The Voyage of the Proteus:

An Eyewitness Account of the End of the World

by Thomas M. Disch

For All My Cassandras:

Elsa Rush, Sara Shaw, Kit Reed, Anne Dick, and Virginia Kidd—Five strong women with four-letter names.

Proem

She was not a particularly attractive young woman. One really expects more from someone who has been a princess, even a Trojan princess who has seen her family slaughtered, her city burned to the ground, and then been raped repeatedly by enemy

soldiers and is now in her seventh month of pregnancy. She simply was not herself. It wasn’t so much her demeanor. She could be downright majestic at times. It was her attitude. She was like Shakespeare’s Ophelia—one minute Hecuba’s virginal daughter, the next a slut spaced out on LSD, hair unbound, dancing around like Isadora Duncan, and speaking in tongues. Except that one of the tongues she was speaking in was mine, English. The other Trojan concubines didn’t have a clue as to what Cassandra was going on about. Even if they’d had a few session of ESL, what would they have made of “global warming” or “nuclear Armageddon”?

On the other hand they did take to the samba well enough, once Cassandra showed them the basic movements, and with Bacchus assisting. The voyage back to Greece promised to be a regular Carnival cruise, and the crew eventually got used to Cassandra’s prophetic outbursts, the ululations and the spittle that went with them. She looked wrecked, of course, but hey, you should have seen Troy. That was wrecked.

Part One

“Have you a name?” she asked me, in her husky Lauren-Bacall voice, as we sat balanced atop two overturned amphoras close to the helmsman. “I ask because you do not seem entirely Greek.”

“I’m not,” I admitted. “I’m an American. My name is Tom.”

“Tom. Tom.” She bit her fingertip as though it were an olive. “It certainly does not sound Greek. Or Trojan either, for that matter. And you seem, if I may say so, rather old to be working on a ship. I never see you reefing sail. You only pace about the deck with that shabby cane of yours.”

I explained that I had come aboard the Proteus as a passenger, but she could sense that

I’d been stung by her remarks about my age.

“At least you’re not a slave. Or a woman. Or both, which is the worst fate of all.”

“Quite true.”

“Would you like to have sex?”

“I beg your pardon.”

She flicked her tongue in the immemorial semaphore for sexual invitation. “It is my duty to ask all the men aboard this ship if they would like to fuck me. I am the sex slave of every man-jack here. So I repeat, would you like to have sex—big boy?”

“Well, in fact, Cassandra, I am gay. That’s to say, I am a homosexual.”

“And what is that, Tom? What is a ‘homosexual.’?”

I explained, in a stumbling way, until when I had finally got across the gist of it, Cassandra laughed in what I would have to call a raucous way.

“If that’s what you mean by being gay, then every sailor on this ship is gay. Or has been, one time or another. Tom, my goodness, what a prig you are. Come, sit closer, let me hold your cock, and let us talk about the rites of Eros.”

Part Two

“Oh my, that was wonderful!” Cassandra said, with a sigh of relief when I had finally unmounted, much relieved if not enraptured. “We must do that again.”

She saw the little archaic smirk of satisfaction on my lips and laughed. “Oh, not you, silly. You are a long way yet from ‘wonderful.’ But what I can see, when we are fucking, is the world you come from—and that is wonderful. Truly. Those little what do you call ems, electrical appliances, that dry your hair and scrub your teeth. The cages inside your enormous buildings that go up and down, up and down, as you were going up and down. They made me want to scream—like this—”

She unloosed a scream loud enough to make the helmsman turn sideways with a warning frown.

“In sooth,” she said (she had a way of slipping into obsolete language whenever she was fearful, as a dog cringes when it’s kicked), “in sooth, it is a world I never could have thought up on my own. Its very colors are unthinkable, as though you all lived inside jewels. Blinding.

“I have seen the ruin of Argos, Agamemnon’s death, yes, even the founding of Rome and its dissolution, but those things seem to follow, one upon another, like propositions in geometry. If a then b. But your world is so much more immense, so much more, if I may say so, horrendous. And I have only had a sip of it. One little seed from the whole dark pomegranate.”

She squeezed my flaccid cock. “So we must, dear Tom—” Another squeeze, this time with a nip of her ragged nails. “We must do this again. I must witness, through your eyes, the fall of your great city’s towers, as I have seen the fall of Troy and, in my own sibyllic way, the ruin of Argos and the Greeks. It’s what I live for now that I am dead, as ‘twere—to watch that asshole Agamemnon in his bloated pride bestride this deck, poking at my pregnant belly with his bully stick, knowing that some day, some day soon, the wife he trusts will drive a sharpened scythe through his fat gut, and he will scream—”

Again, Cassandra screamed, and it was though some taloned demon had ripped the sound from her violated flesh. Her eyes lighted up, and she raised her own mutilated hands, now a harpy’s taloned claws, and cawed.

And when I woke there was the mark she’d etched across my chest, a thin red line across the eagle tattooed there.

She had made me hers.

Part Three

When one attends a symphony in one’s dreams, who is to say if the music one hears really exists? One leaves the odeon in bliss, marveling at the genius of Sibelius or whoever was the star of the occasion, but unless your inner ear is still ringing with his chords, what proof is there? You must be able to hum the tune. It was the same with the poems of Wallace Stevens that I recited for Cassandra, claiming them as my own. Could memory have assimilated all of “The Auroras of Autumn”? I suspect that what I managed to convey was the man’s afflatus, his sense of his own exploding mind translated into a paparazzi sky alive with flashbulbs, black for a while and then, like a defective neon bulb or a berserk fire truck, aflame across the whole horizon.

Cassandra was in awe of anything to do with electricity. “Tell me about your generators,” she bade me in her Lauren Bacall voice. “The dynamos, the power stations. The rows of pylons that cut long swathes through virgin forest. Oh, how Zeus would envy your regimes and corporations! How he would want to chain electric engineers to those denuded mountainsides, to torture them as he tortured Prometheus.” She smiled and tweaked my tit mischievously, then rolled over onto her belly to nibble from the dish of pickled fish we’d brought on deck with us. Is there any pleasure that can rival an Aegean summer night?

“The sea,” she declared, as though it were a proposition in philosophy. I can hear the sea in a shell.”

“We all can do that, Cassandra. But what we hear is not the sea at all. It is an echo of the blood pulsing inside our ear.”

“Tom, how do you come by such nonsense? I hear the sea, and much else as well. I hear the cries of sailors as their ship goes down. I hear the babble of doomed barbarians as the tsunami approaches; the groan of rotted timbers as the levee yields to the pounding waves. I hear the waves lapping over the sill of a second-story window. All that I hear in a shell.”

“Poetry!” I scoffed.

“And am I not a seeress! Am I not entitled to poetry? And is my theme any less grand than that of your Wallace Stevens or your Ossian?”

“Ossian! However did we get to Ossian?”

“By way of the ocean, my dear Tom. The ocean that bears us even now toward our death in Argos. Even with your little education, you know what awaits us there. Thanatos. Death. One syllable away from Thalassos.”

“Two syllables, Cassandra. Count ‘em, two. But if all that is so, and I do not say it is not, then why don’t we jump ship right now and swim for shore?”

“A Trojan princess does not swim. And even if we did, how should we survive? By tending sheep? By writing books? Books won’t exist for centuries yet, or printing presses, and even when they do, I doubt anyone would publish a played-out hack like you.”

Cassandra, as I believe I’ve said already, could be very cruel, which is quite understandable, given all that she’d been through

“In any case, dear boy, haven’t you noticed: we have been rather a long time at sea without getting anywhere? Do you suppose that Agamemnon and his captains are anxious to get home? They surely know as well as you or me that after an absence of ten years things won’t be exactly the way they left them. Then too, the wider world we can inhabit when we travel can be a lot of fun, even for an old fart like Agamemnon. I’m told he’s heading for Aeaea. Notorious Aeaea. Why jump ship when with less effort we may simply disembark? There will be many Aeaeans keen to learn the samba. Each dance step teaches the body some new wisdom. Isn’t that what happened to your Americans with the jitterbug, the rock-and-roll? It’s a pity the phonograph hasn’t been invented yet. I hear your music only when I touch your hand. Just think if there were an electrical loudspeaker mounted on the mast. But at least we can hear the music, so do stop nattering, Tom. Let’s dance.”

