Apollo

Apollo barely steps onto the page, but he leaves two marks. The first is a memory. Standing in front of Nausicaa for the first time, ragged and salt-crusted, Odysseus reaches for something to compare her to and lands on a young palm tree he once saw beside Apollo’s altar on the island of Delos. So straight, so sure of itself, that he had stood rooted and stared. The image does the work a hundred sentences could not. The second mark is the priest at Ismarus, the one Odysseus spares when his men sack the city. The priest gives him jars of an undiluted wine in thanks, the kind you cut twenty parts to one and still lose your balance. That wine ends up in a cave in the side of a mountain, poured into a wooden bowl, and a Cyclops drinks himself unconscious on it. Apollo, by way of the gift, saves Odysseus’s life without ever lifting a hand.