The Lost Books of the Odyssey Read online

  “But do not forget,” said one, as the fire disappeared altogether and the women merged into the shadows, “he is, for all that he is bound by us, allowed just once to direct his fate, though I for one shall not seek his counsel. Let us hope he does not meddle enough to get himself home.”

  FUGITIVE

  The high fires on the Trojan shore illuminated the revels of the Greeks, their long shadows writhing behind them. Their ships rode low in the water, heavy with gold and slaves, and their adversaries were in chains or in hell. Odysseus, architect of the victory, watched his comrades stagger triumphantly and lent half an ear to the crying of gulls, hoping to hear Athena. Agamemnon, mouth purple and scabbard flapping emptily, found him and asked why he sat off by himself, to which Odysseus replied that ten years had accustomed him to vigilance. Agamemnon said that the dead would not be arming themselves and if they did, the Greeks had beaten the very gods, so come and drink to our victory over the Trojans, the dogs, and may nothing grow in their broken, salt-sown city but weeds and evil rumors. Odysseus said, “The house of Priam is broken, his sons dead. There is nothing left for you to curse.” Agamemnon stood with great dignity, adjusted his breast plate (an ill-fitting treasure looted from the battlefield), and went away.

  That night Odysseus dreamt of the ruins and saw the gods rebuilding the city’s shattered wall. Next to him Athena leaned on her spear and watched the work. Odysseus asked why the gods were rebuilding Troy, when some of them, even she, had been at such pains to destroy it. “The gods are not rebuilding Troy,” she said, “as it has not yet been erected.” “Then what are they doing?” asked Odysseus, pointing. She turned her head, recognized him and said, “You should not be here. Run away quick!” Her fear chilled him. Just then the last stone was laid on the city wall; its gates swung open silently and came to with a click.

  The next morning the men pushed the grey ships down the beaches into the green sea. As they sailed away the camp’s cold fire pits and abandoned barricades looked as forlorn as Troy’s black husk.

  Odysseus’s homeward trip, first joyful, soon became a misery. Fate seemed to have a grudge against him and his Ithacans, sending them in quick succession the cannibal cyclops, the lotus eaters, the sirens, Circe, and inexorable Scylla. A year stripped Odysseus of all his men (gone down to death) and all his ships (torn to flinders or sunk in the sea) and found him clinging to a crude raft as he drifted alone through a bad sea.

  Odysseus woke as the water closed over him and thrashed his way to the surface, crying out, though there was no one to hear him. The fog was thick—there was nothing to see but whitecaps and sticks from his raft that sank as he snatched at them. There was no better strategy than striking out hard for land—for all he knew, he would find it. There was not much hope, but it was better than waiting to drown, so he started swimming. He regretted that there were no landmarks and he was, possibly, swimming in circles. His shoulders burned and then his lungs and he was nearly spent when, to his amazement, he drove his hand into something hard that resonated under the blow. He looked up and saw faces peering down at him from a grey ship with a long eye on its prow.

  A familiar voice said, “I expected better from you, if only a better escape.” Strong hands pulled him up and dropped him on deck. He lay there thinking that whatever circumstance he had stumbled into, it was bliss to draw breath, feel the ship moving under him and not think of drowning. His eyes were blurry with salt but, rubbing them, he found himself looking at Agamemnon’s golden greaves. “Did you think you could desert so easily, after I went to so much trouble to recruit you?* Can this be Odysseus of labyrinthine mind?”

  The sailors, embarrassed on his behalf, avoided looking at Odysseus. He put on dry clothes and realized they had been brought by Alkanor, who had died with a Trojan arrow in his heart the day of Hector’s funeral. The fog was gone, the sun hung in the sky, his heart beat. There was nothing to say.

  Agamemnon had the unresisting Odysseus locked belowdecks. After sleeping, he searched the hold and, finding nothing, broke into Agamemnon’s cabin (its lock was contemptible). Among weapons, wine cups and trophies of war he found a book called the Iliad. It was the tale of his war and the gist was right but the details were often wrong. In the introduction he read:

  It is not widely understood that the epics attributed to Homer were in fact written by the gods before the Trojan war—these divine books are the archetypes of that war rather than its history. In fact, there have been innumerable Trojan wars, each played out according to an evolving aesthetic, each representing a fresh attempt at bringing the terror of battle into line with the lucidity of the authorial intent. Inevitably, each particular war is a distortion of its antecedent, an image in a warped hall of mirrors.

