in the shade of the human-sized Ricinus bush, with the bagpipe over his shoulder, slumped on top of the slumped horse, hidden by leaves wide as webbed hands, sweating, he solemnly picks one of the spiky fruit capsules, splits it and picks out the three bean-sized seeds, which, with his head bent backwards, he squeezes them over his mouth so that the fat and yellowish, odorless yet unpleasant oil drips onto his tongue, then swallows it, before picking another spiky fruit capsule, slowly and carefully – afraid of being discovered, afraid of waking up, afraid of falling asleep, afraid that the oil will not agree with his stomach, afraid that the oil will be too hard on his stomach, afraid of not seeing everything, afraid of not being able to make sense of everything he sees and afraid of forgetting everything like the unhappy lotus eaters, those they say live in Africa and feed on the lotus plant because they have seen too much pain, and therefore forget their homeland, its past and its future – he, the Chaldean, stares without blinking, as if his eyelids have been cut off, and he sees time as the fly sees the world, at the same time backward and forward, through morning mist and ground fog, river vapors and evening haze, and through smoke from burning cities, where, far behind him, and for that matter ahead of him, since what follows is what is yet to happen, he glimpses an eclipse of sandust swirling into a cloud, and in this sandustcloudswirl appears a vast swarm of foreign soldiers, unfamiliar in bronze helmets with waving tattered horsehair crests and ragged short purple tunics and bloody greaves, a colossal block formation, on the verge of falling apart, like wet clay in a wooden brick mold thrown too hard onto the ground to dry in the sun, so hard that it rolls around and loses its shape, yet with raised shields, dented and dirty leatherwork, soldiers facing outwards in all four directions, encircling the few creaking chariots of the troop, drawn by oxen and slaves, and between and within the chariots are sheep to be eaten and boys to be loved and livestock to be sacrificed, soothsayers and cooks and prisoners of war, loose women and the children the loose women have borne on the march, ranks of spear-throwers from the land known as Sparta, and slingers from the island of Rhodes, and archers he sees coming from that island, which it is said long ago had ninety mighty but unfortified cities, where men lived in countless crowds and many kinds of tongues were heard, but that all the cities with Cherethites and Pelethites have long since been destroyed by the warlike Achaean tribe[1] from the northern mainland, and which nevertheless still has beautiful and lush olive fields, and cedar trees [Or have the cedar forests already been cut down at this point? I ask the books, or I ask what I remember reading – I have almost no books here. Plato writes in one of his dialogues (which one?) that all the forests on the Greek islands were cut down – or am I remembering wrong? Well, I actually find in Davaras (op. cit., see “Forests”) that ancient Crete was “heavily forested with cypress,” but that as late as the sixteenth century the Venetians used Cretan forests for shipbuilding, and that the Turks during their occupation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries used the forest here for fuel. Got it. But I have read somewhere about logging in antiquity as well. – In this story I will try to describe an event around the year 400 before the beginning of the Western era, and at that time it should be forested with cedar.:] this island is said to have gleaming snow mountains that sway and bellow like wild oxen, but the cedar forests have long since been thinned out by the kings for the use of labyrinthine palaces, and it was there that he, the Chaldean, once listened to a narrator sing of a resourceful pirate named Odysseus, a longtime traveler, who after having plundered the city of the kings Ismaros, and being taken by the north wind and pushed back and forth across the great sea, found shelter for his ships, and where both a man-eating Cyclops and he who was the lord of the winds, the helpful Aiolos[2], situated in the middle of solid land out in the western sea, green and blue, behind which the sun sinks every evening, and that this island, which he has heard women and men from Egypt call Keftiu, and men and women from the Amur land where the western sea begins call Kaftor, and women and men from the Khattu people in the north who call themselves Hittites call Keptaru[3], also called Crete – he hears and sees ten thousand mercenaries, he hears and sees that the ever crumbling and gathering and again crumbling block formation holds, besides those he sees that are not counted: the slaves and the boy-lovers and the cattle and the prisoners of war and the loose women and finally the children, in this order, and that the stray dogs should probably be counted