The gods meet at dawn. Athena will not let the room move on. Odysseus is still trapped on Calypso's island, and in Ithaca the suitors are now hunting his son. Zeus agrees, with a hard condition. Hermes will order the nymph to release him, but Odysseus must cross the sea on a raft he builds himself before the Phaeacians can carry him the rest of the way. Poseidon is away at a feast. The order goes out while the sea-god is not in the room to block it.
Hermes flies to Ogygia and finds Calypso in her cave of cedar and song. She is furious. Male gods keep mortal lovers and no one calls it a crime. She is told to give hers back. She still obeys. She walks down to the beach where Odysseus sits crying toward empty water, day after day, sick of the nymph and sick for home. She tells him to cut timber and go. He does not trust the sudden kindness. He makes her swear by the river Styx that she is not sending him out to drown. She swears. Then she offers what the island actually is: immortality, ease, a goddess for a wife. He refuses. He wants Penelope, Ithaca, and a death that belongs to a man.
He works four days like a shipwright. He fells trees, shapes planks, adds a deck, a mast, a rudder, and a sail. On the fifth she gives him food, wine, clothes, and a wind. He steers by the stars. On the eighteenth day the Phaeacian mountains rise like a shield. Then Poseidon sees him from the mountains of the Solymi. The god who never forgave the blinding of Polyphemus throws every wind at the raft until it is timber in the water. Odysseus clings to the keel. The sea-goddess Ino gives him an immortal veil and tells him to abandon the wreck and swim. He hesitates, afraid of another trick, then leaves the broken raft.
For two days and nights he fights waves and rock. Athena stills all the winds but one. He sees a coast that could kill him on the reefs, so he prays to a river instead and lets the current take him in at the mouth. He crawls onto land, kisses the earth, and looks for cover. Two olive trees have grown together, wild and planted. He buries himself in leaves and sleeps. Athena closes his eyes. Home is still a coast he has not stepped on.
Coming Up in Chapter 6
Exhausted and naked on a foreign shore, Odysseus must now figure out how to approach the Phaeacians without terrifying them. His first encounter will be with a young princess doing laundry by the river, a meeting that could determine whether he finally makes it home or faces yet another detour.