Part Four

“I can see why the tango is thought to be a dance for whores. The woman must be so…loose. So pliant. But you poor dear! You seem to be quite spent.”

“It’s been a while since I’ve been on the dance floor. And a while since I’ve had my Celebrex.”

“I don’t believe in that sort of medicine, frankly. Physicians of whatever century are all a pack of charlatans. I know a herbal remedy that will make you feel years younger. In any case, there is no indisposition that a good fuck won’t cure.”

“Not now, Cassandra, please.”

“You whimper like a sick puppy. How am I to make a man of you? In any case, to return to our original topic: the sea! Life had its beginnings in the sea.”

“So we are told.”

“And I foresee (this is an official prophecy) that it will have its end there, too!”

“Cassandra, could you help me to the rail? Please. I think I’m going to throw up.”

“Yes, Tom—in the sea!” She didn’t stir to help me. I crawled to the far starboard side of the deck and waited for my stomach to make up its mind. Could it have been the pickled fish? Or just the motion of the ship?

“Poseidon is a dark god,” Cassandra confided. “His purposes are hidden. But basically he is like all of us: he’s hungry. Thirsty, too; we can see that. Rain and still more rain, an endless thirst. But he is hungry, too. Hungry for men, for ships, for anything that moves. Just yesterday in Minneapolis, where you were born—”

“No, I was born in Iowa. I did go to kindergarten there. And second and third grades. I skipped first grade because I could already read.”

“A genius no less. I guess that counterbalances your sexual inadequacies.”

“Cassandra, please. Lay off.”

“As I was saying: in Minneapolis the Mississippi River swallowed up a bridge with all its traffic. Just like that. And down-stream in New Orleans the sea reclaimed whole neighborhoods. All along the Atlantic shore it’s going to be the same. And there’s nothing anyone can do.

Like Troy, like me, you all must just submit to Fate.”

“True.”

“Of course it is. I never lie. Now let me taste the vomit on your lips. I want to see more of that future of yours, I can’t wait to find out what’s going to happen to Lindsay Lohan.”

Part Five

“You should not ask so many questions, Tom. You should offer answers, instruction, edification. A man who is always asking questions seems unmanly. Bluster, make threats, spit! Then you will be one of the captains.”

“Or I will have my teeth kicked out, like that poor sailor yesterday.”

“But that was not for asking questions. They were fighting over the last of the wine. In any case, you can’t suppose that I will kick your teeth in? And how is it that you still have the teeth of a boy when you are so very old? Nestor is not so old as you, yet look at him—the mouth of a sage. The very stumps of his teeth are rotted. I hate to kiss him. There is such a smell.”

“We go to dentists in America.”

“All your millions and millions of people go to dentists!”

“Those who can afford to.”

And can the dentists make new teeth to replace those that are lost?” She smiled her gruesome, jaggedy smile as illustration. She had suffered sorely in the rape of Troy.

“Yes, some dentists can do that. You would need a very good dentist. He’d be expensive.”

She sighed. “And I’m a pauper now. Even if I were to be allowed to live when we reach Argos—and I have foreseen the contrary—even if I were to set to work as a dockside whore, I could not earn enough to afford the dental work I need. Even supposing dentists existed in Argos. Which they do not.” She shook her head dolefully.

“People envy seeresses. They don’t know.”

“Now, now.” I stroked her dark hair, made sleek with virgin olive oil. “You still have a gorgeous figure. When you smile, just don’t part your lips.”

“Don’t part my lips!” she flamed. “O Lord Phoebus, hear this American fag! Don’t part my lips! Artemis, reward him! Reward him now!”

Artemis must have been listening, for at that moment, one of the younger sailors, a curly-haired bear-cub of a fellow named Socrates (not to be confused with the philosopher who lived some centuries later), approached us from abaft where he’d been plaiting rope.

“Tom, my main man, you old fag!” He raised his right hand for a high-five.

“Socrates!” I replied in kind.

“Let me have on you a language class of English. Again! Today is Monday. I am fine. And you?”

“I am fine too, Old Soc.”

“Sock it to me!”

We high-fived.

Socrates seemed to have reached the end of his dialogic capabilities. I waited for him to retreat back to his circle of friends. Instead, he said, ticking off each conjugated verb on his fingers:

“I am! You are! He be! He beats the shit out of you!” With which Socrates cold-cocked me on the jaw and knocked me on my ass. His friends roared with laughter, and roared still louder as he began kicking me with feet as rugged from his work on deck as any pair of Timberlines.

One kick caught me, glancingly, in the crotch. He squinted down and adjusted his stance, as though correcting his aim on a rifle. But before he could deliver a decisive kick, Agamemnon, jumping down off the bridge, hit him on the back of his head with the butt end of the club he used to discipline his men.

“No more,” he told the man, in an even tone.

While I could understand Agamemnon without difficulty the sailor’s reply was Greek to me. Even so, the tone alone managed to convey bewilderment, hurt feelings, and murderous rage in equal parts.

Agamemnon turned to me: “He says you are not a Greek and you deserve to die. What do you say to him?”

“Tell him he can suck my cock.”

Cassandra emitted a caw of laughter; Agamemnon smiled the tight-lipped smile he must have learned from all the statues of that time; Socrates, when my meaning had been conveyed to him, rose to his feet and said, “I challenge him to answer my riddle.”

There was a unison gasp from the sailors who had been watching our altercation from a circumspect distance. They tightened their ring: Greeks love a riddle.

“At dawn—” Socrates began.

Here I must note a curious thing. It may not seem so strange, perhaps, in this era of video remotes and DVDs. It’s this: Socrates and Agamemnon, who had a moment earlier been speaking Greek, now spoke English in crisp, dubbed-in-sounding voices, like the cast in a Cinecittá epic. Throughout my time aboard the Proteus this on/off, Greek/English duality obtained, as though someone were fiddling with the subtitle button on a video remote. It could be quite exasperating.

“At dawn I go about on four legs. At noon, on two. At dusk on three. Who am I! And if you don’t get it right on the first guess, I get to kill you with the riddle knife.”

“And the answer, Socrates, is man. As an infant he crawls; in his prime he walks on two legs, and in the evening of his life he needs a cane. Like mine!” And I used my cane to hit him on the head right where Agamemnon had bonked him earlier.

He began to cry. “Oh no, please no, don’t kill me. I’m only fifteen.”

“That’s not true, my boy,” Cassandra chided. “You’re sixteen, and in any case, those are the rules, whatever your age. You would have killed him if he’d been wrong. But he was right so he kills you. That’s how a riddle works. Now, where is the riddle knife?”

The sailors looked round with expressions of exaggerated cluelessness.

“Could it be—” She stooped and reached into the folds of Socrates’ tunic, which was scarcely long enough to conceal the riddle knife. “—here?”

He tried to grab for it, but she raised it out of his reach, then turned and handed it to me with a little bow, as though executing a dance step. (Have I mentioned that she was a very good dancer?).

I looked at the blade, and at Socrates’s throat. I might have protested that I’d never killed a man before, but that did not seem much to the point. In Rome one does as Romans do, and this was Greece. I did what Greeks do. I killed Socrates. The sailors gave a perfunctory Hip Hip Hooray, and that was that.

Part Six

“That question you’d begun to ask—” Cassandra nudged, in her gentlest tone. “What was it you wanted to know?”

“Goodness, I’ve forgotten entirely. The murder—That’s what it was, you know, a murder, nothing less. It just bowled me over. I can’t think.”

