The Lost Books of the Odyssey - By Zachary Mason Page 0,4

the air of a captain. Indeed, you seem as though you might have been a king once. Sadly, times are peaceful and there is not so much call for courage as when I was young—I need no more men-at-arms, and have harpers enough. However, you will not go away without a meal, a bag of gold and a suit of armor. Speak highly of me and of Ithaca as fortune bears you elsewhere. Sometimes my mind will go with you as I tend to my duty here—of the two of us I think that you, freed from necessity, are the happier.”

*Tales of lycanthropy are common among the Pelasgians, the pre-Aryan inhabitants of Greece. Their version of the disease was a sort of royal malady, far from benign but a certain sign of divine descent and the right to rule. The reference to the self-cutting with the knife is obscure—possibly it has to do with the mystery cults whose celebrants were said to be able to pierce their skins but shed no blood. Another interpretation is that the grandfather is cutting away his humanity to reveal the animal within.

GUEST FRIEND

Alcinous, king of Phaeacia, and Odysseus, the wanderer, the eloquent, the silver-tongued, walked along wooded paths over high sea cliffs affording glimpses of the harbor, the distant city and the shining white-capped waves, the sort of place of which a man lost in mazy sea ways and the malice of petty gods might dream. Alcinous said:

Among the Phaeacians it is believed that each man lives out his life as a character in a story told by someone else. The family and city of each person’s storyteller (or possibly tellers) are unknown and perhaps unknowable but are subjects of frequent speculation. Certain philosophers are of the opinion that the evolution of history can be made to reveal the raconteurs’ national character. It has come to be more or less widely accepted (on the basis of the irregular depredations of locusts, of the propensity of Phaeacian kings for taking black-haired wives with green eyes and short tempers, of our excellence in archery, of the frequency in dreams of cavernous palaces carved into the living stone of low round mountains) that the storytellers are natives either of Phrygia, Sogdiana or distant Bamiyan. We have sent messengers to these kingdoms and even those beyond them but all have found nothing. The one thing on which all Phaeacians agree is that not enough is known to infer even a single teller’s name.

Odysseus replied:

Wise king of the happiest country I have seen, is it not better to live your well-favored life never knowing the teller’s name? As long as he is remote, a distant voice, an abstraction, you are the master of your life and lands and all things are possible to you. But once you have seen his face and taken his measure, then the endless possibilities, always an illusion, will dissolve, and your life will be revealed as the poor invention of a limited mind, rarely inspired.

And what if on seeing your kingdom, beautiful beyond compare, he were satisfied and fell silent? Perhaps it would be enough for him to end with a golden island in a distant ocean where a king and a storm-tossed mariner take the evening air.

Alcinous looked out over the ocean and said:

When his story ends a Phaeacian does not die but goes on to play another role in a different story told by the same teller. In this way the changes of station endemic to Phaeacian life are explained. Everyone in that city has a royal ancestor no less than four generations back and considers himself a prince biding his time—likewise, everyone has a great-aunt or great-uncle who must be confined in an attic.

Moreover, loyalties shift in Phaeacia as rapidly as the tide and there is a well-worn track from the throne room to the oubliette. Death finally comes, usually in the evening, when something in the raconteur fades out for good and in the midst of his story his eyes fix on the horizon and he trails off into silence, thinking of nothing. For this reason the Phaeacians consider silence an act of kindness, as sacred as guest friendship, a grant of repose to a distant stranger.

Odysseus looked at the man on his left and replied:

If you welcome death you are gently mad.

The path forked—fields and rivers lay to the left, and to the right, where Alcinous led them, were orchards and woods over sea cliffs. Alcinous said:

Death is unimportant.