After many years and travails I came to Ithaca’s shore, full of caution. All my men were drowned, my ships sunk and my treasures scattered on the sea floor. I was ready for any sort of treachery or decay but found the kingdom to all appearances in good order. The roads were mended, the peasants cheerful and many tall ships spread white sails in the harbor. I asked a sailor who was king here and he said that Odysseus was king in Ithaca, of course. I went to my family’s stronghold and introduced myself to the castellan as a wandering soldier and singer, looking for a place but not for too long—I had heard that Ithaca was prosperous and thought I would try my luck. I was courteously led into the great hall and there was Penelope, aged but still beautiful, and sitting next to her on my own seat was Iapetus the Trojan, bearded and sun-browned but still an alien, a foreigner, not a thing like me. Penelope’s hand rested on his. Telemachus sat in the wings, watching me with polite hauteur. The king, the so-called Odysseus, stood and under his short tunic I saw a white scar on his thigh exactly where the boar had gored me. He said, “Welcome, stranger. Though you introduce yourself with humble speech, your bearing impresses me—you are obviously a man of the best blood and have the air of a captain. Indeed, you seem as though you might have been a king once. Sadly, times are peaceful and there is not so much call for courage as when I was young—I need no more men-at-arms, and have harpers enough. However, you will not go away without a meal, a bag of gold and a suit of armor. Speak highly of me and of Ithaca as fortune bears you elsewhere. Sometimes my mind will go with you as I tend to my duty here—of the two of us I think that you, freed from necessity, are the happier.”
*Tales of lycanthropy are common among the Pelasgians, the pre-Aryan inhabitants of Greece. Their version of the disease was a sort of royal malady, far from benign but a certain sign of divine descent and the right to rule. The reference to the self-cutting with the knife is obscure—possibly it has to do with the mystery cults whose celebrants were said to be able to pierce their skins but shed no blood. Another interpretation is that the grandfather is cutting away his humanity to reveal the animal within.
4
GUEST FRIEND
Alcinous, king of Phaeacia, and Odysseus, the wanderer, the eloquent, the silver-tongued, walked along wooded paths over high sea cliffs affording glimpses of the harbor, the distant city and the shining white-capped waves, the sort of place of which a man lost in mazy sea ways and the malice of petty gods might dream. Alcinous said:
Among the Phaeacians it is believed that each man lives out his life as a character in a story told by someone else. The family and city of each person’s storyteller (or possibly tellers) are unknown and perhaps unknowable but are subjects of frequent speculation. Certain philosophers are of the opinion that the evolution of history can be made to reveal the raconteurs’ national character. It has come to be more or less widely accepted (on the basis of the irregular depredations of locusts, of the propensity of Phaeacian kings for taking black-haired wives with green eyes and short tempers, of our excellence in archery, of the frequency in dreams of cavernous palaces carved into the living stone of low round mountains) that the storytellers are natives either of Phrygia, Sogdiana or distant Bamiyan. We have sent messengers to these kingdoms and even those beyond them but all have found nothing. The one thing on which all Phaeacians agree is that not enough is known to infer even a single teller’s name.
Odysseus replied:
Wise king of the happiest country I have seen, is it not better to live your well-favored life never knowing the teller’s name? As long as he is remote, a distant voice, an abstraction, you are the master of your life and lands and all things are possible to you. But once you have seen his face and taken his measure, then the endless possibilities, always an illusion, will dissolve, and your life will be revealed as the poor invention of a limited mind, rarely inspired.
And what if on seeing your kingdom, beautiful beyond compare, he were satisfied and fell silent? Perhaps it would be enough for him to end with a golden island in a distant ocean where a king and a storm-tossed mariner take the evening air.
Alcinous looked out over the ocean and said:
When his story ends a Phaeacian does not die but goes on to play another role in a different story told by the same teller. In this way the changes of station endemic to Phaeacian life are explained. Everyone in that city has a royal ancestor no less than four generations back and considers himself a prince biding his time—likewise, everyone has a great-aunt or great-uncle who must be confined in an attic.
Moreover, loyalties shift in Phaeacia as rapidly as the tide and there is a well-worn track from the throne room to the oubliette. Death finally comes, usually in the evening, when something in the raconteur fades out for good and in the midst of his story his eyes fix on the horizon and he trails off into silence, thinking of nothing. For this reason the Phaeacians consider silence an act of kindness, as sacred as guest friendship, a grant of repose to a distant stranger.
Odysseus looked at the man on his left and replied:
If you welcome death you are gently mad.
The path forked—fields and rivers lay to the left, and to the right, where Alcinous led them, were orchards and woods over sea cliffs. Alcinous said:
Death is unimportant. Even with the sweetness of the evening, the harbor full of my ships, the firelight in the palace windows, I would have lived enough, would have understood my life’s shape, if I could meet the teller and know him.
And for all the failures of my agents in distant lands, hope is not altogether dead. Certain sages contend that in the oceanic vastness of time the sea will bring him to our shores.