“Then you shouldn’t babble. I’d wager you were the only person aboard the Proteus who hadn’t killed someone before. All these men were present at the sack of Troy. They’re Greeks. Now you are one of them. And I sense—” She grabbed my half-erect cock and squeezed. “—that you don’t entirely object.”

“Cassandra, please.”

“Please yourself, Tom. Unless you’d rather I do the job. Murder is an aphrodisiac for most men. That’s why there are wars. But now that you are an initiate to that common knowledge…you had a question?”

“Well, I was wondering how it is that you seem to be treated so respectfully by the men on the ship. And by Agamemnon in particular. You go about the deck freely. So do the other women. You eat well. You seem to have been abused, but now you’re accorded a kind of respect. I don’t understand.”

She cawed. Then, furrowing her brow: “I am his wife—did you not know that? Of course he has another wife in Argos, but what of that. In Troy, in the temple of Athena, we were wed with much merriment and expense. Indeed, to cap the festivities the temple was destroyed. I was delirious with happiness. Well, delirious, anyhow. Whom did I see two nights ago in almost the same predicament? Ah yes, that soprano covered in blood, Gruberova.”

“Are you saying that in the moment—for it was no more than that—that I recollected her Lucia, you saw enough to take in the whole opera?”

“Time is so relative, Tom. It can be compressed or expanded as occasion requires. If, that is, one has a modicum of psychic power. You were my DVD, and I loved Lucia. She reminded me of myself, a bride betrayed at the altar, such an ecstasy of sorrow, and such a fine voice. But to return to what I was saying, after the destruction of Athena’s temple, the Greeks became very drunk and things turned nasty. Agamemnon spied little Astyanax in his grandmother’s arms. He grabbed him by one dangling leg, and while the babe screamed in terror, he whirled him in circles like a living discus and hurled him from the city’s wall. He landed on the cobble road where his father’s corpse had been dragged by Achilles’ chariot around the city’s wall.

“And then I was possessed myself, and I whirled in circles, and howled, and shrieked like an owl. The goddess possessed me, divine Athena, furious at the destruction of her temple. She, with Poseidon as her ally, swore to destroy the Greeks’ fleets in retribution. I wish I could have seen myself. When I came to, among the other captive women, Hecuba told me what I’d done, what the goddess had done, through me.

“After that the Greeks were not the same. I’m sure they had meant to slaughter the lot of us there on the steps of Athena’s temple, but instead they took us aboard their ships. As hostages are taken in one of your mid-Eastern wars. The sailors and their captains must believe Poseidon will not exercise his wrath against so many Trojan women. And I enjoy the privilege of being Agamemnon’s ‘wife.’ His men were at the ceremony; they’d heard Athena speak through me. Now he dare not lift a hand against me.”

“But I have seen you—”

“—fucking Greeks? Yes, and why not? I am no virgin now. I punish these men with my own pleasure. Watch the face of one I summon, how he will wince. But he will come.”

“And me?”

She smiled with those terrible teeth. “You, Tom, I will punish the most.”

Part Seven

A Belated Invocation

Here I am, in what has to be reckoned the autumn if not the winter of my life, writing my very first novel of the sea—one that will range, as I see it now, from the Pillars of Hercules eastward to Medea’s Colchis—and what have I had to say about the sea? Oh, Cassandra had her rant, which dealt chiefly with that great seaport Minneapolis, but what has there been worthy of the brush of Turner or the pen of O’Brien, men who made the Mediterranean their own? Durrel’s Clea scuba-dove among luminescing sea-anemones, or so I recall. Couldn’t I find some similarly shimmering achievement for myself? Might I not dive into a Mycenean or Minoan wreck to wrest a wonder-working statuette of Aphrodite or Hermes of the winged sandals from the grasp of an ill-natured squid? Since I first saw Kirk Douglas fighting with a giant octopus I thought:: If someone just gave me a chance, I could do that.

And now someone has and here I am writing about some dungeons-and-dragons den mother who’s promised me an exclusive interview about the end of both our civilizations. And what has she delivered? Family gossip and pillow talk! What I want is a scoop on the next, preordained and seer-foreseen Atlantis. What great city, what whole island will be served up to Poseidon’s unappeasable wrath? Will I swim among the still-functioning traffic lights of Washington D.C.? Down into the halls of Congress though the Capitol’s shattered dome, where the skeletons of Senators carry on their old debates and divvy up their ghostly spoils.

O you Muses, let me do that and I will sacrifice a living goat or any beast you ask at your mountain shrine. Two spotless doves! My statuette of Hermes, whatever you demand. Just let me be the last great novelist of the sea. Heap kelp upon me till the astonished audience believes I am the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Tell Poseidon I’m his son begot on some sleeping sea-nymph in Minneapolis.

I am a creature of the deeps. When I was twelve I could swim underwater almost the whole way from the dock to the diving raft at Fairmont’s Sylvania Park, and when I taught one summer in East Lansing, Michigan, I went off the twelve-foot board!

I own I’ve never sailed a boat myself (although I have a friend who has), but I have been upon a ship that went through the Corinth Canal. We stopped at Delphi, and I visited Apollo’s shrine, where the best Greek tragedies premiered. I did! I was within hailing distance of your own Parnassus. So there would be, you see, a kind of continuity.

Muses, possess Cassandra once again and through her take me in your many arms! Make me the victim of your octopus embrace. See how willingly I’ll die for you—but first, this one last novel. A novel of the sea.

Part Eight

“My childhood, Tom? Lord Phoebus, but you are a strange one. No one has ever asked me about my childhood. We Greeks don’t set much stock by childhoods—our own or for that matter our children’s. I could tell you a bit about Hector, when he was a boy. We all knew he was destined for greatness. Of course, what one doesn’t say in such cases is that greatness is often a synonym for death. It doesn’t take an oracle to tell you that.

“My childhood. Well, my mother was a queen, and I had lots of siblings. I was in the middle so I didn’t see that much of her. I can’t say I remember much of anything before the age of six. That’s when Paris brought Auntie Helen home to live with us, and she was so nice, so attentive, so much fun. It seems to me that’s when my life began.

“There was something else, too. Helen had a kind of aura. She was—the word’s there in your mind, Tom. Just let me touch the tip of your tongue. Just so: she was a femme fatale. But for all that, the nicest nanny. She liked to play pretend games. She’d be the goddess, and I’d be the supplicant, and Uncle Laocoon would be a wounded warrior. Such merry times. At least for me. For Helen too, perhaps. My parents weren’t especially welcoming, and when Menelaus sent his ultimatum demanding his wife’s return along with half Troy’s treasury as reparation for the sleight to his honor, Helen was put in purdah. She and Paris dined in their own quarters. She spent a lot of time at the loom.

“That was when my father’s aunt, Chrysotheles, came visiting from Delphi where she was a deputy pythoness. A very important position, but so stressful. Every day a new oracle, fasting and trances and visions and seizures. It’s hard work, and Chrysotheles was in need of some time off. Not that we let her relax. Hecuba wanted to know about her family, and then she was put out to hear that her mother off in Bogazkoy was dead and two sisters ailing, and her uncle in the south was having a plague. Hecuba thought Chrysotheles was making it all up just to be mean.

“But then, the thing that was to change my whole life, Chysotholes declared right there at the dinner table that I was a pythoness! She could see it in the little golden freckles in my eyes, which were just the same as hers. She’d heard me telling stories to my dolls, stories that (she swore) would some day turn out to be true. She knew all this because she could foresee the future, too.

“Hecuba was thrilled. Another pythoness in the family. Not only was that a mark of high distinction but it meant some savings down the road. I’d be a virgin, dedicated to Apollo’s worship, and so there’d be no need to set aside a dowry worthy of King Priam’s daughter.

And I must say I rejoiced myself, for it meant I’d be returning with my great-aunt to the shrine at Delphi. And so I did, missing out on the first years of the siege, which believe me, I do not regret.”

