“I have been your luck, Odysseus,” Athena said. “I sent the dolphins to save you, the warning to flee the workshop. The box, the spearhead, the satyr, the ship, the key—all mine to give.”
Odysseus spread his hands apologetically. “I’m sorry if I didn’t recognise your handiwork.”
“You were not to know,” she told him. “You were to find ways to use what you were given. And you proved that the age of heroes is not yet over.”
The Age of Heroes. Odysseus grinned broadly. Then, as quickly, he grimaced because grinning hurt, even in a dream.
“And so I can tell you that you will take part in one final great adventure before the Heroic Age draws to a close.” The goddess’s face was both beautiful and terrible to behold.
Odysseus held his breath, waiting.
“You will sail to a far-off land and fight a long and dreadful war. Your journey home will be as long and as hard as the war itself.”
“You make the adventure sound terrible, Goddess.”
Athena smiled. “And who was it who said, ‘Any danger averted is an adventure. If you live to tell the story.’”
“Will I live to tell it?” Odysseus asked, leaning forward eagerly.
“Glory is not won cheaply, Odysseus,” she said. “If glory is truly what you seek.”
“What else is there?” His face was puzzled.
“A prince can find joy in seeing his people safe and happy, in the love of a good wife, in watching his baby son grow to manhood,” the goddess said.
Odysseus shook his head. “Only glory lasts. The bards’ songs give us that chance at immortality. Like the gods themselves.”
“Think carefully, Odysseus, what you lose by that choice,” Athena said. She hefted her spear. “But enough. I know your heart. I know your mind. Enjoy the present. You will have calm seas and favourable winds all the way back to Ithaca. A happy homecoming awaits you.”
Odysseus wrinkled his nose at the thought, then drew the golden key from his belt. “And what shall I do with this?”
“Give it to old Praxios,” said Athena. “He will need it when he goes searching for his master. Or keep it for yourself. Whichever you do, make certain it is kept away from your grandfather. The gods themselves tremble to think what might happen if a key that opens all locks should fall into his thieving hands.” Then she threw back her head and, laughing, disappeared.
Odysseus had never felt so awake in his life. He tapped the golden key against his palm, grinning.
Silenus had been wrong. The gods did have a sense of humour after all.
WHAT IS TRUE ABOUT THIS STORY?
DID THE HEROIC AGE—the Age of Heroes—really exist?
Yes and no.
No—there was not a time when the gods took part in human battles, nor were there goat-legged men called satyrs or hundred-headed snakes running around the Greek islands. There were no bird-women sirens swimming in the wine-dark sea.
But yes—there was once a rich and powerful civilisation in Greece where, though each city was a separate state with its own kingdom the people were united by a single language. There was also a thriving culture on the island of Crete, and the remains of the great palace at Knossos can still be seen. In that period—we now know from archaeological evidence—there was a real Troy and a real Trojan War, though whether it was fought because of the abduction of the beautiful Helen by a Trojan prince is debatable. That great civilisation was suddenly destroyed around 1200 B.C.
Five hundred years later, the blind poet Homer created the Iliad, a poem about the Trojan War, and the Odyssey, about the wanderings of the hero Odysseus. In fact, all that we know about Odysseus can be found in Homer’s epic poems and a few Greek folktales. We don’t even know whether Odysseus was a real king of Ithaca (or Ithika or Ithaki or Ithikai) or just a made-up legendary hero.
All that is related in those sources about Odysseus’ boyhood is that he was wounded by a boar on the slopes of Mount Parnassus where he was visiting his grandfather, the cattle thief and robber Autolycus.
But a man—even a legendary hero—must have a childhood and adolescence that foretells his future deeds. In the Odyssey and the Iliad we learn that Odysseus is a short, burly redhead who is not only a fine fighter but a grand and eloquent speaker. Like all Greek princes, he would have been trained in public speaking, but Odysseus outshines his contemporaries in storytelling. Known as cunning and crafty, he is in fact the cleverest of the Greeks, and not above playing mad when necessary. He is the one who figures out how to sneak out of the Cyclops’ cave by clinging to the belly of a sheep. He is the one who teaches his men to stopper their ears so that they might pass by the singing sirens safely. He is the one who invents the wooden horse trick that gets the Greeks (including his ally Idomeneus) inside the impregnable walls of Troy.
Fighter, storyteller, the wily Odysseus wanders ten years around the Mediterranean Sea with his men after the Trojan War as a punishment for offending the sea god, Poseidon. His adventures, as detailed in Homer’s epic poem, include gods, monsters, giants, sorceresses, and many a magical happening.
At last Odysseus comes home to his beloved wife, Penelope, and his son, Telemachus, whom he has not seen since the boy was a baby. All those long years her husband has been away, Penelope has kept 108 suitors at bay by her own wits, each night unweaving a piece of cloth she has promised to finish before choosing a new husband. Penelope is aided only by her handmaidens and by her husband’s trusted friend Mentor, and her wits are every bit as sharp as Odysseus’.
