Chapter 15: Homecoming at Last

MY PEOPLE AND I set sail to the south, for I’d decided we had been blown through the gates of the inner sea to the outer sea during our battle with the Scylla. When we got back through that channel, I had a pretty good idea where Greece was. I figured I might as well head there and get the marital confrontation over with. It was only just of me to tell Penelope of Odysseus’s demise and offer the remaining men and those who sailed in the infinity room, an opportunity to return home.

Do you think Poseidon would let it go at that? Not a chance.

Another storm, another shipwreck and I’m on Circe’s Island. Now Circe was a beautiful pig farmer and—wouldn’t you know it—Helios’s daughter. I never thought of pig farming as being the profession suited for a beautiful woman, but she seemed to derive great pleasure from the pigs.

That was the point at which my crew and their women decided to take a permanent powder. They’d apparently worked out whatever differences they had and salvaged all the treasure from the wreckage they could find and took off into the hills. I figured I’d run into them again before long, but they were dead set on being scarce. I bid them good riddance.

That left me to deal with Circe.

I’d actually known a delightful pig farmer. Manannán mac Lir, from whom I got cattle, told me a long story as we sat on the hillside about having once been a pig farmer. He owned a drove of immortal pigs. When they were killed, they resurrected and came back to life. In all but one instance. If they were butchered and eaten, the pigs did not return to life. It reminded me a bit of my monster son. Nonetheless, the gods of that region found out about Mac Lir’s pigs and descended en masse to have a great feast for days on end. When the feast was done, there were no immortal pigs left, but the gods had all gained immortality by eating them.

It didn’t take long for me to discover Circe was also more than a pig farmer. She was a sorceress.

If you are curious about the various words used for workers of magic, perhaps I can help you. I’ve often referred to my maker as a mage or magus. That might not have been a correct term as it is credited to the Zorastrians sometime around the first millennium BCE. In that culture, it simply meant priest of the religion of the Wise Lord. It implied a worker of unnatural acts or miracles. A wizard, however, is derived from the Middle English word for wisdom. A much later term. They were originally known more for divination than magic, but the magic evolved as well. Finally, ‘sorcerer’ referred to one who influenced fate, from a Latin root. So, you see, the terms are all more modern than what I have applied, though mage seems to be the earliest, etymologically speaking.

Who am I to describe language? I just use the words that fit.

However, Circe considered me a sorcerer, too, and I had to ask why that and not some other branch. She said that in a sorcerer (or sorceress), the magical ability is innate rather than studied. We might learn specific techniques or new spells through our reading of scrolls, but our ability was inside us, not based on what we learned.

Circe was a fascinating woman when she wasn’t trying to kill me. I could see a spell spinning out of her hands from a mile away which is about where she started throwing them at me. She was fun. There is something about a dangerous woman that is just too appetizing to pass up. We engaged in a battle of wit and magic that went on for days. Foreplay. That’s all I can call it. I never managed one spell correctly but they all turned out all right. I was just learning to make spells out of nothing. There were a few well-studied spells—like my transformation spell—I had done so frequently, I knew them forward and backward. But even that one could go awry. There was the time I turned myself into...

I shouldn’t get sidetracked when I’m telling a romantic story about doing battle with a sorceress. Gods playing tricks again. But oh, she got hot when she wove spells and brewed potions, and I was not at all above taking advantage of that. We fucked from one end of her island to the other and back again. She was raw passion. She wanted a child and I seriously considered revoking my vow and giving her one. After all, I reasoned, she wasn’t a human woman, but a demigoddess. She should be able to handle a demon child. But then, I thought about there actually being a little me running around somewhere, learning sorcery and potion making at his mother’s knee. That kind of thing will really dull the desire to make babies.

I finally decided it was time for me to get going and so I proposed a feast during which I intended to give her one of her own potions that would make her sleep long enough for me to push the little raft I’d made off her island and into the sea. I butchered a hog and set it to roast for an entire day, turning the spit myself. Late that evening, I brought the feast to her, laced with the potion I had stolen.

“Oh!” she said in surprise as we ate the roast pork. “Laertos tastes divine!”

“Laertos?” I said. “You named the pigs? I once had a sailor named Laertos.”

“Yes. I rounded up all the crew and women from that shipwreck and turned them into pigs,” she yawned. “I seldom keep one more than a year before I butcher it.”

I was horrified. I’d killed and roasted a man, thinking it was a pig. Then I saw Circe grin as I picked up my goblet to wash the taste from my mouth. Something about that grin told me I would end up spitted if I drank from her cup. I started to set it down and Circe gathered herself to throw a spell at me. I threw the drink at her and in her haste and drugged state, she slurred her words, accidentally reversing the transformation spell. I heard the pigs suddenly talking and running for the woods as Circe fell asleep.