“And what was it like at Delphi?” I asked. “Was it a difficult apprenticeship?”

“As to that, I’m sworn to secrecy. The Eleusinian Mysteries are not more veiled and terrible. Just be glad you’ve never witnessed them. Now turn over and let me sleep in peace. All your talk is wearying.”

Part Nine

It’s not unheard of, when we’re dreaming, to think This must be a dream. It is, I think, unusual, in dreams, to go to sleep and to wake in a regular way, or to suffer from insomnia—which all of us did whenever we had to spend the night below deck because of the weather. The boat would lurch and we’d tumble into each other (as a passenger I slept with the women, not with the crew; there was a partition between us made of fishing nets). Death seemed a real possibility during the worst storms, so there was a constant hum of fearful prayer on both sides of the swaying nets—O Lord Poseidon! Great Protector! Trident bearer! Help!—and promises both trivial and vast: a skin of wine, a daughter’s life.

There was not much anyone could do in a practical way. Agamemnon was as superfluous as the daintiest Trojan maid. Sailing was still a primitive technology. The sail was reefed (there was but one, on a single mast), and whatever was movable was secured with ropes and nets, and then we all simply hoped for the best.

Most nights were quieter, and one could be rocked to sleep by the motion of the vessel.

A week went by, or two, before it occurred to me to wonder how I could go to sleep within my dream, and wake, and go to sleep again. Might this be, perhaps, no dream at all but some alternate form of life? If so it was a form as little likely as if I had been trapped within an opera seria by some baroque composer, compelled to perform one aria da capo after another. But with the conviction of a Callas, believing Metastasio’s lyrics as though they were gospel truth, believing them because they were absurd.

Such moments of epistemological doubt became increasingly rare as the voyage wore on. I ceased to worry as to how I’d get home. I worried whether I could keep down another dinner of raw squid, or whether I would ever sleep again. I’d lie staring up at the stars or into the darkness of the hold, afraid and stupefied by weariness.

As to my fear: there was a voice that addressed me in those wakeful nights, sometimes in a threatening way, sometimes inveiglingly. In Greek most often but without the benefit of subtitles, just hisses, hums, and garbled consonants. Then, there might be a rapping sound, slow and portentous, or brisk and urgent. I wished I knew of a door I might go to that I might bar it. I could only lie there awake—until the night I felt his fingers tighten round my scrotal sac, heard his voice whisper in my ear: “Tom, my main man! Check it out! I’m here from hell. To be your slave. I suck your cock—yes? Just like you say. I love you and you love back. Forever. But first, please Tom, some wine. I am so thirsty, Tom. Wine, Tom. Wine.”

Part Ten

“Then what did he say, Tom?” Cassandra asked, her eyes fixed on me like some vulture of the sea.

“Then I sat bolt upright and he was gone. No fingers scrambling for a hold. No lips damp against my ear. No voice, no rapping at a door that wasn’t there. Darkness and silence.”

“Yet I feel his presence about us still,” Cassandra said, frowning (she had a noble, tragic frown). “Somewhere on this ship. Did you give him the wine he begged of you? If you did, it would be like a net in which a dolphin’s tangled. He’d stick to this ship like a barnacle.” She paused, and then, darkly: “It’s Socrates, you know. His ghost. You must not offer him a drop of wine. No matter how pitiful his pleas. Most of all you must not let him pleasure you. If you should come, just once, by his agency, you would be his as certainly as if you had been shackled side by side to the oars of a galley. The fault is yours, you know. You told him he must suck your cock—and then you killed him. I laughed then; we all did; and now we’re all at risk. Damn you.”

“I will ignore him if he appears again. I will not speak to him. Or let him touch me. He’ll think I am a stone.”

“That’s just what you must not let him think. Be courteous, but cool. Continue with your English lessons. That’s the surest way to drive him off. But do not feed him. Don’t share your wine. Don’t return his kisses. It is on earth as it is in hell: don’t share the food of the damned.

Part Eleven

There was a raised platform at the front of the Proteus, where the ship’s contingent of cats would congregate on sunny afternoons. Cassandra and I would often join them there, but the crew generally avoided the place as being too much in view of someone who might assign them to some make-work task. They stayed below—with one exception. A pockmarked sailor, ill-favored and getting on in years, who would sit cross-legged at the base of the platform, his back braced against the planks, his head tilting left and right like some very slow metronome, his right hand conducting an invisible choir in some solemn music with a short, peeled stick. Our Toscanini.

Cassandra and I would sit with our faces in the wind to get what relief we could from the ship’s forward progress— facing away, therefore, from the sight of sight of the fellow’s tick-tocking head. And we talked. About the Greeks, their low cunning and cruelty; about the Trojans, their nobility and ultimate success (some day, Cassandra prophesied, they’d build Rome and rule the entire world!); and about America, concerning whose supermarkets and shopping malls Cassandra could never learn enough. She bade me remember such matters, then clutched my hand to browse vicariously as I pushed a cart down the aisles of a Wal-Mart filled with all the poisoned produce and booby-trapped toys of the fabled East.

“It is another Trojan horse!” she exclaimed, delighted. “How clever those Chinese must be, how like that devil Ulysses! Now let us go down the cosmetics aisle. Let us smell the most expensive scents. Fifty dollars for a single ounce, but us they will squirt for free! Are they poison, too, like the fish and the toys?”

“Oh yes, of the deadliest sort. The more expensive the knock-off the more corrosive its action over the course of time. In a few years any woman wearing it becomes as hardened in evil as Medea herself.”

“What is a knock-off?” she wanted to know.

“A product that is not really what its name says it is. The bottle may say Chanel but inside is only apple juice and piss.”

“No! Tom, you are inventing all of this. There are no knock-offs, no plot to poison little children, no China. It’s all a wicked invention so you may have fun at my expense.”

“You’ll see it all yourself when I bring you to America, my Princess. You’ll see the hole in the earth where the two towers of the World Trade Center stood. The ruins of the Frick! You can buy a bottle of radio-active dust.”

Cassandra sighed. “Ah, do not tease me. I shall never see America.”

“Why not? I’m here on the Aegean in the Bronze Age. Isn’t the distance in space and time the same for both of us? How did you summon me here? You told me this was all your doing. How was it done?”

“Ah, wouldn’t you like to know. Do you think a pythoness surrenders her secrets so carelessly? With nothing to show for it. But I will tell you! Why not, you won’t understand. My longing brought you here, Tom. Longing and fear. They were so great they became a wind. Imagine a whole orchestra and each man playing a trombone. That loud. That irresistible. When Troy was put to the torch, when the Greeks bound me and dragged me, stumbling after the other slaves, to their ships, I begged the gods then to let me witness my enemies’ ruin.

“The gods heard my prayer. I saw, in the clouds above this ship, our captain slain by his own wife. I saw his daughter at work in Tauris, making the temple of Artemis a slaughterhouse for her fellow Greeks. I saw Sparta and Athens fall to the armies of Rome, and then to the hordes of the Hun, and again to the Ottoman Turks, who were the cruelest of all the barbarian conquerors. They made the Parthenon an ammunition depot, and I thought: a match! Let me light a single match!”

“Instead, Lord Elgin came,” I reminded her.

“Yes, and stripped away the statues that were left. Good riddance. Now let them

be utterly demolished where they have come to rest.”

“They will be, Cassandra. I can promise that.”

“How? By whom?”

“As Rome was—by the very slaves she brought within her gates, who breed in her slums and live there now, a million strong.”

“And how long must I wait?”

“Not long at all. Be patient. The end is near.”

She kissed me, as when a trophy wife, upon opening a Tiffany gift-box, thanks her husband for another rope of pearls.

“Tom,” she said. “These Greeks will die. I love you.”

