Zachary Mason - The Lost Books of the Odyssey

I traveled widely and won much acclaim. I lived among other men but was not of them and this suited me precisely. On the island Chios I bought a gentleman’s farm where I passed the winters. There were women, sometimes the same one for years, but I never married any of them and their names ran together.

In the tenth year after leaving Ithaca I realized I was done with singing and with new shores and cities. I gave the Chian farm to my woman at the time, and there were no hard feelings when I left for port and hitched a ride on a Phoenician trader bound in the general direction of home. At sea I lay on my back on deck and stared at the grey skies while composing an account of the last five years. From a muscle-bound Scythian brigand who had caught me stealing cheeses from his cave I made a one-eyed cannibal ogre. From the cold winters on Chios when I spoke with no one but my lover I made island imprisonments with kindly witches (there are, as far as I have seen, and I have seen much, no gods, no spirits and no such thing as witches, but I seem to be the only one who knows it — the best I can say for the powers of the night is that they make good stories).

At last the traders dropped me on the Ithacan shore and I hid my chests of gold in a cave I remembered. I cast my old cloak into the woods and using a tide-pool for a mirror shaved off the beard I had started when I landed on Asian shores. Clean-shaven, I looked absurdly young. I strode off to my father’s hall and the predictable kerfuffle ensued — amazement, tears, glad reunions, questions, more tears, feasts, speeches. Tedium. I played my part as best I could but in truth just wanted it to end so I could spend my remaining years with sword and harp on the wall, making loans at high interest and fathering sons. I never sang again, fearful of being recognized, but I got some second-hand fame as a patron of bards. I was most generous when they had my songs word-perfect.

*Excrement eaters.

The witch Circe told me that there was no fighting Scylla but it was not in me to believe her. Circe saw the set of my jaw and repeated herself—“She will take six of your men from the deck and it is not, cannot be, in your power to stop her. Don’t waste lives dallying and trying to fight — just row by as quickly as you can. She is born of pure force and is not for you to contend with.” I bowed and spoke graceful words that I could not afterward recall, as I was wondering how to kill Scylla.

A week out of Aiaia *we were in a narrow channel between high, guano-streaked cliffs where, Circe had said, Scylla lived. As the ship coasted along I armed myself in silence, ignoring Circe’s counsel and the men’s questioning looks. I wanted to tell my crew that I was poised to make a famous killing but held my tongue, scanning the cliffs for the lair I knew was hidden among the vortices of seabirds.

I almost missed it when she struck. I was looking out at the restless twitching waters on the other side of the channel and by luck glanced over my shoulder in time to see six men snatched up, Scylla’s long necks twining and receding high above, gone in moments. The crew only realized what had happened when they heard the victims’ cries, shrill and desperate, soon silenced. I gave the order to row at double time and they willingly obeyed. The spear in my hand was an absurd comfort as we passed out of range.

We made landfall on Apollo’s island *and I sat in a black study with my face in my hands while the men crept silently about their duty. I suppressed the urge to sail straight back with bared teeth and drawn blade and instead meditated on her weaknesses, foremost among them her immobility. Pure defense is untenable — it cedes the initiative and even the strongest fortress could, as I had shown, be broken.

Circe had told me that the sun god prized his cattle, so I waited until nightfall before having them slaughtered. For all I knew, Apollo slept like everyone else. If he objects, I thought, let him come to Ithaca and I will give him back an equal number of cows and half as many again, for the Laertides are nothing if not generous. In any event, what’s one more enemy on Olympus? In high good humor, I told the men that the cattle of the Sun would be a proper funeral sacrifice for the fallen and the means of our revenge into the bargain. They were reluctant to do the butchering, their mouths full of hesitant piety, so I grabbed a knife and cut the first cow’s throat myself. As the blade slid in I thought, “This is not who I am, and this is not the way to a happy old age on Ithaca,” but already the victim’s steaming blood spattered my hands and its knees buckled and I was committed. The next cow was dragged forward and I told the men to heat up our forge.

All night we hammered spear blades into barbed hooks, then welded them to long chains affixed to my ship’s keel. We arrayed the cattle’s carcasses on deck in poses of sleep, the hooks concealed within their bodies, the chains covered with sailcloth. In the morning the fleet sailed within sight of Scylla’s rock. We gave the deck of the slaughter-ship a last sluicing and pointed it toward the monster’s lair. The men raised the sails and climbed down into a waiting boat — I locked the rudder and followed them down as the sails filled and the ship went off unmanned.

“The power of a god and the intelligence of a wasp,” I thought as we rocked on the waves. “If this fails I will come back next year with something better. And if I die, then killing this animal will become the pastime of my son and his sons and every lord of Ithaca and my shade will not rest till they burn her heart before my tomb.” We were half a mile away when her heads shot out from her cave to engulf the bait and still I flinched.

She tried to draw up her catch but the hooks bit, the chains held and she was abruptly brought up short. The ship rose slightly in the water but the breeze held and pulled her necks taut as lyre strings. I shivered at her wet, almost musical shrieking as her corpulent body was slowly pulled out of her cavern and into the sunlight, her claws scrabbling for purchase on the guano-slimed stone of her aerie till she reached the edge, clung for a moment, overbalanced and plummeted toward the churning sea where she landed with the sound of a siege-stone hitting a wall and disappeared under a mountain of foam.

I brought the boat forward, my spear poised for the coup de grâce, ready to gloat over her death agony. Her huge yellow body floated belly-up on oily waves, her heads bobbing around her, her fanged mouths slack and black eyes sightless.

I raised my spear but hesitated because among the tangle of her necks I saw a seventh head, not a monster’s but a young woman’s, with milk-white skin and sodden filthy hair. She caught my eye and shouting to be heard over the wind said, “You are the fate that has been haunting me since I was born. I huddled in my high cave for fear of you, starving and wretched, venturing out only to snatch a little food when I could. I thought of hiding in a deep cavern or on a high mountain but I was too afraid to leave home. Mine has been a miserable life and now it is ending and I wish I had never heard the name Odysseus.”

*Circe’s island.

*On Apollo’s island were his sacred cattle, which were immortal, or at any rate ageless, and which he prized highly.

Graceful young men and women moved in small groups over the gentle slopes of Mount Ida, circulating around the temple of Quickness *where Helen sat receiving suitors with gracious brevity and a marble smile. The three most eminent bachelors were Odysseus, unmatched for intelligence, Agamemnon, who would one day be king of all Mycenae, and his brother Menelaus, who never quit.