after all. Only instead of wood, you work in men.”
The look he gave me. Like purest, unmixed wine. “After Achilles died, Agamemnon named me Best of the Greeks. Other men fought bravely, but they flinched from war’s true nature. Only I had the stomach to see what must be done.”
His chest was bare and hatched with scars. I tapped it lightly, as if sounding what lay within. “Such as?”
“You promise mercy to spies so they will spill their story, then you kill them after. You beat men who mutiny. You coax heroes from their sulks. You keep spirits high at any cost. When the great hero Philoctetes was crippled with a festering wound, the men lost their courage over it. So I left him behind on an island and claimed he had asked to be left. Ajax and Agamemnon would have battered at Troy’s locked gates until they died, but it was I who thought of the trick of the giant horse, and I spun the story that convinced the Trojans to pull it inside. I crouched in the wooden belly with my picked men, and if any shook with terror and strain, I put my knife to his throat. When the Trojans finally slept, we tore through them like foxes among soft-feathered chicks.”
These were no songs to sing before a court, no tales from the great golden age. Yet somehow in his mouth they did not seem dishonorable, but just and inspired and wisely pragmatic.
“Why did you go to war in the first place, if you knew what the other kings were like?”
He rubbed at his cheek. “Oh, because of a foolish oath I swore. I tried to get out of it. My son was a year old, and I still felt new-married. There would be other glories, I thought, and when Agamemnon’s man came to collect me I pretended to be mad. I went out naked and began plowing a winter field. He put my infant son in the blade’s path. I stopped, of course, and so I was collected with the rest.”
A bitter paradox, I thought: to keep his son he had to lose him.
“You must have been angry.”
He lifted his hands, let them drop. “The world is an unjust place. Look what happened to that counselor of Agamemnon’s. Palamedes, his name was. He served the army well, but fell in a pit while on a night watch. Someone had set sharpened stakes in the bottom. Terrible loss.”
His eyes glittered. If good Patroclus had been there he might have said, Sir, you are no true hero, no Heracles, no Jason. You speak no honest speeches from pure heart. You do no noble deeds in the gleaming sunlight.
But I had met Jason. And I knew what sort of deeds could be done in the sun’s sight. I said nothing.
The days passed, and the nights with them. My house was crowded with some four dozen men, and for the first time in my life, I found myself steeped in mortal flesh. Those frail bodies of theirs took relentless attention, food and drink, sleep and rest, the cleaning of limbs and fluxes. Such patience mortals must have, I thought, to drag themselves through it hour after hour. The fifth day, Odysseus’ awl slipped and punctured the pad of his thumb. I gave him salves and worked my charms to drive off infection, but it still took half a moon to heal. I watched the pain passing over his face. Now it hurt, and now still it hurt, and now, and now. And that was only one among his discomforts, stiff neck and acid stomach and the ache of old wounds. I ran my hands over his ribbed scars, easing him as I could. The scars themselves I offered to wipe away. He shook his head. “How would I know myself?”
I was secretly glad. They suited him. Enduring Odysseus, he was, and the name was stitched into his skin. Whoever saw him must salute and say: There is a man who has seen the world. There is a captain with stories to tell.
I might have told him, in those hours, stories of my own. Scylla and Glaucos, Aeëtes, the Minotaur. The stone wall cutting into my back. The floor of my hall wet with blood, reflecting the moon. The bodies I had dragged one by one down the hill, and burned with their ship. The sound flesh makes when it tears and re-forms and how, when you change a man, you