The Lost Books of the Odyssey - By Zachary Mason Page 0,51

coming back don’t go rushing in like a puppy.” So he left the road and went up onto a hill overlooking the town, concealed himself among the trees next to a hut that had once been the swineherd’s and settled in to watch. All afternoon there was only stillness and birdsong and several times he caught himself dozing.

Night fell. A bright, full moon rose and illuminated the flawless, static island. There was not even a breath of wind. In the night’s last hours Odysseus stole down through the trees toward his house. Irresistibly reminded of his night-time forays into Troy, where at least there had been a friendly army to retreat to, he slipped through the open-hanging gate of his courtyard, hand on the hilt of his sword.

Within, nothing. Moss on the dung-heap and disintegrating potsherds. A dog’s verdigrised brass collar clanked underfoot. The house was cold and still. As he crept down a corridor, he looked back, saw his footprints in the dust and desiccated leaves, and discarded stealth.

Odysseus murmured to himself, “There are only so many possibilities. The town could have been wiped out in an attack. There could have been a mass emigration—to avoid raiders, for instance. There could have been a sickness. Each of these possibilities entails certain signs. Every event is the cause of myriad effects and it is effectively impossible that a disaster of this magnitude could have swept all the people away and left no record of the manner of their passing. The world is a fundamentally orderly place, never impervious to reason. I will look until I find this record and read it and know what came to pass here.”

He searched the house in earnest for the marks of recent history. In one storeroom he found an amphora of sweet wine he thought he had laid down himself. In another he found a cobwebbed pile of weapons and armor. Altogether, he found:

an orange coral hairpin

a broken loom

an empty, undecorated quiver

a broken stick of incense, still fragrant when he turned it in his fingers

a clay washbasin

He went into the dimness of the great hall. It was a wreck—tables overturned and broken, shattered bowls, a foot-bath. He kicked an ancient, desiccated cow’s hoof. Arrows stuck in the wall here and there, but when he tried to pull them out they crumbled. The aftermath of a battle? The shafts were embedded in just one wall—an archery contest? Idle vandals? He found his great bronze bow lying under some chairs, streaked with green but as strong and supple as ever. This he kept, having missed it many times on the field at Troy and in his wandering.

He left the house and walked among the outbuildings. The sky was beginning to glow. Ropes were strung between the roof of the roundhouse and the corral.* The garden was in a sad state of neglect and the fences were falling down. He resisted an impulse to forget his search and start setting things right.

The sun rose and in the forgiving early light he could almost pretend that his house was not abandoned but still a living place. He went into the cellar, which he had been postponing. Picking his way over toppled, broken jars, he found an intact iron-bound chest shoved into a corner. At last, an answer. He forced the lock with his sword. Within the chest were a funeral shroud, belt buckles, a length of fine linen, and a sack of bronze nails.

That morning he found an abandoned boat and left the island, swearing to come back one day with answers.

*This is where the maids who had lain with the suitors were hanged to death by Odysseus, Eumaios and Telemachus after the suitors’ slaughter in the standard version of the Odyssey.

A MOTE IN

OCEANIC DARKNESS

Waterlogged, frozen, exhausted, Odysseus clung to a floatinag spar, dark waves surging over him. He could not help but think that this was happening to someone else, that someone, a stranger, was being consumed by the sea, was near drowning. His teeth had long since stopped chattering when a were-light appeared on the waters and his mind went from pain and dullness to clarity—Pallas Athena was with him. He said, Goddess, who are you, to find me and bear me up when I am lost in the waste? In the sudden stillness she said:

Water flowing through pipes, pouring into unlit reservoirs there to eddy in silence. Runes of ephemeral fire. A book of many pages written in inks that vanish and reappear. A twilight