The Eighth Arrow Read online

  THE EIGHTH ARROW

  J. AUGUSTINE WETTA, O.S.B.

  THE EIGHTH ARROW

  Odysseus in the Underworld

  A NOVEL

  IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO

  Cover art and design by John Herreid

  Frontispiece: Map of Hell © 2018 by Victor Masetti

  © 2018 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco

  All rights reserved

  ISBN 978-1-62164-220-6 (PB)

  ISBN 978-1-64229-053-0 (EB)

  Library of Congress Control Number 2018931260

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Philip and Jude Pullman

  in gratitude for a cup of cold water—and a dandelion cordial

  Contents

  A Disclaimer

  Book I: Realm of the Wolf

  1. Out of the Depths

  2. Five Sacred Laws

  3. Our First Battle

  4. Our Guide to the Underworld

  5. One Disappointment after Another

  6. Charon

  7. The First Arrow

  8. The Fortress

  9. A Long Walk

  10. Revelation

  11. The Second Arrow

  12. Disappointment

  13. Storm

  14. Helen of Troy

  15. The Third Arrow

  16. A Parting of Ways

  17. Edge of the Abyss

  18. Demons of a Different Sort

  19. A Light in the Darkness

  20. A Race

  21. A Rude Awakening

  22. Scars

  23. The Fourth Arrow

  24. Ignatius

  Book II: Realm of the Lion

  1. Memories, Dreams, Regrets

  2. Gates of Fire

  3. An Old Acquaintance

  4. The Sons of Centauros

  5. A Map of Hades

  6. An Attempt at Eloquence

  7. The Fifth Arrow

  8. Dogs

  9. The Son of Telemon

  10. Paths Converge

  11. Onward

  12. Man and Dog

  13. A Bargain Struck

  Book III: Realm of the Leopard

  1. Lower Hell

  2. We are pursued

  3. The Sixth Arrow

  4. Devils with Wings

  5. Distractions

  6. Two Paths Diverge

  7. Thieves

  8. Liars

  9. A Mountain in the Mist

  10. The Seventh Arrow

  11. Expecting Someone Taller

  12. Lake Cocytus

  13. Hades

  14. The Tables Turn

  15. The Tables Turn Again

  16. The Enemy

  17. The Battle of Lake Cocytus

  18. Last Hope

  19. The Aftermath

  20. The Eighth Arrow

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Glossary

  Notes

  More from Ignatius Press

  A Disclaimer

  ALLOW ME TO set the record straight: I was never in Hell. Never been there—not even for a visit. It’s true that I did terrible things while I was alive. I was a murderer, a thief, an adulterer, and above all, a liar. But God’s grace reaches all people, and His providence embraces all. Though unworthy, I was judged worthy. Pardoned. Justified. Redeemed. Ransomed.

  Unaware of this, Dante Alighieri (God love him!) condemned me to his fictional Inferno, and there have I dwelt ever since, writhing in fictional flame for centuries. And I’m not the only one. Poor Pope Celestine V—Saint Celestine!—also languishes in Dante’s Hell, to say nothing of the billions of souls trapped in his fictional Limbo. Sure, it’s only fiction. Fictional suffering. A fictional Odysseus writhes and gnashes his teeth amid fictional flames. Mere fiction. But flames nonetheless. You can see how it might bother me.

  It doesn’t. Nothing bothers me now. Nonetheless, you can see how it might. And so you will understand my eagerness to free my fictional self, and all those blameless others condemned by Dante’s clerical error. Getting us out will take some work, but I can have a bit of fun while I’m at it. After all, I too am a teller of tales. If Dante’s imagination can imprison me, surely my own imagination will break me out.

  BOOK I

  REALM OF THE WOLF

  Bring me my bow of burning gold!

  Bring me my arrows of desire!

  —William Blake, “Jerusalem”

  CHAPTER 1

  OUT OF THE DEPTHS

  IF YOU’VE EVER passed your finger through a flame, then you know what I’m talking about. There is this awful fascination that compels you to hold your finger in that flame a moment longer. And perhaps a moment longer still. And who does not wonder, when the stakes are high enough, how long he can hold it there before the pain overwhelms him?

