The Lost Books of the Odyssey (8 page)

*
An island in the Aegean Sea.

A
long time ago someone unknown to me lay on this cooling stone under a fading sky and sensed more than saw the ragged herds of oryx and ibex moving slowly through the bush. The tension in the air grew as the sun sank and the torpid predators pricked up their ears in their trees and lairs, waiting for the plain to be immersed in their medium, the dusk. A lion in silhouette stretched her long spine on the peak of a lone hill overlooking a white beach and the sea, a defensible spot, a good place for a city.

A long time from now someone unknown to me will stand on the white plain where I now stand. He will speak a different language and the mountains in the distance may have been ground down but there are certain constants that will reliably inform his life—kings like great trees whose roots are watered in ignorance, men who come to war reluctantly only to discover they have the souls of jackals, and fortresses like mountains, as immovable and inevitable. I anticipate that a flash of intuition
will make him look at the tumulus or crater or clamorous sprawling city where Troy once stood and intuit how many men once bent their minds toward its destruction.

These strangers used and will use their wits to understand the world as far as they are able, though that was and will not be very far, and they did not and will not know where they come from nor who they are. Their ignorance, I infer, also encompasses the true names of the stars, the language of birds, and the key to the circuitous and ever-present defences of Troy. How can it be that I, enjoying the greatest advantage, the only advantage, of living in the present, am just as ignorant?

C
irce had told me that the sirens’ song was irresistible, the very shape of desire, and that no one who heard it went unscathed, as was attested by the bones of their admirers tumbling back and forth in the tide-pools around their reef. But I have never been one to leave a riddle unsolved or, as I overheard my men say, well enough alone and I was determined to hear them for myself.

It seemed that my curiosity could be safely indulged through simple logistics. As the ship neared the sirens’ rock I had myself bound to the mast while the crew stuffed their ears with beeswax. It seemed odd no one had thought of it before but in general there is no accounting for the bovine stupidity of mankind.

There were two of them. As we approached the white breakers around the reef I saw them sit up, stretch their long spines and fix us with their gazes. Their torsos were too long, their fingers had too many joints and their eyes were cold and green. One said something to the other in
a high musical language and my eyes began to water—the other laughed and they began to sing.

As they sang I remembered the face of a Trojan whose name I never knew whom I had killed before the high walls of that city, the man’s surprise as I attacked him blind-side, how easy it was to slip my point past his guard and run him through, the Trojan’s dawning rage at the affront to his body, an emotion half formed on his face when death found him, the tug on my blade as his body fell away. I remembered the first time I saw Penelope, walking away from me in a white courtyard in Sparta. I remembered Ithaca the day I left it. I saw how far I was from home, how remote the chance I would ever see it again. The sirens beckoned, longing for me, offering release from my displacement, but I laughed with delight at being lost and reckless, wandering among unknown islands, not knowing the shape of my days. “This is not so bad,” I said to myself. “Anyone unmanned by these monsters is a home-body or a sentimentalist.”

The sirens, who had been watching me intently, fell silent, briefly nonplussed. They conferred in low voices and I thought they might have given up when they launched into a new song, an intricate counterpoint comprised of just a few themes, varied and interwoven.

Their song broke over me and it was as though a veil had been blown away. I saw how Achilles, whose humanity was subsumed in speed and strength and reckless pride, had made his inevitable slow march toward
death, dragging Agamemnon and Patroclus and all the Greeks and the royal house of Troy stumbling behind him. I saw the implacable self-assertion of Agamemnon mirrored in pious, gentle Priam’s refusal to save his city.
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I saw Hector’s love of country and family opposed by Achilles’ madness for glory and his slight impatience for the death he knew was closing in on him. And overlaying them all were the passions and rivalries of the bright gods, like scirocco winds scouring everything they touched. Finally I saw myself, how my wit exceeded that of other men but gave me no leverage against fate, and how in the time to come it would avail me nothing but possibly an understanding of the full scope of my helplessness.

