The Lost Books of the Odyssey: A Novel

by Zachary Mason

  Time hissed by like the black arrows whose shadows darkened the plain before Troy. The clutch of the battle was so dense that the soldiers could barely move, constrained on all sides by friend and enemy alike, the bodies of their neighbors bearing them up and weighing them down. The wind lifted waves of white dust that coated faces, swords and armor. When the pressure let up the bleached soldiers dealt each other vicious, clumsy, short-armed blows; the crimson flows and spatters of blood were vivid on their whiteness. When the wind was low Odysseus could see the walls of Troy, never far away and always out of reach.

  The smell of the island had not changed—oak, heat, dust, sea, stone—which heartened Odysseus as his white-sailed ship dropped anchor. As he walked up the road to his house for the first time in decades he promised himself that he would have nothing more to do with the affairs of gods or men, would go back to his woods and the stasis of unvarying afternoons. But it seemed that the tears of reunion had hardly dried before the house was filled with wailing and he stood before his father’s high funeral pyre with a torch in his hand. Soon thereafter he held his first grandchild, and under all the weight of birth and death a dam somewhere gave way and time flooded over him. Soon his grandson was tall and strong, as was the tree over his father’s grave, and well before he was ready he could neither string his great bronze bow, nor remember the names of the men who had died for him at Troy, nor speak.

  Telemachus, Penelope and the maids carry Odysseus through the early morning fog to a small building in the hills behind the house. He has not been conscious for days and every breath is a violent, shuddering labor. His hands twitch, briefly, as though in unquiet dreams. The women fill the pitcher, make the bed and open the windows, leaving Telemachus to stand over his father.

  Odysseus is aware of his son standing next to him, occasionally wiping his forehead, murmuring distractedly and looking out the window. Somewhere women talk in low, calm voices. It has been four days since he opened his eyes, but suddenly, emerging from confusion, he is looking at himself lying in bed. What he had thought were nurses are priests, Egyptians, moving around the room (its stone walls layered in hieroglyphics) making ready knives of black glass and alabaster jars. Next to him stands a jackal-headed man with his arms folded, waiting patiently. “Will they never be done and leave me in peace?” he wonders. And then (after the priests have set the jars by his feet next to a pile of linen bandages and jackal-head has whispered in his ear about immortality) he is lying on a table amid green, rolling hills (it occurs to him that this is like the view from his window, or what it will be in a thousand years when the city has eroded away). The hills envelop him, the valley deepening. The tracks of the wind in the tall grasses. Then it is night, the hills are gone. The table lies in a warm, shallow, unmoving sea. It is perfectly silent (except now and then a distant intimation of worried voices). There is no moon. The stars are dim, as though behind a layer of high clouds. But now they are approaching, and are brighter. Now brilliant. Fireworks.

  *The Eighteenth Nile Dynasty of Egypt had an expansionary phase in pre-Classical times and planted colonies on many islands in the Mediterranean. These flourished briefly but ultimately withered due to a lack of support from Egypt, which was racked by a sequence of civil wars. By the time of the Trojan War only ruins and the occasional place name survived.

  42

  RECORD OF A GAME *

  We look at a chess set and see a medieval king, some thin-blooded English Henry sitting in state next to his wanton termagant sorceress wife. Flanking them are machiavel abbés with thin upper lips, all masters of casuistry, elegant courtiers and confirmed atheists. To either side of the cathedral doors (in the checkered board we see first the elongated black-and-white cruciform of a cathedral’s floor plan and then the meticulously delimited plantations of a feudal estate) knights stand guard with hands resting on the pommels of zweihänders, plate mail gleaming. At the edges of the kingdom castellans stroll through winter and summer palaces, pulling white sheets from century-old furniture and airing tower bedrooms in preparation for a royal visit. Originally built as fortifications (with arrow slits and battlements to prove it), the palaces are now country châteaux, their portcullises overgrown with the vines of grapes and tiny, aromatic roses. Hardly worth a mention are the serfs who tend to their betters and their betters’ gardens—brave fellows, always ready to drop teapots and shears to take up long pikes for a headlong charge at the enemy.

  If our discernment were keener, we would see an altogether more ancient and chaotic battlefield. Four-handed chatarang, the progenitor of modern chess, was created in India for the soldier castes two millennia before Christ with pieces that are, in some cases, hardly recognizable. The queen, now the terror of the board, was then a politic vizier who hovered by the king’s side as though fearful of offending. The bishops were war elephants, tusked monsters trampling infantry while the mahouts on their backs shot sling stones and spears. The knights were a cavalry of mounted archers (in the centuries before the stirrup was invented there were no lances), striking swiftly and galloping away. The rooks were not fortresses but war chariots, terrible weapons racing over the battlefield pell-mell, rattling over stones and corpses, wheel-mounted scythes slashing through the legs of men and horses.