The ship’s cats, who had slipped away during our talk of Armageddon (as the ladyfolks will leave the living room when talk turns to sports), now rejoined us on the platform. They sat there licking themselves and watching us have sex.

Part Twelve

One night, long after sunset, with a crescent moon dimly visible behind a scrim of cirrus cloud, a stench came upon the Proteus such that everyone who’d come on deck to sleep was sickened. Many vomited, then went below, hoping to escape the smell there. Those who remained stared into the darkness wondering what could have caused such a fetor. The rotting corpse of some leviathan? A ship freighted with victims of the plague?

The answer lighted on us from above. Harpies! First there was the clanging of their metal wings; then the howling, hellish but half-human; then their talons grappling at our hair, out limbs, anything on which they might gain purchase. One caught hold of a terrified cat and began to devour it in mid-air. so that its blood rained down on us through the darkness. Some women screamed, but their screams were as nothing to the cries of the harpies as their feeding frenzy grew. As it grew, so did the stench. None of us could resist his stomach’s reflex to convulse and cramp and spew, and when that reflex brought us to our knees, the harpies would pounce, driving their talons into the flesh of shoulder, scalp, or face, trying to rip away morsels of flesh small enough to swallow. If they had been equipped with beaks and gullets like the sea-vultures they otherwise resembled, they would have made short work of us, but their mouths were of merely human size; their faces the faces of human women, albeit transfigured by hate and rage.

Two of the harpies had grabbed our Toscanini by his ankles and were lifting him, upside down, off the deck. He’d caught hold of the rail and was trying to shake off his attackers by flailing his legs, but to little avail. The two bird-women had the strength of little helicopters. And now they were joined by a third, who’d lighted on the deck beneath her victim’s inverted body and was gnawing at his knuckles like an ear of corn.

A short bronze sword clattered across the boards of the deck toward me, as though of its own volition. I heard Cassandra’s voice: “Kill them!”

The sword surprised me by its weight, but its haft seemed tailored to my hand. I struck the kneeling harpy’s metal wing with a harsh clang of bronze on bronze. The creature left off her savage meal and twisted round, baring viperish teeth in a grin of menace.

I ignored her and struck at the taloned foot of the harpy just above me. The lopped-off limb still grappled Toscanini’s ankle, but the wounded harpy screamed and beat its metal wings, wobbling in the air like a damaged aircraft. I tried to strike the other harpy, but it flew off with a squawk of protest, letting Toscanini drop to the deck with a thud. He lay there dazed beside the first harpy I had struck, whose left wing, half-detached from her shoulder-blade, would lift and drop, lift and drop, as though in an unconscious plea for sympathy.

I dealt the coup-de-grace, and with the death of one of its number the whole sorry flock of them flew off with the sound of an avalanche of empty garbage cans down a hillside in hell. Almost as fast as the harpies went away, the awful stench departed too.

Part Thirteen

The next day as rosy-fingered dawn was adjusting the clouds arrayed on the eastern horizon, Cassandra appeared with a flask of wine and her hair coifed in

an artful ziggurat of braids worthy of a print by M.C. Escher. “Here,” she said, stooping so that I could take the wine without raising myself from the deck on which I had simply conked out after our battle with the harpies.

“I have good news and still better news. Which do you want to hear first?”

“You are trying to deceive me. What is the bad news?”

“The bad news is that Agamemnon has a toothache that will not go away, and that the harpies carried off our last two goats. The good news is—’” She gestured to an attendant to present me with—Ta da!—a sword, the same I’d used to the night before, the harpies’ amber blood still thick upon the blade like gobs of ear-wax on a Q-Tip. “—you are now officially a warrior in the Achaean army. Isn’t that wonderful? Agamemnon, despite his toothache is feeling a kingly munificence, and so this sword, with a ruby somewhere on the hilt if you look closely and which I filched from his own scabbard last night, is now officially yours. (Until your death; then it reverts to the royal treasury.) Congratulations!”

“Thanks. Is there a title that comes with it? Am I Sir Tom now? Or a salary?”

“Why must you always be so sarcastic? Isn’t it enough that you should be a warrior in ancient Greece? But if it means so much to you—all right: Sir Tom! Satisfied?”

“So what is the news that’s still better?”

“You have made yourself a friend for life. That fellow whose life you saved last night, the one who sits with the cats waving a stick, insists that you come to him (he’s thrown out his back and can’t come to you) so that me may thank you properly.”

I followed Cassandra down the scuttle into the hold, where Toscanini sat waving his baton and muttering quietly. As we approached, he set down his baton and stilled the slow tick-tocking of his head. “Princess! Honored Sir! Greetings!”

“And greetings to you. My name is Tom. Have you a name by which we can address you?”

“Yes, and it is no riddle. Luckily for me, if I am to be with Tom Riddle-Solver. With Tom, Foe of Winged Women, which is another worthy epithet. The Tom to whom I am so much beholden, for I dread to think what would have become of me if those creatures had carried me off to their noisome nest. Had that happened I should not have been able to tell you who I am: Homer, of the Golden Bough.” He held up his baton, lest there be any doubt as to his meaning.

I was more amazed than if I’d met a cyclops or the Queen of the fairies. Homer was a real person, a figure from history, not a wraith from Greek mythology.

“You seem surprised, Honored Sir. My fame is known to you?”

“Oh, very much. And I am indeed surprised to find you here, upon the Proteus.”

“How better to know the men—and women—” A nod toward Cassandra. “—of whom I write than to make their acquaintance? But time flies; we must fly with it, as the eagle rides the wind.

“So, enough for now of these pleasantries. Before all else I must acknowledge the debt that is owed. May I, O Savior of Calliope’s servant, she of the pencil and wax tablet, Muse of epic poetry, be allowed the use of your blade?”

I offered him the sword Cassandra had just given me; he grasped it in his left hand, then grasped my freed right hand with his. “Now, by the lyre of Apollo, let us twain be—” With a single decisive swipe of the sword he made an incision down my forearm and up along his own. Two red lines of blood formed, growing darker as the blood welled up and beaded and rolled down and around our wrists. “—blood brothers!”

He bent forward to kiss the blood braceleting my wrist, then that around his own. Setting the sword aside and grasping my elbow, he made the two open wounds meet in their own kiss.

He smiled with blood-stained lips. “Now you must say it too: By the lyre of Apollo.”

“By the lyre of Apollo.”

“So.” He released his grip. “As much as if we’d dwelt in the same womb together, we are brothers.”

Long years before, when I was 25, in Mexico, in a town between two volcanoes, a similar scene had taken place. I’d been a guest at the Sunday dinner of my landlady’s extended family. Her teenage grandson in a burst of drunken camaraderie had removed a rusty razor blade from his wallet and proposed that we become blood brothers. I demurred; the men laughed; the ladies went into a flutter of reprobation; the rite was not consummated. But this time I was not allowed to fink out, I had become the blood brother of the greatest of all the Greek poets! Dante had had his Virgil, but I had Homer. The thought of it still knocks me out.

Part Fourteen

“Why didn’t you tell me earlier that Homer was among us, on this ship! My God—Homer! Some kind of seeress you are.”

“I knew the fellow as a bard, of course,” Cassandra answered. “The Aegean is full of them. Each island has its own, just as it has its own peculiar accent. You say thalassos and I say thanatos. And Agamemnon collects bards—poets, as you style them—the way another king might collect sculptors, or the way his brother collects dancers. And by the way, if we ever set foot on Spartan soil, you must teach the girls of Menelaus the basics of the samba. It is such a gratifying dance.”

“You’re avoiding the question.”

“Of Homer? I didn’t know he was destined to be of any importance. I didn’t think to look into his future. The future of Troy, or of some great king, those are matters of some import. But the future of epic poetry? Be reasonable, Tom.”

“But surely now that we know who he is, and what he will become, you realize his importance.”