Evening had come to Phaeacia, and though they could still see light on the water and the crushed white shells of the path they had themselves become indistinct, a pair of silhouettes deep in conference in blue twilight shadows. They came to an apple orchard where fireflies winked amid branches that groaned in the wind and Odysseus said:
Let me tell you a story, Majesty. On a remote island a king who shares your ambition walks along a path of crushed shells with a grey-eyed vagabond plucked from the sea. The vagabond is well spoken and full of ready invention—the king wonders whether this is the teller he has longed to meet. As evening settles, island and ocean become indistinct—ships become as waves, towers as cliffs and trees as ghosts. The amiable pair come to an orchard, already half shrouded in darkness. The wanderer, who beneath his bland and cultured demeanor has a mind full of rapine and whose name has been on the lips of innumerable noblemen as their mouths filled with blood, falls a few steps behind the sovereign, maintaining a constant flow of words to comfort and distract, for he sees bright arrowheads winking among the apple trees and hears the creak of slowly drawn bow-strings. He had been expecting the king to try to confirm his suspicions and now the means are clear: Archers lie in wait for the pair with orders to kill their king’s companion—if he was the teller, he would not die in his own story and would thereby be revealed. And if he was just a man, well, no one need know that a nameless greybeard far from home died by treachery.
Odysseus paused. The gloaming had deepened and the orchard shook in a gusting wind that made his footsteps inaudible. When the wind subsided he went on:
Hark to the rush of the bird’s wings, Majesty, so close around us. They say the gods send us messages in their flight.
To continue. The wanderer, whatever else he may be, is economical of means. He falls silent for a moment and moves to the king’s left. As they come around a bend in the road the archers see their two shadows and fire at the one on their left who, though they do not know it, is their master, who I find has fallen behind me now, perhaps distracted by the humming passage of night birds, and now I am leaving the orchard alone as night swallows the last of the sun and I tell this story to myself, very quietly.
5
AGAMEMNON AND THE WORD
Agamemnon wanted a fortress on the wide plain before the walls of Troy but there was nothing
to build with but a few trees and an unlimited quantity of sand. Therefore (at Odysseus’s suggestion) the Greeks dug the negative image of a palace in the white plain, a convoluted warren where cascades of fine grains trickled endlessly down the walls and into the tenuous corridors irregularly shored up with masonry. It was an uncomfortable home but Agamemnon said two things of his new capital: that it was not fully in keeping with the dignity of his ancestors but was perhaps fitting for a king at war, and that if he failed to take Troy at least his tomb was built around him.
In the center of the palace Agamemnon sat in state on a throne of granite in a chamber supported by the ribs of a scuttled ship. Around him were generals, astrologers, sages, polymaths, priests and oneiromancers, all filling his ears with their murmuring. In this way the court functioned much as it had in Mycenae, except for the frequent cave-ins and sand-slides that suddenly obliterated rooms, courtiers, armories, armorers, elegists and exits. Following the wisdom of the court geomancers it was considered impious to exhume any of the collapsed rooms and tunnels, a sin on a par with looting a tomb, so when more space was needed the miners struck out into virgin ground. Thus the underground palace evolved dendritically, sending off new shoots in all directions, sometimes opposed by unforeseen aquifers or plumes of hard rock, working around these obstacles with ant-like tenacity.
One night a black cloud of grief descended on Agamemnon and he fell to brooding on the apparent perfection of his ignorance, exemplified by his failure to capture a single city in years of siege though he had ten times as many men as his enemy and god-like heroes ran to do his bidding. The failure of his knowledge, he reflected, extended beyond military strategy and encompassed all the world, even unto the names of his servants, the topography of his palace and the history of the blade hanging at his side. He called together his wisest men, Nestor, Palamedes and wily Odysseus, and commissioned them to write for him a book that clearly and explicitly explained everything under the sun, even unto all the mysteries hidden within the earth, the true names of every living thing, the number of grains of sand on the Troad, the secret histories of the gods and the tumultuous futures of the stars, all to be writ fair in no more and no less than a thousand pages.
The counselors conferred in low voices out of the king’s hearing, speaking of the state of the king’s mind and vanity, the innate interest of the task, whether the taskmaster would be able to recognize a solution, and finally whether their combined lifetimes would suffice to write the required book. At last they turned to the throne, bowed as one, and said it would be done. That night they left Troy followed by scribes and cartloads of gold, promising to return no later than as soon as they got back.
When they returned the king’s beard had turned silver and his limbs were twisted like oak branches. The palace was deeper than when the sages had left—as floods and settling sands buried the first layer of tunnels new ones were excavated in the higher strata and the remnants of the old levels were relegated to storage, dungeon and thief-road. As for Troy, at nightfall bonfires smoked and crackled atop its towers and when the moon was full the sounds of a night market drifted down from its walls. From the roof of Agamemnon’s palace the marketers’ sapphire and emerald lanterns could be discerned, bobbing like distant fireflies in a wind that brought the scents of cardamom and cinnamon.
The three sages bowed before their sovereign and with a flourish presented a heavy book bound in tarnished silver containing a thousand thick, densely written pages. When opened the book released a waft like hot iron in a winter forge. Within Agamemnon read of many things:
The history of his ancestors the Atreides.
