The Lost Books of the Odyssey - By Zachary Mason Page 0,37

man could look upon her without being burned away, until Zeus took pity on her (and perhaps on the Achaeans) and hid her behind a veil that occluded most of her nature—any man looking at her would see the epigone of feminine beauty as he conceived it, and almost nothing of who she really was (in so far as she was anyone at all).

*It is interesting to note that Odysseus’s description of Helen consists mostly of attributes characteristic of Pallas Athena. Mentor was one of Athena’s preferred manifestations—one wonders whether she was aware of what Odysseus saw and whether even her fortress-like heart was moved a little.

BRIGHT LAND

Pale* lived by the sea in an open house on high posts that the tide ran through. The house was full of light and while he had mother and sister, canoe, sun and sea he wanted for nothing but his father, who had been away at war in the East since time out of mind.

Every morning his sister dove for mussels in the shallows of the bay, his mother spun wool on her wheel, and he went fishing in his canoe. When the sun was straight overhead his mother put down her work and peered into the East in hopes of seeing her husband returning, but she only ever saw water and air. In the afternoon Pale and his sister walked in the forest or listened to their mother tell tales of the bright lands to the west where virtue flowed down from the tops of the mountains and evil washed in from the sea.

One day in an infinite succession of otherwise identical days, the sky turned dark and the sea was angry and the air was like smoke. Pale was fishing in his canoe and as he was a brave man he kept casting his net, though he could not see out of the troughs of the waves. A great swell came out of the east and bore him up and up till he thought all the water in the sea must be flowing beneath him, and then it dropped him down. When he and his canoe bobbed to the surface, an evil intuition sent him racing toward shore over water that ran black and full of weed. The beach where his house had been was swept clean, nothing there but smooth, damp, white sand. The forest above the house was gone too, dying fish and seaweed in its place, uprooted trees bobbing in the turbulent surf. He paddled frantically here and there looking for his mother and sister, thinking he saw hair floating on the surface and racing over only to find a tangle of kelp or a broken gull.

He was determined, but on the third day he gave up. He lay on his back and let the canoe drift, eyes closed, swimming in the blood-red light of the sun. At sunset he sighed and turned his back on the empty coast. He had heard that thirteen days’ paddle to the south was an island where one-eyed wild men lived in caves, and he had heard that inland a track led through the forest and over the hills to a city with a high round wall where the king had never seen the sea, but he let night fall and set his course by the stars for the bright lands in the west, for if his mother and sister had gone anywhere it would be there, to bathe in the springs at the top of the mountains. The water glowed blue with each paddle stroke and he sang a wordless song through the turning of the night.

Toward dawn, he came to an islet with a spring and beached there to sleep through the day. He flipped over his canoe, crawled into its shade and was closing his eyes when he heard a hoarse crying. He sprang up and found a small seal floating in the tide, moving weakly. “Perhaps your family misses you, seal,” he said and dragged it out of the water above the high tide mark into the shade of a surviving palm. He went to sleep and dreamed that he saw a slight woman with pitch black hair and bright black eyes smiling down at him. At dusk he woke and the seal was gone.

He filled his water jug in the spring, oriented by the dolphin constellation, and headed west. In the late watches of the night he thought he saw the seal again, keeping pace with him,