Odysseus slogged out of the surf onto the white sands of the beach, wishing once again that they had a better way to disembark from their galley when they moored somewhere without docks. Odysseus surveyed his surroundings. The tropical island was paradisiacal; it was exactly the sort of place Achaeans believed the most honorable and valorous dead traveled to in the afterlife. Any man should be lucky to see such a beautiful place within the span of his years, but Odysseus didn’t care.
How many years had it been since he’d left Troa? Seven? Eight? The journey home to Ithaca should have taken weeks at most, but in the final days of the Trojan War, Odysseus had managed to severely offend Poseidon. Presumably it was for that reason that a storm had separated them from the rest of the armada, even from the other Ithacan ships, and sent them off into uncharted waters. Since then, the voyage had been a succession of unlikely mishaps and stupid, arrogant mistakes, each one a delay that put another day between Odysseus and his family. His wife and his son, his father, mother, and sister…
When Agamemnon and Menelaus had called the lords of Achaea together for their war on Priam’s city, Odysseus had been pessimistic about his chances of surviving. Yet, survive he had. Ten years of war. He’d survived the bronze head of a Trojan spear slicing his ribs to the bone. He’d survived infernal diseases, visited upon them by the Trojan’s beloved Apollo. He’d survived famine, brought on by the Greeks’ own scorched earth strategy. He’d survived battles with Aeneas, Hector, and Priam’s countless sons, most of whom had proven themselves more than capable of handling themselves in a fight. He’d survived Agamemnon’s needlessly complicated and petty intrigues, and Achilles’ madness. He’d outlived Achilles, a man some people had believed was an invincible demigod.
And Odysseus was the hero of the Greek war effort. He’d rallied them after Achilles death, and concocted the plan that finally breached the impenetrable walls of Troy (the same plan that had likely offended Poseidon). He’d ushered in the end of the war. The end had been ugly, inhumane. After ten years of suffering on foreign soil, the Greek soldiers were beyond merciless. Their cruelty was not callous, but cathartic. They had raped the women, enslaved the children, and butchered the men. Hector’s infant son had been thrown from the walls at Agamemnon’s command.
Odysseus could have objected. He was that man – the one who told people what they didn’t like to hear. He was the one who outlined, in detail, their failures and mistakes, while somehow managing to technically be perfectly polite. He was the tightrope walker, the one that could chastise their leadership in front of the men, and not be executed for it. He could have told Agamemnon to stop. He could have argued to spare the boy, to treat the Trojans with dignity. But he’d been so tired. All he’d wanted to do was go home to Penelope and Telemachus, and being a good man would have delayed that. So he’d left the other kings in the burning city to rape and pillage, gone back to his ship, and started packing for his return, feeling hope for the first time in ten years.
Hundreds, maybe thousands of people had suffered unimaginable cruelty because Odysseus had been in too much of a hurry to do the right thing. He’d let them suffer and die to get himself home a little faster. And now, here he was, years later, wading ashore on an unnamed island, looking to find food and freshwater for his surviving crew, and trying to bring himself to hope that there might be someone on the island that could help the Ithacan sailors find their way back to the Aegean. It would be three millennia before anyone uttered the words, “Karma’s a bitch,” but Odysseus certainly understood the sentiment. And it would have been unfair for Odysseus to reflect on the years they’d been lost at sea and think that he’d somehow shouldered the worst of it all.
The galley Odysseus had sailed to Troy had had seats for nearly fifty men at her oars, and had carried more fighting men on top of that. Many of Odysseus’s men hadn’t survived the war, but their seats on the return voyage had been filled with Trojan slaves or men consolidated from Ithacan ships that couldn’t assemble enough of a crew to set sail again. All in all, he’d left Troy with over 80 people onboard. Their grim misadventures since then had reduced their numbers to barely more than two dozen men. With all hands on deck, they could only run half the oars, making them more dependent than ever on favorable winds, and if the winds favored anyone, it was not Odysseus.
“This place is wondrous!” Elpenor cried, “Beautiful! We must surely find something to abate our hunger and slake our thirst here.”
“Our odds are good,” Odysseus said to his soldier, “But even the most beautiful gardens can bear poisoned fruit, so watch what you stick in your mouth.” The warning shouldn’t have been necessary. Elpenor was a grown man, not a toddler, but over the past decade and a half, Odysseus had frequent occasion to wonder at Elpenor’s existence. He’d been the youngest Ithacan to go to war, sneaking aboard the ship dreaming of glory in war, despite having no experience, training, or conditioning. If Odysseus had ever sought proof of the divine, Elpenor’s survival through ten years of war and nearly as many in diaspora would have been the best evidence he could have found. It was a true miracle.
“Right, no fruit. Stick with vegetables.”
“No,” Odysseus said, “Fruit is… you know what, just take Chylus and Huro with you,” Odysseus called over the two young Trojan captives. They’d survived the attack on their city because they’d been too young to fight, born no more than a year or two before the ten year war began. Now they were men, Huro nearing twenty years. “Boys, we need food. Go foraging with Elpenor, don’t eat anything you don’t recognize.”
“Yes, master,” Huro said, “but what if we find nothing familiar on this island?”
“Then bring back whatever you can find and we’ll… figure something out.”
“You’ll make us eat it to find out if it’s poisonous…” Chylus was visibly distressed.
“I wouldn’t do that,” Odysseus said, “If I were that cruel I’d just kill you and feed you to the crew.”
Huro laughed heartily but Chylus turned pale.
“It was a joke, Chylus,” Odysseus said, “We’re all in this together now. Greeks and Trojans. Slaves and freemen. You’re part of my crew, have been for years now, which means I’m responsible for your safety. Now, get going and stay clear of the hunting parties. We don’t want anyone mistaking Elpenor for a wild boar.” The young men headed down the beach with Elpenor following along to ‘supervise’. Greeks often tasked slaves with babysitting, so in Odysseus’s mind this was a fine use of the boys’ time.
