The Lost Books of the Odyssey - By Zachary Mason Page 0,19

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 her, 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