The Lost Books of the Odyssey - By Zachary Mason Page 0,45

as a womb where it smelled of wet stone and hot metal. I asked the shuddering oracle, whom I heard but could not see, whether Odysseus would come back to me. ‘No man will return to you, but not for a long while,’ she said, and all my hope fell to the floor.*

“Back in Ithaca, many men sought my hand. I told them I would marry when I had finished my husband’s funeral shroud, and I kept weaving it and weaving it. They grew impatient—they pled and reasoned but were working themselves up to violence.

“I wanted to secure my son’s patrimony. So I sent Telemachus off to visit Sparta and when he was gone gave a feast to which I made a point of inviting every man who had courted me. I let it be known that by the end of the feast I would be with the man who would be my husband. The wine was poisoned—painful and slow, but sure. I drank first. And so I made a liar of myself, for though I have searched every vale of the shadowlands I have not found even a rumor of him.”

“Would you know your husband? Do you not recognize me, at all?” asked Odysseus gently.

“Yes, I recognize you. You are the living, come with all your heat and blood to trouble my shadows and dust. Traveler, begone from here.”

“But I must come back once more when my days are done and then, finally, you will be waiting for me,” he said and reached out to touch her cheek but she slipped away like a fish in a stream.

*It was a little more than ten years after leaving Ithaca that Odysseus encountered the cyclops Polyphemus and as a ruse de guerre said his name was Noman.

PHOENICIAN

Since you ask, I will tell you. So drink your wine and take your ease, traveler. The nights are long in Ithaca and tomorrow will look after itself.*

I was born on Limnos, an island far west of here, the last place the sun rises. The farms on Limnos are scattered and the people are taciturn, miserly and dishonest. The king was Tethios, my father, a grim, silent man. Our house was on a white hill on the westernmost point of the island. On the beach the bones of a ruined temple protruded from the sand and I would play among its weathered stones while Nurse watched me.

Nurse was a Phoenician with a face like a blade and a body like an arrow. Now I know that no one would call her desirable but to me she was beautiful. My mother stayed in bed in a darkened room and my father had no interest in nursery matters so she and I were left to our own devices. She would sit me on her knee under the oak atop the hill and in her own language tell me stories of her home, Tyre, the island city, where the sea was the moat and the walls so high that hundred-year waves broke on them without wetting the battlements. She told me how Heracles, also called Melquart, had been the slave of a wicked old king who told him to go and sleep among the waves. Heracles threw a great white stone into the sea to be his bed—the wave from the stone drowned the king’s subterranean palace, and the stone itself became Tyre’s foundation. She told me of the fire roaring in the belly of the idol of Baal, how the priests bound children with cords and cast them into the flame to appease the god’s hunger. She told me of the dye-works where women ground the murex,* dripping crimson to the elbows like a coven of murderesses. She loved me as I loved her, I think, and anyway no one else wanted her.

Early one spring, a Phoenician trading ship dropped anchor in our harbor. There was a general air of holiday as everyone on the island went down to see what they had to sell. Nurse was especially excited, as she had not spoken her mother tongue to anyone but me since my father took her for a slave. She stood on the shingle rattling away with the traders while the other women picked over amber, knives and linen. All smiles, their captain brought her aboard to drink wine. I sat on the sand and heard them laughing.

The next morning she told me to look after myself and hurried off. I followed her at a distance, and