Odysseus had told me that Penelope’s pains began so faintly, she thought them a stomachache from too many pears. Mine dropped from the sky like a thunderbolt. I remember crawling to the house from the garden, hunched against the tearing contraction. I had the willow draught ready, and I drank some, then all, and by the end I was licking the bottle’s neck.
I knew so little of childbirth, its stages and progression. The shadows changed, but it was all one endless moment, the pain like stones grinding me to meal. I screamed and pushed against it for hours, and still the baby did not come. Midwives had tricks to help the child move, but I did not know them. One thing I did understand: if it took too long, my son would die.
On it went. In my agonies, I overturned a table. After, I would find the room torn apart as if by bears, tapestries ripped from the walls, stools shattered, platters broken. I do not remember it. My mind was lurching through a thousand terrors. Was the baby dead already? Or was I like my sister, growing some monster within me? The unremitting pain only seemed a confirmation. If the baby were whole and natural, wouldn’t he come?
I closed my eyes. Putting a hand inside myself, I felt for the smooth curve of the child’s head. It had no horns, no other horrors I could tell. It was only stuck against the inner opening, squeezed between my muscles and my bones.
I prayed to Eileithyia, goddess of childbirth. She had the power to loosen the womb’s hold and bring the child into the world. She was said to watch over the birth of every god and demigod. Help me, I cried out. But she did not come. The animals whined in their corners, and I began to remember the whispers of my cousins in Oceanos’ halls so long ago. If a god did not wish your child to be born, they might hold Eileithyia back.
The thought seized my careering mind. Someone was keeping her from me. Someone dared to try to harm my son. It gave me the strength I needed. I bared my teeth at the dark and crawled to the kitchen. I seized a knife and dragged a great bronze mirror to face me, for there was no Daedalus now to help. I leaned against the marble wall, amid the broken table legs. The coolness of the stone calmed me. This child was no Minotaur, but a mortal. I must not cut too deep.
I had been afraid the pain would undo me, but I scarcely felt it. There was a rasping sound, like stone upon stone, that I realized was my own breath. The layers of flesh parted, and I saw him at last: limbs curled like a snail in its shell. I stared, afraid to move him. What if he was dead already? What if he was not, and I killed him with my touch? But I drew him forth, and his skin met the air, and he began to wail. I wailed with him, for I had never heard a sweeter sound. I laid him on my chest. The stones beneath us felt like feathers. He was shuddering and shuddering, pressing my skin with his wet, living face. I cut the cord, holding him all the while.
See? I told him. We do not need anyone. In answer, he made a froggy croak and closed his eyes. My son, Telegonus.
I did not go easy to motherhood. I faced it as soldiers face their enemies, girded and braced, sword up against the coming blows. Yet all my preparations were not enough. In those months I had spent with Odysseus, I had thought I’d learned some tricks of mortal living. Three meals a day, the fluxes, the washing and cleaning. Twenty diaper cloths I had cut, and believed myself wise. But what did I know of mortal babies? Ae?tes was in arms less than a month. Twenty cloths got me only through the first day.
Thank the gods I did not have to sleep. Every minute I must wash and boil and clean and scrub and put to soak. Yet how could I do that, when every minute he also needed something, food and change and sleep? That last I had always thought the most natural thing for mortals, easy as breathing, yet he could not seem to do it. However I wrapped him, however I rocked and sang, he screamed, gasping and shaking until the lions fled, until I feared he would do himself harm. I made a sling to carry him, so he might lie against my heart. I gave him soothing herbs, I burned incenses, I called birds to sing at our windows. The only thing that helped was if I walked—walked the halls, walked the hills, walked the shore. Then at last he would wear himself out, close his eyes, and sleep. But if I stopped, if I tried to put him down, he would wake at once. Even when I walked without ceasing, he was soon up, screaming again. Within him was an ocean’s worth of grief, which could only be stoppered a moment, never emptied. How often in those days did I think of Odysseus’ smiling child? I tried his trick, along with all the rest. Held my son’s floppy body up into the air, promised him he was safe. He only screamed louder. Whatever made the prince Telemachus so sweet, I thought, it must have come from Penelope. This was the child I deserved.
We did find some moments of peace. When he finally slept, when he nursed at my breast, when he smiled at a flight of birds scattering from a tree. I would look at him and feel a love so sharp it seemed my flesh lay open. I made a list of all the things I would do for him. Scald off my skin. Tear out my eyes. Walk my feet to bones, if only he would be happy and well.
He was not happy. A moment, I thought, I only need one moment without his damp rage in my arms. But there was none. He hated sun. He hated wind. He hated baths. He hated to be clothed, to be naked, to lie on his belly, and his back. He hated this great world and everything in it, and me, so it seemed, most of all.
I thought of all those hours I had spent working my spells, singing, weaving. I felt their loss like a limb torn away. I told myself I even missed turning men to pigs, for at least that I had been good at. I wanted to hurl him from me, but instead I marched on in that darkness with him, back and forth before the waves, and at every step I yearned for my old life. I spoke sourly to the night air as he wailed: “At least I do not worry he is dead.”
I clapped a hand to my mouth, for the god of the underworld comes at much less invitation. I held his fierce little face against me. The tears were standing in his eyes, his hair disordered, a small scratch on his cheek. How had he gotten it? What villain dared to hurt him? Everything that I had heard of mortal babies flooded back: how they died for no reason, for any reason, because they grew too cold, too hungry, because they lay one way, or another. I felt each breath in his thin chest, how improbable it was, how unlikely that this frail creature, who could not even lift his head, could survive in the harsh world. But he would survive. He would, if I must wrestle the veiled god myself.
I stared into the darkness. I listened like wolves do, pricked for any danger. I wove again those illusions that made my island look like savage rocks. But still I feared. Sometimes men were reckless in their desperation. If they landed on the rocks anyway, they would hear his screams and come. What if I had forgotten my tricks and could not make them drink? I remembered the stories Odysseus had told me of what soldiers did to children. Astyanax and all the sons of Troy, smashed and spitted, torn to pieces, trampled by horses, killed and killed so they would not live and grow to strength and one day come looking for their vengeance.
My whole life, I had waited for tragedy to find me. I never doubted that it would, for I had desires and defiance and powers more than others thought I deserved, all the things that draw the thunderstroke. A dozen times grief had scorched, but its fire had never burned through my skin. My madness in those days rose from a new certainty: that at last, I had met the thing the gods could use against me.