The Lost Books of the Odyssey - By Zachary Mason Page 0,22
a lone hill overlooking a white beach and the sea, a defensible spot, a good place for a city.
A long time from now someone unknown to me will stand on the white plain where I now stand. He will speak a different language and the mountains in the distance may have been ground down but there are certain constants that will reliably inform his life—kings like great trees whose roots are watered in ignorance, men who come to war reluctantly only to discover they have the souls of jackals, and fortresses like mountains, as immovable and inevitable. I anticipate that a flash of intuition will make him look at the tumulus or crater or clamorous sprawling city where Troy once stood and intuit how many men once bent their minds toward its destruction.
These strangers used and will use their wits to understand the world as far as they are able, though that was and will not be very far, and they did not and will not know where they come from nor who they are. Their ignorance, I infer, also encompasses the true names of the stars, the language of birds, and the key to the circuitous and ever-present defences of Troy. How can it be that I, enjoying the greatest advantage, the only advantage, of living in the present, am just as ignorant?
SIRENS
Circe had told me that the sirens’ song was irresistible, the very shape of desire, and that no one who heard it went unscathed, as was attested by the bones of their admirers tumbling back and forth in the tide-pools around their reef. But I have never been one to leave a riddle unsolved or, as I overheard my men say, well enough alone and I was determined to hear them for myself.
It seemed that my curiosity could be safely indulged through simple logistics. As the ship neared the sirens’ rock I had myself bound to the mast while the crew stuffed their ears with beeswax. It seemed odd no one had thought of it before but in general there is no accounting for the bovine stupidity of mankind.
There were two of them. As we approached the white breakers around the reef I saw them sit up, stretch their long spines and fix us with their gazes. Their torsos were too long, their fingers had too many joints and their eyes were cold and green. One said something to the other in a high musical language and my eyes began to water—the other laughed and they began to sing.
As they sang I remembered the face of a Trojan whose name I never knew whom I had killed before the high walls of that city, the man’s surprise as I attacked him blind-side, how easy it was to slip my point past his guard and run him through, the Trojan’s dawning rage at the affront to his body, an emotion half formed on his face when death found him, the tug on my blade as his body fell away. I remembered the first time I saw Penelope, walking away from me in a white courtyard in Sparta. I remembered Ithaca the day I left it. I saw how far I was from home, how remote the chance I would ever see it again. The sirens beckoned, longing for me, offering release from my displacement, but I laughed with delight at being lost and reckless, wandering among unknown islands, not knowing the shape of my days. “This is not so bad,” I said to myself. “Anyone unmanned by these monsters is a home-body or a sentimentalist.”
The sirens, who had been watching me intently, fell silent, briefly nonplussed. They conferred in low voices and I thought they might have given up when they launched into a new song, an intricate counterpoint comprised of just a few themes, varied and interwoven.
Their song broke over me and it was as though a veil had been blown away. I saw how Achilles, whose humanity was subsumed in speed and strength and reckless pride, had made his inevitable slow march toward death, dragging Agamemnon and Patroclus and all the Greeks and the royal house of Troy stumbling behind him. I saw the implacable self-assertion of Agamemnon mirrored in pious, gentle Priam’s refusal to save his city.* I saw Hector’s love of country and family opposed by Achilles’ madness for glory and his slight impatience for the death he knew was closing in on him. And overlaying them all were the passions and rivalries of