  The Iliad and the Odyssey have sometimes, through authorial and managerial oversights, become available to their protagonists. Surprisingly, this has had no impact on the action or the outcome. Agamemnon is too obstinate to change his mind and anyway never believes what he reads. Achilles flips through the Iliad and shrugs. Priam makes sacrifices to the nonplussed gods and anyway thinks that he is above prophecy (recall Cassandra). Perhaps there were once characters who read the book with dawning apprehension and fled that very hour, finding refuge in the hills, never again to meddle in the affairs of cities and gods, but if ever there were they are long gone now.

  In time they came to Troy and there was Achilles, bright as gold and full of life, leaping from his ship’s prow, the first to set foot on Asian soil. The Ithacans arrived and gathered around Odysseus, asking him where he had gone and why he had left his own ship and taken a berth with Agamemnon. He had liked most and mourned all. They asked him what moved him so—it had been just two weeks since they last had seen him. Odysseus said he had seen by signs and portents that it would be a long war.

  Everything fell out as before. In the first year Achilles fought a Trojan champion who was proof against blades and stones and strangled him with his helmet strap. In the second year Hector led an attack on the Greek camp and killed Agamemnon’s younger son. In the third year the Amazons fought alongside the Trojans and slaughtered many Greeks with javelins. And so on—as though choreographed, the Greeks attacked the city and arrows and death found their appointed marks. Odysseus knew who was going to die, so he was able to say his goodbyes. Men said he was bad luck.

  He saw Athena from time to time, though she was silent. Sometimes she looked at him with pity. Other times her face was unreadable.

  He looked at his image in polished blades and water. He could have been a battle-hardened forty or a weathered twenty. He thought of stealing a ship or wading into the sea with stones in his pockets, but for his men’s sake he stayed, even though he thought they were illusions, or a dream.

  The time came for him to steal into the city and see Helen. They spoke as they had before and as he knew they must. He had forgotten most of their conversation so he improvised. He thought he saw recognition in her eyes, and, as he left, their hands touched, a novelty.

  In due time he proposed the ruse of the horse. He sat in its belly listening to the Trojans debate whether to burn it or push it into the sea, to Cassandra’s weeping, to Priam ordering it brought within the city walls. That night he and his men crept out of the horse, opened the gates and set fire to the city. By midnight his face was black and his sword-arm was red to the elbow. He saw fallen enemies die again, heard old screams again, saw a tower he had burned to ashes risen in flame. In the palace he found Helen brushing her hair. Without looking away from her mirror she told him that ten years ago she had been dragged back to Menelaus’s house and thrown into their old bedroom as half a wife and half a slave. The next morning she opened the door to a tap-tapping and there was Paris,* her lover, long dead and turned to ashes and now shyly beckoning. Helen hid her golden hair under Odysseus’s hood and that hour they fled the city and went out of Troy’s history.

  In a fisherman’s hut Odysseus held her and told her about the book. He supposed the
y would have ten years, then they would see. Athena never spoke to him again.

  *Odysseus did not want to leave Ithaca to flight at Troy, so he feigned madness in hopes that Agamemnon would go away. Palamedes defeated his ruse by threatening the infant Telemachus with a sword—Odysseus moved to defend his son and thereby revealed his rationality.

  *Helen’s husband and kidnapper, the instigator of the Trojan War.

  A NIGHT IN THE WOODS

  We forget ourselves in company. When I led my men into the Trojan ranks or through haunted unmapped islands I wore a dauntless mask, neither smiling nor frowning, always taking the next step, whether toward flanking the enemy’s archers or improvising a sail from our ruined stores or getting us back to the ship just ahead of our pursuers. The essence of that mask was pride—my men loved me not for being right but for my intransigence, instant decisions and intolerance of any slight. It made me a monster of ego, which was wearisome, but while they were in my charge I had no choice.

