Free The Whispering Muse by Sjon

then it swells into a song. The singer is a woman.’
    ‘Now, there’s a surprise ...’ I remarked rather loudly, inadvertently interrupting Mate Caeneus.
    ‘I beg your pardon?’
    ‘Never mind ...’ I answered, adding, ‘I think the pork chops must have disagreed with me.’
    While the mate droned on about his piece of wood, I wondered whether oak trees had genders and whether the reason for the unexpected response in my nether regions to the smell of the splinter was that it had been split off a female tree.
    ‘As you will remember, sir, Athena fitted the bow timber into the many-nailed Argo and the nature of her gift was such that it had the power of human speech. Without it we would never have found our way through the Bosphorus, across the Black Sea to Colchis, up the Donau and her tributaries, into the Baltic and North Sea, and from there north across the Atlantic to cruise off the chill island of Thule, that strange land shrouded in eternal darkness, where the water boils of its own accord in the snow. Indeed, it was on the black sands of Ultima Thule that we Argonauts, first of mortal men, saw the gleam of Helios’ harp strings as he dwells with the Hyperboreans and tunes his instrument beneath the vault of the world. Without the guidance of the loquacious oak we would not have known to turn our ship south-south-east and thus find the way home to the civilised world of the Mediterranean.
    ‘After this journey we mortal men had somewhat humbled the pride of blue-haired Poseidon, for by our successful voyage one could say that we Argonauts had conquered great territories in his watery realm.’
    ‘Excuse me ...’
    Here I raised a finger:
    ‘Pray excuse me, good host, I have to go and spend a penny.’
    Mate Caeneus:
    ‘Of course ...’
    I hurried to the lavatory and relieved myself. ‘He’ was perhaps not quite as sprightly as the last time this fit was upon him – but he was lively enough. Yes, it gladdened my old heart to see how much vigour the scent of the precious speaking wood had injected into ‘the old chap’.

     
    When I returned to the saloon I noticed that Caeneus had refilled our brandy glasses. His glass, that is to say, for I myself had been sipping my drink sparingly – not wishing to abuse Magnus Jung-Olsen’s hospitality – whereas the mate was becoming a little the worse for wear.
    I sat down beside him without comment, then ventured to suggest something that had occurred to me in the lavatory:
    ‘I was thinking: could the voice you detect in the humming of the wood be your own voice? Like the poet who obstinately believes that he is writing about the world but is in reality only telling yet another story about himself?’
    The idea was not entirely my own. My brother-in-law, the psychiatrist Dr Pázmány, had said something similar when the invisible people moved in with me during the winter of 1910–11. However, Mate Caeneus’s response to this little theory of mine – which was only a friendly suggestion – was to scowl and pout and rest his cheek on his hand while his black eyes stared into space.
    A good while passed in this manner. I kept silence with him, and it didn’t occur to me to try and explain my words or elaborate. I was becoming used to the crew members’ tendency to behave as if everything I said was incomprehensible, to remain silent for just as long as I was speaking, then carry on from where they had left off, treating me like some guano-covered rock that one must steer a course around. While we two sat in silence over our brandy glasses, I amused myself by trying to work out what the mate was staring at – no doubt he would soon take up the thread from where he had left off when I slipped out to answer the call of nature. It seemed to me that his gaze was resting halfway between the teaspoon and the crumb of French bread just above the middle of the table, a little to the right from his point of view.
    But, as it happened, the mate did not yield, any