The Lost Books of the Odyssey Read online

  One day I thought I saw someone walking along my well-tended paths. I went to meet him and found not a visitor or a statue but a silver disc hanging in the air, reflecting the brilliant sun. I stared into it as it floated toward me, unearthly, the moon come down to haunt me. A flash of bronze in my peripheral vision and my mind is full of the distinctive lineaments of a sword.

  Suddenly it is twilight. A shadow with a blade and shield stands beside me in the half darkness, insubstantial as smoke. But there is someone else—I turn and see a beardless young man with blond oiled hair. I am delighted—it is my lover from so long ago, so slender and fleet. I reach for his hand, which he gives me willingly. Hermes* says, “I had hoped not to see you again, Medusa.”

  *Lord of snakes and god of ghosts, Hermes was the psychopompos, the god who conducted newly dead souls to the underworld.

  CASSANDRA’S RULE

  Running from her brother through the old city in the early morning when the shadows were sharp and her skin iridescent in the sun she found a refuge in the temple of Apollo. Within, it was dark and cool and the silence was a comfort—she lay down and put her head on her arms, watching the statue of the god, who seemed lost in thought. She fell into that middle sleep where everything is grey stillness and stayed there until the grey coalesced into a beautiful man speaking softly of an island full of cattle whose death would be many men’s undoing, of a mother wading in the River Styx and holding her infant son by the heel that would one day blossom into his ruin, of the inexorable tightening of fate’s net. She woke up and found Apollo regarding her thoughtfully. He said, “Never mind. No one will ever believe you.”

  Thereafter, whenever she looked at the sun long enough she could hear Apollo as he talked to himself, a slow, endless monologue touching on all things under his far-reaching gaze, and in that way she knew the future. With staring, sun-blind eyes she learned the sad ends of Hector her brother and Priam her father and wept for them even as they sat beside her. She begged them to flee, to pray, to stay inside on inauspicious days but they only smiled, kissed her, brushed her aside. She saw that the war that was coming to Troy could not be won, that it could only end in flame and fields sewn with salt, but no one would be persuaded. She heard her own fate, to warn but be disbelieved, to inveigh against the horse as it was pulled through the city gates, finally to be a slave in a distant country. She thought of fleeing but knew from the fall of the city wall’s shadow, from the voice of the wind sighing through the towers and from the shapes of the bright clouds overhead, always changing, that it would not be so, that her fate was elsewhere, that for once the god had lied.

  PRINCIPIA PELAGICA

  The rigging creaks and the bow wave hisses as Homer lies in his hammock looking up at the shadows of ropes crisscrossing the glory of the white sail’s glowing spread, the sun behind it. The stories he has been composing float just below the surface of his mind and, blissful, he falls asleep. This is his dream:

  Thin light, driftwood, seawrack, black flies aimlessly circling. No one else was on the beach, which surprised me, made me think of the contour of the continent and how much of the coast, at any given time, is empty or nearly empty, of a lone fisherman in waders or a spark of campfire seen at distance from a high coastal road. Something half buried in sand, too angular and regular to be kelp. Sweeping away the sand, thinking it might be an old chunk of keel or jetsam from the off-shore refineries. Instead it is a book, the cover cut from some thick hide, salt-swollen, pitted and abrasive. The pages are slick, fibrous, plasticine—not paper. I open it at random and there is a page of neatly spaced symbols, about eleven wide and twenty deep. It is no alphabet I recognize—I wonder if it could be Sanskrit or katakana and, briefly, the letters’ gestalts twist themselves to my expectations but I see they are different, in fact not letters at all, but tiny, intricate drawings, no two alike. The contour of each symbol is immensely detailed, what looks like a straight line from a distance revealing itself on close inspection as an elegant welter of hooks and curlicues. Study reveals nothing, just intricate enigmatic shapes that could as well be the scars of a burrowing worm as an accounts ledger as a Confucian classic, no visible order beyond the regular spacing and no symbol ever repeating (unless the ink ran into the grain of the page somehow and I am focused on something irrelevant). Having nothing better to do, I turn the pages as the sun slides across the sky and the tide comes in. The breaking waves make a faint blue light (luciferin and luciferase mixing in the oceanic bacteria, a part of my distracted mind notes) by which I read (if that is the word) the book, poring over each page, wearing away the sense of entropy. Now there is an intuition, an intimation of order, though when I rally myself to articulate it, nothing comes. If I can’t put it into words is it real? I wonder. Night now, headlights sliding over high distant coastal cliffs.