“I’ll take your word in the matter, Tom. As to his poetry, I’m sure he’ll be happy to recite any amount of the stuff to you. They go on for hours at their festivals, waving their wands and waggling their heads and strumming their lyres. I saw enough of that as a child to last a lifetime. But if he does recite his stuff, he will expect a pourboire, you know. Poetry is never free.”

“Not even among fellow poets?”

“Not then especially, I would think. Who is more likely to steal your words. But I am forgetting—you are his blood-brother now. For you he will have to make an exception.”

I could not put the question to him at once, since the crew was ashore on a raiding expedition to replace what the ship had lost to the harpies and just generally to stock up on meat and dairy. When they got back and we’d all sated ourselves on the spoils of their piracy, I suggested to Homer that we retire to our usual nook forward on the deck and recite some of our poems to each other. He agreed, on condition I go first.

Cassandra tried to wiggle free, saying that though she loved poetry above all else, it was too soon after dinner.

“Oh please, dear Princess,” Homer begged, already shifting into high poetic gear. “A woman’s presence makes the poet’s honey sweeter, and that is still more true when the woman is as beautiful as thou.”

That thou did it. Cassandra sighed her acquiescence and we settled down among the basking cats. I pressed an imaginary lyre against my forehead and furrowed my brow as I thought a proper poet might. I’d never memorized my own poetry. Writing had been invented to obviate such a chore. But back in high school I had committed yards of the Rubaiyat to memory.

“Awake! [I began] for Morning in the Bowl of Night

Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight:

And Lo! the Hunter of the East has caught

The Sultan’s Turret in a Noose of Light.”

It goes on, and I went on with it, till even Edward Fitzgerald would have been gorged. Cassandra professed to be thrilled, while Homer obviously had divided feelings: hate and love. He hated the so unGreek iambic meter and surfeit of rhyme; but he loved the way almost every line seemed to come from some platonic Bartlett’s, one familiar quotation on the heels of the next. Isn’t that what we all love about the poem?

Now it was Homer’s turn. He cleared his throat and gave a short preface—”You must understand that this is still a work in progress. My hero, Ulysses, has been some time at sea when he comes to the land of the Cimmeria. And there—” Twang! Homer swept his hand across the strings of his lyre, and continued:

“There in a lonely land, and gloomy cells,

The dusky nation of Cimmeria dwells;

The sun ne’er views the’ uncomfortable seats,

When radiant he advances or retreats:

Unhappy race, whom endless night invades,

Clouds the dull air, and wraps them round in shades.

“The ships we moor on these obscure abodes,

Disbark the sheep, an offering to the gods;

And, hellward bending, o’er the beach descry

The dolesome passage to th’ infernal sky.

The victims, vow’d to each Tartarean power,

Eurylochus and Perimedes bore.

Here opened hell; all hell I here implored,

And from the scabbard drew the shining sword—”

“Stop!” Cassandra cried, in her pythoness voice. “That is the answer! Tom saved us last night from those monstrous birds, but, Homer, you have done more! While the blood of Socrates remains unexpiated, this ship will sail under a curse. There is only one way to remove it. And you have shown the way, Homer! There may be more to epic poetry than I ever thought. We must go to Agamemnon now and explain these things to him.

Part Fifteen

Agamemnon.

We would all rather not think of him. The man is the problem of evil personified. A wicked king who was also stupid, venal, self-righteous, and deeply hated by his own people, who, even so, were ready to commit atrocities at his behest if they stood to profit thereby. He was the George Bush of 1100 BC.

Yet there was this difference between Then and Now. The Greeks didn’t think kings or countries should be good. Achaea, as the Greeks spoke of Greece back then, was a loose confederacy of pirate bands marauding whatever coastal settlements seemed ripe for plunder. Troy was only the last and largest such victim whose bones they might pick clean before they were forced to prey upon each other. They were like biker gangs or Islamic nations now.

God went to war against goddess, as Sunni against Shia, or Crips against Bloods. Those engaged in the fighting thought themselves all very noble and heroic. As to what anyone else might think of them, they didn’t give a fuck. Bush is no different, except that he is obliged to issue little hypocrisies from time to time about our peace-loving democracy and the Founding Fathers and Shop at Wal-Mart and Save. For the Greeks it was enough to sacrifice a hecatomb of cattle and (when the ground had soaked up the blood and the gods were no longer thirsty) to have themselves a barbecue.

It was only a matter of poetic justice, then, that Agamemnon was slated to die in just such a scene of carnage as he’d decreed so many times for others. Not such a death as is depicted in Brad Pitt’s Troy, where he is stabbed as part of a mop-up operation at the end of the movie (slain by the slave girl Breseis, who’d suffered abuse from all the Greeks except Brad Pitt). No, Agamemnon would die in a slaughter engineered by the wife who’d stayed home tending shop and nursing her grievances. The deed was scarcely unforeseen. Cassandra had seen it coming a mile away, and she had warned the king, not from any concern for his well-being but because she knew she’d be drowned in the general bloodbath. Agamemnon listened, thought about it—and became furious with a seeress with the ill grace to foresee his doom.

Even so he did not shoot the messenger. He found one pretext after another to delay his homecoming, setting out on a tour of his tributary states or else plundering those who’d failed to fall in line with his original scheme of conquering Troy. There were feasts and conferences and solemn rites, and the time slipped by, just as it had for Ulysses on Calypso’s isle.

How, we may wonder, will George Bush pass his time when his Troy is dis-Troyed and he must retire from the scene of his triumph? Where will he spend his long vacation? Shall I tell you what I have screed of the future on my own empty TV screen? The jeering throngs at the state funeral. The Texas state police circling the stalled cortege. And at dusk, like a display of fireworks, the arcs of the incoming rockets. That was the night the authorities took over all the media. Or should I say “that will be the night”? It’s hard to know what tense is to be used in making prophecies.

Part Sixteen

“Someday, Tom,” Cassandra said, at a much later stage of our voyage, when we were moored in the shadow of Gibraltar, “you will want to unwrite much that you have written.”

“I daresay that’s true of most writers. But, as Edward Fitzgerald wrote in the poem you so much admired: “The Moving Finger writes and, having writ moves on.”

“Perhaps I should have said ‘much that you will have written.’ The thing is, Tom, tyrants are protective of their public image, and they especially resent anyone who predicts their assassination. It can be considered an incitement to the deed.”

“Read what I will have written, Cassandra. I predicted an attack on Bush’s funeral cortege. I didn’t say how he died, or when. He might have died an octogenarian, like Gerald Ford. I can only tell you what I glimpsed, in a prophetic way, on TV.”

“Yes, it’s always a good policy to hedge one’s bets with a bit of fog. That’s why any pythoness will insist that you come into her cave, and then that you inhale the smoke, and share her wine.”

“And her couch?’

“Oh, Tom, you old rascal. But no, of course not. Prophecy is a serious business. That’s why I say again: do not be imprudent in what you write. Do not offend the Agamemnons of this world. And not just him. You insult the high priests in their temples.”

“You mean my play that the Catholic Church tried to evict from the theater in New York City where it was playing?”

“Goodness, Tom, that’s ancient history. Everyone’s forgotten that by now. I mean the terrible things you say about those peace-loving fellow citizens of yours who happen to be Islamic.”

“Peace-loving poppycock! Now it’s you who aren’t being serious.”

Cassandra giggled. (We had been drinking the local vintage.). “They do remind me of some of the Persians I’ve known, even down to their rebarbative and barbarous fashion sense. But I am serious. The most egregious liars are always the most dangerous. They don’t expect to be believed, but they also don’t expect to be called to account for their lies.”

“So how does one deal with such people?”

“As everyone else does. One ignores them. One lets their little border wars go unreported. One invites them to Peace Conferences somewhere deep in the Sudan or the Gobi Desert. One leaves them to their own devices and wishes them every success in killing each other. That’s how civilized people handle such things.”

“I’ll try and remember that.”

