Ego's Odyssey

Ego’s Odyessy is a psychological fantasy inspired by Greco-Roman mythology.

Following a terrible shipwreck, the young deck-hand Ego washes ashore on the uncharted island of Tyria, in the Olearic Sea. He wakes in the Snake-Temple of Esklepios, suffering from the plague and a broken back. His beautiful and mysterious nurse, Anima, uses very strange methods to heal her patients: she interprets their dreams, dreams sent to them by the god Eskelpios, and makes them talk about themselves. Ego learns that his illness and injuries originate in the mind, not the body, and that to be cured, he must peer into the darkest corners of his soul, and relive the horrors he endured aboard ship. He makes a full and miraculous recovery, but when he moves into the opulent palace of Tyria, and makes the acquaintance of the eccentric hermit Mentor the Madman, he soon discovers that there is more to Anima, the island of Tyria, and life itself, than he could ever have imagined. His physical odyessy may be over, but his spiritual journey has just begun. For Mentor promises to reveal Forbidden Wisdom known only to the gods themselves: the secrets of life, health, magic, enlightenment and immortality.

Copyright © 2023 Robert Ensor

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.The author’s moral rights have been asserted.First Published as an e-book in the United Kingdom, 17 January 2023. Read the full title as a pdf:

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I woke.

The first thing I saw was the snake. I felt it sliding slowly across my bare stomach with its hard, muscular body, coated in repulsive leathery scales. His dead cold eyes stared at me. They held less sympathy than the eyes of the worst killer in the world. The forked tongue poked from between the eerily motionless lips to tickle my clavicle in a devilish kiss. I squirmed in fright. The dull throbbing pain that suffused my entire body had sharpened to a knifepoint in my upper back. I groaned.

Then She appeared, emerging from the vague shadows at my bedside.

The nurse was clad all in white, except for the red cross on her tunic. Six feet tall and slim yet strongly built, with long dark blonde hair garlanded with red roses, small green eyes, a pert nose, well-defined jaw and full red lips. She was beautiful.

She lifted the serpent off my skin and set it down on the ground. It made a hiss of displeasure.

‘How are you feeling?’ she asked.

‘Uh, terrible,’ I said, groggy. I raised my head. ‘I have a pain in my neck, shooting down the spine.’

She smiled and shook her head. The smile was absolutely radiant.

‘No, how do you feel – in here,’ she said, pointing at the stitched red cross over her heart.

‘Terrible,’ I said, grinning weakly at my humour, so pathetically inadequate before her beauty.

‘Why?’ she enquired. There was sympathy in her marvellous cat-green eyes. Those eyes seemed vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t quite place them.

I groped for words, and, finding some, stumbled over them.

‘I was joking. My wounds are physical, not mental. How bad are they?’

‘To joke in such a condition would be a rare display of courage,’ she said, with a note of scepticism.

‘Your spine is broken in two places. And, in case you were wondering, you still have the plague,’ said a nasal, sarcastic voice.

An old man hobbled into view. He was balding, with a large, bulbous, purple-tipped nose, and an abrasive demeanour. Addled as my brain was, I recognised him at once. He had been our ship’s doctor. He wore loose, flowing white sheets and was supported by ingeniously carved wooden sticks that fit under his armpits. Such things were unknown in the land of my birth.

‘Who are you?’ she asked, turning to face the newcomer with a smile that concealed daggers of ice.

‘Diodorus Placebo. Doctor Diodorus Placebo. And your patient will be dead within a week – no, three days, if you continue to treat him in this way. Step, aside, maiden, and let me conduct a proper examination.’

She stood firm, with two sturdy legs planted well apart on the marble floor. Of the two, she was clearly the stronger, especially in the old man’s current enfeebled state.

He raised a sardonic eyebrow.

‘I’m not sure what will kill him first: your snakes or your ineptitude. The men and I shall wager on it – could use a little sport around here.’

The lovely face hardened. There was granite behind those thick yet shapely brown brows.