  EPIGRAPH

  There is a silence in desolate places that is terrible for a man too long away from home and it was waiting for Odysseus in Ithaca Town. No human voices there, no smoke of fires, no creak of wagons. Grass grew in the street and a thin, feral cow regarded him suspiciously while browsing on deadfalls in a fig orchard. The master mariner thought, “Caution. Who knows what mischief befell this town and what mischief is left? After all these years coming back don’t go rushing in like a puppy.” So he left the road and went up onto a hill overlooking the town, concealed himself among the trees next to a hut that had once been the swineherd’s and settled in to watch. All afternoon there was only stillness and birdsong and several times he caught himself dozing.

  Night fell. A bright, full moon rose and illuminated the flawless, static island. There was not even a breath of wind. In the night’s last hours Odysseus stole down through the trees toward his house. Irresistibly reminded of his night-time forays into Troy, where at least there had been a friendly army to retreat to, he slipped through the open-hanging gate of his courtyard, hand on the hilt of his sword.

  Within, nothing. Moss on the dung-heap and disintegrating potsherds. A dog’s verdigrised brass collar clanked underfoot. The house was cold and still. As he crept down a corridor, he looked back, saw his footprints in the dust and desiccated leaves, and discarded stealth.

  Odysseus murmured to himself, “There are only so many possibilities. The town could have been wiped out in an attack. There could have been a mass emigration—to avoid raiders, for instance. There could have been a sickness. Each of these possibilities entails certain signs. Every event is the cause of myriad effects and it is effectively impossible that a disaster of this magnitude could have swept all the people away and left no record of the manner of their passing. The world is a fundamentally orderly place, never impervious to reason. I will look until I find this record and read it and know what came to pass here.”

  He searched the house in earnest for the marks of recent history. In one storeroom he found an amphora of sweet wine he thought he had laid down himself. In another he found a cobwebbed pile of weapons and armor. Altogether, he found:

  an orange coral hairpin

  a broken loom

  an empty, undecorated quiver

  a broken stick of incense, still fragrant when he turned it in his fingers

  a clay washbasin

  He went into the dimness of the great hall. It was a wreck—tables overturned and broken, shattered bowls, a foot-bath. He kicked an ancient, desiccated cow’s hoof. Arrows stuck in the wall here and there, but when he tried to pull them out they crumbled. The aftermath of a battle? The shafts were embedded in just one wall—an archery contest? Idle vandals? He found his great bronze bow lying under some chairs, streaked with green but as strong and supple as ever. This he kept, having missed it many times on the field at Troy and in his wandering.

  He left the house and walked among the outbuildings. The sky was beginning to glow. Ropes were strung between the roof of the roundhouse and the corral.* The garden was in a sad state of neglect and the fences were falling down. He resisted an impulse to forget his search and sta
rt setting things right.

  The sun rose and in the forgiving early light he could almost pretend that his house was not abandoned but still a living place. He went into the cellar, which he had been postponing. Picking his way over toppled, broken jars, he found an intact iron-bound chest shoved into a corner. At last, an answer. He forced the lock with his sword. Within the chest were a funeral shroud, belt buckles, a length of fine linen, and a sack of bronze nails.

  That morning he found an abandoned boat and left the island, swearing to come back one day with answers.