  Imagine, then, what it would be like to hold your finger over a flame until the fire burned through. That is what I did for three thousand years. Except that it wasn’t merely my hand that burned—it was my whole body and my soul too, surrounded by oceans of emptiness. Can you imagine such suffering? Yet of my own free will, I remained encased in fire. For three thousand years, I burned in the eighth circle of Hell among liars, frauds, and sowers of discord; and if there was comfort for me in that sea of pain, it was this: that my friend Diomedes remained there with me, the two of us imprisoned in a single flame.

  I am Odysseus, Sacker of Cities, Son of Laertes, Raider of Troy, Blinder of the Cyclops, Teller of Tales, Man of Many Faces. Sing, heavenly Muse, the last adventure of flame-tossed Odysseus.

  Tedium. Tedium. Emptiness and grief. The dull, incessant groan of countless souls. The hiss of flame on flesh. Looking beyond the smoke and fire, I saw only a ragged wall of blackened stone. Looking within myself, I saw only rage and despair. There was no sun to mark the days, no star to measure the nights, but only a sort of visible darkness. One year dissolved into a thousand. Time turned in on itself like a snake eating its tail. A thousand years passed, and two thousand more.

  Then a voice: “You there—you two, who burn together, speak. Tell us who you are and how you died.”

  I opened my eyes and squinted through the fire. The owner of the voice was very tall, and he stood with his chin raised, looking down his long nose at us like someone with a secret. A heavy gray cloak hung from his shoulders.

  Beside me, Diomedes stirred. “I don’t like him.” It was the first time he had spoken in a thousand years, and already he was grumbling. Even so, I had to agree. The stranger had a precious, pampered look—the pale skin and the thin, soft hands of a man who spent his time reclining in the shade with a quill and parchment. Worse still, his voice had a faintly Trojan ring—a languid rolling of the tongue between syllables that tainted every word with a sort of gargle. But after three millennia of boredom, anything is a relief.

  “I am Odysseus, King of Ithaca. And this blistered mess to my left is brave Diomedes, Conqueror of Thebes.”

  Diomedes growled.

  “Speak to us, then, Odysseus of Ithaca,” said the tall stranger, “for I am Publius Vergilius Maro, singer of tales. With me walks the poet Dante of the Alighieri.” Cowering behind him, clinging to his robes was a dwarfish, pudgy, hook-nosed man. He reminded me of a parrot, the way he cringed and ducked, snapping his head to and fro.

  “It was my curiosity that killed me,” I answered. “Had to see the far ends of the earth. Fell right off the edge and landed here.” It was mostly truth, and it seemed to satisfy the visitor, who touched his thumb to his chin, nodded twice, whispered something to his charge, then led him away by the arm.

  And that was that. All might have returned to tedium and despair had I not noticed the footprints. The stranger—not the tall one,
but the pudgy one named Dante—had left a trail in the soot as he walked. In Hades, where the only things of substance are the walls, a footprint is a sign of life. I looked at those footprints, and something surfaced in my soul—a bright spring of hope, like water from a rock—and lifting my arms to Heaven, I cried out the first prayer that Hell had ever heard: “Athena, goddess of the glowing smile, ancient patroness of Greece, bright-eyed virgin whom my people call Parthenos, if ever you have heard my prayers, hear me now. In life, you stood beside me. So now in death, stand by me once more. Rescue me from this prison.”

  I had no sooner finished my prayer than the flame died away, and calling to me from the very place I had seen the poet stand was a woman, robed in stars. I might have expected her to descend from the heavens on a cloud or burst forth in a flash of light, but no, she was simply there—as though she had been waiting for me all along and I hadn’t noticed. She was impossibly tall, carried the golden aegis, the storm shield of Zeus in her left hand, and wore a shining, silver helmet low upon her head, so that, although I recognized her at once, I couldn’t quite see her face. Timid as fawns at a stream, Diomedes and I crept forward from the fire into her shining presence.