“You better, Tom, or you’ll be shot in the back of your head by one of your fabled Uzis. I kid you not. And I’m a seeress. A serious seeress. Now, stop that!” She swatted away my playful fingers.

We made love until Phoebus’ chariot had reached its stable in the Western Ocean. Cassandra was always at her erotic best after she had predicted someone’s violent death.

Part Seventeen

“Agamemnon, please, stop playing checkers for a moment, and pay attention. This concerns the safety of all aboard this ship. Of the whole Achaean navy.”

“Yes, Cassandra, I am listening.” For all that, he didn’t lift his gaze from the intaglio checkerboard. He had two kings; his opponent, young, smug Neoptolemus, had six.

“We are being haunted, Agamemnon. There is a curse upon the ship, and the harpies will keep returning so long as the curse is not expiated. They will hover above us like flies over carrion. The stench will penetrate our clothes and hair and skin. Our food will rot as soon as it is brought aboard. We’ll live like rats.”

“Well then, expatiate whatever it is that someone has done. All that is your department, my good woman. Abra cadaver. Whatever it takes.”

“It is not as simple as that, Sir. There was a murder, as you know. A sailor lad called Socrates—”

“Not so!” put in Neoptolemus. “I was there. The boy failed to answer this stranger’s riddle.” With a wince in my direction. “So his life was forfeit. (As soon this game will be, my Lord, unless Athena herself comes to your rescue.) It was all done by the rules.”

“Yes,” Cassandra agreed impatiently, “but then the fellow returned as a ghost on a later night and begged a boon he felt entitled to—”

“He wanted to suck my cock,” I said in a tone of offended modesty, “but I told him he could not.”

“But then,” Cassandra went on, “it seemed he applied elsewhere and with better success. To this fellow, for instance, your bard, Sir, who, if I am not mistaken, took up Socrates’ offer—”

“You can’t prove that!” said Homer.

“I am not a seeress for nothing. But it wasn’t just this fellow, nor on this ship alone. Ghosts can flit about like gulls. By now there have been many men whom Socrates has serviced: the entire fleet’s infected. And it is the taint of that infection that draws the harpies to our ships. They will return, and in fourfold numbers, and they will bring their pets, weevils and rats and maggots. Their stench bears plagues. And just the horror of them can—” She shook her head to show the frenzy the harpies might induce, dislodging the careful coils of her braids so that they waved about like the snakes of Medusa.

“What is their price then?” Agamemnon demanded.

“Their price, Sir?”

“Everyone has a price. Priam did. He paid for Helen’s abduction with the loss of his life and his city and you. What price do these winged women ask?”

“Something on a par with the price Priam paid, I expect. Your all, whatever that might be.”

“Arms, Sir,” suggested Neoptolemus. “They attacked us without swords and were easily repelled. All these savages are still living in the Stone Age and they will sell their firstborns for a good bronze sword.”

“Wouldn’t they need arms to bear arms?” Homer asked, as much pleased with his wordplay as with the evident merit of his argument.

Before Neoptolemus could get on his high aristocratic horse, there was a whistle from the lookout mounted atop the mast, a signal that the harpies had indeed returned. Soon other lookouts on other ships echoed the same shrill warning. We could hear a tumult of human and animal feet over our heads as the ship’s crew went through their drill, herding our livestock into the larger hold (we were in a compartment reserved for the captain and his officers) and taking refuge there themselves. This was followed by the clang of brazen wings and the snarls and screams of the monstrous women. Though they had human mouths they seemed not to have human speech, but the meaning of their howling was clear as the chant of a troop of soldiers or the baying of a pack of wolves. They wanted blood.

“Who is at the helm?” Agamemnon thought to ask. When there was no reply, he said, “Follow me,” and bounded up the short flight of steps and raised the hatch just enough to expose the talons of one of the harpies clawing to prize open the hatch herself. “You know what you must do. Use your sword!”

“Sir! said Neoptolemus, drawing his sword and extending it in a salute.

I took the hilt of the sword I had brought with me in both my hands and, as a skier hurls himself into the void or a diver springs from the board, I plunged it into my breast.

Part Eighteen

I have a horror of bats. I imagine bats are not much liked by anyone except Count Dracula and his daughters, but my feelings pass beyond aversion, beyond phobia, into the realm of trauma and screaming. I remember the night my mother and her younger sister Marion, both country girls who should have known better, went into hysterics because there was a bat inside the house. They ran about in terror, swatting at the empty air with brooms because they thought the bat would become tangled in their hair!

My fear of bats is even less rational than that. I’m afraid they will grab some soft part of me with their little claws and, having stapled themselves to my flesh, will start gnawing at me. Have you ever looked at a dead bat close up? Its face? So much more fearful than that of any snake or reptile simply because it is mammalian. For other mammals one feels a natural fellowship. Groundhogs and bunnies, even bears and wolves, especially when they’re young, can come across as genuinely cute. But bats are hideous at any age.

And the horror I feel for harpies is one step beyond my horror of bats. Like Dracula they are death in an animate form, with the further transcendental awfulness that they can fly. Their cousins, the Gorgons, are credited with a power that even the harpies didn’t possess: if you so much as looked at them you’d be turned to stone.

That was how the harpies affected me. Their squinting eyes and squirmy lips parting to reveal those nightmare teeth: a human face but with the humanity subtracted and only a malignant hunger left. Dante had them nesting in his wood of suicides, emblems of a despair that feeds on the pain of others. His harpies snap off branches from that trees that had been men, men who had killed themselves, and from the broken branches, along with the dark sap that oozes out, the suicides whisper their doleful tales.

But bats, and the harpies that attacked the Proteus, are even worse than that. They are in their very nature abominations. To see them, even to know that they exist anywhere at all, is to despair.

And that is why I had to kill myself that day when I saw the creature’s talons scrabbling at the opening hatch.

Part Ninteen

But—some readers will be thinking—you are writing this, so it can’t be that you are dead. Logically you could not have killed yourself. True enough. At the last moment the fatal thrust was deflected by a friend’s hand. But this white cicatrix above my left tit shows how very nearly I succeeded at my deplorable task.

It was my blood-brother Homer who stayed my hand and saved my life. At the same moment he was stricken blind. Was it a punishment exacted by some Greek god who’d taken an extreme dislike to me and every friend I had, or a mere coincidence? Neither, in fact. The pestilent smear of harpy blood that had made me mad had acted on Home in another way. The blood visible on the blade of the sword that was used to cut our forearms had worked its ill on both of us like an AIDs-infected syringe.

It was Cassandra who’d put two and two together and deduced a single cause for our two disorders. For me there would be a long-term benefit from my brief bout with supreme despair. I had been inoculated against any recurrence, as those who’d once come down with chicken pox are impervious to it thereafter. But Homer enjoyed no such incidental benefit. He would be blind for the rest of his long life. For him, therefore, there’d be no benefit from Calliope’s emblematic wax tablet and pencil. As an artist he would always be slave to the mother of the Muses, Memory.

But these developments were still in the womb of time, and we were stuck in the muck and hugger-mugger of the present. Once Cassandra had ascertained that my chest wound had been superficial, I had to follow Agamemnon and Neoptolemus to the upper deck and join battle once again with the screeching flock of harpies. Once one had overcome one’s gag reflex it was an unequal combat. As Homer had remarked, the harpies had wings but no arms. Fighting them was like contending against an army of emus or ostriches. Their wings might be armored, but their breasts and necks and grotesque faces were unprotected. Our swords worked like scythes in a field of wheat.

Afterwards Agamemnon set the crew to the task of heaving the bodies of the slain into the sea with a stern injunction not, not, not to let the least drop of their blood get on their clothes or skin, either as they disposed of the dead or when they swabbed the deck.

We repaired once more below, where Agamemnon was no longer so cavalier

about the need for us to lift the curse that plagued the ship. To this question Cassandra already had conceived a solution: “A pious prayer or the sacrifice of a pair of doves will not be enough. The homecoming of Ulysses. (It’s a fine poem but still with a few rough edges, which I’m sure he will refine.) At one point in his travels Ulysses goes to the very entrance-hall of Hades, and then—

But the bard is here with us; let him tell you what happens himself.”