The detailed plans of the castle on the highest peak of Mount Olympus, and what dolorous event will transpire there on the day the engines of the world shudder, hesitate and begin their slow deceleration.
The mathematics underlying the populations of herring in the sea, the evolution of the stars and the fencing style of a certain little-known sect of Sicilian masters, and how these disparate things are secretly ruled by a single idea.
A survey of the many layers of the Earth and the currents and tidal schedules of its vast seas of magma.
A lexicon of the hidden language of cities, in which buildings are nouns, the inhabitants verbs, and empty spaces adjectives in an endlessly changing narrative.
A certain General Sun’s theory of warfare, based on modern scientific principles.
The gossip and scurrilous propensities of every whole number from zero up to the largest number that had yet been conceived of by men.
. . . and a great many more topics besides. It had been impossible to fit this wealth of knowledge into a mere thousand pages (even with letters no larger than a grain of the ubiquitous white sand) so the sages had made the book read differently and coherently forward and backward, from bottom to top and top to bottom, if every other word was skipped, and if every third letter was ignored and so on.
Agamemnon read until his eyelids were heavy and his chin sank onto his breast. He gave a start, lifted his head and closed the book with a click. The sages silently awaited their due.
“This is not it. This is not it at all,” said the king. “I wanted a book that gave me some understanding, not this cabinet of wonders and analogies, this encyclopedia of encyclopedias tricked into a millennium of pages. I am very disappointed. However. I will not punish you for your failure, in part because I see in your faces that you truly thought you had done well, and anyway, I have no wiser counselors to hand. So I will give you another chance, and this time I will make my orders exceedingly simple. Find the sentence, the single sentence, that contains the sum total of all wisdom.” The sages bowed and withdrew, leaving the palace with caskets of jewels and companies of armed men.
They were gone for a very long time. When they returned, Troy had been abandoned, its moss-stained walls as worn as mountain-sides, the rusting hulks of war machines decaying on its parapets amid the tatterdemalion shells of factories. The levels of the Greek palace had multiplied, gone deeper—now it resembled a vast inverted castle, its battlements and towers soaring into the depths of the earth. Now and then a district was separated by a landslide and till the miners could reconnect them to the king’s rule they lived with their own laws and minted their own coins. The years had turned Agamemnon hard and bright, scouring away everything patient and human in him. Palamedes, who exceeded even Odysseus in seeing into the inner workings of things, approached Agamemnon and presented him with a dagger sheathed in a red cloth. The king drew the mirror-bright double-edged blade and on both sides read, “And this, too, shall pass.”
For a long time the king thought deeply and seemed almost to smile. “This is better. Here is a comfort in sorrow and a check on joy. But . . . even this is not enough. I have left too much room for interpretation and error, so I will rephrase the task one final time. Bring me everything, the skies and their clouds and the rain pouring into the oceans and every grain of sand on all the beaches, every ant crawling on a stone and every god in his pomposity, all in a single word.” Showing no surprise, the counselors dispersed yet again. This time each went a different way from Troy and took nothing but the robes on their backs.
Seasons came and went with unseemly haste and in time Odysseus returned alone. Troy was a memory and the palace a kind of madness to which cartographers were susceptible. Odysseus took the king’s skeletal bone-colored claw and slipped onto it a silver ring set with a blue gem the color of the western sky in the failing of the day. “Look into the gem, sire. There is your word.” Agamemnon looked but what he made of the word is not recorded because moments later he slumped forward, the interminable tyrant finally dead. Also not recorded is whether Odysseus had poisoned the ring or whether he had found the word and it sufficed.
6
PENELOPE’S ELEGY
Odysseus set foot on Ithaca trembling with wrath, his spear poised to fly through the heart of the first man unwise enough to cross him. He passed unopposed up to his old hall
where instead of enemies he found his kinsmen turning to face him with wide eyes, exclaiming in wonder—he first thought it was a war-cry and nearly slew them. They drew him in among them, touching and praising him, all astonishment and delight except for Penelope (whose face had been the ground for the figure of his dreams), hardly aged and oddly quiet, lingering alone at the back of the crowd. He pushed his way through to her and reached out to touch her cheek but she evaded him and the crowd looked away, suddenly quiet, and Odysseus was aware that he had blundered. The next day they showed him her grave. For the rest of his time on Ithaca Odysseus avoided looking at her as she lingered in his house, staring out the window and idly running her fingertips over familiar things. He mastered his desire to seize her legs and kiss her thighs and hands for he knew she would turn to ash and shadow as soon as he touched her and moreover nothing is more disgraceful than to acknowledge the presence of the dead.
7
BACCHAE
When the Trojan shore sank below the horizon I thought about what to do next. There was a sentiment that we should go straight back to Ithaca but I decided we would take the long way back and turn raider till we saw our own harbor—we had a fleet of five ships, every man was lean and hard from years of war and, taken by surprise, the yeoman militias of the coastal cities stood no chance against us.
The Lost Books of the Odyssey: A Novel Page 2
