The Lost Books of the Odyssey (10 page)

There were few bards that far out on the periphery of the Greek-speaking world and I flourished. I never failed to get applause when I gave them the classics and soon became confident enough to invent material. I never went as far as sussing out the local headman’s lineage and singing a paean—I preferred to keep an emotional distance
from my patrons. I took to telling the story of Odysseus of the Greeks, cleverest of men, whose ruses had been the death of so many. (In the same moment I formulated this epithet, it occurred to me that it was Helen’s treacherous maid who told the Trojans when to attack. I wondered whether she was wealthy now or dead, or perhaps both, lying in a beehive tomb with gold and wine jars piled around her.)

It was when I was a guest in Tyre that I first heard another bard singing one of my songs and it occurred to me that I had in my hands the means of making myself an epic hero. What good is the truth when those who were there are dead or scattered? I took to rearranging the events of Troy’s downfall, eliding my betrayals and the woman-killing, and making a good tale of it. My account of Odysseus’s heroics changed according to my mood. Sometimes I led the defence as the Trojans went to burn the ships, sometimes I put myself in Diomedes’ boots and led the counter-attack on Troy. Sometimes Athena loved me so much that she shattered the Trojan curtain wall with a thunderbolt.

Diomedes’ cavalry, the maid’s bag of gold and the hours hiding in the airless tent combined somehow to give me the idea of Greek soldiers ensconced in a treacherous wooden house. The ruse appealed to me and though I could never come up with a fully satisfactory reason why the Trojans would blithely drag a suspicious fifty-foot-tall wooden statue into their city, I glossed over
their deliberations and the story was well received. I told the story so many times that I sometimes thought I really remembered Menelaus breathing fast and shallow in the stuffy darkness of the horse’s belly.

I traveled widely and won much acclaim. I lived among other men but was not of them and this suited me precisely. On the island Chios I bought a gentleman’s farm where I passed the winters. There were women, sometimes the same one for years, but I never married any of them and their names ran together.

In the tenth year after leaving Ithaca I realized I was done with singing and with new shores and cities. I gave the Chian farm to my woman at the time, and there were no hard feelings when I left for port and hitched a ride on a Phoenician trader bound in the general direction of home. At sea I lay on my back on deck and stared at the grey skies while composing an account of the last five years. From a muscle-bound Scythian brigand who had caught me stealing cheeses from his cave I made a one-eyed cannibal ogre. From the cold winters on Chios when I spoke with no one but my lover I made island imprisonments with kindly witches (there are, as far as I have seen, and I have seen much, no gods, no spirits and no such thing as witches, but I seem to be the only one who knows it—the best I can say for the powers of the night is that they make good stories).

At last the traders dropped me on the Ithacan shore and I hid my chests of gold in a cave I remembered. I cast
my old cloak into the woods and using a tide-pool for a mirror shaved off the beard I had started when I landed on Asian shores. Clean-shaven, I looked absurdly young. I strode off to my father’s hall and the predictable kerfuffle ensued—amazement, tears, glad reunions, questions, more tears, feasts, speeches. Tedium. I played my part as best I could but in truth just wanted it to end so I could spend my remaining years with sword and harp on the wall, making loans at high interest and fathering sons. I never sang again, fearful of being recognized, but I got some second-hand fame as a patron of bards. I was most generous when they had my songs word-perfect.

*
Excrement eaters.

T
he witch Circe told me that there was no fighting Scylla but it was not in me to believe her. Circe saw the set of my jaw and repeated herself—“She will take six of your men from the deck and it is not, cannot be, in your power to stop her. Don’t waste lives dallying and trying to fight—just row by as quickly as you can. She is born of pure force and is not for you to contend with.” I bowed and spoke graceful words that I could not afterward recall, as I was wondering how to kill Scylla.

A week out of Aiaia
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we were in a narrow channel between high, guano-streaked cliffs where, Circe had said, Scylla lived. As the ship coasted along I armed myself in silence, ignoring Circe’s counsel and the men’s questioning looks. I wanted to tell my crew that I was poised to make a famous killing but held my tongue, scanning the cliffs for the lair I knew was hidden among the vortices of seabirds.