  *This is where the maids who had lain with the suitors were hanged to death by Odysseus, Eumaios and Telemachus after the suitors’ slaughter in the standard version of the Odyssey.

  A MOTE IN

  OCEANIC DARKNESS

  Waterlogged, frozen, exhausted, Odysseus clung to a floatinag spar, dark waves surging over him. He could not help but think that this was happening to someone else, that someone, a stranger, was being consumed by the sea, was near drowning. His teeth had long since stopped chattering when a were-light appeared on the waters and his mind went from pain and dullness to clarity—Pallas Athena was with him. He said, Goddess, who are you, to find me and bear me up when I am lost in the waste? In the sudden stillness she said:

  Water flowing through pipes, pouring into unlit reservoirs there to eddy in silence. Runes of ephemeral fire. A book of many pages written in inks that vanish and reappear. A twilight forest haunted by beasts, watchful and inquisitive. Steadfast of heroes. An onion, an ocean, a palimpsest, a staccato machine of oiled iron gears. These are among the metaphors with which I describe myself, like a hand trying to grasp itself by reaching into a mirror.

  ATHENA’S WEAVE

  Midnight came and still Odysseus lay awake, in his own house again after twenty years. He lay under a pile of sheepskins in the portico, his gaze traveling round and round the once familiar walls as though they held some secret, the answer to his agony. He had come a long way to get there only to find his home had become an enemy camp and for a moment his heart failed him. Courage, he told himself—the cyclops, whose rage was like an avalanche, was worse than this. These are but men—boys, really—none of them seasoned in war, no three of whom I could not cut down in seconds, but there are close on fifty of them. How shall I kill them when I am only one? He wanted to walk past the suitors where they slept in the main hall and go to his own bed but knew it would be the death of him. Eventually his tears dried and he drifted close to sleep.

  In the grey middle ground between dream and waking Athena appeared to him as she sometimes did and said, “Do not fear, wanderer. There could be fifty times fifty men such as these all baying for your blood and still you would triumph. Like me, you have the knack of stringing victory together out of whatever is at hand.” Odysseus replied, “It is a shame that the way of the Olympians is to help their protégés help themselves—if I thought you would slaughter them all for me I would indeed rest at ease. If you wish to do so, please proceed—do not stand on ceremony with so old a friend as me.” Athena laughed and went back to Olympus, but before she went she gave him a dream.

  There was a sense of movement and of distant women whispering and Odysseus found a cloth in his hands which he immediately knew was the weave of fate. Its manifold complexities drew his eyes but Athena whispered in his ear not to be distracted, to look for the bright, strong thread of his own life, how it was interwoven with the threads of his wife and son, Menelaus and Helen, all the Trojans, Calypso and Circe, the isle of Ithaca. The suitors’ fates were slight things, just barely bound to the world. Myriad futures opened up before them but all were short and all ended bitter.

  Odysseus woke bemused, feeling like a seer. He floated gracefully through the deception of the household,* watching himself as though he were an actor in a theater, immersing himself in the role of wandering beggar and studying his enemies with clear eyes. When things came to a head and the bronze bow was strung* he fired one arrow after another into the suitors’ chests with the utmost detachment—he had a vision of standing in the dewy corral in the hills above the house, streaming sweat in the late morning sun, sending arrow after arrow into the bole of the oak a hundred paces distant. Each time he nocked an arrow he could smell the wet grass and see the sun burning behind the oak leaves.

  When the remaining suitors managed to arm themselves and come to close quarters there was none of the usual rush of battle. A man would rush up waving a sword, present an opening into which Odysseus put his blade, fall down dead and so on, one after another.

  After the tears of reunion dried and his and Penelope’s joy had reached a less fevered pitch, she showed him the shroud she had been weaving for his father, Laertes. Odysseus picked up the ordinary and unfateful piece of cloth and recognized the fabric shown him by Athena, the improviser, the deceiver.

  *Recall that Odysseus returned to his house posing as a beggar.