‘You are a patient here, not a doctor, and I shall use our methods to treat him. Now return to your bed!’ she said, in a deep, strong voice, that was sufficiently controlled to avoid wide notice. The room darkened perceptibly, along with her face, which assumed an inhuman grey aspect. She towered over the weak old man, until she seemed seven feet tall.

At first, Placebo shrank from her magnificent wrath.

‘Well, yes, my leg is hurting rather badly, come to think of it,’ he said, shuffling off, as fast as he could safely manage.

After two steps, emboldened by the fresh distance between them, he turned and fixed her with a bitter sneer.

‘I suppose it doesn’t matter. Even if by some miracle he survives the ravages of the buboes, he’ll be crippled for life. Your incompetence at least has the virtue of finishing off those wretches the gods have deemed unworthy of life.’

‘He is worthy of life. More worthy than you: a small man who hides behind his profession, a man who has taken more lives than the worst criminal, who delights in the death of his patients as a relief of his workload and would rather die than be proven wrong. If it weren’t for your stubbornness, you could recover, old man, but instead you will be dead within a week.’

The doctor stopped dead and shuddered. A sudden panic fear of demoralisation lit up his milky old eye, but only for an instant. The sneering mask was reassumed, though this time it was cracked a little, like antique pottery.

‘If I wasn’t suffering from a broken leg and dying of plague, I’d put you in your place, missy,’ he muttered, then staggered off in exaggerated motions, so his crutches rapped obnoxiously against the marble floor.

Despite my pain, I couldn’t help but smile upon witnessing that pompous hacklimb getting knocked down a peg or two.

‘Someone should have said that to him years ago,’ I said.

She turned to face me.

I averted my eyes. The truth was, she terrified me, and the terror of her beauty was redoubled by her formidable strength. It seemed grossly unfair of the gods to endow one being with such splendour.

‘Where am I?’ I said, looking at the high coffered limestone ceiling.

She folded the white screen back, revealing a vast pillared hall of beds, filled with the groaning sick and injured, who were tended by innumerable women in white tunics, some of them maidenly, some older. The limestone pillars were carved with snakes curling around their circumference.

‘In the Snake-Temple of Esklepios, on the Island of Tyria.’

‘A temple?’ I said, my mind racing at the impropriety of my naked torso. Our gods spoke often of modesty. ‘But I’m not properly clothed —’

‘The god does not care. The god asks only that you heal.’

I grimaced, surveying my ruined body, covered in taut, angry buboes, black as death, and blood-seeping bandages.

‘I fear the god asks too much.’

‘You will heal,’ she said, with serene, perfect confidence. ‘If you are truly willing to heal.’

I smiled, condescendingly. Clearly the girl was some naïve young nurse, in her first month at the work, who had not yet become jaded by years of drudgery and dead patients.

‘There’s only so much the will can do when confronted with a shattered body,’ as I said the words, I felt first a lurch of dread at the yawning abyss of despair opening up before me, then a sharp pain in the spine.

‘The will can work miracles, if you let it. For almost all health and all sickness are a matter of will. It is theoretically possible to live forever, for one in whom the will to life is unwavering.’

I couldn’t help but laugh. Then I saw she was serious – quite deadly serious, in fact.

‘Be careful of your cynicism, lest it become a self-fulfilling prophecy,’ she said, making to leave.

‘Wait! What’s your name?’

She hesitated for a second. ‘Anima,’ she said, at last, with a beguiling half-smile.

‘I’m Ego,’ I said.

‘I know.’

She knew. But how? The manifest had gone down with the ship. I assumed one of the crew must have told her, though it later transpired that nobody had. Read the next chapter: https://www.robertensor.com/post/ego-s-odyssey-chapter-2 Or buy now from amazon in paperback or ebook formats: https://www.amazon.com/Egos-Odyssey-Ego-Aeonia-Book-ebook/dp/B0BSHD2MT8