The Lost Books of the Odyssey Read online

  The next morning I take my armor from my pack and cast away Nohbdy’s cloak and name. I find a stream and shave with my dagger. I stride into town in the center of the road, very much the master. There are no guards at the gates but a maid sees me coming and flutters inside. In the empty, newly white-washed courtyard another maid is weeping hysterically, surrounded by three others, one of whom is gripping her shoulder and speaking to her in a low, brutal whisper. They see me and fall silent, their faces blank. I go into the great hall and there is Penelope, a head shorter than me, green-eyed and pretty in her red dress, smiling demurely. She embraces me and says all that is right and sheds a tear of happiness as the maids energetically scrub the already pristine flagstones behind her. One maid hurries past us on her way to the midden with a sack of scraps from the slaughter-room. The cloth sack is soaked through and a second maid runs behind her to wipe up the trail of red droplets.

  The celebration lasts into the night and our reunion is entirely convivial. I tell Penelope about the war and my many exploits, already feeling myself becoming a bore whose only conversation is of battles long past. She seems not to notice when I skim over Circe and Calypso, and for my part I take no notice when her own history becomes light on detail. In the evening Telemachus appears, back from hunting, and greets me respectfully. I kiss him and turn his face this way and that in the light, pleased beyond words to see him.

  Ithaca Town gradually comes back to life. There are a few squires inquiring into the whereabouts of their fools of sons, gone missing, and dour farmers impertinent enough to bring me dark insinuations, but they are quickly dealt with and soon there is peace. Almost overnight I cease to be the clear-eyed wanderer and undoer of men and become, as my circumstances require, the level-headed lord of a small island, settling disputes about sheep and planning with my engineer to dredge the harbor. Penelope is attentive and I am happy to be back with her, though of course I would not tolerate the slightest insubordination, let alone infidelity.

  Telemachus is an excellent young man. He can throw a javelin farther even than Achilles could and outruns his peers without breaking a sweat. He is affectionate, loyal and fiercely protective of his house. In him, the preeminence of my house and line are secure for generations, though for all my satisfaction it sometimes gives me pause to see he has his mother’s eyes.

  *The name Autolykos is usually translated “The Wolf Himself.”

  *Hera, the wife of Zeus and goddess of marriage, was always invoked at weddings.

  DECREMENT

  In the lassitude after love Odysseus asks Circe, “What is the way to the land of the dead?”

  Circe answers, “You are muffled in folds of heavy fabric. You close your eyes against the rough cloth and though you struggle to free yourself you can barely move. With much thrashing and writhing, you manage to throw off a layer, but find that not only is there another one beyond it, but that the weight bearing you down has scarcely decreased. With dauntless spirit you continue to struggle. By infinitesimal degrees, the load becomes lighter and your confinement less. At last, you push away a piece of coarse, heavy cloth and, relieved, feel that it was the last one. As it falls away, you realize you have been fighting through years. You open your eyes.”

  EPIPHANY

  I mutilated his son, the cyclops,* but he had outraged the laws of hospitality that bind both gods and men and Poseidon knew it. The waters were calm when I sailed away from that island, my spear still caked with the clotted humors of Polyphemus’s ruined eye. I needed a story, though, and the notional grudge of the sea lord was a plausible one—people are willing to attribute any amount of ill-tempered vindictiveness to the gods. Even after she forsook me I was unwilling to embarrass her.

  She carried me through the war. Nestor said he had never seen a god so openly love a mortal, and I suppose it is true. So much so, in fact, that my friendships with other men were strained—more than once I overheard someone call me uncanny, and some of the Achaeans made the sign against the evil eye when I passed. But I did not care—their fear added to my mystique and made them pliable, easy to manipulate, and anyway I had her.

  She spoke to me often, manifesting as a brother warrior, or in the cry of a seagull, or in the crash of waves, or very rarely as herself, a tall severe woman with a long thin face whose skin was so pale it seemed to glow. Our discussions were mostly concrete—she would tell me not to leave my tent that night, or to seek out a certain Trojan in the fray, or what lie to tell or inanity to feign to survive the next few hours. Now and then she would be talkative and tell me what she had seen in the wider world—giants grumbling and talking rebellion among the roots of mountains, a lightning-riddled storm cloud scudding over blood-warm equatorial seas.

