He rubbed at the base of his thumb, where the awl-puncture had been. “We named him Telemachus after my skill with the bow.” Distant fighter, it meant. “But the joke was that he screamed his whole first day as if he were living in the battlefield’s heart. The women tried every trick they knew, rocking, walking, swaddling his arms, a thumb wetted with wine to suck. The midwife said she had never seen such passion. Even my old nurse was covering her ears. My wife had gone gray, for she feared there was something wrong with him. Give him to me, I said. I held him up before me and looked into his screaming face. ‘Sweet son,’ I said, ‘you are right, this world is a wild and terrible place, and worth shouting at. But you are safe now, and all of us need to sleep. Will you let us have a little peace?’ And he calmed. Just went quiet in my hands. After that, you could not find an easier child. He was always smiling, laughing for anyone who’d stop to speak to him. The maids would invent excuses to come and pinch his fat cheeks. ‘What a king he will be one day!’ they would say. ‘Mild as the west wind, oh!’”
He went on with his memories. Telemachus’ first bite of bread, his first word, how he loved goats and hiding beneath chairs, giggling to be found. He had more stories of his son from a single year, I thought, than my father had of me in all eternity.
“I know his mother will keep me in his mind, but I was leading the hunts by his age. I had killed a boar myself. I only hope there will still be something to teach him when I return. I want to leave some mark upon him.”
I said something vague and soothing, I am sure. You will leave a mark. Every boy wants a father, he will wait for you. But I was thinking again of the relentlessness of mortal lives. Even as we spoke, the moments were passing. The sweet baby was vanished. His son was aging, growing, sharpening into a man. Thirteen years Odysseus had lost of him already. How many more?
My thoughts returned often to that quiet-eyed, watchful boy. I wondered if he knew what his father expected, if he felt the weight of those hopes. I imagined him out on the cliffs every day, praying for a ship. I imagined his weariness, his soft, inward grief before he went to sleep each night, curling on his bed as he had once been cradled in his father’s hands.
I cupped my own hands in the dark. I did not have a thousand wiles, and I was no fixed star, yet for the first time I felt something in that space. A hope, a living breath, that might yet grow between.
Chapter Seventeen
THE TREES WERE JUST beginning to bud. The sea was still foam-capped, but soon its waves would calm, and it would be spring and time for Odysseus to sail. He would race across the sea, tacking between storms and Poseidon’s great hand, his eye fixed on home. And my island would fall silent again.
I lay beside him in the moonlight each night. Just one more season, I imagined saying to him. Just till summer’s end, that is when the best winds come. It would surprise him. I would catch the faintest flicker of disappointment in his eyes. Golden witches are not supposed to beg. I let the island plead for me instead, speaking with its eloquent beauty. Every day the stones shed more of their icy chill, and the blossoms swelled. We ate picnics on the green grass. We walked on the sun-warm sand and swam in the bright bay. I took him to the shade of an apple tree, so that the scent would waft over him while he slept. I unrolled all Aiaia’s wonders like a rug before him, and I saw him begin to waver.
His men saw too. Thirteen years they had lived beside him, and though his twisting thoughts were mostly beyond their ken, they sensed a change, as hounds scent the moods of their master. Day by day, they grew more restless. Ithaca, they said, loudly, every chance they got. Queen Penelope. Telemachus. Eurylochos stalked about my halls, glaring. I saw him whispering in corners with the others. When I passed by, they fell silent, gazes down. In ones and twos, they made their creeping way to Odysseus. I waited for him to send them away, but he only stared over their shoulders into the dusty sunset air. I should have left them pigs, I thought.
Death’s Brother is the name that poets give to sleep. For most men those dark hours are a reminder of the stillness that waits at the end of days. But Odysseus’ slumber was like his life, tossed and restless, heavy with murmurs that made my wolves prick up their ears. I watched him in the pearl-gray light of dawn: the tremors of his face, the striving tension in his shoulders. He twisted the sheets as if they were opponents he tried to throw in a wrestling match. A year of peaceful days he had stayed with me, and still every night he went to war.
The shutters were open. It must have rained in the night, I thought. The air that drifted in felt washed and very clear. Each sound—bird trills, fluttering leaves, the hush of waves—hung in the air like a chime. I dressed and followed that glory outside. His men still slept. Elpenor was up on the roof, wrapped in one of my best blankets. The wind rippled past me like lyre notes, and my own breath seemed to pipe in harmony. A dewdrop fell from a branch. It struck the earth like the ringing of a bell.
I felt my mouth go dry.
He stepped out from my stand of laurels. Every line of his body was beautiful, perfect with grace. His dark, loose hair was crowned with a wreath. From his shoulder hung a shining, silver-tipped bow carved from olive wood.
“Circe,” Apollo said, and it was the greatest chime of all. Every melody in the world belonged to him.
He held up an elegant hand. “My brother warned me about your voice. I think it will be better if you speak as little as possible.”
His words carried no malice. Though perhaps that was what malice sounded like in those perfect tones.
“I will not be silenced on my own island.”
He winced. “Hermes said that you were difficult. I come with a prophecy for Odysseus.”
I felt myself tense. Olympian riddles were always double-edged. “He is inside.”
“Yes,” he said, “I know.”
The wind struck me across the face. I had no time to cry out. It rushed into my throat, battering its way to my belly as if all the sky were being funneled through me. I gagged, but its swelling force poured on and on, choking off my breath, drowning me in its alien power. Apollo watched, his face pleasant.
The island clearing was swept away. Odysseus stood on a shore with cliffs rising around him. In the distance were goats and olive groves. I saw a wide-halled house, its courtyard set with stones, its walls gleaming with ancestral weapons. Ithaca.
Then Odysseus stood upon a different shore. Dark sand and a sky that never saw my father’s light. Shadowed poplars loomed and willows trailed their leaves in black water. No birds sang, no beast moved. I knew the place at once, though I had never been there. A great cave gaped, and in its mouth stood an old man with unseeing eyes. I heard his name in my mind: Teiresias.
I threw myself down into the dirt of my garden bed. Scrabbling, tugging up the moly roots, I stuffed a few into my mouth, brown earth still clinging. At once the wind ceased, dying as quickly as it had come. I coughed, my whole body shaking. My tongue tasted of slime and ash. I fought to my knees.
“You dare,” I said. “You dare to misuse me on my own island? I am Titan blood. This will bring war. My father—”
“It was your father who suggested it. My vessels must have prophecy in their blood. You should be honored,” he said. “You have borne a vision of Apollo.”
His voice was a hymn. His beautiful face showed only the faintest puzzlement. I wanted to tear him with my nails. The gods and their incomprehensible rules. Always there was a reason you must kneel.
“I will not tell Odysseus.”
“That is beneath my concern,” he said. “The prophecy is delivered.”
He was gone. I pressed my forehead to the wrinkled bole of an olive. My chest was heaving. I shook with rage and humiliation. How many times would I have to learn? Every moment of my peace was a lie, for it came only at the gods’ pleasure. No matter what I did, how long I lived, at a whim they would be able to reach down and do with me what they wished.
The sky was not yet fully blue. Inside, Odysseus still slept. I woke him and led him to the hall. I did not tell him the prophecy. I watched him eat and fingered my rage as if it were a knife’s point. I wanted to keep it sharp as long as I could, for I knew what would come after. In the vision, he had been back again on Ithaca. The last of my little hopes were gone.
I set out my best dishes, broached my oldest wine. But there was no savor in it. His face was abstracted. All day he kept turning to look out the window as if someone would come. We spoke politely, but I felt him waiting for the men to eat, to go to bed. When the last of their voices had died into sleep, he knelt.