[Cheiron continues]

It took Silenus a moment to realise Polyphemus meant him to be Ganymede, and by the time he'd managed to say, 'Look, you're not my type – we'll regret it in the morning...' Polyphemus had grabbed him and was dragging him off to the bedroom at the back of the cave. Silenus yelled, 'Come and rescue me, you cowards! He's trying to rape me! HELP!' and the other satyrs wondered whether they ought to do something. But, after all, hadn't Silenus himself always taught them that 'Advantage is a better soldier than rashness,'? And who were they to despise their father's teaching? So they decided to let Silenus solve the problem for himself. And a moment later, Silenus came staggering out, exclaiming, 'Honestly, what a lazy, drunken lump! He tried to grope me, I wriggled out of his way, and he just threw up, fell over and went to sleep! He's lying there snoring his head off right now!'

The other satyrs, who had seen their father in the same state many times, laughed about it: 'So, you've kept your virtue intact, have you?' 'Come off it – when was our dad ever virtuous?'

But the Ithacan captain shushed them and hissed, 'Now's your chance! Don't you want to be free? While your father was keeping the giant occupied, I've been sharpening this tree-trunk by the fire, and made it into a giant spear. Now, if you'll grab hold of it with me, we can drive it into the giant's eye and blind him, and then we'll all be able to escape! Come on, who wants to hold which end?'

The satyrs began to shuffle back, mumbling, 'I can't; I've hurt my hoof,' 'And there's all that vomit we might slip on – isn't that a health and safety hazard?' 'Yeah, I'm allergic to cyclops-vomit – it makes all the hairs in my tail fall out, and how am I going to swat flies with a bald tail?' So the human captain, and the four strongest of his men, picked up the log, thrust the sharpened end into the fire once more until it glowed with fire, and then ran to Polyphemus's bedroom and stabbed it into his eye.

At once he was awake, and roaring in pain: 'Help! Help! Nobody's attacking me!'

The giant in the cave to the east of Polyphemus shouted, 'Well, shut up and go to sleep, then!'

'But you don't understand!' yelled Polyphemus. 'Nobody's blinded me!'

'Well, of course they haven't, you idiot!' snapped the giant in the cave to the west. 'It's night-time, that's all! Now leave us in peace, will you?'

'Well, I'll punish Nobody for this, anyway,' muttered Polyphemus to himself. He tried groping around the cave for his enemies, but everyone, humans and satyrs alike, kept dodging out of his way, and once when he thought he'd caught the hairy leg of a satyr, it turned out to be a sheep who gave him a sharp kick. In the end he lay down again, unable to sleep, but groaning in pain until morning.

Eventually, Polyphemus heard the sound of birdsong through a crack in the cave roof, and he could hear the sheep bleating to be let out and graze. And now, he thought, this might be his chance – when he pulled the stone in from the entrance, he could crouch by the entrance and feel for the humans as they ran out. But, as he stretched out his hands, all he could feel going out of the cave were the woolly backs of his sheep: twenty-one rams and eighty-one ewes, all trotting out to feed as they usually did, even without the satyrs to shepherd them. He isn't any too bright, my nephew, and it didn't occur to him to feel under the sheep, or he'd have realised there were humans or satyrs clinging underneath the biggest, hanging onto their wool with hands and feet or hands and hooves. It wasn't until the sheep were well away from the cave that he heard voices raised in argument.

'Aren't you going to take us with you?' pleaded Silenus. 'After all we've risked for you, especially all I've risked – the way I gave you food, the way I showed the ogre how to drink, and nearly got raped by him for helping you – you're just going to abandon me and my sons to be eaten by him and the other giants? Is that fair?'

'Yes, it is,' said the man called Nobody. 'You're despicable, lying cowards who wouldn't lift a finger to save me and my friends, or to avenge those who've already been eaten. You, the father, lied and pretended I'd robbed you in order to save your own skin – you, his sons, didn't even try to protect your own father – as far as I'm concerned, the lot of you and the giants deserve each other. The only hoofed animals I'm taking with me are the juiciest of these sheep, and you can explain the loss of them to your master. Goodbye!'

Polyphemus picked up a stone and hurled it in the vague direction of the voices. 'That's right!' he called. 'That's what comes of trusting Nobody!'

But the men must already have set sail, because Polyphemus heard their captain calling, over the splashing of the waves as his ship rowed out to sea: 'Who are you calling Nobody? I'm Odysseus, son of Laertes, and King of Ithaca!'

Perhaps he'd have done better to keep his mouth shut, because Polyphemus immediately knelt down and prayed, 'Father Poseidon, lord of the seas, please avenge what's happened to me. Don't ever let Odysseus and his men get home, but let them be all be shipwrecked and drowned. And please heal my eye, as well. Oh, and I'm sorry I said all that about not believing in gods. Amen.'