  Some nights when the fighting had been fierce I would open my eyes and, still half dreaming, see her standing over me in the moonlight, leaning on her spear, gazing into the distance and appearing to ignore me. Something in her indifference rang false and I knew she was watching me. She was like a cat who likes company but will not suffer herself to be touched. I never said anything but her presence was a comfort to me.

  Sometimes her aid was direct—twice on the field I saw her from the corner of my eye coming in like a black cloud to envelop an enemy and cast him aside drained of life, emptied like a wineskin.

  In time Hector died and was buried, Troy was sacked and then burned, Helen was in Menelaus’s bed again and all of Priam’s line were sent hurtling down to Hades. My ships rode low in the water with Troy’s riches and the golden, god-forged armor of Achilles lay wrapped in scented linen in my cabin, treasure to reinforce the preeminence of the Laertides in Ithaca for three generations. The next morning we were to weigh anchor and all the men were ashore for a final carouse with the companions they would most likely not see again. I was aboard ship checking every cable, line and sail, to ensure that all was seaworthy after a decade aground on the beach. She was there with me, suddenly, and as always in her presence I saw the world in sharper relief. I wasn’t unduly surprised to see her—perhaps there had been something in the voice of the wind that forewarned me. Usually she was armed, holding her spear with a soldier’s ease, but this time she had no weapon and no armor. She had on a plain white dress and, disconcertingly, wore her hair down—she looked almost girlish. I had seen her brighter but never so warm. I was ashamed to find myself desiring her and violently quashed the impulse.

  I remember her every word and every intonation. I will not repeat what she said, though it will always echo in my daydreams. The broad sense of it was that she was offering me everything. Which is to say, herself. And as the husband of an Olympian, and one of the greatest in strength and honor (as she quite correctly reminded me), I would be given immortality. We would have all eternity together. All would fear us and love us and no one could ever touch us.

  I am old in killing and I do not always attack from the front. I have seen friends die before my eyes and trampled their bodies as the battle and the hot day wore on. My skin is thick but her embarrassment made my knees weak. She was blushing and ran too quickly through what was clearly a prepared speech, she who is never at a loss for words, never doubts or hesitates. This was Bright-Eyes, Grey-Spear, Battle-Lover and Quick-Thinker, whom I had seen run laughing to fight hand-to-hand with Ares, the render, contemptuously turning his spear-thrust and driving her riposte neatly through his shoulder. Warming to her oratory, she praised the depth of my understanding and the quickness of my mind, comparable only to hers even among immortals. She praised my beauty and my composure (the latter I am willing to grant—as for the former, I am strong enough but no dancer, neither tall nor smooth-skinned nor so young anymore). I felt like a child watching his father, incorruptible and immovable, beyond all weak human passion, dissolve into tears.

  I need hardly add that I could not accept her. What would I do, be her Ganymede, fetching wine and beaming while she spoke with her equals, her pretty boy with scars, wrinkles and sun-black skin? Or, worse, I could master h
er, be a proper husband and make her my helpmeet and bed-mate, have her wait on me while I spoke with Father Zeus on kingly matters. The idea is absurd. Even if it could be otherwise, she is beautiful and quick and her mind is like a lightning flash but she is a god, and therefore remote, and I cannot imagine her as anything else. I started to compose an eloquent and humble demurral but to my lasting regret I could not keep from laughing. She flushed bright red and for a moment looked so furious that I thought I would die in that instant—the gods’ affairs, failed or otherwise, rarely end well for their lovers.

  But she did not strike me down. Her face cleared and she kissed me on the cheek, once, and vanished. I have not seen her since.