Homer rose with a woeful smile and turned his head from side to side, uncertain where Agamemnon might be stationed. “Well, my Lord, I haven’t worked out all the details yet. I intend for Ulysses to talk to his mother first. I figure that’s the person anyone would want to talk to at the moment he arrives in hell. And then he’ll talk to the warriors he fought with and who were slain before the walls of Troy. Ajax, for instance.”

“Ah yes, bless his soul. That sounds like a very nice plan for some long poem. But what has it to do with us?”

“Sir,” said Cassandra, “it must be our plan, too. Only Hades can release us from the burden of blood-guilt. So it is in Hades we must plead our case and beg the Kindly Ones, the Furies, for their mercy. We must go to hell!”

Part Twenty

Nothing speaks of the past, of History with its dates and reigns and battles, inaugurations and abdications, so eloquently as a walk though the ruins of a city wrecked beyond redemption.

“Look on my works, ye mighty,” and all that. And Cnossus, where I now found myself, was the first world-class ruined city. Babel might claim the honor, but Babel was only a myth. Cnossos had really existed, a city on a par with any of its time, with a cultural life—theaters, restaurants, brothels—profitable enough to provide a living for thousands of urban parasites: scions of wealth, scam artists, whores, financiers, eunuchs in gold-plated manacles, litter-bearers, the warp and woof of a city’s pullulating life.

All that was gone by the time the Proteus moored at a safe distance from its crumbling docks. First there had been the earthquake. No knowing what that would have registered on the Richter scale, but it had done a thorough job, and when the survivors tried to rebuild, they had had no more success than the citizens of New Orleans or Los Angeles. The shattered city was an easy target for the looters and marauders of the entire Eastern Mediterranean, who stole the very cups and bowls of the desperate people who first had squatted in whatever domestic interiors the earthquake had left intact. Their corpses would be the legacy of the children of those vultures who had feasted on the victims of the quake.

Most ships ceased to visit the island, all but the scuzziest bucaneers, the indigents and shopping bag ladies of the open seas. The whole of Crete had long since been denuded of any useful timber; its soil was poor; its vineyards razed by those who could find no other target for their baffled greed—the same fate that would befall the orchards and farmlands of southern and central California. Now Cnossos was the last refuge of the harpies, themselves a dying breed, as New Orleans would become the Venice of American crime, a city officially outside the aegis of the law.

Harpies, like vampires, are nocturnal beasts, so it was possible to walk the city’s ruined streets by day with less sense of danger than if one were strolling through Berlin or Amsterdam. There was not a living mugger left; no window to act as a mask for ill-intending eyes. Only lizards scuttling about the rubble, and gulls overhead. Not even vultures any more; their food was gone.

That was our quest, of course, we of the Proteus. We needed to stock up for the

westward voyage ahead of us, and though Cnossos lacked markets as such, its harbor abounded in fish, its neighboring shores in goats (the schmoos of the Aegean), and streams of fresh water flowed down from a nearby mountain. Mount Ida? Whatever— it was potable. Wine there was none, and the crew grumbled, for what kind of shore leave doesn’t moisten the tongue? But there was the hope that trading vessels might stop in the harbor on their way south to Egypt, and they might have wine and oil to trade. We had only our women to offer them, but these were women who could perform the samba and were, most of them, still capable of child-bearing. Just one might be worth a tun of the best red retsina.

One half of the crew spent each day foraging; the other half remained aboard the ships as watchdogs and handicraftsmen, turning tortoise shells into musical instruments suitable for trade. Cassandra and I went about on our own, sifting through the better sort of ruins, on the lookout for objects of magical or esthetic virtu, as children pick over a beach for shells and bottle glass.

The weather, before the blaze of noon, was pleasant to tolerable. Except for the lurking presence of the harpies, our life was free of fear.

Yet Cassandra was unhappy. In a prior age, as long ago as America is now from the days of its Pilgrim Fathers, Troy had been a colony of Crete. Her oldest gods were Cretan gods; the oldest bric-a-brac in Troy’s flea markets had borne the marks of Cretan potters. So when Cassandra looked at the ruins of Cnossos she saw as well the ruins of Troy as they would appear when two hundred years of rain had rinsed away the soot and ashes of war, and acanthus had sprung up to make the rubble picturesque.

“So sad, isn’t it?” she commented in a sorrowing, mater-dolorosa tone. “All the life that lived here once, generation upon generation, all wiped away. As, you have told me, all the world will be some day.”

“Very sad,” I agreed. “But you know the saying: Gather ye rosebuds while ye may.”

“Do you have that saying too? It’s very true. Very true. Not that there are many roses around here, or flowers of whatever sort. Cnossos seems to have been built on rocks and sand.”

“Like the cities of our own South-west. You wouldn’t think it to look at them now, but our Los Angeles and San Diego and perhaps as many as a thousand suburbs were once accounted garden spots—like Cnossos. Legions of illegal laborers were paid slave wages to keep them looking like Elysium.”

“I wish my poor father could have found such laborers. He spent a fortune on his gardeners. Slaves they may have been, but they were not cheap.” She sighed. “Ah, but all that is gone. With the wind! Troy has become another Cnossos.”

We plowed ahead, poking at anything that glinted of promise amid the debris, Cassandra with a long shepherd crook, which she claimed to have powers as a divining rod; I with my bronze sword, which I had adapted with a bit of lathing for use as a walking stick.

“Look there,” said Cassandra, pointing with her crook. “Down in that little glen ahead. An entire temple, still intact!”

To call it a temple was an exaggeration. A fane, perhaps, or at most a tempietto. But its full complement of six columns was still upright and supported a circular frieze if not a roof. We headed toward it with a single, greedy impulse. There if anywhere we would find plunder worth the having.

What we found within was not what we had hoped.

“What is it?” Cassandra asked. (She had been hoping for a baby. That’s what all women of olden days hoped for. They lived to celebrate fertility rites and give suck.)

“It is a recliner. A kind of chair that changes its shape according to your mood. You can sit up straight if you want to read or to talk with people. It will tilt back if you want to watch tv, or it will tilt even further back if you want to take a nap. I think I’d tilted it all the way back just before you brought me here, to ancient Greece.”

She sighed. “And it is also a symbol, I suppose.”

“Of the End. Yes, I guess it is. I’m sorry. I was looking forward to more adventures. It seemed we’d just got started.”

“Well, that is the way of adventures, Tom. One starts having an adventure, or

a civilization, then wham, the bottom drops out. For me all Troy was an adventure that came to an end. Poor Hector! Poor Astyanix.”

“Poor you.”

“Poor me, too, but for a seeress it’s different. The End is always there before us. I was looking forward to a westward voyage.”

“And so was I. I even thought we’d reach Gibraltar. That’s to say, the Pillars of Hercules. I thought we might go farther and pre-discover America.”

She laughed. “Oh, you and your America! I never believed half of all those tales of yours. It’s easy to make up stories about the end of a world that is only a dream-world. The World Trade Center! Just another name for the Tower of Babel, which we both know to be a myth. Perhaps I am a myth, and Agamemnon another. Poor fellow, he’s actually eager to get back to that harpy of a wife Clytemnestra.”

“You haven’t told him what he can expect from his lady wife?”

“I’ve thrown out hints, and was almost thrown overboard myself as a result. No, he won’t hear anything against her.”

“And you’re not afraid to go back with him?”

“Are you afraid to return to your America? Isn’t there a kind of morbid interest in watching the inevitable unfold? I thought so when I saw them trundling that giant wooden horse into the city. But I don’t worry about a heartless bastard like you. You’ll survive. So, have a seat, Sir. And good-bye.”

She walked off without a backward look.

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