The high fires on the Trojan shore illuminated the revels of the Greeks, their long shadows writhing behind them. Their adversaries were in chains or in hell and their ships rode low in the water, heavy with gold and slaves. Odysseus, architect of the victory, watched his comrades stagger triumphantly and lent half an ear to the crying of gulls, hoping to hear Athena. Agamemnon, mouth purple and scabbard flapping emptily, found him and asked why he sat off by himself, to which Odysseus replied that ten years had accustomed him to vigilance. Agamemnon said that the dead would not be arming themselves and if they did, the Greeks had beaten the very gods, so come and drink to our victory over the Trojans, the dogs, and may nothing grow in their broken, salt-sown city but weeds and evil rumors. Odysseus said, ``The house of Priam is broken, his sons dead. There is nothing left for you to curse.'' Agamemnon stood with great dignity, adjusted his breast plate (an ill-fitting treasure looted from the battlefield), and went away.
That night Odysseus dreamt of the ruins and saw the gods rebuilding the city's shattered wall. Next to him Athena leaned on her spear and watched the work. Odysseus asked why the gods were rebuilding Troy, when some of them, even she, had been at such pains to destroy it. ``The gods are not rebuilding Troy,'' she said, ``as it has not yet been erected.'' ``Then what are they doing?'' asked Odysseus, pointing. She turned her head, recognized him and said, ``You should not be here. Run away quick!'' Her fear chilled him. Just then the last stone was laid on the city wall and its gates swung open with a click.
The next morning the men pushed the grey ships down the beaches into the green sea. As they sailed away the camp's cold firepits and abandoned barricades looked as forlorn as Troy's black husk.
Odysseus's homeward trip, first joyful, soon became a misery. Fate seemed to have a grudge against him and his Ithacans, sending them in quick succession the cannibal cyclops, the lotus eaters, the sirens, Circe, and inexorable Scylla. A year stripped Odysseus of all his men (gone down to death) and all his ships (torn to flinders or sunk in the sea) and found him clinging to a crude raft as he drifted alone through a bad sea.10.1
Odysseus woke as the water closed over him and thrashed his way to the surface, crying out, though there was no one to hear him. The fog was thick--there was nothing to see but whitecaps and sticks from his raft that sank as he snatched at them. There was no better strategy than striking out hard for land--for all he knew he would find it. There was not much hope, but it was better than waiting to drown so he started swimming. He regretted that there were no landmarks and he was, possibly, swimming in circles. His shoulders burned and then his lungs and he was nearly spent when, to his amazement, he drove his hand into something hard that resonated under the blow. He looked up and saw faces peering down at him from a grey ship with a long eye on its prow.
A familiar voice said, ``I expected better from you, if only a better escape." Strong hands pulled him up and dropped him on deck. He lay there thinking that whatever circumstance he had stumbled into, it was bliss to draw breath, feel the ship moving under him, and not think of drowning. His eyes were blurry with salt but rubbing them he found himself looking at Agamemnon's golden greaves. ``Did you think you could desert so easily, after I went to so much trouble to recruit you?10.2 Can this be Odysseus of labyrinthine mind?"
The sailors, embarrassed on his behalf, avoided looking at Odysseus. He put on dry clothes and realized they had been brought by Alkanor, who had died with a Trojan arrow in his heart the day of Hector's funeral. The fog was gone, the sun hung in the sky, his heart beat. There was nothing to say.
Agamemnon had the unresisting Odysseus locked below decks. After sleeping, he searched the hold and, finding nothing, broke into Agamemnon's cabin (its lock was contemptible). Among weapons, wine cups and trophies of war he found a book called the Iliad. It was the tale of his war and the gist was right but the details were often wrong. In the introduction he read:
It is not widely understood that the epics attributed to Homer were in fact written by the gods before the Trojan war--these divine books are the archetypes of that war rather than its history. In fact, there have been innumerable Trojan wars, each played out according to an evolving aesthetic, each representing a fresh attempt at bringing the terror of battle into line with the lucidity of the authorial intent. Inevitably, each particular war is a distortion of its antecedent, an image in a warped hall of mirrors.
The Iliad and the Odyssey have sometimes, through authorial and managerial oversights, become available to their protagonists. Surprisingly, this has had no impact on the action or the outcome. Agamemnon is too obstinate to change his mind and anyway never believes what he reads. Achilles flips through the Iliad and shrugs. Priam makes sacrifices to the nonplussed gods and anyway thinks that he is above prophecy (recall Cassandra). Perhaps there were once characters who read the book with dawning apprehension and fled that very hour, finding refuge in the hills, never again to meddle in the affairs of cities and gods, but if ever there were they are long gone now.
In time they came to Troy and there was Achilles, bright as gold and full of life leaping from his ship's prow, the first to set foot on Asian soil. The Ithacans arrived and gathered around Odysseus asking him where he had gone and why he had left his own ship and taken a berth with Agamemnon. He had liked most and mourned all. They asked him what moved him so--it had been just two weeks since they saw him. Odysseus said he had seen by signs and portents that it would be a long war.
Everything fell out as before. In the first year Achilles fought a Trojan champion who was proof against blades and stones and strangled him with his helmet strap. In the second year Hector led an attack on the Greek camp and killed Agamemnon's younger son. In the third year the amazons fought alongside the Trojans and slaughtered many Greeks with javelins. And so on--as though choreographed, the Greeks attacked the city and arrows and death found their appointed marks. Odysseus knew who was going to die so he was able to say his goodbyes. Men said he was bad luck.
He saw Athena from time to time, though she was silent. Sometimes she looked at him with pity. Other times her face was unreadable.
He looked at his image in polished blades and water. He could have been a battle-hardened forty or a weathered twenty. He thought of stealing a ship or wading into the sea with stones in his pockets, but for his men's sake he stayed, even though he thought they were illusions, or a dream.
The time came for him to steal into the city and see Helen. They spoke as they had before and as he knew they must. He had forgotten most of their conversation so he improvised. He thought he saw recognition in her eyes, and as he left their hands touched, a novelty.
In due time he proposed the ruse of the horse. He sat in its belly listening to the Trojans debate whether to burn it or push it into the sea, to Cassandra's weeping, to Priam ordering it brought within the city walls. That night he and his men crept out of the horse, opened the gates and set fire to the city. By midnight his face was black and his sword arm was red to the elbow. He saw fallen enemies die again, heard old screams again, saw a tower he had burned to ashes risen in flame. In the palace he found Helen brushing her hair. Without looking away from her mirror she told him that ten years ago she had been dragged back to Menelaus's house, thrown into their old bedroom as half a wife and half a slave. The next morning she opened the door to a tap-tapping and there was Paris, her lover, long dead and turned to ashes and now shyly beckoning. Helen hid her golden hair under Odysseus's hood and that hour they fled the city and went out of Troy's history.
In a fisherman's hut Odysseus held her and told her about the book. He supposed they would have ten years, then they would see. Athena never spoke to him again.