Well, I'm sure you've both grown up hearing the story of how long it took Odysseus to get home after that. Poseidon always has been better at causing trouble for sailors than at helping or healing anyone, but he did ask me to go and do what I could for my nephew. I couldn't restore Polyphemus's sight – there was scarcely any eyeball left to repair – but at least I could wash and bandage his wound, and tell him to live on a diet of milk and raw vegetables until he was healed, and avoid eating people, because they weren't good for an open wound. I tried asking the other cyclopes to nurse him, and to bring him food now that Odysseus had stolen his sheep, but they just said that if Polyphemus was stupid enough to let a human maim him, that was his problem.

In fact, in the end it was the satyrs who came back to look after Polyphemus, and who guided him around when he was feeling better, and taught him how to feel his way with a stick. You see, what Odysseus hadn't realised was that, while satyrs can be pretty cowardly and lazy, they are also much more soft-hearted than some humans, and they can't bear to see anyone suffering, even an enemy. I don't think they'd realised, until Odysseus came, just how lonely it was to be a cyclops, and how terrifying it was to be an injured cyclops with no friend to comfort him.

Besides, the satyrs had found out that, while a very drunk cyclops is even more terrifying than a sober one, a cyclops who's had just a bit to drink might start to be sociable, and even make jokes. There was still a lot of wine left in the wineskin, and, as I said, it was very heavily concentrated so that, when it was mixed with water, it went a long way. So the satyrs had an idea for Polyphemus to make a living even though he was disabled and had hardly any sheep left. They set up the first tavern on the island, with bay-leaves and oak-leaves over the mouth of the cave – it should have been vine-leaves, but there weren't any – and a sign saying The Blind Drunk, and then they explained to all the other cyclopes how they could come to Polyphemus's cave to trade food for a drink of this wonderful thing called wine.

They were starting to wonder what would happen when the wine ran out, when Silenus, who was out cutting fresh oak-leaves, saw another ship drawing up on the beach. And this time, the person stepping out of it was someone Silenus knew. He dropped his secateurs and his basket of leaves, and immediately ran down to the beach to hug his friend. 'Dionysus!' he exclaimed. 'You're looking well for a man who's been to Hell and back! How was it?'

Dionysus smiled. 'Oh, not too bad. I had a spot of bother at first, because I was disguised as Heracles, and they beat me for all the trouble Heracles had caused last time he visited the Underworld. But when I managed to prove who I was, and that I just wanted a playwright, Hades said I was welcome to take either Aeschylus or Euripides, because ever since they'd died they'd done nothing but argue over which of them was a better writer, and nobody could get any peace. So, I've brought back Aeschylus! He's in Athens now, writing great trilogies of tragedies of revenge, honour, justice, and mercy: plays that will inspire a new generation of theatre-goers and make Athens great again!'

Silenus shrugged. 'Have they got dirty songs in them?'

'Well, not in the tragedies,' said Dionysus. 'But he's also writing plays about satyrs! So I've got a gig for you and the lads – as soon as he's finished writing the script, we can go back to Athens and start rehearsing.' (In fact, Dionysus had told Aeschylus to write a satyr-play before he started writing the tragedies, because he knew it took satyrs much longer than human actors to get organised and start learning their lines, and they'd never be ready in time otherwise.)

'Sounds good,' said Silenus, 'but until the script's ready, I think there's work for us to do right here. Do you realise, the poor benighted ogres who live on this island had never even heard of wine until Odysseus brought some along last month? Is it any wonder they didn't have any kind of social life? We've made the most of what Odysseus gave us, but if you could make some vines grow for our host Polyphemus, and leave some of us on duty here to help him tend them, he could be in business for life.'

'That was a good story,' said Jack, when I'd finished, 'but you're an even bigger liar than I am. It didn't really happen like that, did it?'

'Well, maybe Dionysus wasn't ransoming a playwright at the same time that the satyrs were Polyphemus's slaves and Odysseus was returning from the Trojan War,' I admitted. 'Come to think of it, that business with Aeschylus and Euripides must have been a few hundred years later. I can't remember where Dionysus had got to when the satyrs were on the island of the cyclopes.'

'I don't mind you lying,' Jack reassured me. 'Only, if you're trying to reform me, you ought to be completely truthful about everything, in the hope that I'll somehow catch honesty off you. But I preferred the story the way you told it.'

'Some of these stories about Dionysus make him sound almost like Jesus,' said Arthur thoughtfully. 'Being a god, but the son of a human mother, and being persecuted, and descending into Hell in order to raise people to life. And Jesus turned water into wine, as well.'

'Yes – if Jesus had gone wrong, I suppose he might have ended up like Dionysus,' I said. 'But Dionysus was a nasty little thug some of the time. When his family refused to believe in him, he drove his aunts insane and made them murder his cousin. I can't imagine Jesus behaving like that, can you? Jesus was the true God, but he knew how to be a good man as well. Dionysus couldn't get the hang of being either, and so a lot of the time he was a wild, mixed-up demigod who did terrible things when he was out of his mind and couldn't control himself. I'd have done what I could to help him, just because he was suffering, but I don't think I could have loved him nearly so much if he hadn't been Silenus's friend.'