  Not long after that things went bad. I do not think she persecuted me—that would be beneath her—but I have felt her absence, and I think no river nymph or wind god will risk her hatred to help me. And I was reckless, after she left me, and I paid for it with my ships, all sunk now, and my men, all dead now, with no tombs to mark their passing.

  *There was a race of cyclopes but one of them, Polyphemus, was the son of the sea god Poseidon. In the traditional version of the Odyssey, Odysseus blinds Polyphemus and thereby incurs Poseidon’s hatred.

  FRAGMENT

  A single fragment is all that survives of the forty-fifth book of the Odyssey:

  Odysseus, finding that his reputation for trickery preceded him, started inventing histories for himself and disseminating them wherever he went. This had the intended effect of clouding perception and distorting expectation, making it easier for him to work as he was wont, and the unexpected effect that one of his lies became, with minor variations, the Odyssey of Homer.

  THE MYRMIDON GOLEM

  Wounded pride justifies kidnapping, Agamemnon thought, when the pride is mine. He had just recruited the magus Odysseus from Ithaca by holding a sword to his infant son’s throat. He might have asked him to come but greatly feared the Trojans and dared not risk a rebuff. With characteristic self-assurance he assumed that his victim would soon accept his servitude as a fait accompli and embrace his, Agamemnon’s, purpose. Odysseus hated him as much for his presumption as for the kidnapping. From the bow of the ship he watched Ithaca recede and longed for his workshop, where he could have summoned a cackling sylph to seize Agamemnon and maroon him on the iciest peaks of the Caucasus. In the event he saw no option but biding his time.

  A week out of Ithaca the ship touched at Syros.* Odysseus was told to go recruit the warrior Achilles, and to do it within a day, or he, Agamemnon, would sail back to the now unguarded shores of Ithaca—he always needed more slaves. Agamemnon said, “The oracle at Delphi decreed that Achilles must sail with me or I will find a bad death waiting when I come back from Troy. Of course you see why I chose you, of all my men, for this mission.” Odysseus was amazed to see that Agamemnon expected him to be moved by his fulsomeness. Nonetheless, he disembarked and went to the court of the Syrian king Polyxenos, an old friend and a fellow devotee of the hermetic arts.

  Polyxenos told Odysseus that Achilles, late his ward, had died, bitten on the heel by an adder. His mother, the sea nymph Thetis, had appeared in a cloud of grace and nursed him but the poison was implacable and on the seventh day the boy went down to Hades. Odysseus held his head in his hands—not even a sorcerer could call back the dead and Agamemnon was a resolute and stupid man who prided himself on being unmoved by reason.

  Polyxenos took pity on his friend and suggested that they use their arts to fashion a clay simulacrum of Achilles. Such an imitation would not withstand close inspection but it could fool everyone for a while. If need be, the double could be discretely dissolved in the sea. He observed that no one in the Greek army had ever set eyes on Achilles—who were they to doubt the Achilles they were given? Objections sprang to Odysseus’s mind but, as he had no better idea, he mastered himself and agreed with as much enthusiasm as he could muster.

  In the small hours of the night the two lords crept out through the postern gate and filled canvas sacks with wet riverbank clay. By the time the moon set they were in the cool, dusty palace cellars, shaping the clay into a man. His proportions were heroic on the theory that idiosyncrasies are suspicious in an aristocrat but anything at all may be expected of a man whose very frame proclaims him half a god.

  They lured a pretty young slave girl to the cellar with hints of assignation and preferment, and cut her throat as soon as she walked in the door. They hollowed out a cavity in the golem’s chest and filled it with her blood so that the golem could partake of her bloom. At cockcrow the girl’s body was buried under an oak tree and the golem was done down to the least hair. Odysseus carved the word “Life” into the prostrate thing’s forehead and its dull eyes opened.

