I reached for my sword to stab where the midriff holds the liver, then stopped: if he died we could never move the door-stone. So we groaned and waited for Dawn. At first light he milked again, seized two more for breakfast, rolled the stone aside, drove out the flock, and set the slab back as lightly as a man sets a lid on a quiver.
I cut a length from his own green olive staff — thick as a ship’s mast — and had the men taper and harden its tip in the fire. I hid it under the dung. We cast lots; four were chosen to help me drive it, and I made a fifth. That evening he returned, drove all the flock inside, milked, and killed two more for supper.
Then I stood near him with an ivy-wood bowl of Maron’s wine: “Cyclops, drink after your meal of man’s flesh, so you may know what drink our ship carried. I brought it hoping you might pity me and send me home. You have not done right.” He drank it off, delighted, and asked for more — and for my name, so he might give a guest-gift.
Three times I poured; three times he drained it. When the wine had hold of his wits I said, “Cyclops, you asked my name. Nobody is my name. Nobody is what my mother and father and all my friends call me.” He answered that Nobody he would eat last, after all his comrades — that was his guest-gift — and toppled backward in sleep, wine and human flesh spewing from his throat.
We heated the stake till it glowed. I cheered my men so none would flinch. Then we drove the fire-hot olive into the one eye in his forehead and spun it as a shipwright spins a drill. Blood flowed; the eye hissed around the wood as a smith’s axe hisses in cold water. He gave a horrible cry, tore the stake away, and shouted for the Cyclopes who lived around him on the windy heights.
When we had blinded him and the other Cyclopes had gone away fooled by the name Nobody, I did not sleep. All the rest of the night I schemed how we might get past the door-stone and past those great hands waiting in the entrance.