Sometimes he would go off smiling with them, but sometimes he would shout, or strike them. He was not so easy and even as he pretended. Living with him was like standing beside the sea. Each day a different color, a different foam-capped height, but always the same restless intensity pulling towards the horizon. When the rail broke on his ship he kicked it out in fury and threw the pieces into the sea. The next day he went grimly to the forest with his axe, and when Eurylochos offered to help him, he bared his teeth. He could still marshal himself, show the face he must have worn each day to harness Achilles, but it cost him, and after he was prone to moods and tempers. The men would slink away, and I saw the confusion on their faces. Daedalus had said to me once: Even the best iron grows brittle with too much beating.
I was smooth as oil, calm as windless water. I drew him out, asked him for stories of his travels among foreign lands and men. He told me of the armies of Memnon, son of the Dawn, king of Aethiopia, and the Amazon horsewomen with their crescent shields. He had heard that in Egypt some of their pharaohs were women dressed in men’s clothes. In India, he’d heard, there were ants the size of foxes who dig up gold among the dunes. And to the far north were a people who did not believe that Oceanos’ river circled the earth, but instead it was a great girdling serpent, thick around as a boat and always hungry. It could never be still, for its appetite drove it ever onwards, devouring everything bite by bite, and one day when it had eaten all the world, it would devour itself.
But however far afield he traveled, always he came back to Ithaca. His olive groves and his goats, his loyal servants and the excellent hunting dogs he’d raised by hand. His noble parents and his old nurse and his first boar hunt, which had given him the long scar I had seen on his leg. His son, Telemachus, would be bringing the herds down from the mountains by now. He will be good with them, I always was. Every prince needs to know his lands, and there’s no better way to learn than by grazing the goats. He never said, What if I go home, and all of it is ash? But I saw the thought in him, living like a second body, and feeding in the dark.
It was autumn by then, the light thinning, the grass crackling underfoot. The month was nearly gone. We were lying in my bed. “I think we must leave very soon, or else stay the winter.”
The window was open; the breeze passed over us. It was a trick of his, to set a sentence out like a plate on a table and see what you would put on it. But he surprised me by continuing. “I would stay,” he said. “If you would have me. It will only be until spring. I will go as soon as the seas are passable. It will be scarcely any delay.”
That last was not said to me, but to some person he argued with silently. His men perhaps, his wife, I did not care. I kept my face turned away so he would not see my pleasure.
“I will have you,” I said.
Something shifted in him after that, the releasing of a tension I had not realized he held. The next day he went humming down to the shore with his crew. They dragged the ship into a sheltered cave. They staked it, rolled the sail, stowed all the gear to keep it safely through the winter storms till spring.
Sometimes, I would see him watching me. An intentness would come over his face, and he would begin to ask me his casual, sideways questions. About the island, about my father, the loom, my history, witchcraft. I had come to know that look well: it was the same he wore when he spotted a crab with a triple claw, or wondered over the trick tides of Aiaia’s east bay. The world was made of mysteries, and I was only another riddle among the millions. I did not answer him, and though he pretended frustration, I began to see that it pleased him in some strange way. A door that did not open at his knock was a novelty in its own right, and a kind of relief as well. All the world confessed to him. He confessed to me.
Some stories he told me by daylight. Others came only when the fire was burnt out, and there was no one to know his face but the shadows.
“It was after the cyclops,” he said. “We had a bit of luck at last. We landed on the Island of the Winds. You know it?”
“King Aeolus,” I said. One of Zeus’ pets, whose job it was to keep track of the gusts that spin ships across the world.
“I pleased him, and he sped us on our way. He gave me besides a great bag holding all of the contrary winds, so they could not trouble us. For nine days and nine nights we skimmed across the waves. I did not sleep, not even an hour, for I was guarding the bag. I had told my men what it was, of course, but—” He shook his head. “They decided it was treasure I did not wish to share. The portions they had received from Troy had been long lost in the waves. They did not want to come home empty-handed. Well.” He drew a deep breath. “You may imagine what happened.”
I did imagine it. His men were unrulier than ever now, giddy with the prospect of a whole winter’s idleness. At night they liked to play a game of throwing wine dregs. They picked some trencher as the target, but their aim was terrible, for by then they had drunk down bowl after bowl. The table grew stained as if with slaughter, and they looked to my nymphs to clear it up. When I told them they would do it themselves, they eyed each other, and if I had been anyone else, they would have defied me. But they still remembered their snouts.
“At last when I could fight it no longer,” Odysseus said, “I fell asleep. I did not feel them take the bag from my hand. It was the howling of the winds that woke me. They whirled out of the bag and blew us back as if we had never left. Every league undone. They think I grieve for their dead comrades, and I do. But sometimes it is all I can do not to kill them myself. They have wrinkles, but no wisdom. I took them to war before they could do any of those things that steady a man. They were unmarried when they left. They had no children. They had no years of lean harvest, when they must scrape the bottom of their stores, and no good years either, that they might learn to save. They have not seen their parents grow old and begin to fail. They have not seen them die. I fear I have robbed them not only of their youth but their age as well.”
He rubbed at his knuckles. He had been a bowman when he was young, and the strength it takes to string and nock and shoot taxes hands like nothing else. He had left his bow behind when he went to war, but the pain had followed him. He’d told me once that if he had brought the bow, he would have been the best archer in both armies.
“Then why leave it?”
Politics, he had explained. The bow was Paris’ weapon. Paris, the pretty wife-stealer. “Among heroes, he was seen as cowardly. No bowman would ever have been made Best of the Greeks, no matter how skilled he was.”
“Heroes are fools,” I had said.
He had laughed. “We are agreed.”
His eyes were closed. He was silent so long I thought he slept. Then he said: “If you could have seen how close we were to Ithaca. I could smell the fishing fires from the beach.”
I began to ask him for small favors. Would he kill a buck for dinner? Would he catch a few fish? My sty was falling to pieces, might he mend some of the posts? It gave me a sharp pleasure to see him come in the door with full nets, with baskets of fruit from my orchards. He joined me in the garden, staking vines. We spoke of what winds were blowing, how Elpenor had taken to sleeping on the roof, and whether we should forbid it.
“That idiot,” he said. “He will break his neck.”
“I will tell him he only has permission when he’s sober.”
He snorted. “That will be never.”
I knew I was a fool. Even if he stayed past that spring to the next, such a man could never be happy closed up on my narrow shores. And even if somehow I found a way to keep him contented, yet still there were limits, for he was mortal, and not young. Give thanks, I told myself. A winter is more than you had with Daedalus.
I did not give thanks. I learned his favorite foods and smiled to see his pleasure in them. At night we sat together at the hearth and talked over the day. “What do you think,” I asked him, “about the great oak, struck by lightning? Do you think there is rot within?”
“I will look,” he said. “If there is, it will not be hard to take down. I will do it before dinner tomorrow.”
He cut it down, then hacked the rest of the day at my brambles. “They were overrun. What you really need is some goats. A flock of four would have them flat in a month. And they’d keep it flat.”
“And where will I find goats?”
That word between us, Ithaca, like the breaking of a spell.
“Never mind,” I said. “I will transform a few of the sheep, that will fix it.”