  The golem’s cheeks were flushed and his skin was as warm and smooth as newly fired porcelain. When he stood up he seemed to be jointless. Second thoughts swarmed in Odysseus’s mind—the hair did not look real, the skin tone was wrong for a Mycenaean, and his gaze had a strange, intense fixity. It was too late to change anything, though, so they girded him in armor, put a spear in his hand and told him that his name was Achilles. The golem did all they bade him do, opening doors and putting away knives and alembics, but for all their commands and cajolery he would not speak. Odysseus would have turned the thing back to dust and started over but Polyxenos reminded him that the king was waiting. He summoned his son Patroclus and told him to go with Odysseus and help sustain the ruse. In the first hour of daylight they swathed the golem in black cloth and hurried him onto the waiting ship.

  Agamemnon was delighted to have avoided a bitter fate. Odysseus and Patroclus quietly monopolized their charge, who, on the rare occasions when they were not with him, stood board-straight by the railing and stared at the horizon. Odysseus explained his reserve as the hauteur of one more god than man, and Patroclus explained it as homesickness. Eventually Odysseus admitted to Agamemnon that Achilles was somewhat unbalanced by divine influences and unlikely ever to resemble an ordinary man—he had not revealed it earlier for fear of being accused of failing in his task and dooming his wife to shackles. Agamemnon laughed and told him he need not worry about such quibbles when he was dealing with a great-hearted man of honor.

  At Troy, Patroclus shared a tent with Achilles and it was widely assumed that they were lovers. In fact, Achilles was tireless, endlessly biddable and intelligent enough to cook, mend and polish, which allowed Patroclus to live in the indolent luxury he craved.

  Achilles’ eloquence in battle made up for his muteness and the ruse went undiscovered. Once Paris shot him in the face with an arrow at point-blank range—it stuck, quivering, in his cheek. Achilles pulled it out in a puff of dust, threw it away and went back to his bloody work. In the confusion of battle, with friend and foe besmirched with white earth and blood, he sometimes killed at random, ignoring the Greeks’ terrified, indignant cries, and so he became feared by Greek and Trojan alike.

  Odysseus approvingly surveyed the stacks of Greek and Trojan dead piled up by his creation—the Trojans were a lawful enemy and mere foreigners besides, and as for the Greeks they were fools serving a fool of a king.

  His delight in the ruse ended when Hector put his spear through Patroclus’s heart. Achilles saw Patroclus die and went to stand over the body, shooing Hector away and trying to rouse his dead friend. The Trojans circled warily—Achilles killed those who got too close. The battle moved away but Achilles stayed with the body through the day and the night, sometimes nudging Patroclus with his foot, sometimes looking around as though for help, but he was the only one left on the moonlit plain. On the morning of the second day some understanding of death must have seeped into his thick clay skull because without warning he snatched up a spear, ran half a mile toward the thick of the fighting and threw himself in headlong. He fought in a rage, killing Greek and Trojan indiscriminately. He ignored the cruelest blows and his arm never tired—the flower of both armies poured their blood onto the field and soon all fled, leaving Achilles
standing listlessly among the bodies with a bronze sword dangling from his hand. He reversed the blade and thrust it at his abdomen, snapping it.

  In the following days both sides kept to their strongholds and even then they were afraid Achilles would overwhelm them, indifferent as he was both to blows and to entreaty. Peering over their barricades, they saw him walking a slow circuit around the city wall, dragging Patroclus behind him by the heel, occasionally looking back to see if he was stirring.

  The Greeks had had enough. Agamemnon fulminated but he could not stop them from breaking camp and taking to their ships. Odysseus was relieved that no one had thought to question him about Achilles’ extraordinary behavior and decided it was time to bring an end to his creation’s career. On a grey morning when the other captains were getting their ships ready for sea, he got a handful of black mud from the banks of the Scamander and went alone to the deserted plain where Achilles made his grisly circuit around Troy (it had been three hot days and Patroclus’s remains were faring poorly). “You there! Come here,” said Odysseus with a confidence he did not feel. “I am here to help. I will make your friend there as alive as you are.” Achilles approached him, all innocence, his burden ploughing the dust behind him. “Give me your helmet,” said Odysseus. As Achilles lifted it off, Odysseus reached up and smeared the mud on his forehead, effacing the word “Life.” Achilles stood there holding his helmet in his hands, as still as any stone.