The Lost Books of the Odyssey (21 page)

We berthed between a trading scow and a one-time warship, now gaily painted, its ram sawn off and white bunting strung along its sides. Ashore, vendors sold trinkets and meat cooked on sticks. Children shrieked and parents bought them sweets. My men were delighted—the young ones could barely contain their excitement long enough to tie up the ship before running off to buy tickets, have caricatures drawn, talk to girls, and watch puppet shows—I winced to see a marionette Ajax slaughtering Deineira on a plywood altar amid a welter of fluttering red rags. My old companions took themselves off the ship more gingerly but were pleased to have a stroll in the city that had been the focus of so many years’ ambition but which they had never really seen, always having been besieging it or burning it or sailing away.

I walked through Troy jostled by families of every nation. Shops sold drinking cups, gilded statuettes and oddments of armor. There was the square where I had chafed my hands over a fire and drunk the wine of a Trojan patrol, posing as one of them, regaling them with lies. There was a reconstruction of Cassandra’s ancient house, though I thought it might be in the wrong street.

Actors worked the crowd, aping famous Greeks and Trojans. I counted four Achilleses, three Hectors, one Patroclus and two each of Priam and Agamemnon. All of them were better-looking than their originals, except for
the Achilleses, which I imagined could not be helped. The crowd cleared for a staged combat in which a Hector and a swashbuckling Achilles clacked wooden swords and bellowed insults, often with double entendres. (I remembered Hector and Achilles fighting at dawn in the wasteland between the city and the camp—Hector’s focus, discipline and flares of inspiration against Achilles’ luminous relentless hatred. They chose the same moment to stop attacking and wait, watching for an opening, the glowing empty space between them vivid in the sudden stillness.) Another actor brushed past me, his face made up in a leer of cruel cunning and an oversized bronze bow in his hand, and after a moment I recognized myself. I watched the actor mount a raised stage to join a handsome actress in a long red wig who wore an expression of beatific sadness while pretending to weave.

As the sun set, I pushed my way through the crowds and out the gates, walking up into the hills from which I could see the city and all its precincts. That was where Agamemnon had his camp, I thought, and that is where Achilles had his funeral games. That ribbon of distant brightness must be the Scamander and that ragged mouth in the old wrecked walls the gate we took the horse through. I said to myself, “Somewhere I must have made a mistake. Turned down the wrong street, opened the wrong door, failed to make a sacrifice when the god was willing. And now I am old and not far from nothing, and everything I knew has turned to smoke.”

Something glinted golden in the dust at my feet. I stooped to dig it out and found a disc of metal, a shield. Amazed, I saw that it was made of gold, not only that but it was the very shield forged for Achilles by the divine smith Hephaistos, which I had won at Achilles’ funeral games and lost again on the disastrous trip home. It was almost too heavy to lift but I hefted it with both hands and studied its familiar surface. I wondered how it could have come back to Troy—some nereid must have found it in the deep, I reflected, and brought it back to rest near Achilles’ tomb.

I could not bear the thought of bringing it back to Ithaca to gather dust on my wall, so in the fading light I walked down to the beach where all our ships had landed so many decades ago and in a sudden access of strength threw it toward the sea. For a moment it seemed to hang motionless in the air and I wondered if my gesture had somehow permitted me to step out of time, but then the shield splashed heavily into the water and the waves closed over it and I went back to my ship with a light heart.

Among the dunes stood Athena, who still watched over him as best she was able. She was relieved to see him sail back toward Ithaca, where, she knew, a peaceful death would find him before the year was out. Like him, the goddess had a light heart. She was grateful that his eyes
were not as sharp as they had been and that the light had been flattering but not too bright and he had not noticed that the workmanship of the shield was crude, the figures awkward, that there had been countless other shields just like it for sale cheap among the stalls in Troy’s ruins.

*
The cyclops’s cave was closed with an enormous stone which only the gigantic cyclops was strong enough to move. Thus, killing him would have meant a slow death by starvation.

*
In prehistoric times the Greek islands were home to a number of species of small mastodons. Although they did not long survive the arrival of man, they did leave a fossil record, and, interestingly, their skulls (like the skulls of all pachyderms) have a mono-orbital, cyclopean appearance.