I took off as well, reaching my raft and shoving off from the shore. I don’t know what happened to the rest of my crew. I called for them to join me but, of course, they’d just witnessed me take one of their number and roast him, so there was no trust between us. I do hope they survived.

I’ve never had a taste for pork since then.

AND THEN there was Callie. Oh, my, what a girl! There are so many islands in the sea and it seemed I beached my raft on each of them. When I managed to get to her little island, I found a beautiful and sensual woman who sat looking out at the sea, praying to Aphrodite for a lover, even if only for a year. The past few days had been rather peaceful on the raft, and I had a feeling Aphrodite might have been pushing my craft toward this island as the answer to the prayer of one of her devotees.

“Why do you weep, girl?” I asked when I saw her. She stared at me in disbelief and fainted. Being the gallant demon I am, I caught her as she plunged toward the rocks below and scooped her up in my arms—where she woke.

“My prayers have been answered!” she exclaimed.

Whenever I’m the answer to someone’s prayers, you can bet a god or goddess has been interfering. But I really had no urgent need to be anywhere. What crew was left in the infinity room had long since given up ever returning to Ithaca and had found a peaceful seaside paradise where they built a village and were thriving with some of the women brought from Troy by the sailors and some of the priestesses I’d brought from the temple. Most of the children and nurses from the harem had been delivered there as well, much to the delight of the women. Since arriving in the infinity room, they’d ceased aging and even regressed some to an optimum age. Those who had wives in Ithaca had no desire to return to the old women back home. Yes, they were heartless cads. And also highly sexed. For myself, I had Penelope’s image from Odysseus’s memories, but she was his wife, not mine.

Following Callie’s instructions, I carried her to her home where I met her family, such as it was. She lived with an elder brother and his wife and their three children. The wife was pregnant with another. The village in which she lived was isolated and a little inbred. It looked like Callie was doomed to become a lower wife to her brother. Neither of them was looking forward to that.

The people of the village lived a peaceful and pastoral life and most were bored silly. They had regular free sex parties during which they had sex for entertainment and occasionally procreation happened.

Callie was soft and sensual—perhaps not the most beautiful woman in the world, but I’d already had her. It did not take long courting Callie before we were in bed together. That night, I think. We were shown to a little cabin nearby that was empty and from that moment were considered married. She was plush. No bones stuck out in odd places like hips or ribs. She had adequate padding overall to be perfectly delightful to sex. She was phenomenally receptive to making love at any given time and usually twice at a time.

Sinking into her steamy depths was like being welcomed into a volcano of love. And when she erupted, she sprayed her juices everywhere!

I mentioned the village and surrounding area as having regular sex parties. One might think of them as orgies that included everyone in the village. Each orgy resulted in at least one pregnancy, father unknown. The women all flocked to my pole, hoping to bring new blood into their progeny. I needed to help the village expand its gene pool. After my first introduction and for the next seven years thereafter, I would slip into the infinity room during the orgies and disguise one to six of my men to take to the village to plunder the waiting pussies. Over the next few years, I could count most of a generation as having come from outside the village. The people, of course, credited the new blood to me, including the three children I had with Callie (seeded by one of my men). In fact, Bartolos became quite fond of Callie as I was myself, and occasionally I left him for as much as a month with my wife while I returned to the infinity room.

I discovered our own population growing. Several of the women in the village of my former sailors had children and our experience told us that as of that time, mother and father would both begin to age naturally—but healthily. Since we’d never indicated this was a place where they would be immortal, they considered the process natural and to be expected.

As I worked my way from woman to woman in my harem, I always ended up in Josie or Nimia. They wanted me to bring Callie to the infinity room to stay with them, but somehow, I didn’t think the village girl would adjust to life with the ageless. Josie and Nimia had been with me for the better part of a millennium and still looked like the teens I’d married. They never came out of the room into the natural world anymore. I was never sure how much time had passed in the infinity room while I was outside, but I was always greeted as if it was just the next day.

MY IDYLLIC life was interrupted by a dream. Not mine, but Callie’s. She woke in the morning weeping on my shoulder.

“What is it, my little love?” I asked.

“You have to leave me,” she whimpered. “My goddess Aphrodite said I asked for just one year and she had rewarded me with six more, but now your time on the island is over. You must re-build your raft and leave my side. Oh, my Odysseus, why must you leave?”

“I don’t know, Callie,” I said. I was still masquerading as Odysseus, though I’d neglected to really age while on the voyage or the island, so I suppose that could have raised alarms soon by looking ever young. In fact, I probably looked younger than I had at Troy.

I could see Aphrodite’s hand all over this decree. I went to the top of the island that night to call out to her and find out what was going on. Imagine my surprise when the bastard Hermes showed up.