We have taken the Odysseus of the Odyssey and the Iliad and projected him backwards, using what archeologists have told us about the civilisation he would have inhabited if he had been a real man.
Or a young hero.
A Conversation Between the Authors
Jane: When we began the first of the four Young Heroes books, Odysseus in the Serpent Maze, we were quickly heads down in the thirteenth century BCE. I remember feeling amazed each time we swam up to the surface, where we were using computers to write the books, not scrolls, and sending emails back and forth, even when we were living in the same country.
And look where we are now: We have cell phones that can take us from point A to point B and take and send photographs from any location; we have twitters and tweets and more. Does all this technology make it even harder to get into the Heroic Age mindset?
Bob: When I try to think about being in a “mindset,” my mind goes completely blank. To give an answer worth reading, I would just have to make something up. In other words, lie.
Jane: Well, after all, lying is what we do professionally—in other words, telling stories.
Bob: I’ll give you the truth. Having written stories that span more than two thousand years, I’ll say that there is no mindset for each period. There is only a storytelling mindset, which is about plot and character.
Jane: Absolutely. The story tells us where we are. Though I have to say, Plot Man, that I would have been well lost in the past without your compass, and your background in the classics. While we can both do the necessary research for details, you are the one who Finds Us a Plot. Me, I am the Follow-Your-Characters-and-Shout-at-Them-to-Slow-Down-and-Wait-for-Me kind of writer.
How do you invent plot?
Bob: You’ll remember that we reached a point early in the Odysseus novel where Odysseus and his friends are lost at sea in a small boat. It took us quite a while to decide what would happen next: that they would come upon a ship, but one that appeared to be deserted.
It was asking questions about that ship that unfolded the plot for the rest of the book: Why is the ship deserted? Who built it? Where did it come from? Once we had answered those questions, the rest of the book almost wrote itself.
OK, it’s not that easy—but it was something like that.
Jane: So, if you are stuck without a plot, ask questions! It’s a bit like being lost without a compass or a GPS. But you can find your way if you turn to the nearest friendly resident and a
re not afraid to ask questions.
Now that I have that handle on plotting . . . you may have talked your way out of being my cowriter, Bob!
The thing is, though, when we have two of us working on the same short stories (and we’ve done a bunch of those) as well as novels (four Young Heroes, four Scottish novels), we always come to a place where two heads really are better than one. And sometimes, when we can get your wife, Debby, in on our plotting sessions, the three of us come up with enough plot twists and turns to write a dozen more books. So look out, world!
A Personal History by Jane Yolen
I was born in New York City on February 11, 1939. Because February 11 is also Thomas Edison’s birthday, my parents used to say I brought light into their world. But my parents were both writers and prone to exaggeration. My father was a journalist; my mother wrote short stories and created crossword puzzles and double acrostics. My younger brother, Steve, eventually became a newspaperman. We were a family of an awful lot of words!
We lived in the city for most of my childhood, with two brief moves: to California for a year while my father worked as a publicity agent for Warner Bros. films, and then to Newport News, Virginia, during the World War II years, when my mother moved my baby brother and me in with her parents while my father was stationed in London running the Army’s secret radio.
When I was thirteen, we moved to Connecticut. After college I worked in book publishing in New York for five years, married, and after a year traveling around Europe and the Middle East with my husband in a Volkswagen camper, returned to the States. We bought a house in Massachusetts, where we lived almost happily ever after, raising three wonderful children.
I say “almost,” because in 2006, my wonderful husband of forty-four years—Professor David Stemple, the original Pa in my Caldecott Award–winning picture book, Owl Moon—died. I still live in the same house in Massachusetts.
And I am still writing.
I have often been called the “Hans Christian Andersen of America,” something first noted in Newsweek close to forty years ago because I was writing a lot of my own fairy tales at the time.
The sum of my books—including some eighty-five fairy tales in a variety of collections and anthologies—is now well over 335. Probably the most famous are Owl Moon, The Devil’s Arithmetic, and How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? My work ranges from rhymed picture books and baby board books, through middle grade fiction, poetry collections, and nonfiction, to novels and story collections for young adults and adults. I’ve also written lyrics for folk and rock groups, scripted several animated shorts, and done voiceover work for animated short movies. And I do a monthly radio show called Once Upon a Time.
These days, my work includes writing books with each of my three children, now grown up and with families of their own. With Heidi, I have written mostly picture books, including Not All Princesses Dress in Pink and the nonfiction series Unsolved Mysteries from History. With my son Adam, I have written a series of Rock and Roll Fairy Tales for middle grades, among other fantasy novels. With my son Jason, who is an award-winning nature photographer, I have written poems to accompany his photographs for books like Wild Wings and Color Me a Rhyme.
