This is a tale of the horrors of love and how it brought low the Lord of Hell. In my cell here alone, I can tell it only to you, the clay tablet a guard has smuggled me, and hope you will retain the story until the time is right for its retelling.

What is love, and where does it abide but in the sinews of man and the passions of conflict? This I dared to write and no one would heed me—not here, not in Hell. In Hell, as in life, truth is judged not by men’s minds but by their glands, and must pass the test of convenience.

Is it convenient to know that I was called Homer, that I wrote in a weak and piteous age of a better one, and from my work men drew the truths of their convenience and inspiration for every kind of sin? Is it helpful to observe that from my tales of mighty souls and mighty passions skewed by love into mighty errors, men learned nothing of caution, nothing of wisdom—learned only to pit themselves against one another more fiercely?

I’m here in Hell, so I am told, because I am responsible for the ‘Homeric’ tradition, for the heroic model that spurred so many fools to murder and death. I’m here because my work was perceived as a treatise on the art of fighting with spear and bow, of chariotry and covert tactics—because I made war beautiful and glorious.

My stamp is on the corpse of every warrior to come here, the Welcome Woman said to me. As if they all wouldn’t have made the Trip by other means, as if all the Alexanders and Pattons and worse of history wouldn’t have come to their fates some other way.

I met a man, while I was with the Dissidents sworn to bring the Devil low, who had fought in a war so terrible its weapons razed whole countries, boiled seas, and made the very air rain char. I met another sure that truth was the single most potent weapon of destruction in a world powered by lies.

And there too I met Alexander of Macedon, who looked upon me with teary eyes and said that it was my work that had guided him to his greatest moments, my influence that made of him what he was.

My influence. As if there had been no Troy, no black ships on the beach, no Odysseus and Diomedes, no Helen who raised her skirts to tumble men into war.

But I digress. I mean to tell you a simple tale, a tale of afterlife and what it holds. I have paid a great price to be witness for the damned. I have met an angel, a single emissary of Olympian grace, who has agreed to smuggle out the story.

It is a tale of truth. It is a tale of sorrow. It is a tale that cannot be told here in my cell nor in the whole of Hell itself, where only the damned abide. This tale must be told on the living land, where the sweet wind blows and the winey sea rolls dark and bold. It must be told in my homeland and in all the homelands of men who live and breathe, so that they will cease hastening here in all their numbers.

It must be told so that I, who meant one thing and accomplished another, can make peace with every soul here on my account.

This time, I add a preface so I cannot be misunderstood. I say to you, clay tablet and custodian of my endeavor, that if all the men of the world can learn what I have learned since last I wrote, then they will know better things than how to strike a killing blow up through a man’s bladder. They will learn that the price of passion is to be its everlasting slave. They will learn that what is done in life is forever, and what is given there will be received, manifold times over, in afterlife.

And if this tale does not teach the lesson, then I cannot teach it. And if we do not learn it, then death and destruction eternally is our lot. And so, since I cannot find an ear here, among those who have nothing left to save, I have struck my bargain with the angel.

It is for you, soft clay of infinite memory and infinite strength, to take this tale of self-made folly to those who may hear it, whose ears are not closed with the wax of arrogance and whose eyes are not sewn shut with the thread of sins. For on Earth, not in Hell, there is a chance to change the future. In Hell, there is no future, only the results of chances untaken and opportunities lost.

Everything that I tell you here is true, tablet, as everything I told before was true. It is up to the angel and fate and your faithful self to make sure that this time there is no misunderstanding.

*

Now, when the Devil himself came to me and said, “Homer, tell my story,” I was unmoved by the honor. There is no honor in Hell that is not dishonorable, I learned that long ago.

So I was not surprised when the Devil added, “My joy has left me, and taken with it all hope for the damned. As awful as existence has been, for all the teeming souls consigned to me, they have had better than nothingness. If my joie d’apres vivre is not returned to me, there will be only nothingness. I cannot lose what does not exist.” The Devil bared teeth sharpened on countless souls. His moon-gold eyes shone bright as sunrise; his flaming fury steamed his breath. He was larger than a man of any realm, and dark of skin, with a bold tail and horns finer than a Minotaur’s. He was sitting, during this audience, in a chair built out of human skulls and thigh bones, an ivory of yellow caste.

And when I did not reply, he clacked his black claws on the skull of his chair’s armrest, a skull frozen in an eternal scream, and said, “Well, Homer, will you do for me what you did for the minor lords of Troy and your querulous Achaean princes?”

“Do what for you, my lord?” I said. It’s hard enough to get any kind of publishing arrangement in Hell that my soul ached to say yes and be done with it. But that was what the Devil wanted, obviously—for me to commit to a project for which I had no feeling. Worse, to commit to a project impossible of completion. “Write something that will bring your joy back to you? You are the Supreme Power here, not I. Surely there is nothing a scribbler can do that You cannot do.”

“Damn you further, Homer, don’t talk back to me. Only say you will undertake a chronicle of My Majesty in Hell. An enspiriting epic, a tale that will lighten the weight of eternity and ennoble my struggle. I am tired. I need to be revivified, to regain faith in the power of Hell itself. I no longer revel in the suffering of the damned; I no longer love the lessons of Hell, nor their teaching. I no longer love the glory of war, though it is all about me. I need, in short, to be the hero in an epic of Homeric proportions—to see myself as the Magnificent Antichrist once more. For this, Homer, you are eminently suited.” The Devil, grinning, snapped his claws together and the sound caused my teeth to water. “You, who made a paragon of the sniveling Achilles, can create a mirror in which I can regain my love of eternal vengeance! Like that!”

My soul, brave as it was in the face of dissolution, was also canny. It was I who had given face and form and mind to Odysseus, remember! So I said, “Sire, I will undertake such a task, but only under certain conditions will it be the story you need to inspire your flagging sense of duty.”

The Devil growled, “You made songs for the Dissidents without conditions.”

“But they are only Dissidents—the underdogs. They were easy; you are the Fallen Angel, the ruler of Hell. I need to acquire the vision fit to your grandeur, to encompass the whole sweep of Hell.”

“That’s what you want—safe-conducts? Move you freely about then, throughout my realm, and see what you will. And now, about the deadline—”

Out stretched the Devil’s hand and in it appeared a contract.

I shuddered and drew my own hands against my chest. “No deadline, Sire,” I said. “A work of greatness cannot be done to deadline. If you wish hack­work, get Dante, or Borges, or Dickens or—”

The contract in the Devil’s outstretched hand began to blacken and shrivel at the edges. It smoked; its center crackled; it turned red and gold as it flamed.

“No deadline,” agreed the Devil, who was also flaming now. “But when I come to you and say present the tale, you’d best have at least some parts of it ready to read to me.”

“Of course, my lord,” I said to the Devil who was flaming away, crackling and shriveling and grinning through the noxious smoke as he burned. And that was my mistake—the one that got me in this prison from which I write, furtively, waiting for an angel to come and smuggle the real story out. But I get ahead of myself . . .