Up and down the beach, men were gathered in groups, some sleeping, some talking, some with girls. Somewhere Odysseus was talking to a blind man.
As they left the sand and began to walk along the path to the village, Echion caught a glimpse of their craft: a wooden horse with its head poking out above the strange trees. It looked sad and lonely, like some creature lost in a dream.
5.
It is dark in Homer’s room and the inside of the wooden horse is like a huge barn in midsummer. The heat is stifling. The horse was not designed for the tropics and the air is heavy with the smell of the men who left it this morning: it seems to ooze from the wood as it exhales in the daytime what it has inhaled in the night.
But now Echion is here. He is puzzled and guilty to find himself doing this, but he is reading Odysseus’s papers. The papers he had always assumed to be navigation charts and calculations now reveal themselves to be merely pages of verse. Why should Odysseus spend so many hours reading these verses as if they were maps or instructions? Perhaps Echion has found the wrong thing. Perhaps he is mistaken.
His dark eyes scan the pages hurriedly, and then a little more slowly, and then very slowly indeed.
Because Echion has just stepped inside the blueprints for his own bad dreams.
Each page of verse has a thick line drawn through it diagonally, as if it were some kind of mistake, but the words on these pages describe, in more detail than Echion had remembered, the details of his bad dreams. The verse records the incident with the female warriors, tells how Odysseus was set afire by mechanical monsters, how Diomedes was castrated and then decapitated. The verse contains more battles than a man could fight if he lived for a hundred years and Echion is in every one. As he reads them he feels a great weariness, the weariness he has been trying to deny, sweep over him. His dark eyes fill with huge tears as he reads of the pain and death of his dearest friends. The pages seem cruel and hard to him, the work of merciless gods who have been playing with his life. The handwriting sweeps on and on, seemingly never ending. He begins to skip through the thousands of pages until he comes, at last, to those at the end. These have not been crossed out.
These later pages appear more normal. There are no monsters. Instead they talk about a city called Troy and a wooden horse and a battle in which thirty men will fight against the Trojans, assisted by others who will come in ships. There is a roughness about the verse, as if it were not quite finalized. Small alterations have already been made. Words have been crossed out and not replaced. Echion reads this with relief and then his eye catches his own name near the bottom of a page.
He reads quickly and then, suddenly, lets out a great bellow of rage.
The verse tells how Echion is so eager for battle that he is the first to emerge from the horse at Troy. He is so keen that he falls and breaks his neck. Echion doesn’t know what he has stumbled into. He knows only that he feels a greater rage than he has ever felt in his life. Someone is playing tricks with him. His whole life has been controlled by some evil practical joker who has manipulated him, tortured him, and killed him a thousand times. And now it seems that they wish to kill him one more time.
“The bastards.” He shouts the word. He doesn’t know who he shouts it at. Perhaps at Odysseus. He doesn’t know who it is.
The wooden horse now seems to him to be a terrible jail, a torture chamber from which he must escape before this next death can take place. He has no possessions. There is nothing to delay him. He will disappear for ever into the depths of this land. He would rather spend his life amongst strangers than be subjected to one more death.
He turns from the pages of verse with his jaw set hard and finds himself face to face with a frail old blind man with a pampered face. He has never seen him before. He dislikes him instantly.
“Excuse me,” says the blind man, “I’m blind. I can’t see.”
Echion remains still and doesn’t make a sound. He watches the blind man like a cat watching a snake.
“Put my hand on your shoulder.”
The old man looks so frail that Echion takes the hand and lays it on his shoulder. The hand is small and soft and his shoulder is hard and heavy. With his heart beating hard Echion begins to walk towards the trapdoor.
“Perhaps,” says the blind man, “it might be better to stay.”
“I’m going.”
“You are going … to Troy,” the blind man smiles. His hand is like a vice on Echion’s shoulder. Echion feels as if the marrow has been sucked from his bones. He is like a blown-out candle. He stands helplessly and looks at the rose petal mouth of this man. Finally he manages to speak. He says, “I read what Odysseus wrote.”
“My name is Homer,” says the blind man, “and you read what I told Odysseus to write and you read it because I permitted you to. This will be the last time for you. The other times were mistakes. But this business in Troy is what I needed you for, I need you to fall from the horse,” the poet says, “for the irony.”
Homer leads Echion to a place by the door where he ties his hands with leather thongs and binds them to a post. Echion doesn’t protest. He feels like an ox in a slaughter yard. The blind man ties on a gag to stop him bellowing.
6.
When the night came his companions returned to the horse to sleep. They had been told some story about Echion and no one, not even Diomedes, looked his way. It was as if he were invisible, already dead and buried in the pages of Homer’s verse.
When they had all drunk their wine Odysseus explained the nature of the battle to be fought the next day. He said nothing of how the wooden horse was to be moved to Troy. He mentioned “allies” and once talked of a “powerful friend”. The men’s minds, accustomed to living on the waves of Homer’s fevers, accepted all this without question and retired to bed early to be ready for tomorrow’s battle.
Echion lay in the dark and waited for Diomedes, but when he didn’t come to release him he began to work quietly on his leather bindings, gnawing on them with his broken teeth until his gums bled and his mouth was full of the sticky juices of his veins.
Around him the horse groaned and creaked like a ship weathering a heavy sea. Outside he fancied he could hear voices and hammering and the crash of masonry. His jaws ached and his arms twitched and it wasn’t until early morning that his bindings were finally undone.
He crept stiffly to the door and lowered the great trapdoor. The rope ladder flopped down in the dark. His arms were stiff and his hands so cramped that he could barely clench them. His head was strange from lack of sleep and as he lowered himself onto the first rung he was overcome with giddiness.
His foot slipped on the second rung, and he fell.
In the grey hours before dawn a giant wooden horse could be seen enclosed by the walls of Troy. The first Greeks who descended the rope ladder found Echion already there. He was lying on the dusty ground with his neck broken.
7.
Echion hadn’t died immediately. He had written some words in the fine clay dust with a bleeding finger. The words were as follows:
“KILL THE PIG TYRANT HOMER WHO OPPRESSES US ALL.”
But the words were erased by the blind feet of his companions as the whole incident concerning Echion was later erased by Homer, who no longer found the incident interesting enough to tell.
Withdrawal
1.
The front room of Eddie Rayner’s shop is like many other shops in High Street. It’s busy on Saturdays and quiet for the rest of the week. The shops around him sell the same things he sells: stripped pine furniture, bentwood chairs, old advertising signs, blue and white china, and odds and ends like butter churns and stained-glass windows. The prices are high and the work isn’t too hard. On weekdays the second-hand dealers stand in the street, chatting about prices and the pieces they’ve picked up at the auctions.