  The Katishya caste, who were the warriors and rulers of Indian society at the time, believed deeply in the innate elegance of rectilinear order. Their image of paradise was a perfectly level green field bisected north to south by one cold, blue river and east to west by another. Their gardens matched this ideal as closely as possible and, perversely, so did their maps. It was considered self-evident that the earth, an emanation of the mind of god, was arranged in arrays of adjacent, geometrically perfect squares—the failure of the observed geographical world to match this mathematical ideal was easily accounted for by the sinfulness of man and the decadence of the times. The Katishyas’ military science resembled their gardening and their cartography—a small repertoire of battlefield maneuvers was drilled into troops and petty officers until they could be executed with repeatable precision, and the mastery of this lexicon and its combinatorics was considered the essence of generalship. The Katishyas considered it the epitome of strategy to take the dust-shrouded confusion of the battlefield and reduce it to a set of symbols on a grid from which could be derived a concise sequence of moves leading inevitably to victory.

  Chatarang radiated out from the subcontinent and begat many descendants—it is said that there are as many variations of chess as there are Indo-European languages. Not least among its issue was a game immensely popular in the Achaean societies of the Attic peninsula and the culturally similar islands of the Cyclades in the thirteenth century before Christ. The sum total of the source material for the Achaean variant consists of two complete and three partial game sets (all but one of which were excavated on Chios, known for producing the greatest chess masters), a reference in Hesiod and a primer that was a sort of rarefied transcript of a particularly long and difficult game.

  Unlike the ancient, mellow and caste-bound Indian culture in which chatarang originated, the Achaeans were, as a society, desperately concerned with the preeminence of the individual. This difference is reflected in their chess—in the original chatarang, the pieces represent types, interchangeable atoms of abstract ordnance, while in the Achaean game they are individual warriors with names, histories and idiosyncracies.

  The Achaean chess primer was the record of a single long game that was believed to embody all that could usefully be said on the subject of chess. On Chios, journeymen who sought their chess master’s robes were required to recite the primer in its entirety before a panel of judges who would neither miss nor forgive the slightest error. In its earliest phase, the primer was a raw transcript of move, counter-move and counter’s counter, with little or no analysis or exposition. Occasionally, fragments of other classic games were given as a kind of aside, presumably to illustrate some principle of play, though to modern readers their signifi
cance can be obscure.

  The purity of the primer eroded over time—formulaic descriptions were added as aides-mémoire (pieces were called swift-moving, versatile, valuable in the middle game, and so forth), and, most likely, to give the reciter a respite while he gathered his thoughts. Over the centuries, tactical commentary crept into what had once been a purely descriptive account.

  By the eighth century B.C. the instructional character of the primer had largely atrophied and the recitation of the by then baroquely ornamented text had become an end in itself. From this time on, the manual, known as the Iliad, assumed an essentially literary character, although its original nature was still sometimes discernible in, say, its fixation on the exchange of casualties—Alpha slew Beta with this spear and Gamma slew Alpha with that stone and so on, a meaningless list of deaths unless one knows how to read it as a nuanced sequence of middle-game exchanges. Similarly, the Catalog of Ships* can be usefully read as a treatise on positional play in the opening.

  Although the book became more complex over time, the pieces retained a characteristic geometric simplicity. Achilles is represented as a tall, spare warrior holding a shield and a spear, and carved, by preference, from white coral. Nestor is a stooped warrior with two parallel lines incised in the forehead of an otherwise featureless oval face. The stylistic exception is Odysseus, who is always depicted with a detailed, naturalistic countenance that suggests more self-awareness and humanity than the smooth, geometrically regular faces of his peers.

  There is a second and most likely apocryphal manual of Achaean chess, the record of a long and bitter endgame played out on a board nearly stripped of pieces. It is even more difficult to associate this book with the practice of chess than the Iliad, probably due to the corruption of the text and many late interpolations. It has been speculated that the Odyssey is a sort of fantastic parody of a chess book, a treatise on tactics to be used after the game has ended and the board been abandoned by the players, the pieces left finally to their own devices and to entropy. One of the few surviving pieces is Odysseus, inching across the crumbling board toward his home square.

  *Though written in credible Homeric Greek, the contents of this chapter cannot be dated much before the early Middle Ages. We can assume it is a late addition to the papyrus; in any event, it is the least intact of the papyrus’s texts—water damage has made many words and in some cases whole paragraphs matters of inference and conjecture.

  *The Catalog of Ships is a section of the second book of the Iliad which consists almost entirely of a list of which cities sent how many ships to Troy.

  43

  ALEXANDER’S ODYSSEY

  The instant the prow of his ship touched the shore, Achilles drew back his arm and cast his spear at the high walls of Troy,” recited Alexander as his ship ground on the sand and he cast his own spear in the same trajectory toward Troy’s crumbling ruins.* His Macedonians jumped down into the breakers, delighted to finally bring war to the empire on whose motions they and their fathers had for so long kept a weather eye.† That evening, Alexander and Hephaestion‡ raced around the tumulus of Achilles’ tomb, after which an augur crowned them with laurels and declared that they were Achilles and Patroclus reborn.

  Dawn came to the long valley of Gaugamela. A warm band of light burgeoned on the western mountains and spread east, first illuminating an empty expanse of cracked mud and dry grass, then the tents of the Macedonian army, and blinding, for a few moments, the eyes of its sentries. The light poured across no man’s land and then over the sprawling Persian host, gleaming red on their helmets, spearpoints, mail and buckles as though on the molten surface of a restless sea. They had been standing in battle array since sunset, their sleepless emperor determined not to be taken unawares. His multitudes blinked uneasily as the sun rose behind them.

