At dinner, my nymphs had begun to linger near the men, to lead the ones they liked to their beds. This pleased me too. My household mingling with his. I had once told Daedalus that I would never marry, because my hands were dirty, and I liked my work too much. But this was a man with his own dirty hands.
And where, Circe, do you think he learned all these domestic niceties?
My wife, he always said, when he talked of her. My wife, my wife. Those words, carried before him like a shield. Like country folk who will not say the god of death’s name, for fear he will come and take their dearest heart.
Penelope, she was called. While he slept, I would sometimes speak those syllables to the black air. It was a dare, or maybe a proof. See? She does not come. She does not have the powers you believe.
I held off as long as I could, but in the end she was the scab that I must pick. I waited for the sound of his breath that meant he was awake enough to talk.
“What is she like?”
He told me of her gentle manner, how her mild direction made men jump faster than any shout. She was an excellent swimmer. Her favorite flower was the crocus, and she wore the first bloom of the season in her hair for luck. He had a trick of speaking of her as if she were only in the next room, as if they were not twelve years and distant seas apart.
She was Helen’s cousin, he said. A thousand times cleverer and wiser, though Helen was clever in her way, but of course fickle. I had heard his stories of Helen by then, the queen of Sparta, mortal daughter of Zeus, most beautiful woman in the world. Paris, prince of Troy, had spirited her away from her husband, Menelaus, and so started the war.
“Did she leave with Paris by choice, or was she forced?” I asked.
“Who can say? For ten years we were camped outside her gates, and she never tried to run that I heard. But the moment Menelaus stormed the city she threw herself upon him naked, swearing it had been a torment, and all she wanted was her husband back. You will never get the whole truth from her. She has as many coils as a snake, and an eye always to her advantage.”
Not unlike you, I thought.
“My wife, though,” he said. “She is constant. Constant in all things. Even wise men go astray sometimes, but never her. She is a fixed star, a true-made bow.” A silence, in which I felt him moving deep among his memories. “Nothing she says has a single meaning, nor a single intention, yet she is steady. She knows herself.”
The words slid into me, smooth as a polished knife. I had known he loved her from the moment he’d spoken of her weaving. Yet he had stayed, month after month, and I had let myself be lulled. Now I saw more clearly: all those nights in my bed had been only his traveler’s wisdom. When you are in Egypt, you worship Isis; when in Anatolia, you kill a lamb for Cybele. It does not trespass on your Athena still at home.
But even as I thought that, I knew it was not the whole answer. I remembered all the hours he had spent at war, managing the fine glass tempers of kings, the sulks of princes, balancing each proud warrior against his fellow. It was a feat equal to taming Ae?tes’ fire-breathing bulls, with only his own wiles for aid. But back home in Ithaca, there would be no such fractious heroes, no councils, no midnight raids, no desperate stratagems that he must devise or men would die. And how would such a man go home again, to his fireside and his olives? His domestic harmony with me was closer to a sort of rehearsal, I realized. When he sat by the hearth, when he worked in my garden, he was trying to remember the trick of it. How an axe might feel in wood instead of flesh. How he might fit himself to Penelope again, smooth as one of Daedalus’ joints.
He slept beside me. Every now and then his breath caught in the back of his throat. Tick.
Pasipha? would have counseled me to make a love draught and bind him to me. Ae?tes would say I should steal away his wits. I imagined his face empty of all thoughts but what I put into it. He would sit at my knee, gazing up, fatuous and adoring and empty.
The winter rains began, and the whole island smelled of earth. I loved the season, the cold sands, the white hellebore blooming. Odysseus had put on flesh and did not wince so often when he moved. The worst of his tempers had ebbed. I tried to find satisfaction in it. Like seeing a garden well tended, I told myself. Like watching new lambs struggle to their feet.
The men stayed close to the house, drinking themselves warm. For entertainment, Odysseus told them heroic stories of Achilles, Ajax, Diomedes, making them live again in the twilight air and perform their glorious deeds. The men were rapt, their faces struck with wonder. Remember, they whispered with awe. We walked among them. We stood against Hector. Our sons will tell the tale.
He smiled over them like an indulgent father, but that night he scoffed: “They could no more stand against Hector than fly. Anyone with a brain ran when they saw him.”
“Including you?”
“Of course. Ajax could barely hold against him, and only Achilles could have beaten him. I am a fair enough warrior, but I know where I end.”
He did, I thought. So many closed their eyes and spun fantasies of their wished-for strength. But he was mapped and surveyed, each stone and hummock noted with clear-eyed precision. He measured his gifts to the scruple.
“I met Hector once,” he said. “It was the early days of the war, when we still pretended there might be a truce. He sat beside his father, Priam, on a rickety stool and made it look like a throne. He did not gleam like gold. He was not polished and perfect. But he was the same all the way through, like a block of marble cut whole from a quarry. His wife, Andromache, poured our wine. Later, we heard she bore him a son. Astyanax, Commander of the city. But Hector called him Scamandrios, after the river that ran past Troy.”
Something in his voice.
“What happened to him?”
“The same that happens to all sons in war. Achilles killed Hector, and after, when Achilles’ son, Pyrrhus, stormed the palace, he took the child Astyanax and smashed open his head. It was a horror, like everything Pyrrhus did. But it was necessary. The child would have grown up with a blade in his heart. It is a son’s highest duty to avenge his father. If he had lived, he would have rallied men to his side and come after us.”
The moon had slivered down to a shard outside the window. He was silent, turning through his thoughts.
“It is strange how comforting the idea is to me. That if I am killed, my son will take to the seas. He will hunt down those men who laid me low. He will stand before them and say, ‘You dared to spill the blood of Odysseus, and now yours is spilled in turn.’”
The room was still. It was late, the owls long gone to their trees.
“What was he like? Your son?”