I almost missed it when she struck. I was looking out at the restless twitching waters on the other side of the channel and by luck glanced over my shoulder in time to see six men snatched up, Scylla’s long necks twining and receding high above, gone in moments. The crew only realized what had happened when they heard the victims’ cries, shrill and desperate, soon silenced. I gave the order to row at double time and they willingly obeyed. The spear in my hand was an absurd comfort as we passed out of range.

We made landfall on Apollo’s island
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and I sat in a black study with my face in my hands while the men crept silently about their duty. I suppressed the urge to sail straight back with bared teeth and drawn blade and instead meditated on her weaknesses, foremost among them her immobility. Pure defense is untenable—it cedes the initiative and even the strongest fortress could, as I had shown, be broken.

Circe had told me that the sun god prized his cattle, so I waited until nightfall before having them slaughtered. For all I knew, Apollo slept like everyone else. If he objects, I thought, let him come to Ithaca and I will give him back an equal number of cows and half as many again, for the Laertides are nothing if not generous. In any event, what’s one more enemy on Olympus? In high
good humor, I told the men that the cattle of the Sun would be a proper funeral sacrifice for the fallen and the means of our revenge into the bargain. They were reluctant to do the butchering, their mouths full of hesitant piety, so I grabbed a knife and cut the first cow’s throat myself. As the blade slid in I thought, “This is not who I am, and this is not the way to a happy old age on Ithaca,” but already the victim’s steaming blood spattered my hands and its knees buckled and I was committed. The next cow was dragged forward and I told the men to heat up our forge.

All night we hammered spear blades into barbed hooks, then welded them to long chains affixed to my ship’s keel. We arrayed the cattle’s carcasses on deck in poses of sleep, the hooks concealed within their bodies, the chains covered with sailcloth. In the morning the fleet sailed within sight of Scylla’s rock. We gave the deck of the slaughter-ship a last sluicing and pointed it toward the monster’s lair. The men raised the sails and climbed down into a waiting boat—I locked the rudder and followed them down as the sails filled and the ship went off unmanned.

“The power of a god and the intelligence of a wasp,” I thought as we rocked on the waves. “If this fails I will come back next year with something better. And if I die, then killing this animal will become the pastime of my son and his sons and every lord of Ithaca and my shade
will not rest till they burn her heart before my tomb.” We were half a mile away when her heads shot out from her cave to engulf the bait and still I flinched.

She tried to draw up her catch but the hooks bit, the chains held and she was abruptly brought up short. The ship rose slightly in the water but the breeze held and pulled her necks taut as lyre strings. I shivered at her wet, almost musical shrieking as her corpulent body was slowly pulled out of her cavern and into the sunlight, her claws scrabbling for purchase on the guano-slimed stone of her aerie till she reached the edge, clung for a moment, overbalanced and plummeted toward the churning sea where she landed with the sound of a siege-stone hitting a wall and disappeared under a mountain of foam.

I brought the boat forward, my spear poised for the coup de grâce, ready to gloat over her death agony. Her huge yellow body floated belly-up on oily waves, her heads bobbing around her, her fanged mouths slack and black eyes sightless.

I raised my spear but hesitated because among the tangle of her necks I saw a seventh head, not a monster’s but a young woman’s, with milk-white skin and sodden filthy hair. She caught my eye and shouting to be heard over the wind said, “You are the fate that has been haunting me since I was born. I huddled in my high cave for fear of you, starving and wretched, venturing out
only to snatch a little food when I could. I thought of hiding in a deep cavern or on a high mountain but I was too afraid to leave home. Mine has been a miserable life and now it is ending and I wish I had never heard the name Odysseus.”

*
Circe’s island.

*
On Apollo’s island were his sacred cattle, which were immortal, or at any rate ageless, and which he prized highly.

G
raceful young men and women moved in small groups over the gentle slopes of Mount Ida, circulating around the temple of Quickness
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where Helen sat receiving suitors with gracious brevity and a marble smile. The three most eminent bachelors were Odysseus, unmatched for intelligence, Agamemnon, who would one day be king of all Mycenae, and his brother Menelaus, who never quit.

