Circe had told me that the sirens' song was irresistible, the very shape of desire, and that no one who heard it went unscathed, as was attested by the bones of their admirers tumbling back and forth in the tide-pools around their reef. But I have never been one to leave a riddle unsolved or, as I overheard my men say, well enough alone and I was determined to hear them for myself.
It seemed that my curiosity could be safely indulged through simple logistics. As the ship neared the sirens' rock I had myself bound to the mast while the crew stuffed their ears with beeswax. It seemed odd no one had thought of it before but in general there is no accounting for the bovine stupidity of mankind.
There were two of them. As we approached the white breakers around the reef I saw them sit up, stretch their long spines and fix us with their gazes. Their torsos were too long, their fingers had too many joints and their eyes were cold and green. One said something to the other in a high musical language and my eyes began to water--the other laughed and they began to sing.
As they sang I remembered the face of a Trojan whose name I never knew whom I had killed before the high walls of that city, the man's surprise as I attacked him blind-side, how easy it was to slip my point past his guard and run him through, the Trojan's dawning rage at the affront to his body, an emotion half formed on his face when death found him, the tug on my blade as his body fell away. I remembered the first time I saw Penelope, walking away from me in a white courtyard in Sparta. I remembered Ithaca the day I left it. I saw how far I was from home, how remote the chance I would ever see it again. The sirens beckoned, longing for me, offering release from my displacement, but I laughed with delight at being lost and reckless, wandering among unknown islands, not knowing the shape of my days. ``This is not so bad,'' I said to myself. ``Anyone unmanned by these monsters is a home-body or a sentimentalist.''
The sirens, who had been watching me intently, fell silent, briefly nonplussed. They conferred in low voices and I thought they might have given up when they launched into a new song, an intricate counterpoint comprised of just a few themes, varied and interwoven.
Their song broke over me and it was as though a veil had been blown away. I saw how Achilles, whose humanity was subsumed in speed and strength and reckless pride, had made his inevitable slow march toward death, dragging Agamemnon and Patroclus and all the Greeks and the royal house of Troy stumbling behind him. I saw the implacable self-assertion of Agamemnon mirrored by pious, gentle Priam's refusal to save his city.18.1 I saw Hector's love of country and family opposed by Achilles' madness for glory and his slight impatience for the death he knew was closing in on him. And overlaying them all were the passions and rivalries of the bright gods, like scirocco winds scouring everything they touched. Finally I saw myself, how my wit exceeded that of other men but gave me no leverage against fate, and how in the time to come it would avail me nothing but possibly an understanding of the full scope of my helplessness.
As their song crescendoed I had the sudden conviction that the world, which I had considered the province of meaningless chances, a mad dance of atoms, was as orderly as the hexagons in the honeycombs I had just crushed into wax (my fingers still sticky with their honey) and that behind everything, from Helen's weaving to Circe's mountain to Scylla's death was a subtle pattern, an order of the most compelling lucidity, but hidden from me, a code I could never crack.
Abruptly, the song ended and I sagged forward, the ropes digging into my chest as the men took the ship out. I cried out for the sirens to continue, that I was close to an answer, but they watched me depart with their chins propped on their hands.
I tried to reconstruct their song while its echoes yet lingered in my mind but all I could remember were four lines:
Achaea's old soldiery
Charmed out of time we see.
No life on earth can be
Hid from our dreaming.18.2
When the reef was well behind us the men unbound me. Making an effort to appear self-possessed, I told them that I had not had time to hear quite all and that we must go back. The men looked at each other sidelong, shuffled their feet and avoided my gaze. I cursed them, called them disobedient dogs whose lot was to obey, not to question. Reluctantly, they did as I asked, replacing the wax in their ears, rebinding me to the mast and retracing our course. They anchored the ship within bowshot of the monsters and stood guard by the rail with arrows nocked and spears lowered.
The sirens regarded me and said nothing. They beckoned with their strange hands and smiled (I wondered how they managed not to cut their tongues with such long, sharp teeth). I pled with them, begged, fulminated. They might have been amused. Soon they lost interest and lay down to sleep on their beds of twisted black basalt. A nervous crewman released an arrow that clattered on the rocks before ploughing into the sea.
The men conferred among themselves by signs, then weighed anchor and took us away, leaving me bound to the mast. I bellowed at them to turn back but they ignored me or pointed to their ears with exaggerated incomprehension. We sailed at good speed all day and left the sirens far behind us.
They freed me by torchlight. An order was on my lips but I saw mutiny in their deliberately blank faces and went to sit in the back of the ship, looking out over the flat moonlit sea and thinking of the sirens sprawled languidly under the stars, arms entwined, singing quietly to themselves over the hissing of the waves.