And I am still writing.
Oh—along the way, I have won a lot of awards: two Nebula Awards, a World Fantasy Award, a Caldecott Medal, the Golden Kite Award, three Mythopoeic Awards, two Christopher Awards, the Jewish Book Award, and a nomination for the National Book Award, among many accolades. I have also won (for my full body of work) the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement, the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s Grand Master Award, the Catholic Library Association’s Regina Medal, the University of Minnesota’s Kerlan Award, the University of Southern Mississippi and de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection’s Southern Miss Medallion, and the Smith College Medal. Six colleges and universities have given me honorary doctorate degrees. One of my awards, the Skylark, given by the New England Science Fiction Association, set my good coat on fire when the top part of it (a large magnifying glass) caught the sunlight. So I always give this warning: Be careful with awards and put them where the sun don’t shine!
Also of note—in case you find yourself in a children’s book trivia contest—I lost my fencing foil in Grand Central Station during a date, fell overboard while whitewater rafting in the Colorado River, and rode in a dog sled in Alaska one March day.
And yes—I am still writing.
At a Yolen cousins reunion as a child, holding up a photograph of myself. In the photo, I am about one year old, maybe two.
Sitting on the statue of Hans Christian Andersen in Central Park in New York in 1961, when I was twenty-two. (Photo by David Stemple.)
Enjoying Dirleton Castle in Scotland in 2010.
Signing my Caldecott Medal–winning book Owl Moon in 2011.
Reading for an audience at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 2012.
Visiting Andrew Lang’s gravesite at the Cathedral of Saint Andrew in Scotland in 2011.
A Personal History by Robert J. Harris
I was born in Dundee, Scotland, in 1955. From a young age, I was writing stories, drawing comics, and making my own board games. It was while at university in St. Andrews that I met my wife, Debby, who had grown up in Florida and had come to Scotland to further her studies in English.
Shortly after we married and settled in St. Andrews, Debby had her first fantasy novel published, and I created my board game Talisman, which was based upon a game I had originally created in high school. Thirty years later, Talisman is still produced and is being played all over the world. In one television episode of CBS’s The Big Bang Theory, the characters are playing Talisman.
It was a few years after I created Talisman that our friend Jane Yolen prodded me into doing some serious writing. I have written eight novels with Jane: the four Young Heroes books and the Scottish Quartet. I have written novels of my own concerning the boyhood adventures of Leonardo da Vinci and Will Shakespeare, which have been published widely across Europe. I have also written comedy scripts for BBC radio. I have a new novel, a comic fantasy, being published in Scotland later this year.
In the course of an interesting life I have worked as a nurse, a bartender, a salesman, and an actor. I have traveled to the United States several times, and have made epic journeys across Europe, ending up in Greece, where I have visited many of the sites featured in the Young Heroes adventures.
My wife and I have three sons: One is training to be a health worker, one now lives in Michigan with his American wife, and the third is an aspiring writer and a musician. We also have a dog named Kyra who loves to eat cheese and chase sticks.
To learn even more about my life and my books, visit my website: www.harris-authors.com.
With the boys from my class at Clepington Primary School in Dundee, Scotland, in 1966. I’m in the front row, seated second from the right.
Playing my homemade version of Talisman in London, England, in 1982, with the guys from Games Workshop, who turned the game into a global phenomenon. I’m in the upper left.
Playing on a beach in Florida in 1988 with my son Matthew, who was one year old.
With my wife, Debby, and our sons Matthew, Robert, and Jamie in Prestonpans, Scotland, in 2000.
At the Morgan Academy High School Reunion in Dundee, Scotland, in 2002.
At the 2005 World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) in Glasgow, Scotland, with my wife, Debby, and my friend and co-author Jane Yolen. They don’t seem to care that I'm being attacked by a fake parrot. (Photo courtesy of Stella Paskins.)
Surrounded by the games, books, and CDs of radio shows that I have created, in St. Andrews, Scotland, in 2006.
Holding a copy of my game Mythgardia in St. Andrews, Scotland, in 2008. Some friends and I produced a limited run of these games, illustrated by my wife, which we sold as special collector’s items.
Our dog Kyra, who is around six years old, in St. Andrews, Scotland, in 2013.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2000 by Jane Yolen and Robert J. Harris
Cover design by Julianna Lee
978-1-4804-2337-4
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
345 Hudson Street
New York, NY 10014
www.openroadmedia.com
THE YOUNG HEROES SERIES
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
Available wherever ebooks are sold
EBOOKS BY JANE YOLEN
FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA
Available wherever ebooks are sold
Open Road Integrated Media is a digital publisher and multimedia content company. Open Road creates connections between authors and their audiences by marketing its ebooks through a new proprietary online platform, which uses premium video content and social media.
Odysseus in the Serpent Maze Page 17