As their song crescendoed I had the sudden conviction that the world, which I had considered the province of meaningless chances, a mad dance of atoms, was as orderly as the hexagons in the honeycombs I had just crushed into wax and that behind everything, from Helen’s weaving to Circe’s mountain to Scylla’s death, was a subtle pattern, an order of the most compelling lucidity, but hidden from me, a code I could never crack.

Abruptly, the song ended and I sagged forward, the ropes digging into my chest as the men took the ship out. I cried out for the sirens to continue, that I was close to
an answer, but they watched me depart with their chins propped on their hands.

I tried to reconstruct their song while its echoes yet lingered in my mind but all I could remember were four lines:

Achaea’s old soldiery

Charmed out of time we see.

No life on earth can be

Hid from our dreaming.
^*

When the reef was well behind us the men unbound me. Making an effort to appear self-possessed, I told them that I had not had time to hear quite all and that we must go back. The men looked at each other sidelong, shuffled their feet and avoided my gaze. I cursed them, called them disobedient dogs whose lot was to obey, not to question. Reluctantly, they did as I asked, replacing the wax in their ears, rebinding me to the mast and retracing our course. They anchored the ship within bowshot of the monsters and stood guard by the rail with arrows nocked and spears lowered.

The sirens regarded me and said nothing. They beckoned with their strange hands and smiled (I wondered how they managed not to cut their tongues with such
long, sharp teeth). I pled with them, begged, fulminated. They might have been amused. Soon they lost interest and lay down to sleep on their beds of twisted black basalt. A nervous crewman released an arrow that clattered on the rocks before ploughing into the sea.

The men conferred among themselves by signs, then weighed anchor and took us away, leaving me bound to the mast. I bellowed at them to turn back but they ignored me or pointed to their ears with exaggerated incomprehension. We sailed at good speed all day and left the sirens far behind us.

They freed me by torchlight. An order was on my lips but I saw mutiny in their deliberately blank faces and went to sit in the back of the ship, looking out over the flat moonlit sea and thinking of the sirens sprawled languidly under the stars, arms entwined, singing quietly to themselves over the hissing of the waves.

*
Presumably the author means that Priam could have saved his city by violating guest friendship and giving up Paris to the Achaeans.

*
This is identical to the text of the sirens’ song from Book Twelve of the standard
Odyssey
.

I
have often wondered whether all men are cowards like I am. Achaea’s flower, the chosen of Ares, disciplined, hard-muscled men who do not know what fear is—all a fraud, a conceit for bards and braggarts that has nothing to do with the vapid squalor of war.

I have no talent for martial arts. I was the despair of the arms master but I was the heir and to his sorrow he was in no position to give up on me. When I dropped my practice sword, hit myself in the head with my spear or broke down in frustrated tears, he would smile grimly and with forced good cheer say, “
Anyone
can learn to fight with enough application.” And, lo, the good man was right—despite my clumsiness, fat, stiff muscles and inclination to cry under stress I did eventually attain a modest standard of skill at arms, thanks mostly to my father watching our practices and encouraging the master to beat me bloody if I gave anything less than my absolute best. And beat me he did, and often, though to his credit I do not think he relished it. After a whipping
he would help me up, dress my wounds and say, “Sorry, boy, but it’s your father’s orders and you’ll get worse than that when you go to war.” I dreamed of coming into my title and having him flogged and enslaved.

The exception to my general military ineptitude was with the bow, at which I excelled. When I pulled the string the world became quiet and I was aware only of the target, which I regarded with interest but no malice as my arrow all but invariably found its mark. Unfortunately for me this only exacerbated my reputation for effeminacy—as it allows one to strike from safety, the bow is a coward’s weapon, the sort of thing used by nomads and Asiatics. I could shoot rooks in the eye at a hundred paces all I liked and still be despised.

