The Lost Books of the Odyssey - By Zachary Mason Page 0,28

and did nothing to help them, though the circumstances of their deaths are etched in my memory. I clambered over the rude timber walls at the camp’s boundary and dropped down onto the sand below. From within the wall came cries of agony and the roar of flames—the Trojans must have gotten at the ships. Without, all was peaceful—a wide empty beach stretched before me and Troy was just visible on my left. It seemed unnatural that I could leave so easily. I threw my borrowed helmet into the surf and started walking.

After an hour the war seemed as though it had been a dream. I looked back and saw black pillars of smoke over the camp and over Troy.

I took stock of my situation. I had a sword, bread and a bag of silver. I was on a coast where I had no friends and many enemies, though few of them knew my name. Having no alternative, I kept walking south along the shore. I had heard of a city not far from Troy and in two days reached it. The guard at the gate asked me who I was and what I wanted. I had a mad impulse to say, “I am a sinister-minded foreigner who has lately been making war on the principal city of your country in hopes of rapine, pillage and blood-soaked revenge,” but instead said I was an itinerant bard hoping to sing for my supper. The guard looked at my sword and said I carried a strange sort of lyre. I replied that bandits abounded, many of them desperate and dangerous renegades from the war up north, and I had discovered by trial and error that it was more effective to hit them with a sword than a musical instrument. Indeed, my lyre had not survived the first trial but I was pleased to say my sword was in good shape even after many encores—my most popular ballad was “Feint Toward the Heart and Slash the Hamstring” but “Throw Sand in Their Eyes and Stab the Sword-Hand” was gaining popularity.

I found a place with the lord of the city. I had been afraid it would be galling to sit at the lower table but in the event found a bard’s station unobjectionable—I was given all I needed and there was no offensive familiarity. At first I sang the old standbys—“Theseus in the Repeating Labyrinth,” “The Tale of Medusa’s Shade,” “Athena’s Lover” and the like. I had the rapt attention of everyone from the lord to the potboy. Even the dogs under the tables watched with heads cocked.

Refugees trickled in over the following weeks and from their accounts I pieced together the story of the war’s end. The Trojans had overplayed their hand—they set fire to the Greek ships but in their race to the shore left many Greek soldiers behind them, intact and desperate. Diomedes, an independent-minded Greek general, wrote off the ships as a loss and had his soldiers mount up and race for Troy, emptied of men, its gates hanging open. The Greeks erupted into the city and gave vent to their rage. When the Trojans saw the smoke they rushed home to stop the sack and hours and then days of vicious house-to-house fighting followed, until Troy and the Greek ships were all in ashes, the soldiers slain or scattered, both forces broken. The only Greek ship to survive was Agamemnon’s, which had been anchored out in the bay—he and a handful of men sailed away that night, their sails filled with the spark-laden wind pouring out of the burning city, leaving their countrymen to get home as best they could.

I was concerned that the refugees would recognize me but no one thought to look for a Greek captain in the face of the bard sleeping on sheep-skins by the hearth. Still, when a month had passed the city was thick with displaced Trojans and I decided to go.

There were few bards that far out on the periphery of the Greek-speaking world and I flourished. I never failed to get applause when I gave them the classics and soon became confident enough to invent material. I never went as far as sussing out the local headman’s lineage and singing a paean—I preferred to keep an emotional distance from my patrons. I took to telling the story of Odysseus of the Greeks, cleverest of men, whose ruses had been the death of so many. (In the same moment I formulated this