The Lost Books of the Odyssey - By Zachary Mason Page 0,64

I climbed down and went into Calypso’s cave with a pang of vanity—she will be as young as when last I saw her, I thought, and for me winter has come, but the low, cool, sand-floored room was empty save for the echoes of the sea. Her bed and loom were gone and the hearth had been effaced—not even a footprint was left. It was peaceful but somehow redolent of weariness, and it felt abandoned. I wondered where she had gone but did not know where to look.

Next was Aiaia, Circe’s isle, which had been a thicket then and was a thicket now. Wolf song hung in the evening air and the young men’s eyes shone as they hefted their spears. There were signs of recent visitors—cold campfires by the anchorage, piles of smashed pottery, litter in the bushes. I hiked up the hill to Circe’s house in the failing light, my men behind with weapons ready.

The walls of her house had burned away, leaving only charred beams, flagstones and the fireplace. Names were crudely carved into the blackened stones, and the noble mantel I remembered, carved with wolves becoming men and men becoming wolves, had been pried out and taken away. Green and gold eyes watched us from the woods but they winked out one by one as the stars emerged, and soon we left.

Next was the island of the cyclops. I expected my men to chafe at venturing onto such dangerous ground but the old companions regarded the prospect with cheerful equanimity and the young men were delighted to finally risk their lives. I stood in the prow with an arrow nocked as we took the ship in toward the familiar beach. “I doubt I could shoot a rook in the heart anymore,” I said to my friends, “so it’s lucky a cyclops’ heart is so big.” As we crept up the shingle toward the wood I felt some of the old life come back and I nearly put an arrow into a boy who came running out of the trees. Contrite, I helped him up and dusted him off, and he soon recovered himself; he had seen our ship from the hill and had wanted to be first to greet us; he lived in a house, over the next rise, with his dog, parents and a sister.

He knew little about the cyclopes—they had been gone when the first colonists arrived except for an old blind one who lived alone in his miserable cave and died of unhappiness soon after men came. Where they had gone no one knew, but they had left nothing besides drawings on cave walls and old bones embedded in rock. The boy asked if we had heard of the deeds of great Odysseus, who slew a cyclops in single combat and had the stature of a god? I admitted that I had heard of that Ithacan but did not believe a word of his story and asked to see the bones.

The boy led us to a huge skeleton embedded in a cliff face. The skull had a single wide orbit flanked by fearsome tusks nearly half as long as its body.* Its posture was the record of a death agony. I had meant to go to Polyphemus’s cave but found I had no heart for lingering where my men had died so badly, so we went back to the ship and sailed for Troy.

We came within sight of that city in the hour just before sunset when the light falls in warm sheets and makes every face beautiful and every banality poignant. The city walls were higher even than in my memory, with grim silhouettes patrolling and watch fires ablaze on every tower. As the ship coasted into harbor, I had the sudden conviction that my time had come again, that all the ghosts of Troy had come up from Hell to guard their haunted city.

I hefted my spear and was glad of the Trojans in their numbers and the hopelessness of the battle into which we sailed. I felt light and free—this time, I thought, I need no stratagems. The Trojans gave a shout and one of them threw something. I jumped to the side and raised my shield—it took me a moment to realize that the bombardment was not of stones or arrows but the petals of myriad red flowers. As I lowered my shield, the petals clinging to my armor like spattered blood, the cries I had taken for defiance