The Lost Books of the Odyssey - By Zachary Mason Page 0,2
quiet prayer to Pallas Athena which was unusual in so far as she hates the Trojans and it was evident from my visitor’s narrow features and dark hair that he was of that race and city. He said, “I bring you a host-gift, Lord. A riddle—thus:
“One: When I was a boy visiting my grandfather, a man of great will but widely despised, he told me that his father’s father had counted both bears and men among his kin, this in the days before the red-hairs came. Though the blood is running thin, he said, the change still sometimes comes. He took me to a glade in a dark wood, drew a dagger with a wavy blade and cut deep into his wrists. I thought he was killing himself before my eyes and was going to run for help but fur erupted from his wounds and surged over his arms. His hands became padded paws with yellow half-moon claws and his irises turned mirror-green. The change stopped there and he soon reverted to the shape of a man,* exhausted and dissatisfied. He said that an uncle of his had had the true power but as a young man had gone off to live alone in the mountains and never come back, even to visit. And this is the reason, he added, that our family is disliked and respected, though these days few remember it.
“Two: I went hunting with my cousins when I was just shy of manhood. I fell behind the hunt and, distracted for a moment, did not hear the boar coming. I raised my spear and tried to thrust but my arms had lost their strength and it gored me. My cousins came bursting out of the wood and killed it but I had already fallen. It was my first wound and I wept openly, from pain and surprise and because I thought it had unmanned me, though as it turned out the gash didn’t extend beyond the top of my thigh.
“Three: There is an Olympian who loves me. The first time she spoke to me I was lost in the fog in the channel off of Zakynthos.
“Who am I?”
I replied, “You must be none other than that famous Odysseus, king of Ithaca, which is to say myself, for all these things happened to me, though I have never spoken of any of them. Did some god spy on me and whisper my secrets in your ear? Speak quickly, stranger.”
He had been watching my face intently. Closing his eyes, he said in a dead voice, “I am not making game of you and if any god did this it was without my knowledge or consent. For I too am Odysseus, king of Ithaca, and the night before last I fell asleep on that bed and the next morning woke up in a house in Troy, as you see me now, one of them. With a new wife and new children, who call me Iapetus.” He sat down heavily on my camp chair. “I feigned madness to buy time and hide my confusion. Tonight I slipped out of their city to see who was in my tent—it was strange to walk so carelessly past the Trojan guards. I must admit, you were the last person I expected to find here. I had thought it would be Iapetus the Trojan, or some stranger, and was ready to bargain, or kill him if he was going to disgrace my name.”
“Your approach to assassination has the virtue of originality.” I put my blade to his throat, ready for him to make a move. I have interrogated men at sword’s point before—often I have seen in their eyes a conviction that they, heroes, cannot die under such ignominious circumstances and a nascent intent to turn the tables on me. At such times I stick them in the big artery in the neck, the same stroke I used to kill pigs in the slaughter-house back home (it is a quiet death, life coursing gently away over a few minutes, pleasant compared to some). “Say I am in Ithaca and want to move my bed into the great hall. What then? Answer quickly, or I will send you back to Troy.” If the wind happens to blow your ashes that way, I added privately.
“The bed is built around an olive tree that emerges from the floor and passes out through the ceiling. I built it myself, starting work the day after my wedding,” he said, opening