before the women and children, and the surviving private horses of the wealthy should be included in the count, and he sees that they are retreating, what they themselves call katabasis, northward through this desert land, ten thousand stadia away from their own country which they name Hellas, one stadion for each countable man, muttering and growling in their disheartening task, wriggling like a giant constantly-chewing caterpillar between the poor villages they plunder, ravage and burn, the first the second the third the fourth, and over or around huge mounds, none of them understand what they’re hiding, only that they are hiding something, of gravel and earth and sand and thistles and sheep shit and darting lizards and fading skeletons and shards of broken bricks and shattered water jars, along the east bank of the great river Tigris in the country from which he, the Chaldean, is himself fleeing [Where, in this breakbulk story, I the writer am tapping away, the eventual reader will, presumably, only imagine this fleeing.], until they sling themselves all the way to and up Mount Theches, where they can finally see the horizon, the sea they call Pontos Euxeinos, The Hospitable Sea, and the barely visible wisps of smoke from the campfires of compatriots in the old colony of Trapezus down by the coast, and where they can finally shout: Thalatta! Thalatta! Sei mir gegrüsst, du ewiges Meer! loud and wailing and relieved [To the effect that those who do not hear them, but read about them in the millennia to follow, think it is a battle of liberation these ten thousand have fought], so that those who hear the echoing reverberations of them, and whom the ten thousand have plundered and ravaged in the days and weeks and months before, all those peoples who live in the snowy mountains, the Armenians and the Taoches and the Chalybers and the Scythians and the Macrons and the Colchians and the warlike Karduches, those who never obey the Persian king, they now realize that they are at last rid of these ten thousand robbers, who also did not obey the king of the Persians, and therefore now flee his army, the great king of the land of Persia, Artaxerxes Mnemon, the Great King, the King of Kings, of King Darius the Son whose forces are constant pursuers, who constantly attacks from behind, and from whom they have been fleeing ever since the battle of Kunaxa, some wings of the Euphrates just north of the [already long ago] ancient city of Babylon, that battle which they won, but still lost, because the commander of the army, Cyrus, was killed, he who was both governor of Lydia and Phrygia and Cappadocia, and commander of all the troops that meet to muster on the plain of Kastollos, and who was at the same time the Persian king Artaxerxes Mnemon, the King of Kings, his hungry little brother, and who, supported by Sparta, enlisted some of them at Ephesus, on the coast of Lydia, and bought up and attracted army leaders of both the Hellenes and the barbarians at Sardis, some twenty parasangs further in Lydia, whence he advanced with the whole vast convoy through the Anatolian highlands, saying that they were to drive the Pisidians from every place where Pisidians were found in his district, over the passes of the snow-topped Tauros Mountains into Cilicia and down to the coast, where there was a hastily abandoned fortress with still steaming pots over hot embers in the forecourt on either side of the border with Syria, and in the northeastern-most bay awaited sixty ships full of soldiers that he, Cyrus, had enlisted – and the great army moves on a day’s march, five parasangs, into Syria, along a great swampy poppy plain that follows the sea bay, full of seaweed and deceiving sand, camel dung and the sweet rotten smell of carcasses, to the Phoenician city of Myriandros [This city Alexander the Great Murderer sixty-eight years later will expand and rename Alexandria ad Issum. In the nineteenth century it is located in Ottoman territory, and is still named and then after the same murderer, Alexandretta, and then in our century, that of the eventual reader and myself, the twentieth, alternately ruled by the Syrians and the French, to become part of Turkey under the name of Iskenderun.], a loading and unloading port with ships at anchor and camels with tied feet, where goods and travelers go in constant caravans in and out of a narrow pass in the [not yet felled] cedar-scented Amanus Mountains, like silvery broad branches reaching straight up to the blue sky around one parasang on the swamp plain, eastward to and from the peoples of Mesopotamia and Persia, and westward by ship to the peoples of the islands and along the coast of the Cretan Sea, all the way out to the Pillars of Heracles and back to Myriandros, where the mercenary army plows its way through tumbling bales of cloth and crates of spices, camels and donkeys and mules leaping out, and barbarians of all colors and shapes, silent, as