  *With the connivance of his son Telemachus, Odysseus had the suitors try to string his massive bronze bow. As a joke the suitors gave the beggar a try, and were thereby undone.

  THE LONG WAY BACK

  In retrospect Theseus saw it was Daedalus he should have feared. Minos was just a king, however wise, and Ariadne just a girl, however beautiful, but neither Daedalus’s cunning nor his labyrinth had any end. Theseus had come to Crete as a young man, nominally a prisoner and a sacrifice but laughing in his heart and out for blood. He was not yet old enough to believe in death, though he had already killed a dozen men. Watching their lives’ blood stain his spear and hands had only taught him that death is the province of others.

  In their white robes of hieratic office King Minos and his golden-haired daughter Ariadne greeted the Athenian offerings as they disembarked in Knossos port. Theseus, the Athenian captain, considered it charming to treat his enemy with great politeness and replied to their official greeting with the utmost courtesy. Minos, a fair-minded man, told them at length why they were going to die. He spoke of Pasiphaë* and monstrous couplings, white cattle flying across the sea and crazed hatred in divine eyes. Theseus barely listened—they were where they were and it didn’t matter much how they got there, and anyway he was distracted by Ariadne, who first avoided but soon returned his gaze. After Minos’s speech the Athenians were led away to the opulent cells where they would be kept for a week before being sent into the labyrinth—the Minotaur preferred victims healthy, well fed and free of disease.

  On the second night they were taken to a banquet served in the balconies overlooking an arena; below them, slaves leapt over charging bulls and initiates danced with double-headed axes. The old engineer Daedalus was there, wearing a white, plain, food-stained robe and ignoring both his companions and the ceremonies below, all his interest absorbed by the diagrams he was drawing on the table with the lees of the wine. Beside him, a bare-breasted matron with an ageless face and hard smile made vain and persistent attempts at conversation (which made Theseus smile—her accoutrement was outrageous by Athenian standards but her face and manner reminded him of his mother). Minos made several toasts to Daedalus, who received them with forced good grace—rumor had it he was an unwilling guest in Crete. Minos extolled Daedalus’s many achievements—not only had he designed and built the labyrinth at the heart of the palace but also the palace itself and the city with its harbors, fanes, libraries and universities. He had even laid out the farms, fields and roads around Knossos, not to mention his architectural projects in the outlying provinces, the mainland and even the Lydian and Persian kingdoms far to the east. Theseus thought that he did not look like much for someone who exceeded all men in the scope of his achievements. With his thin neck, long nose and heavy grizzled head, the only remarkable things about him were his abstractedness and the intensity with which he regarded his vinous sketches. Ariadne excused herself to check on her Athenian guests—she stood by Theseus’s chair and he thanked her for her hospitality, touching her hand for emphasis.

  The next night Ariadne
visited Theseus on the pretext of expounding her father’s justice, the necessity of keeping the sacred monster placated, the reasonable and traditional subjugation of Athens to Knossos. He made every pretense of attentiveness and sat close enough that their legs were touching. Things proceeded. She was not his first lover but the danger, the secrecy and the promise of bloodshed gave the affair a luminous intensity he had known before only in battle. She loved him, loved him completely, more than her parents, her temple or her life, she said in a thick, clotted voice, her white face red with emotion. She left for a while and came back with the wherewithal for victory—a thick ball of twine, a sharp sword and the key to his cell.

  When Ariadne had gone, Theseus crouched by his door for some indefinite duration, listening, hearing nothing. When impatience finally overcame caution, he slipped out of his cell and followed Ariadne’s directions through torch-lit corridors and down dark stairs. He padded along barefoot, trading comfort (the floor was very cold) for silence, prepared to bluff then kill anyone he met, but he did not see another soul on his way to the labyrinth’s door. Ariadne had told him that it would not be locked—all who wished to enter were free to do so. He tied one end of his twine to a torch bracket, drew his sword and crept in, his blood singing a war-song.