  Now it has been years since I have been lost at sea and they have been lost for good. With no uncertain young faces looking to me I have become contemplative, used to thinking things through in my own good time. And so, as the Phoenician ship touches at Ithaca I neither weep nor throw myself onto the shingle to kiss my native ground. Instead of dressing myself in finery and going to my old hall with arms open and a foolish smile on my face, I put on a worn old brown cloak and sling a peddler’s pack over my shoulder, the better to have a quiet look around. Penelope is more than an ordinary woman but many outrages can happen in twenty years. Still, I am prepared to forgive—all that matters to me is that my house is strong and, above all, that Telemachus, my son, flourishes. As I walk away up the beach and the wind fills the Phoenician’s sails the captain shouts goodbye in his strange patois and promises to call again in a month’s time.

  I go through the forest to the old highway and head toward town with my eyes open. Peasants and merchants walk past, ignoring me. They look well fed but keep their eyes on the road. I come to town and see smoke rising from every chimney and houses in good repair, whitewashed and clean. It is, however, very quiet—no doors slamming, mothers calling or children shrieking. My conviction that all is not well is cemented at the fountain, where the women get their water and stride quickly home without so much as passing the time of day. I sit down on the low wall of a corral to think about my people, who have become as timid as the knot of cattle lowing nervously behind me.

  I am reminded of the village of my father-in-law Autolykos.* Nevertheless, I collect myself and as it gets dark go toward what was once my hall, guided by the red torchlight glowing from its high windows. With the ham of my fist I pound on the gate—“Open up, good people! It is Nohbdy the peddler come to deal—let me in and show me some hospitality!” The door is opened by a greasy young man with a glazed expression. His bearing suggests breeding but he barely acknowledges me, gesturing at me to follow him down the hall with a loose flick of his wrist.

  We pass through the clean-swept courtyard, where cracked bones are piled against the walls. I shape my face into a mask combining greed and cringing humility and prepare myself for what I now know I will find in the great hall. On my throne Penelope lounges, taller than I remember, her presence filling the room. Young gentlemen orbit around her with vacant faces and deferential postures, lighting up when she notices them. There is no furniture except the throne and piles of matted furs strewn on the ground. It smells musky, like an animal’s den.

  Penelope toys with the black hair of a lanky young man who lounges at her feet, his arm entangled in her legs, and studies me balefully while the men study her. She orders a maid to bring me meat and wine, and as I eat I say, “I have news that you will rejoice to hear, dread queen. Not a day’s journey behind me is Odysseus Laertides himself, your husband and king, returned alive after many years of suffering. His Lordship did me the honor of speaking with me and entrusted me with a message for you—he says that the first thing he intends to do upon getting home is move his bed out of the bedroom for airing. That was all of his message, and I swear to you every word is true, or I am not Nohbdy.”

  Penelope sniffs the air and smiles toothily, thanking me for my welcome but—and here she almost purrs—extremely surprising news. She regrets that her house is full tonight—I should come back tomorrow and there will be room enough. The black-haired boy, apparently a favorite, pipes up that they have no other guests, so why can’t the peddler stay, but she puts a finger to his lips. Though her movements are gentle there is a new predatory light in her eyes. As she surreptitiously sizes up the men who crowd around her, their stupid, trusting, Ithacan faces remind me of my own men, all lost, and I make a hasty goodbye, leaving sooner than is polite.

  I set off into the warm night, walking briskly, not minding much where I am going so long as I put the hall out of earshot behind me. After many miles I find an abandoned shepherd’s hut, just visible from the road. I try to sleep but end up lying under my cloak for hours listening to the crickets play and the wind sigh through the branches. Every time a branch cracks I bolt upright, poised, alert, sword in my hand, holding my breath. Probably just foxes making their nocturnal rounds. I know I am being absurd. I think of Penelope’s green eyes and the mooncalf faces of her lovers. I wonder if I performed the rites properly and my men, all dead now, have such peace as the shadow kingdom can afford. I wonder how Telemachus is doing and wish I could have seen him. By the time the moon sets I have given up on sleep and go outside to sit on the porch and stare out into the dark woods.

