The Lost Books of the Odyssey - By Zachary Mason Page 0,52
forest haunted by beasts, watchful and inquisitive. Steadfast of heroes. An onion, an ocean, a palimpsest, a staccato machine of oiled iron gears. These are among the metaphors with which I describe myself, like a hand trying to grasp itself by reaching into a mirror.
ATHENA’S WEAVE
Midnight came and still Odysseus lay awake, in his own house again after twenty years. He lay under a pile of sheepskins in the portico, his gaze traveling round and round the once familiar walls as though they held some secret, the answer to his agony. He had come a long way to get there only to find his home had become an enemy camp and for a moment his heart failed him. Courage, he told himself—the cyclops, whose rage was like an avalanche, was worse than this. These are but men—boys, really—none of them seasoned in war, no three of whom I could not cut down in seconds, but there are close on fifty of them. How shall I kill them when I am only one? He wanted to walk past the suitors where they slept in the main hall and go to his own bed but knew it would be the death of him. Eventually his tears dried and he drifted close to sleep.
In the grey middle ground between dream and waking Athena appeared to him as she sometimes did and said, “Do not fear, wanderer. There could be fifty times fifty men such as these all baying for your blood and still you would triumph. Like me, you have the knack of stringing victory together out of whatever is at hand.” Odysseus replied, “It is a shame that the way of the Olympians is to help their protégés help themselves—if I thought you would slaughter them all for me I would indeed rest at ease. If you wish to do so, please proceed—do not stand on ceremony with so old a friend as me.” Athena laughed and went back to Olympus, but before she went she gave him a dream.
There was a sense of movement and of distant women whispering and Odysseus found a cloth in his hands which he immediately knew was the weave of fate. Its manifold complexities drew his eyes but Athena whispered in his ear not to be distracted, to look for the bright, strong thread of his own life, how it was interwoven with the threads of his wife and son, Menelaus and Helen, all the Trojans, Calypso and Circe, the isle of Ithaca. The suitors’ fates were slight things, just barely bound to the world. Myriad futures opened up before them but all were short and all ended bitter.
Odysseus woke bemused, feeling like a seer. He floated gracefully through the deception of the household,* watching himself as though he were an actor in a theater, immersing himself in the role of wandering beggar and studying his enemies with clear eyes. When things came to a head and the bronze bow was strung* he fired one arrow after another into the suitors’ chests with the utmost detachment—he had a vision of standing in the dewy corral in the hills above the house, streaming sweat in the late morning sun, sending arrow after arrow into the bole of the oak a hundred paces distant. Each time he nocked an arrow he could smell the wet grass and see the sun burning behind the oak leaves.
When the remaining suitors managed to arm themselves and come to close quarters there was none of the usual rush of battle. A man would rush up waving a sword, present an opening into which Odysseus put his blade, fall down dead and so on, one after another.
After the tears of reunion dried and his and Penelope’s joy had reached a less fevered pitch, she showed him the shroud she had been weaving for his father, Laertes. Odysseus picked up the ordinary and unfateful piece of cloth and recognized the fabric shown him by Athena, the improviser, the deceiver.
*Recall that Odysseus returned to his house posing as a beggar.
*With the connivance of his son Telemachus, Odysseus had the suitors try to string his massive bronze bow. As a joke the suitors gave the beggar a try, and were thereby undone.
THE LONG WAY BACK
In retrospect Theseus saw it was Daedalus he should have feared. Minos was just a king, however wise, and Ariadne just a girl, however beautiful, but neither Daedalus’s cunning nor his labyrinth had any end. Theseus had come to Crete as a