only those who are furious to the point of rebellion are dead quiet, and the rattling jabbering blathering whinnying cackling roaring bickering squabbling sand cloud piss train shit train – and laughing, without a doubt: this laughing singing shitting laughing convoy of Hellenes and all manner of barbarians swings wide and up through the narrow Amanus Pass, rich with splashing waterfalls and broad silver-lined cedar branches, where stone and shadow blend into each other, making the mountainsides feel suddenly very close – is this mountain? is this shadow? watch out! – a shimmering bluish green glistening, an oppressive cedar-covered mountain world that seems to transform into something intangible then merge with the moonlit star-studded sky as the soldiers try to spot the peaks, giving them the feeling of being trapped inside the stone world, crushed, until finally the dense resin-smelling mountainsides sink and give way, and the mercenary army slowly scrambles into a vast sky-wide plain, glowing yellow from the sandy dust in the flooding sun, perhaps ten parasangs in all directions, between the Amanus Mountains and the [also still] cedar-covered Lebanon Mountains to the south, where it …
[1] The Achaeans, Homer’s name for the Greeks, identical with the Mycenaeans, writes the Greek archaeologist Costis Davaras in “Guide to Cretan Antiquities” (1976, see: “Achaians”) – the golden kingdoms of the Bronze Age Peloponnese, which the German Heinrich Schliemann rediscovered in 1876 by excavating the castle ruins of Mycenae with the rough-hewing technique of early adventure archaeology, and the creators of the Linear B script, which the Englishman Michael Ventris deciphered in 1952. – Between 1450 and 1400 BCE, invaded non-Akai Crete, where the Minoans had created the Linear A script several hundred years earlier, which many believe to have deciphered, but on which there is still no consensus. Together with earthquakes and volcanic eruptions on Thera, they plundered, raped and destroyed cities and palaces (including Zakros), except the largest, Knossos, from which they took over and controlled the island, but which by c. 1375 BCE had also been burned down – and the Mycenaean kingship on Crete ended (Davaras, Op. cit; see: “Destructions of Palaces”). Greek settlers then took the land. Then militarism took over their minds. The chainmail armies of the Iron Age were drawn with horsepower all over eventual Europe. – E.S. This must be the reason why the Cretans, i.e. the Cretan Achaeans, not the Minoans, contributed the third largest contingent, eighty ships, under the leadership of the commander Idomeneus and the hero Meriones, brethren in manslaughter for the war god Ares, to the Achaean fleet during the plunder and rape of Troy, as stated in the so-called ship catalog “Iliad” (second song, lines 645-652), around 1260 BC.
[2] Instead of square brackets: I find this assumption in the fifth and sixth chapters of English naval exploration historian Tim Severin’s 1987 “The Ulysses Voyage” – the account of an expedition in the wake of Odysseus. The one-eyed and cannibalistic caveman giant Polyphemus, who I, and not Severin, think of as reminiscent of the giant Humbaba from the Gilgamesh epic. The guardian of the Lebanon forest, who in some old depictions has a face shaped like an intestinal maze, and whom Gilgamesh also defeated, resides, according to Severin, in the southwestern corner of Crete, where Homer writes (Odyssey, ninth song, lin. 109-110, P. Østbye’s translation, cheap edition from 1961 – brought along) that “nothing is sown and the fields are never plowed,” but where the land nevertheless “grew by itself both wheat and barley and vines that bear,” which Severin believes may be the fields left by the Minoans several generations ago (cf. note 1). The lord of the winds, the friendly Aiolos with his wind-catching leather bag, Severin finds that he must live on the flat part of a leather bag-shaped island with bronze-red cliff walls on the northwest corner of Crete. Both on the west coast, unfortunately, and not here, in the east. – Maybe it doesn’t work to use notes or square brackets in a story like this, the flow of language is impeded? But this is becoming a fragmented story! The sources must be incorporated, entwined, kneaded in. The question is how.
[3] Davaras, op. cit., see: Keftiu*.
This extract is taken from the opening of Iron Age Dreams.
Steinar Løding is a Norwegian author. In 1998, Løding was awarded the Bjørnson scholarship for his novel Iron Age Dreams. Odd Surén writes in Vagant: “What makes this book successful, fascinating and unforgettable is not its frustrations or cautious and diffuse conclusions, it is that it is a grandiose failure, and the author knows it.”
Jordan Barger is a translator. Publications can be found in Poetry Magazine, FENCE, Circumference, Firmament, The Poetry Review UK, Caesura, Action Books’ blog and more.
minor literature[s] 