“I went to my mother after that, but he had set guards to keep me out, and when I shouted past them she said I must be patient and not provoke him. The only person who would speak to me was my old nurse, Eurycleia, who had been his nurse as well. We sat by the fire, chewing our fish to paste. He was not always like this, she kept telling me. As if that changed anything. This man of rage was all the father I had. She died not long after, but my father did not stay to watch her pyre burn. He was tired of living among ashes, he said. He set out on a skiff and came back a month later with gold belts and cups and a new breastplate, and splashes of dried blood on his clothes. It was the happiest I had ever seen him. But it did not last. By the next morning he was railing about the smoky hall and the clumsiness of the servants.”
I had seen him in such moods. Every petty defect of the world enraged him, all the waste and stupidity and slowness of men, and all the irritants of nature too, biting flies and warping wood and the briars that ripped his cloak. When he had lived with me, I’d smoothed all those things away, wrapping him in my magic and divinity. Perhaps it was why he had been so happy. An idyll, I had called our time. Illusion might have been a better word.
“After that, he went on some raid every month. Reports came back, scarcely believable. He had taken a new wife, the queen of some inland kingdom. He ruled there happily among the cows and barley. He wore a golden circlet and feasted till dawn and ate boars whole and roared with laughter. He had fathered another son.”
His eyes were Odysseus’. The shape and color, even the intensity. But the expression: Odysseus’ gaze was always reaching out, cajoling. Telemachus’ held fast to itself.
“Was any of it true?”
He lifted his shoulders, let them drop. “Who can say? Perhaps he started the rumors himself to wound us. I sent a message to my mother that the goats needed extra tending and went to live in an empty hut on the hillside. My father could plot and rage, but I did not have to see it. My mother could eat one piece of cheese all day and let her eyes turn gray on her loom, but I did not have to see that either.”
In the fire, the logs had burnt down. Their remains glowed white, scaled with ash.
“Into such miseries, your son came. Bright as a sunrise, sweet as ripe fruit. He carried that silly-looking spear, and gifts for us all, silver bowls and cloaks and gold. His face was handsome and his hopes crackled loud as a fire. I wanted to shake him. I thought: when my father returns, this boy will learn that life is not a bard’s song. And so he did.”
The moon had lifted away from the window, and the room was draped in shadows. Telemachus’ hands rested on his knees.
“You were trying to help him,” I said. “That is why you went down to the beach.”
His eyes were on the fire’s ashes. “He did not need me, as it turned out.”
I had used to imagine Telemachus so often. As a quiet boy keeping watch for Odysseus, as a burning youth bearing vengeance across land and sea. But now he was a man, and his voice was dull and drained. He was like those messengers who run great distances with news for kings. They gasp out their words, then fall to the ground and do not rise.
Without thinking, I reached across and laid my hand on his arm. “You are not your blood. Do not let him take you with him.”
He looked down at my fingers a moment, then up into my face. “You pity me. Do not. My father lied about many things, but he was right when he called me a coward. I let him be what he was for year after year, raging and beating the servants, shouting at my mother, and turning our house to ash. He told me to help him kill the suitors and I did it. Then he told me to kill all the men who had aided them, and I did that too. Then he commanded me to gather up all the slave girls who had ever lain with one of them and make them clean the blood-soaked floor, and when they were finished, I was to kill them as well.”
The words jolted me. “The girls would have had no choice. Odysseus would have known it.”
“Odysseus told me to carve them into joints like animals.” His eyes held mine. “Do you disbelieve it?”
It was not one story that I thought of, but a dozen. He had always loved his vengeances. He had always hated those he thought betrayed him.
“Did you do as he said?”
“No,” he said. “I hanged them instead. I found twelve lengths of rope and tied twelve knots.” Each word was like a blade he thrust into himself. “I had never seen it done, but I remembered how in all the stories of my childhood the women were always hanging themselves. I had some thought that it must be more proper. I should have used the sword instead. I have never known such ugly, drawn-out deaths. I will see their feet twisting the rest of my days. Goodnight, Lady Circe.”
He picked his knife up from my table and was gone.
The storm had passed, and the night sky was clear again. I walked, wanting to feel the new-washed breeze on my skin, the earth crumbling softly beneath my feet, to shake off that ugly image of twitching bodies. Overhead, my aunt sailed, but I did not trouble with her anymore. She liked to watch lovers, and I had not been one of those for a long time. Perhaps I had never been.
I could imagine Odysseus’ face as he killed those suitors, man by man by man. I had seen him chop wood. He did it in one swift motion, clean through. They would have died at his feet, their blood staining him to the knees. He would note it coolly, distantly, like the click of a counter: done.
The heat would have come after. When he had stood over the motionless slaughter-yard, and felt his rage still brimming and unspent. So he would have fed more into it, like logs, to keep a fire going. The men who had aided the suitors, the slaves who had lain with them, the fathers who dared to speak against him. On and on he would have gone, if Athena had not intervened.
And what of me? How long would I have gone on filling my sty, if Odysseus had not come? I remembered the night he had asked me about the pigs. “Tell me,” he had said, “how do you decide which man deserves punishment and which does not? How can you judge for certain, this heart is rotted and this one good? What if you make a mistake?”
I had been warmed that night by wine and fire, lured by the flush of his regard. “Let us consider,” I said, “a boatload of sailors. Among them, some are undoubtedly worse than others. Some exult in rape and piracy, but others are newly come to it and scarcely have their beards. Some would never imagine robbery, except that their families are starving. Some feel shame after, some do it only because their captain commands it, and because they have the crowd of other men there, to hide among.”
“And so,” he said, “which do you change, and which do you let go?”
“I change them all,” I said. “They have come to my house. Why should I care what is in their hearts?”
He had smiled and lifted his cup to me. “Lady, you and I are in accord.”
An owl passed its wings over my head. I heard the sound of scuffling brush, the beak snap. A mouse had died for its carelessness. I was glad Telemachus would not know of those words between me and his father. At the time I had been boasting, showing off my ruthlessness. I had felt untouchable, filled with teeth and power. I scarcely remembered what that was like.
Odysseus’ favorite pose had been to pretend that he was a man like other men, but there were none like him, and now that he was dead, there were none at all. All heroes are fools, he liked to say. What he meant was, all heroes but me. So who could correct him when he erred? He had stood on the beach looking at Telegonus and believing him a pirate. He had stood in his hall and accused Telemachus of conspiracy. Two children he had had, and he had not seen either clearly. But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.
I was in the cypress grove by then. Their branches showed black in the darkness, and as I passed the needles brushed my face, and I felt the faint sticky catch of their sap. He had liked this place. I remember him running his hand along a trunk. It was one of my favorite things about him, how he admired the world like a jewel, turning its facets to catch the light. A well-made boat, a well-grown tree, a well-told story, these were all pleasures to him.