The Lost Books of the Odyssey - By Zachary Mason Page 0,14

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 they 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