  By this time most of the Macedonian soldiers had been astir for hours despite the order that everyone get a full night’s sleep. They lingered in their tents, lying on their beds with their eyes fixed on nothing, talking quietly with their tent-mates of distant farms, old summers, and what the day might bring.

  The pacing silhouettes of officers passed unnoticed on the wall of Alexander’s tent. Sergeants shouted, distant horses whinnied and men called for swords but Alexander was still asleep, his arm thrown over his face to block out the sun. Increasingly anxious aides circulated around his door. Eventually, his abashed valet, firmly directed by Ptolemy,* went in and gently shook him. Alexander woke at once, apologized to the valet for oversleeping and sprang out of bed to wash his face in cold water. The morning mist had burned off and the day was bright and clear. Alexander put on his white plumed helmet (the better for friend and enemy to find him on the battle-field) and rode out to stand in front of his troops as they formed their line, trumpets sounded and the Persians came thundering to meet them.

  After crossing the Ganges, Alexander proclaimed his intention to subjugate India and if there was anything beyond to bend that to his will also and so on to the end of the world. His soldiers, however, had had enough of loot in the sack of Persepolis, enough of hard living in the frozen passes of the Hindu Kush and enough of glory when they dethroned the Emperor Darius. They missed their wives and farms and did not want to die in a strange land where their sons would never tend their graves, and they said that they would go no farther.

  Alexander ordered them forward in the peremptory bark they were used to obeying. Then he cajoled them, praised their loyalty and valor, went from man to man and knew each one’s name and deeds and wounds, whose life he had saved and who had saved his. Only a little farther, he promised, and then a talent of gold for each of them and all the world would know forevermore what it meant to be a Macedonian. Next he cursed them, called them spiritless curs who were sated with glory after expelling a few hill barons from their mud fortresses—without him they would have been no more than a rabble of cattle thieves. Finally, he said that if all his men were traitors, he would go on alone and at least die with honor, a term with which they were probably unacquainted. He turned his back on them and retired to his tent where he refused both food and entreaty. After three days the men sent emissaries pleading their love, begging him to eat something and keep his strength up so that he, their king, could lead them on the long trip home, and Alexander was at last moved by his veterans’ tears.

  Alexander’s deathbed was in a river-side pavilion within Babylon’s high walls. He had been wounded and gone back to the battle line so many times that he had thought he was immortal, but now he knew he was dying. A week ago there had been hope but since then he had faded, although he could still move his head and part of his left arm. His wife Rukshana tended to him, the bloom of her beauty unwilted despite the years with the army under the hard desert sun. Some days his eyes watered with love when she came in to bathe him. Others, he blamed her for his frailty.

  Alexander reflected on the contrivance of his legend. Since he was a boy he had longed to be Achilles, who had never known a moment’s doubt or shied away from death even when he knew it was rushing to meet him. Alexander had carefully promoted his identification with the ancient hero, arranging his wars with an eye to the picturesque. The race around the tomb had been planned since the starlit summer night in Athens when he and Hephaestion had decided to invade Persia. He had not slept at all the night before Gaugamela—only through a great exertion of will had he refrained from summoning his generals to go through the battle plan one last time. In the morning he had pretended to oversleep, his arm cast over his face, taking deep, even breaths and occasionally affecting a snore. In India he had been well aware that his supply lines were overextended but had wanted it said that his ambition was limitless, and had pushed his men by inches till he got the gentle mutiny he wanted.

  I, he thought, am made of weaker stuff than Achilles and if I am remarkable at all it is for my invention. I have set out to be Achilles and ended up no more than Odysseus of endless contrivance. If I were Achilles I would have died young and
at the height of my glory, beloved by all and feared by all, but since I am Odysseus I will suffer an interminable old age and in its good time death will come from the sea.

  In that moment Alexander detested his empire, a castle built on sand that he knew would not survive him by a week—already his generals were circling. He wanted to go home to Pella,* linger in the women’s quarters, have his mother stroke his hair, hear the laughter echoing in the baths, see the snakes emerge from their shrine to lap up milk with flickering tongues.

  With a sense of profound revelation he heard rather than thought the words, “Odysseus returned and so shall I.” He saw himself rising up out of bed, lurching toward the door and then striding along the sunlit arcades and alamedas of Babylon, going through the massive lion-carved gates through which ten horsemen could pass abreast, and finally out into the blinding desert where through the grace of the gods, who had often loved and now pitied him, a chariot waited to bear him across the hot sand to the cold sea and a black ship to bear him home.

  That evening he lost the use of his voice, and then his hand, and then his eyes, and then he died.

  Great strife followed. After several burials his body was disinterred and carried in a golden casket to its final resting place in his most famous city, Egyptian Alexandria, under the eye and reign of Ptolemy.

  *Alexander the Great, king of Macedon, is reciting a verse from book seventeen of the Iliad, a copy of which he kept under his pillow.