some temptation he had to escape? Or was he pursued under law? Had he, too, taken an innocent life…? By his benevolent smile, it was hard to imagine those old work-weary hands wreaking violence, but can one truly ever know a man? Perhaps he, too, looked at me and saw an innocent boy — too fair for merciless sunlight, too soft-skinned to have known hardship, too young to survive alone — and could not imagine I had killed…
       Drinking water was the most difficult to come by; a shallow spring was trickling down limestone, but after weeks without rain it was barely enough to fill a palm, so I supplemented it with water pooled in rock pans, warm and tasting faintly of salt and algae like a broth. Working under the harsh sun and walking on sore foot drained my strength and made me light-headed. But after a few days of assiduous work, the raft was ready – flimsy, but ready – and I was eager to test it the next day.
       That night, the figures on the walls revealed themselves as men I knew, men from Iceland finally there to punish me. So close they gathered that I could feel their breath, and I was paralysed on the floor, unable to move or scream. The faded character in the central painting turned out to be a woman – I could see her headdress clearly now, and through the brightness of the sun disc around her head I saw it was my mother seeking me and calling my name, outstretched arms ready to receive me in embrace. But she was up there, unreachable, and I – lost in a dark place under the earth and ears of grain. The men caught up to me and pierced my stomach with a spear. Blood and gore splashed at the woman’s feet, in the shape of a pomegranate.
       When morning came, I threw up repeatedly, stomach aching like it was about to burst. I was in no condition to row; the raft had to wait. 
       Lying on the floor in pain and feebleness, I realised a pomegranate was indeed painted on the wall, but it seemed apart from the images of the gathering men as if it had been, somehow, painted under it. With my fingers and seax, I chipped at the plaster of the wall, not without remorse. I felt sorry to destroy the creation of those meticulous hands which could render reality in such beautiful shapes and colours, but curiosity drove me. And there, beneath it, painted by a different hand, stretched another image, older and darkened: it showed a woman, a girl dressed in white, holding a pomegranate in her hands.
       Though the paintings of the men were more elaborate but soulless, like mere conventions, the girl seemed to shine out of the gloominess in which she was depicted, and I instantly knew she was a goddess, imparting with mortals the wisdom of her revelations. While she looked grave, as if resigned to some dark fate, and solemn as one performing a secret ritual act, there was so much strength and resolve in her expression that I felt empowered by some strange force outside of me to stop crawling and stand back on my feet.
       The next day, I took the raft out to sea. The bones of my ribcage were protruding under my skin; always well-fed and active, I had never seen myself so frail, but still I rowed with the oar I had made. The farther I rowed from the shore, the more distant the land I had to reach turned out to be. Each small wave, each push of the current, each shift of my weight, every motion destabilised the contraption little by little, and soon the makeshift planks parted and water seeped through. A corner sank first, and after a wave hit obliquely it came undone, and I found myself in the open sea, that dreadfully bottomless blue beneath me again. Holding onto the buoyant wood I kicked myself back to shore in what felt like an eternity, exhausted and back-burnt.
       That evening, I stepped once more under the shade of the olive trees and the old man greeted me with his benevolent smiling face.
       “Kore,” he pointed to the girl in the painting when I took him to the temple. “Persephónē.”
       Through gestures and drawings on the ground, paired with unknown words whose meanings I gradually came to understand, I learned that a goddess-maiden named Persephónē was taken away from her mother into the land of the dead. Long was she sought after and long her mother cried, but Kore was lost to her in the darkness which had become her home; and while her mother was sad and furious, Kore was not. She had grown accustomed to the darkness.
       Demeter, her mother, was represented above the fields of grain searching for her, over which the painting of the woman had been superimposed. It must have been him much older, I realised, that painting of Demeter and Kore, and over it people from a more recent time had painted images of Christian gods, though these were quite faded and ruined, too. How old was this temple? the question pressed me, but found no words to ask.
       I laid my hands upon the wall and tried to peel away the outer painting to see the old one underneath, but the man stopped me:
       “Mother,” he said, pointing at the ensemble. “Mother of God.”
       Looking at the painting again, I suddenly understood it: the people were gathering, in boats and over land, to worship the woman, for she was a goddess herself, just like Demeter. And then I knew that this faceless female deity with outstretched arms and the sun’s halo behind her head represented the idea of Mother, and her face needed not be seen because everyone knows what Mother looks like, just as I had seen my own inside it.
