We lay on the rugs at the foot of my bed. Moment by moment, his vitality had returned. His eyes were bright now, storm-lit. When he talked, he was lawyer and bard and crossroads charlatan at once, arguing his case, entertaining, pulling back the veil to show you the secrets of the world. It was not just his words, though they were clever enough. It was everything together: his face, his gestures, the sliding tones of his voice. I would say it was like a spell he cast, but there was no spell I knew that could equal it. The gift was his alone.
“The generals take the credit, of course, and indeed they provide the gold. But they are always calling you into their tent and asking for reports of what you’re doing instead of letting you go do it. The songs say it is heroes. They are another piece. When Achilles puts on his helmet and cleaves his red path through the field, the hearts of common men swell in their chests. They think of the stories that will be told, and they long to be in them. I fought beside Achilles. I stood shield to shield with Ajax. I felt the wind and fan of their great spears. Those soldiers, of course, are yet another piece, for though they are weak and unsteady, when they are harnessed together they will carry you to victory. But there is a hand that must gather all those pieces and make them whole. A mind to guide the purpose, and not flinch from war’s necessities.”
“And that is your part,” I said. “Which means you are like Daedalus 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, Ae?tes, 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 may stop the transformation partway through, and then that monstrous, half-beast thing will die.
His face would be intent as he listened, his relentless mind examining, weighing and cataloguing. However I pretended I could conceal my thoughts as well as he, I knew it was not true. He would see down to my bones. He would gather my weaknesses up and set them with the rest of his collection, alongside Achilles’ and Ajax’s. He kept them on his person as other men keep their knives.
I looked down at my body, bare in the fire’s light, and tried to imagine it written over with its history: my palm with its lightning streak, my hand missing its fingers, the thousand cuts from my witch-work, the gristled furrows of my father’s fire, the skin of my face like some half-melted taper. And those were only the things that had left marks.
There would be no salutes. What had Ae?tes called an ugly nymph? A stain upon the face of the world.
My smooth belly glowed beneath my hand, the color of honey shining in the sun. I drew him down to me. I was a golden witch, who had no past at all.
I began to know his men a little, those unsteady hearts that he had spoken of, those leaky vessels. Polites was better-mannered than the rest, Eurylochos stubborn and sulky. Thin-faced Elpenor had a laugh like a screechy owl. They reminded me of wolf pups, their griefs gone when their bellies were full. They looked down when I passed, as if to be sure their hands were still their own.
Every day they spent at games. They held races through the hills and on the beach. They were always running up to Odysseus, panting. Will you judge our archery contest? Our discus throw? Our spears?