As that jumbled speech left my lips I heard my father hiss my name. The sons of Aeolus, drawn from their weighty conversation by my arrival, erupted in good-natured laughter. My cheeks reddened, though I did not know what my transgression had been. I was ever too aware of the opinions others bore of me, even as a lad and young man. I feared making a fool of myself more than I feared death.
But when the old man raised his hand for silence I knew my error. In that moment, I wished by all the gods below that the earth would open beneath my feet and save me from my folly. My father told me later that I went scarlet from toes to crown. King Aeolus, though, took it all in stride.
“It is well, son of Lykaon,” he said with a wink, “that the king is here to listen to this man’s message.” The king came closer. I saw him grimace as he peered into Polyphemus’s ruined visage; gently, he took the fellow’s hand from my shoulder. “Polyphemus, is it? Is that what you’re calling yourself these days, Kyklops?”
Polyphemus bowed. “So the boy has named me.”
King Aeolus draped Polyphemus’s arm in his—the thin, dark-skinned stranger towered over my king, who looked frail in the titan’s shadow—and motioned for me to follow. He led the blinded man to a part of the portico with the deepest shade, where potted hyacinths perfumed the air and from beyond the screen of jasmine came the burble of a fountain; here, the king’s sons brought seats with soft cushions of fringed brocade. Aeolus helped him to sit. Polyphemus twitched his cloak aside, and only then did I behold the wounds he had borne up from the harbor without complaint. He had signs of torture—bruises from being beaten with a knotted rope, strips of skin peeled away from his ribs, craters burned in his bony chest by hot coals; he had a spear wound, crudely bandaged, in the meat of one hip and blood-crusted lacerations on his right bicep. These last were warrior’s wounds, I learned later, when I received much the same at the hands of Phoenician pirates. My friend had not gone quietly. “Fetch my physician,” the king muttered. “And wine.”
Polyphemus sighed. “Thank you, lord.”
“Do not be so quick to thank me.” The king sat opposite of Polyphemus. I found a perch to the right of the king—a small stool one of his sons had brought for me—while my father and the men of the harbor arrayed themselves around the portico’s edge. Old King Aeolus did not stand so much on ceremony. “For a score of years, you have dwelt as an exile at the edges of my land,” the king continued. “You have preyed upon my people, ignored my emissaries and spurned my offers of friendship. Yet it is only now—now! —after some ill has befallen you, that you seek the hospitality of my city? The son of Lykaon has done right by you, Polyphemus. But he is just a boy who carries nothing of the weight of the world on his shoulders. Not yet, at any rate.” Aeolus smiled at me, once more. A reassurance that I had done nothing wrong. “Why should we not turn you out, at best? Or make an example of you, as my fishermen would have me do?” A chorus of assents rose at this. I did not hear my father’s voice among them.
A breeze picked up, causing the city’s Etesian chimes to sing. I watched Polyphemus’s long face. There was a serenity in it, as though the chimes sang only for him. A servant brought him a cup of wine and placed it in his hand. It trembled as he raised it to his lips, drained it, and held it out for the servant to refill. Polyphemus wiped his bottom lip with one thumb, and then smoothed his silver beard as the music of the chimes faded away.
“There is a saying among my people,” Polyphemus said, after a moment. “When a man dies, they say of him that he has gone to meet his ka. I believe your people have a saying that means much the same, that a shade has gone to cross the River, no? That is how I come to you, lord. I come as a man who has gone to meet his ka. I bring a warning, a tale of woe. After that, I am like the dead man left unburied by the side of a road—what care does he have for meat or drink or the hospitality of his fellow men when he will never reach the paradise that is the Sekhet-Aaru?”
“A warning?”
The man I knew as Polyphemus nodded. I’ve often mused upon what his true name must have been. It was only much later that I discovered he came from an ancient land, called Aegyptos, for he never mentioned it himself. What? Have I seen it? Oh, once, child. And once was enough for my tastes. It is a strange place where traditions of hospitality do not exist. Every man there is a slave to their king, and their gods have the heads of beasts. The memory of it makes me shiver, even on a warm day such as this.
King Aeolus was skeptical of him. “What warning do you bear?”
Polyphemus leaned forward. There was something unreadable about his eyeless face, with its scars and its faded tattoos, something that bordered upon the inhuman. “Beware the Achaeans!” he hissed. “They are the ones who did this to me! Their fleet lurks in these waters, as Setesh lurks in the desert, still reeking of the sack of Troy and the slaughter of the Ismarians—or so they boasted! The one who leads them is a serpent who wears the skin of a man! Odysseus, he is called, the son of Laertes, king of Ithaca!”
The name provoked fierce whispers, like drops of water sizzling on hot stones. King Aeolus held a hand up for silence; reluctantly, the sounds faded away. He, too, leaned forward, and the look on his face was neither affable nor kindly; it was the narrow-eyed glare of a warlord.
“Tell me this tale,” he said.
And this is the tale Polyphemus told…
* * *
3
* * *
“You are familiar with the land wherein I dwell, lord,” Polyphemus said, “it lies around Cape Pachynos, east and north, past the Isle of the Quails. It is a rugged land, a hard land, but it bears the bounty of the gods—freshets of sweet water, tall pines and oaks, vines that grow of their own volition and a plenitude of green meadows where flocks can grow fat under the summer sun. In truth, it is too fine a land for the dregs which inhabit it: exiles like myself and desperate men who cannot meet in simple brotherhood for fear of one spilling the others blood. So we live apart, in caves protected by great stones or atop naked hills, behind palisades of boulders and rough-hewn trees. With a spear ever poised to strike, we maintain a banner of truce—you do not steal from me and I will not steal from you. Amun-Ra must have smiled upon us, for somehow we thrived.