Her father Tyndareus had been in a quandary, as he had just the one daughter but could not afford to offend the many princes who must necessarily go home bachelors.
He had therefore abdicated the decision to the goddess, and, to forestall future problems, had made each suitor swear that, should Helen be kidnapped, he would go to war to help recover her. As the suitors assembled on the temple steps, a white heifer was led out of the coolness of the shrine and stood blinking in the sun. Tyndareus said, “The groom will be the one closest to the victim,” and cut the beast’s throat. Odysseus, who was devoted to Quickness and confident of his chances, peered into the shadowy precincts of the temple and saw the idol smile at him with pity and affection and then turn her gaze toward Menelaus. The cow hesitated, then took a few tottering steps toward Menelaus and collapsed at his feet, wetting his thighs with her blood, and the suitors felt that there was a stranger among them. Helen laughed delightedly, either at the death or their dismay, and in the clarity of disappointment Odysseus realized that this was the first time he had seen her show emotion. It also occurred to him that however close Menelaus had been to the dying animal, Death was closer.

Menelaus took Helen back with him to Sparta but there was no peace in his victory because as soon as he was home the dreams began. Every night he dreamed he flew in lazy circles high over a dark place where he knew there was but could not see a city. Scattered points of light appeared, moving inward. He flew lower and the lights became torches in the hands of soldiers and then the city started burning, the army swarming in over the
walls like sparks flowing back into a fire. He lost sight of the soldiers in the thickening smoke and tried to go lower. Then the wind changed and he was on the ground again and the soldiers lay dead around him, their bodies already stiff and pale though they showed no outward wounds. He walked among the bodies for a while and then he was on the walls of the now silent polis. Looking down (he knew he should not but could not help himself), he saw that the walls descended into the earth endlessly, vertiginously, layer upon layer of cold stone stretching down into darkness forever.

Every night he woke from this dream weeping but dried his tears before Helen could see them. Ashamed, he swore never to be afraid of mortal men or of the gods or even of death. As his wedding day receded into the past the dream faded but his resolve did not. He acquired the habit of smothering his fear with reckless bravado—he dove deeper than his friends in the coastal seas, rode breakneck over rough hills and more than once went first over an enemy wall, made so fast by terror that no spear or sword could touch him. By the time he was twenty
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he believed he had conquered fear and valued himself highly for it. It was pride in his courage that made him open his gates to King Death, who, though famous for his hospitality, was used to getting none in return.

Death, who in those parts most often went by the name Paris, was a tall pale man with colorless eyes and flaxen hair. At first glance he looked like a thirty-year-old who had never been in the sun but the translucence of his skin, the formality of his bearing and the perfect blankness of his eyes made him upon consideration seem older, and older, and finally as old as night. He showed up at the palace gates without any retainers, clad in old black armor, knocking rhythmically and loud. The porter demanded his name and country and got a quiet answer. He went trembling to Menelaus and told him who had come. Menelaus did not hesitate, though he became very grim, and went out through the now empty courtyard to admit his guest.

Death must have been unaccustomed to a guest’s portion but he played his part with courtesy. When the wine came, he poured a libation to Zeus the All-Father, who some said was his brother, saluted Menelaus and his knights and bowed to Helen, whose radiance seemed to light up the dark and smoky hall, though it and she were tolerably cold. As courtesy required, Menelaus spoke first of his own affairs, but when the wine was down to the dregs he asked the pale man how things did in his kingdom. Death said that though he was the ruler of but a single city he had many subjects and none had yet complained for want of room. He spoke of vast, heavy silence, of shadows moving over fields of asphodel, of the somnolent trickling of the waters of Hell, of the company
of the august dead—Minos the judge, wise in all things, bluff Orion hunting the spirits of animals through the endless gloaming, and the mortal part of Hercules standing in the River Styx and looking pensively toward Mount Olympus, where his immortal twin disported himself among the gods. Finally Death said that for all he was master of shadows he had of late begun to pine for brightness, and with a sidelong glance at Helen rose and went away to his room.