Odysseus ran one of his broad, calloused hands through his red hair and it came away with white hairs. The years and the miles were both showing. His men – those who’d known him from the beginning – said he was looking more and more like his father every day. Odysseus wasn’t afraid of aging and dying, but thinking about the lost time ate at him. Even if he lived to be a doddering old invalid, the good years he’d lost could never be reclaimed.
“Staff, Ty,” Odysseus called two of his soldiers, “Two hunting parties. Look for game trails and follow them to water and, if possible, meat. Don’t shoot Elpenor.”
“You’re not worried about the boys you sent off with Elpenor?” Staphylus asked.
“No, I know they have the good damned sense to stay clear of men with drawn bows.”
Staphylus and Tiphys rousted the men who were lounging on the beach and led them off into the jungle, away from the direction that Elpenor and the boys had gone. Odysseus helped some of the remaining men fell some trees – they needed lumber to maintenance the ship, and this was as good an opportunity as any to build a fire. If the men brought back any game, the gods would be owed a sacrifice, and even in this hot climate the men would need a fire tonight to warm their dampened spirits. Odysseus also hoped, as he had many times before, that this might be the night that some Achaean merchant ship would see their fire and decide to investigate.
The day wore on, and the fire was built, but the two hunting parties didn’t return. Odysseus sat around a fire with four of his best soldiers, men who’d been with him now through thick and thin for nearly twenty years; Mel, Cal, Duke, and Zeet.
One day, the Greeks would be well remembered for their phalanxes of disciplined hoplites, but the Trojan War had marked the beginning of the end for an older tradition of warfare, a more personal, individualist form of conflict. It would be another two hundred years or more before the Greeks began to modernize their approach to war by standardizing the training and equipment of their fighting men, and even then, the chaotic, savage clashes of the heroic era would continue to be romanticized by nostalgic military historians.
In reality, patriotism hadn’t been invented yet. Every man was prepared to defend his home, but one went to war because his king went to war, not because his nation went to war, and the only reason they followed their king to war was because he promised them mountains of gold for their service and threatened them with ostracism and exile if they didn’t serve. Almost every Greek soldier fell somewhere between mercenary and conscript, and the units they fought in might have been best described as loosely directed riots. Men went to war with whatever weapons and armor they’d inherited from their fathers, and they picked fallen enemies clean, so that they could replace their own gear when it inevitably wore out and broke. A melee in the ancient world was as much about stripping the bodies of the dead as it was about actually making ones’ enemies dead. Calais, Deucalion, Meleager, and Zetes wouldn’t make it into any history books, but they had served Odysseus well.
Deucalion was as close as a mortal came to being a demigod hero. He was big, nearly six feet tall, and possessed the sort of noble sense of bravery one only heard about in folktales. Many men were willing to throw themselves in harm’s way if there were enough gold on the line, but Duke believed in the old stories of Elysium and the Isles of the Blessed. He believed that there was more to life than surviving it, and had risked his own life countless times, not for money, but for his dedication to the men next to him. He didn’t care about lines on a map or titles and thrones – he cared about his brothers, and would die for them if need be, expecting that his valor and righteousness in life would be well-rewarded after death.
Calais was much less noble; he was a pragmatic survivor. Cal’s commander at the Battle of Dardanus had called him a coward for fleeing the field in the face of an unexpected and overwhelming Trojan counterattack. The rest of his unit had defied their commander and followed Cal when he ran, and though many were run down or shot in the back as they retreated, Odysseus had no doubt that those who survived lived only because Cal had had the good sense to run away from an impossible fight. Odysseus had sent the commander to work in the camp’s mess hall and given Cal his position. Since then, Cal had become an indispensable adviser, a realist that grounded Odysseus’s rare moments of heroic bravado.
Meleagar and Zetes were among the finest of Greece’s archers. They were not on the same par as Teucer or Paris, certainly, but they were nearly as good as Odysseus had been in his prime. Meleagar was a cool perfectionist and a sharpshooter, so accurate he could strike small birds out of the air with his bow. Zetes was less precise, but still had fantastic aim considering how quickly he fired his bow. When asked how he did it, Zetes simply claimed he fired first and then aimed, saying he didn’t understand why other archers did it the other way around.
They were sitting in the dark next to the fire arguing over Zeet’s defiance of logical ordering, when Elpenor came running back to the beach, alone.
“Where in Tartarus have you been?!” Odysseus cried, “Where are the Trojan boys I sent with you?!”
“They’re with her!”
“Her who?” Odysseus demanded.
“The sorceress!” Elpenor said, “Circe!”
“Circe?” Meleagar asked skeptically, “As in the sorceress that helped Jason return to Iolchis? What would she be doing on some uncharted isle? And she’d be long dead by now, surely.”
“Aye,” Deucalion said, “She should be over a hundred years old now.”
“Why do you think this woman you found is the sorceress, Circe?” Odysseus asked.
“Well, because she said she was,” Elpenor said simply.
Odysseus and his other men looked at each other for a moment.
“Couldn’t be….” Meleagar said, “…Right?”
“Well…” Odysseus thought about it for a moment, “What are the odds some random woman on a deserted isle would make a point of claiming to be the ancient sorceress who helped the Argonauts?”
“You actually think it might be the real Circe?” Calais was deeply skeptical.
“I think we have two missing hunting parties to search for, and that if there’s a human being on this island who can string together a noun, a verb, and a direct object in a coherent manner, they’re worth talking to. The six of us will investigate come dawn. Prepare for a hike. Full kit. We come in peace, but we are not helpless.”
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