       The more time I spent in the temple, the more I realised Kore’s journey was not that different from mine. I, too – like Kore, like the old man – was away from home on some form of exile, lost in darkness. But Kore and the man were neither sad, nor scared, nor angry, whereas I was all of them.
       I fished and gathered for the old man and he milked the goat and cooked. I lived his simple and frugal life, knowing that my uncle’s ship had sailed and he was in Sikiley already thinking I had perished in the pirate attack. The thought scared and angered me less and less.
       One afternoon, when I had stopped counting the days, a boat was seen in the distance. It was that time of the year –  the man had explained to me – when day and night were equal. A dozen men and women descended from the boat bearing foods and drinks, each greeted by the old man with long exchanges of words.
       I had expected a banquet, but none was given. Grains and long-lasting food was set in the old man’s stores, and the more lavish foods were taken to the temple in a candle-lit procession after nightfall. Their joyful voices turned solemn as soon as the journey started, and they began to intone a chant. Inside the temple they shared among themselves a boiled herbal drink, bread and honey. They uttered names and the old man wrote them on wax tablets, and along with each tablet the people laid down an object, ordinary to my eyes: a piece of cloth, a shoe, a toy, a comb.
       Then the old man opened a single pomegranate and scattered its seeds in the palm of each of them: six seeds.
       “Queen of Heaven and Earth,” they looked at Kore and the motherly figure above her, bowed before her in worship, chanting as they ate.
       I ate my seeds, too, the red juice infusing my tongue with sweetness and fulfillment. With the combined strength of all their arms, the trapdoor in the stone was opened, and they stepped into the opening one by one, candles extinguished.
       “No,” the old man placed a hand on my chest as I tried to follow. “You wait here.”
       I sat under the painting and waited, hearing their chant disappear in the underground. I closed my eyes, the pomegranate still flavouring my tongue, and thought of the ceremonies back home celebrated among kin and friends. Of the gods of my people. Of Hel ruling in solitude over her misty abode of the dead. Of Óðinn, descending to that realm of no return to gather knowledge and understanding that, in order to achieve true wisdom, one must die. I imagined him, hanging from a tree and pierced with a spear, visions of past and future, death and rebirth, passing behind his closed eyes. I thought of my father’s death which I had pushed away from my mind. Of how my mother and I had punished the ones responsible for it. Of my mother waiting for me while I wandered the world, burdened by guilt, trying to forget things I had seen and done, trying to return to a place which perhaps existed no longer or was forever changed. Of the Greek sailor I had pushed under.
       In runes, I wrote their names with my finger on the dirt of the floor, the way the people had written the names of their dead, so that Kore might bring them peace – both to the dead and to those surviving in guilt.
       It was marvellous, I thought, how these experiences – my own, those of other people, those of the gods – were so unlike and yet so similar! How these different faiths, the older and the newer, the beliefs and lives of different people dozens of tylptir away, share a common ground.
       Kore had been dragged into the realm of death and darkness unwillingly, and had become its queen, more resplendent for it. Óðinn had wounded himself to near-death, and in that half-dead state he gained wisdom immeasurable. Christ was mortal, he died and became god.
       And at that moment I thought that perhaps death is not something to be feared, but embraced as an altering experience. That the darkness of one’s condition must be accepted. That all change is good or can be made good because it is fulfilling. That everything – every experience, every concept – is layered, just like the temple, old and new superimposed, personal and cosmic, all build upon what existed before it, all blending together to form a universal truth which we all know deep down but must search long to find, and once found we discover the secrets of the universe.
       I was awoken by the procession emerging from the underground. Dawn was rising over the small island.
       With them, I stepped into the boat that was to take me to the nearest shore from which I would get to Patras and, hopefully, find my uncle still waiting or find passage to Sikiley and reunite with him there. I took my leave from the old man. He never asked my name and I never asked his.I did not know who he was, why he lived there alone or what his religion was, but in my mind he was forever linked to the maiden who had come to master the darkness, to wisdom sprung from the unlikeliest of places, to acceptance and growth. 
       And now, his benevolent smile made sense, at last.