The Lost Books of the Odyssey - By Zachary Mason Page 0,46

saw her go into the woods with the captain. I hid behind an oak and heard her tell him that she was the king of Tyre’s daughter, abducted so many years ago, and still homesick. “Tomorrow we go and you should come with us,” the captain said. She laughed with pleasure and said she would and she might bring Tethios’s most precious treasure with her, for all that it was getting too big to carry.

The next morning when the tide was in the offing the Phoenicians sent a messenger to the court with their goodbyes and a gift for the queen, a necklace of rough gold and amber. While the women passed it from hand to hand, Nurse slipped away and made for the ship. I overtook her not far from the anchorage, and, weeping, asked her how she could bear to leave me. She gave a start and comforted me, smoothing back my hair, explaining that she was leaving me because I was my father’s only son and I would miss him. I said I would miss no one but her. So we went on the ship together, and she held my hand and ignored the sailors, who ignored us in turn, as though we were ghosts.

Limnos faded behind us. Nurse took ill and kept to her berth, her face turned away from me. On the fifth day out she stopped speaking and on the sixth she stopped breathing. She went into the sea with little ceremony, swung over the side by sailors with wooden faces, her lover among them. They spoke in their own tongue (not knowing I understood them) of taking me back to Limnos for ransom, but decided it was too risky, and that anyway I had some value other than as a king’s son. Their talk of profits cheapened my mourning and it was a relief when we came to Ithaca and I stepped ashore a slave.

*The narrator of this story is apparently Eumaios, the swineherd who sheltered Odysseus when he first returned to Ithaca and later helped him kill the suitors. Most likely, Eumaios is telling his story to Odysseus on the eve of the battle.

*The Tyrians were famous for the dye they extracted from the red murex, a kind of marine snail.

INTERMEZZO

We sailed that night from Ilium. Dirty snow on deck, the sizzle of snowflakes dissolving on the swell, the yellow lights of the city dwindling behind me. I spent the night sitting on the prow, the bosun bringing hot wine when the watch changed. We passed in and out of low cloud banks floating on the sea. Distant lights from little coastal towns glittered like myriads of tiny luminous creatures drawn up out of the deep by a rare current.

My life in the East had passed as a dream—it was an unpleasant, even painful time, and already the recollection of it all but eluded me. (In the future it would come to me only in fragments: a small, cramped tent with the lamplight shining on Achilles’ obdurate frowning face, the warm glow of his armor, the shadows on the worried faces of his bent crowd of supplicants. The humming of arrows as they darkened the sky above us. The interior of the horse, confined and creaking like the hold of a ship.) I tried to imagine the life awaiting me in Ithaca but as much as I turned my mind toward it I could not see that island’s forests, walls, towns or harbors. All that came to mind were a few disconnected images—palm trees in washed-out light, the broken surface of a temple pool, cracked blue tiles, a silver chariot before whitewashed walls. Ithaca, I recall saying, is good for raising men and goats and little else. Ithaca had become a sequence of images that could be made to fit almost anywhere.

I lay listening to the hissing of the bow wave and tried to tell the future. The ship will dock and I will set foot on the wharf for the first time in ten years. I will walk up through the harbor and see my father’s father’s house standing there on the hill. And what then? Images flickered through my mind. The face of a young woman, her suspicion turning to welcome. The creak of a bowstring. An island far away and bound in darkness, a woman’s shadow moving over its hills. I stared up at the lightening sky and imagined that the contours of the bluing intricate clouds, just visible,