Free The Whispering Muse by Sjon Page A

more than a chess piece that has already been played. I had, so to speak, the floor. The clock was ticking on my side. But instead of following up my previous comment by stating the obvious: ‘when your gaze is so abstracted that you seem to see beyond field and forest, you are in fact staring at what stands closest to you; yourself’, courtesy bade me say:
    ‘Has this awe-inspiring object been in your possession long?’
    Mate Caeneus’s large, curly head lifted from his hand. He looked at me enquiringly. To my horror I saw that his left eye, which had been resting on his palm, was full of tears. He cleared his throat and answered as if from the dregs of sleep:
    ‘You read my thoughts, sir. I was just recalling the terrible night I acquired this talkative stick.’
    The mate seized his brandy glass from the table, raised it to face level and looked over the brim – straight into my eyes:
    ‘Your health, shipmate Haraldsson!’
    The saloon clock struck twelve.

VIII
     
    BY THE END I was having difficulty following the plot, both because the storyteller’s words had become slurred with drink and because my own head was nodding. But so much is certain: the mate told me that one night, long after the Argonauts had returned home with the golden fleece, he was down on the waterfront in the city of Corinth. The weather was bad and there were few people abroad apart from Caeneus himself and his companions, a few squawking herring gulls and a clutch of adolescent kittens that he stressed had been both ill-favoured and irksome. By this stage in the story the hero’s world had suffered such an ill wind that his errand to the boat shed was to scavenge for something to eat. There he could usually find fish guts left over from the day’s catch, rotting crustaceans and dubious scallops, if his luck was in.
    And would you know it? This time the easily pleased protagonist spotted a basket of bait that had somehow rolled over and was propped up on its side in the lee of a blue-and-white-striped fishing boat, while the shark bait – consisting mainly of mares’ intestines – lay wet and inviting in the sand. Caeneus glided into the shade and began to bolt down this feast in frenzied rivalry with the other gulls (his words), and the rapture of the competitive glut was so all-consuming that Caeneus couldn’t tear himself away from the delicacies even when an unseen bird-catcher jerked a string that was buried in the sand and tied to the end of the twig propping up the basket. The swarm of gulls whirled from under the keel of the boat like a foaming wave and Caeneus felt like the luckiest dog alive to be left alone with the mares’ bowels in the darkness of the basket.
    The bird-catcher soon put an end to the fun, however. He stuck his hairy human hand under the bait basket, seized the feather-soft bird’s neck he encountered there and extracted Caeneus, who realised belatedly that he had walked into a trap.
    Caeneus fought viciously with the hunter, pecking at his hands with his strong yellow beak, beating his head with silver-grey wings and clawing his chest with pink, fleshless feet, but the hunter tightened his hold on his prey, whirling Caeneus around hard in the hope of breaking his neck. It was an unequal struggle. The god of heaven had granted Caeneus the power of imperviousness to weapons and fists whereas the bird-catcher was the most wretched of vagabonds: a bald, haggard, pinch-bellied, shrunken-limbed old man – and as such was bound to yield to the bird in the end. But just as the bird-catcher loosened his grip and Caeneus squirmed from his hands, their eyes met:
    ‘Oh no ...’
    Grief crushed the liver-red gull’s heart as Caeneus recognised in the tramp’s burst pupils the most splendid champion the world had ever known, the man who had commanded the most famous heroes in days of yore, he who had won the love of queens and enchantresses; yes, there the gull saw the ruins of his old captain, Jason son of