My shameful aptitudes did not end with archery—I was also articulate. I have never been at a loss for a tale, lie or synonym. I could recite the epic of Hercules after hearing it just four times. I was ideally suited to be a bard, a profession fit only for villeins, wandering masterless men who live at the pleasure of their landed betters, as my father reminded me when I broached the idea. He and his men would say things like, “We are here to live the stories, not compose them!” Sing, Muses, of the wrath of godlike shit-for-brains, hereditary lord of the mighty Coprophagoi,
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who skewered a number of other men with his pig-sticker and valued himself highly for so doing.

When I was twenty, Agamemnon the High King came to the island to raise an army. His brother’s wife had preferred a sloe-eyed prince with a palace to her lawful husband, a Spartan king who lived in a mud hut and slept with his pigs for warmth. Privately, I saluted her common sense.

My father volunteered me to lead our troops. Age was slowing him down and he had lately been transferring more administrative responsibility to me but I hadn’t expected to be war-leader so soon. I had been making a point of carrying myself as I thought a battle-hardened hero would, loudly scorning danger, and though I thought my act was transparent enough for a child to penetrate, it seems I had convinced both my father and the men in the guard—they gave a cheer when they got the news and immediately started divvying up old King Priam’s daughters and treasures.

Refusing to go to war was impossible. The only excuse would be madness or infirmity, and it would have been very suspicious if I were struck by a terrible disease just when it was time to sail. At this point a man of the common run would have realized the situation was impossible and bowed to fate but my cowardice made me capable of the extraordinary.

My father threw a feast in the High King’s honor and I got my first good look at him. I knew his reputation as a warrior but in his face was a willfulness such as I had
never seen. He looked like a man who would lash out with all his strength if crossed even minutely.

I played the part of the young-buck-keen-to-make-a-name for all I was worth. How eager I was to leave boring, quiet Ithaca, see the world, win renown by feats of arms and so forth. Looking distant for a moment, I said, “And Troy is a long, long way away? If a man took ill there I suppose he would have no option but to stay and fight?” and darted a quick, inquisitive look at Agamemnon. Palamedes, Agamemnon’s lieutenant, a bald, silent man who thought much and spoke little, looked at me as though I had suddenly become interesting.

After a few minutes I made myself look as ill as possible and made my excuses. I went out, closed the door behind me, and, taking a deep breath, fell down thrashing, my heel hammering against the floor. The door opened—there were Agamemnon and Laertes, Palamedes and the arms master, all the men I had grown up with looking down at me as I writhed on the ground, saliva dribbling down my chin. Through my convulsive chattering I growled, “Close the door. Close the door!” Abashed, they did, leaving me to complete my fit in private. After a minute I desisted, sick with relief.

The next morning I showed up for arms practice as usual, face ashen, very grave. Father was there, nearly unmanned with grief—his son was damaged goods, all but unmarriageable and not fit for battle. Agamemnon
clapped an avuncular hand on my shoulder and asked me how I did, and Palamedes asked if I ever felt the touch of god when the fits came on me. I knew that seizures were often preceded by epiphanies, so I reluctantly admitted that I did—sometimes, I told them, it was as though Pallas Athena herself spoke with me while my spell played out, whispering secrets in my ear. It was the first thing that came to mind. I had their rapt attention, which made me confident and, like a fool, I embellished on my intimacy with the god. Agamemnon smiled and I was horrified to see in his face an emotion I had thought alien to him—generosity. “My boy, your luck is in. Palamedes here was telling me about the warrior Laon, who suffered the same disease you do, but it never slowed him down, not for a moment. So you see, there is no need to be concerned. And I’m even told it’s lucky, the god’s-touch disease. And for this campaign I believe we’ll be needing all the luck we can get, ha ha!” He clapped me on the shoulder again and went off to see about his ships. Palamedes smiled at me before following him and I decided that if I got the chance I would kill him.