  While I wait for dawn, my mind turns back to the one time I met my father-in-law Autolykos, lord of high peaks and deep valleys a week’s hard journey into the mountains of the mainland. Wolf song had ushered me up through the last pass and into his domain, a prosperous quiet land where the dark pines were thick up to the edges of the fields. I was picking my way along a narrow track in a dense stretch of forest when he stepped out of the trees with his daughter at his side and greeted me. A young deer, just gutted, was slung over his shoulders. He was a rangy, wild-looking man with the quiet air of one who had never been contradicted. His daughter, Penelope, was barefoot and wore a torn, ill-fitting dress that hung so awkwardly she might have just shrugged it on. There were twigs in her hair and she never smiled but even in her bare, muddy feet she walked with a careless hauteur that would have discomfited Helen. Autolykos led me through his village and down to the deep river valley where his hall was built, an old place, mostly underground, with the roots of ancient, still-living trees for pillars and a foundation. The servant was clumsy, singeing the venison and burning his fingers. As we ate, Autolykos made odd little formal stabs at conversation. We discussed the weather (unseasonably cold for spring), the wheat (which seemed to bore him), the wars in the East (of which he knew nothing) and the migration of elk (which, finally, engaged him). He and his silent daughter ate with their hands. He watched me sidelong as I used my knife. Ithaca is not so cosmopolitan and it was the first time I had ever felt effetely civilized.

  When we had washed our hands he questioned me about my family: Who was my father? My father’s father? How long had my line been kings? (He suppressed a snort when I told him five generations.) Were there heroes among them? Was there any madness, divine possession or shameful defect of person? Then he interrogated me about my island: What were the forests like? Was the hunting good? Was it far away from every other place where men lived? How well could I control my people? I painted a portrait of a line of kings who had been at the periphery of the great events of Hellas but had never permitted the slightest infringement of their prerogatives or weakening of their bloodline, and of a harsh island of many valleys, full of mists, favored by hunters, where it was easy to lose one’s way. Of the people I said they were strong-minded and though the land was poor they were not—Ithacans were steadfast, good fighters and better traders. He asked about the character of the people, their religious observances and what they feared. I sensed h
e was circling around something and replied that in Ithaca people minded their own business and that in any event if I chose to give them a queen they would not only accept her but like it too. This seemed to satisfy him. He drew me up and embraced me, wishing me good luck and long life, large dominion and many children, and said that he would be gone in the morning. He smelled sharp and musky, full of spices. Then he showed me to my room, comfortable but practically a cave, and that was the last I ever saw of him.

  I slept deeply that night, for all that the forest was full of movement. Sometime in the small hours Penelope came in to get me, clad only in her shift, her eyes green in the moonlight. She shook me awake and led me by the hand out into the woods. I assumed that it would be futile to ask for explanations. We went deep into the forest and all I could see in the sighing darkness were stray patches of moonlight on the pine needles.

  She pulled her hand away and vanished. Entirely awake, I balanced on the balls of my feet, listening, hands out as though to feel currents in the air. I could hear motion among the trees, now here, now there. I saw a flash of green eyes. Something moved behind me and I ducked as she sprang at me, the fur on her flank brushing my shoulder. My eyes had adjusted and I caught just a glimpse of her, and she was a fine thing, so very fleet. She didn’t lunge again but stood in a patch of moonlight where I could see her face, where amusement and threat were written in equal measure, but I showed no fear and she disappeared again, coming back moments later, a woman again, and insinuated herself into my arms. Hera* was never invoked and there were neither gifts nor priests but I suppose that was when we were married.

  The next day I led her out through the valley and up through the mountains and soon after we sailed for Ithaca. I brought her to my father’s house and she was gracious with her new relatives but privately complained that the place smelled like centuries of dead wood and men, though I think that really she was just homesick. To please her, I built a new house, centered around our bedroom, in which I carved our bed out of the wood of a wide-trunked, still-living olive tree, its fruits falling onto our roof each summer. She did not want it said that she was strange or that she clung to the old ways, so we kept the bed a secret, even from the servants.