  “Odysseus.” Her voice rang clear as a bell on a cold night. “You called. I have come.” Each word was a song. “Tell me, though, why have you waited so long to invoke my assistance?”

  That was a question I couldn’t answer. The simple truth is, I have always been a proud and stubborn man. I would no sooner have admitted my powerlessness than lost my shield in battle. And to ask forgiveness, even of a god, was as foreign to me as running from a fight. O moi ego! What a fool I was, no less in death than in life!

  “And you, Diomedes,” she said, turning to my friend, who lay face down beside me, his blond hair spread in the ash like a dirty crown, “have you no words of your own?”

  Diomedes didn’t answer. He didn’t even raise his eyes. He was no coward, but he knew when to hold his tongue.

  I’ve never known when to hold my tongue, so I said, “Virgin Goddess, forgive us. You know everything already, so you must know that we have always had more courage than wisdom. Release us from this prison, and we will offer you a hundred bulls, pour out rich, honeyed wine at your temple, and dust the fires of your altar with barley.”

  She looked down at me, the plume of her helm shaking. “You used your wit as a weapon, Odysseus. You squandered your talent among brutes like Agamemnon and Achilles. And the worst of it, you son of Laertes, is that you knew better. Therefore it is fitting that you should find yourself in this prison.”

  “Gentle Virgin,” I answered, “there was an age when you smiled on the men of Achaea. Will you not smile on us once more? I was clever and quick. Diomedes was brave and strong. But look at us now, broken and bowed before you. If we wasted those gifts in life, give us one last chance to serve you with honor. Is there not some deed, some sacrifice, some work of atonement?”

  The goddess looked away over the sea of fire and nodded. “There is perhaps.”

  Diomedes lifted his head.

  I held my breath.

  “A general is needed,” she said, “a leader of men who knows the geography of Hell. We need a man who can be gentle as a dove and shrewd as a snake.”

  “That settles it,” I said, rising on hands and knees. “Here I am. I am a general. Choose me. Choose me!” I must have looked rather doglike.

  The goddess laughed, her gray eyes glittering from the shadows of her helm. “My king has no use for a lying, thieving, adulterous, idolatrous crook such as you.”

  Those words stung, and all the more because they were true. There wasn’t much in the realm of vice that I hadn’t experienced firsthand. I bowed my head. For the first time in my existence, I was too ashamed to speak.

  “If you are to be worthy of my service,” she continued, casting her eyes from me to Diomedes, “you must prove yourselves. Before you can enter the land of the living, you must bear witness to the nine rings of torment and learn the limits of evil. This you must do, my sons, because, as you stand before me now, the geography of Hades is the geography of your souls.”

  Silence. I knew well—and was learning better by the second—that there is no way to justify oneself before a god. One might as well uproot a mountain or empty the sea with a shell.

  The goddess smiled. “No clever retort, Odysseus?” Now her voice was milk and honey. “Very well. Do not lose heart. I would never give you a task you could not complete. I come bearing gifts.”

  With her right hand, she lifted the corner of her cloak, and there at her feet lay a mound of glittering armor: two shining swords, two sets of well-wrought greaves, two leather corselets studded with bronze, two helmets, two shields, and glowing like gold from the furnace, my polished bow. This lay apart from the rest along with a small leather pouch, a coil of rope, and a quiver of arrows.

  “Weapons,” I gasped. “You’ve come to guide us out of Hades.”

  “No,” she said, and now her voice was laced with thunder. “You lied and swindled your way here. Fight your way out.”

  “But Athena,” cried Diomedes, stretching out his hands—man-killing hands, now trembling and streaked with soot—“we don’t even know the way!”

  “Truth at last,” she said. “Stalwart Diomedes, slow to speak and still slower to comprehend. You do not know the way. You do not even know my true name. But now you know your weakness, and that is a good way to begin. With patience and fortitude, you and your companion may yet see the light of Heaven. So here is my counsel to you, Son of Tydeus: prefer your wit to your sword, trust in your armor over your arms, and let mercy triumph over justice. Do this, and you will find your way.”

