The Lost Books of the Odyssey - By Zachary Mason Page 0,29
epithet, it occurred to me that it was Helen’s treacherous maid who told the Trojans when to attack. I wondered whether she was wealthy now or dead, or perhaps both, lying in a beehive tomb with gold and wine jars piled around her.)
It was when I was a guest in Tyre that I first heard another bard singing one of my songs and it occurred to me that I had in my hands the means of making myself an epic hero. What good is the truth when those who were there are dead or scattered? I took to rearranging the events of Troy’s downfall, eliding my betrayals and the woman-killing, and making a good tale of it. My account of Odysseus’s heroics changed according to my mood. Sometimes I led the defence as the Trojans went to burn the ships, sometimes I put myself in Diomedes’ boots and led the counter-attack on Troy. Sometimes Athena loved me so much that she shattered the Trojan curtain wall with a thunderbolt.
Diomedes’ cavalry, the maid’s bag of gold and the hours hiding in the airless tent combined somehow to give me the idea of Greek soldiers ensconced in a treacherous wooden house. The ruse appealed to me and though I could never come up with a fully satisfactory reason why the Trojans would blithely drag a suspicious fifty-foot-tall wooden statue into their city, I glossed over their deliberations and the story was well received. I told the story so many times that I sometimes thought I really remembered Menelaus breathing fast and shallow in the stuffy darkness of the horse’s belly.
I traveled widely and won much acclaim. I lived among other men but was not of them and this suited me precisely. On the island Chios I bought a gentleman’s farm where I passed the winters. There were women, sometimes the same one for years, but I never married any of them and their names ran together.
In the tenth year after leaving Ithaca I realized I was done with singing and with new shores and cities. I gave the Chian farm to my woman at the time, and there were no hard feelings when I left for port and hitched a ride on a Phoenician trader bound in the general direction of home. At sea I lay on my back on deck and stared at the grey skies while composing an account of the last five years. From a muscle-bound Scythian brigand who had caught me stealing cheeses from his cave I made a one-eyed cannibal ogre. From the cold winters on Chios when I spoke with no one but my lover I made island imprisonments with kindly witches (there are, as far as I have seen, and I have seen much, no gods, no spirits and no such thing as witches, but I seem to be the only one who knows it—the best I can say for the powers of the night is that they make good stories).
At last the traders dropped me on the Ithacan shore and I hid my chests of gold in a cave I remembered. I cast my old cloak into the woods and using a tide-pool for a mirror shaved off the beard I had started when I landed on Asian shores. Clean-shaven, I looked absurdly young. I strode off to my father’s hall and the predictable kerfuffle ensued—amazement, tears, glad reunions, questions, more tears, feasts, speeches. Tedium. I played my part as best I could but in truth just wanted it to end so I could spend my remaining years with sword and harp on the wall, making loans at high interest and fathering sons. I never sang again, fearful of being recognized, but I got some second-hand fame as a patron of bards. I was most generous when they had my songs word-perfect.
*Excrement eaters.
KILLING SCYLLA
The witch Circe told me that there was no fighting Scylla but it was not in me to believe her. Circe saw the set of my jaw and repeated herself—“She will take six of your men from the deck and it is not, cannot be, in your power to stop her. Don’t waste lives dallying and trying to fight—just row by as quickly as you can. She is born of pure force and is not for you to contend with.” I bowed and spoke graceful words that I could not afterward recall, as I was wondering how to kill Scylla.
A week out of Aiaia* we were in a narrow channel between