The Lost Books of the Odyssey - By Zachary Mason Page 0,63

while the cyclops glutted himself on my sailors, drawing my sword to kill the beast but checking myself when I realized that victory would mean imprisonment?* Sometimes in dreams my sword-arm went nerveless at the sight of the giant rending and devouring my men and I dropped my blade and scurried behind the monster’s cheeses.

I exhumed my old bronze bow from the back of a storeroom. In the torchlight it flickered back and forth between a death-dealing heirloom that had sent countless warriors to Hell and a quotidian implement to hang beside the rakes in a yeoman’s cottage. I remembered the battle with the suitors fondly—my once furious resentment had long since faded and each year on the anniversary of the slaughter I sacrificed a ram on the hill where I had dug their grave.

I often wondered what had happened to Pallas Athena. Her absence grieved me and I was no longer sure I had not imagined her. It is unlikely she was an illusion, I told myself. Most of the details of my travels have become vague but I will never forget the clarity of mind she brought me, like a lucid, sunlit dream.

One night as I sat by the fire with Penelope I told her I was going on a trip to the East, possibly raiding, more likely visiting old friends. I saw her formulate an objection (she would miss me and believed I was more comfortable with her around), conceal it (because she didn’t want to be a shrew and thought she’d have a better chance of getting her way indirectly), put on an expression of mild inquiry (to avoid revealing her indirect intentions with a conspicuous blankness) and finally see in my face that I had followed her chain of thought, which made her smile. She told me not to be gone long. I said I would try and I hoped that this time the house would not be full of strange men when I came back. She promised to do her best but could not help the power of her beauty.

I sought out my old companions in their gardens and estates and told them what was in the offing. Many had died (I poured libations of strong wine and honey in the dust before their tombs) and of the living most were infirm, but three of the halest laughed when they heard my plan and said they would like nothing better than to sail with their old captain one more time. They brought out swords that had not been drawn in twenty years and came to port to oversee the lading of the ship. The odd-job men hanging around the harbor might have smiled to see us greybeards preparing for war but even then there was that in me that kept them civil. We quickly filled out a crew with young men who regretted the strifelessness of the times—they longed to win names and see the world and hoped some of my glory would rub off on them.

It was only as we sailed out of Ithaca harbor that I told them we would retrace my long trip home. Our first port of call was Phaeacia, which we reached in five days of peaceful sailing. We entered the empty harbor at noon. The quiet was profound and we were unsurprised to see the city abandoned. Young trees grew from cracks in the city wall and the rotting remnants of a pier swam below the water’s surface. On the quarantine island in the middle of the harbor was a hospital from whose eaves hung beehives, the swarms droning away the afternoon. A herdsman lay in the grass as his cattle drank from a stream gurgling over the beach. When I hailed him he started, gave us a fearful look and hurriedly drove his charges into the woods with great whacks of his stick. The men, eager as hounds, were all for pursuing him but I demurred and we sailed away.

Next was Ogygia, Calypso’s island, which seemed to have gotten smaller. I walked spryly enough to the top of the hill where I had passed the days waiting for a ship’s sails to nick the horizon (I imagined that it was thirty-five years ago—how it would have felt to look down and see the Ithacan ship bobbing in the cove). I remembered cutting timber for the raft that would bear me away and ran my hands over the axe-scarred pine trunk that had been too thick to fell.