  Pointing up the cavern wall, she continued. “You will begin at the uppermost ring, where the small-souled chase the wind. There you will see the upper door. But do not dare open it. The weight of the living world would crush you. You will not have the strength until you have descended through all nine rings of Hell and passed through the lower portal. You will not be ready until you have discovered—and used—the eighth arrow. The Authority has willed it. This is to be your purgation and your witness, a fitting and final labor.”

  Then I cried out, “Virgin Goddess, where can we find this Authority? Was it Zeus who consigned us to this prison?”

  But even as I spoke, she vanished, and her voice, trailing on the hot, hopeless wind, whispered back to me, “He of the four-letter name.”

  CHAPTER 2

  FIVE SACRED LAWS

  AND THEN she was gone.

  Diomedes, never one to waste time, was already examining the armor, testing each piece. The man never looked tired or sick. Even now, bent over double and covered in soot, he had the look of a predator—all taut muscle and agility. In Diomedes, weakness just looked like hidden strength. “Odysseus,” he called over his shoulder, “you should see this.” He tossed a helmet at me.

  “I see it.”

  “That’s my helmet,” he said.

  “An astute observer, as always.” I tossed it back at him. Perfect as he was, I always took a certain dull pleasure in making him feel imperfect. “Whose armor were you expecting?”

  He narrowed his green eyes at the helmet, turning it like a bowl of wine. “Here’s the place where Hector bashed me with that rock. And here . . . the mark of Aeneas’ sword. But what is this?” He lifted his breastplate and pointed to a pair of crimson marks gouged into the center. They were set at right angles like a tau. “It’s on yours too.”

  I walked over and crouched beside him. The symbol had also been inscribed on both our shields. “It must stand for something.”

  “Thebes, maybe,” said Diomedes. I watched him run his fingertips over the nicks and dents, the ghost of a smile in his eyes. I liked my armor light and flexible, but he preferred armor of the old style—heavy, angular, and plain. The more beat-up it looked, the more he liked it.

  I took my own breastplate in my hands, weighing the metal. The b
uckles clattered. The leather bindings gave off a familiar odor of tallow and beeswax. Long centuries had passed since I’d handled the grim gear of war, and all at once I felt that familiar rush of sweat and fear. I longed to be encased in bronze, to feel once more that thrill of invulnerability like a crab in its shell, to march with locked shields into the no-man’s-land of dirt and blood, to hear the clattering surge of a thousand shields—the scrape of pike on pike. It came over me like the rush of wine, and for a moment I could almost hear the tramp and cry of my brothers-in-arms.

  You see, Diomedes and I come from Achaea, and Achaea is a land of warriors. Every waking hour is battle, from the screaming moment of birth to the last rattle of breath in the old man’s throat. From the earliest times, Achaeans have fought one enemy or another, and when there were no enemies to fight, we fought among ourselves. A man who died with both eyes and all his fingers we considered fortunate—though none would call him lucky till he was dead. There were those who considered us savages, who looked upon us with fear and contempt. They called us “the Danaans” and told their children that we were lawless brigands. Pirates. Men without honor. But they did not know us. We had our own law and our own standard of honor, which we measured in cattle and bronze. For us, there was no “good” or “evil”. There were only timē and kleos—honor and fame—and these were embodied in five sacred laws:

  Obey the gods.

  Honor your parents.

  Respect your guests.

  Defend your allies.

  Kill your enemies.

  If we kept these laws, we were men. If we surpassed them, we were heroes.

  For the Achaean, therefore, life was ceaseless battle, and the one prize above all others—the only prize worth the fight—was the armor. To lose one’s armor was to lose face in the most fundamental sense, because armor was the physical manifestation of the warrior code—the source of the hero’s identity. To seize another man’s shield was to strip him of that dignity, and to drop one’s own in battle was the ultimate disgrace. I’d watched men throw themselves on their swords for the shame of it. As I left for war, my beloved Penelope would tell me, “Come back with your shield, or come back on it.”