I passed a pear tree drifted with white blossoms. A fish splashed in the moonlit river. With every step I felt lighter. An emotion was swelling in my throat. It took me a moment to recognize what it was. I had been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.
Telemachus slept on. His hands were clasped like a child’s under his chin. They had been bloodied at the oars, and I had salved them, their warm weight resting in my lap. His fingers had been more calloused than I imagined, but his palms were smooth. So often on Aiaia, I had wondered how it would feel to touch him.
His eyes opened as if I had spoken the words aloud. They were clear as they always were.
I said, “Scylla was not born a monster. I made her.”
His face was in the fire’s shadows. “How did it happen?”
There was a piece of me that shouted its alarm: if you speak he will turn gray and hate you. But I pushed past it. If he turned gray, then he did. I would not go on anymore weaving my cloths by day and unraveling them again at night, making nothing. I told him the whole tale of it, each jealousy and folly and all the lives that had been lost because of me.
“Her name,” he said. “Scylla. It means the Render. Perhaps it was always her destiny to be a monster, and you were only the instrument.”
“Do you use the same excuse for the maids you hanged?”
It was as if I had struck him. “I make no excuse for that. I will wear that shame all my life. I cannot undo it, but I will spend my days wishing I could.”
“It is how you know you are different from your father,” I said.
“Yes.” His voice was sharp.
“It is the same for me,” I said. “Do not try to take my regret from me.”
He was quiet a long time. “You are wise,” he said.
“If it is so,” I said, “it is only because I have been fool enough for a hundred lifetimes.”
“Yet at least what you loved, you fought for.”
“That is not always a blessing. I must tell you, all my past is like today, monsters and horrors no one wants to hear.”
He held my gaze. Something about him then reminded me strangely of Trygon. An unearthly, quiet patience.
“I want to hear,” he said.
I had kept away from him for so many reasons: his mother and my son, his father and Athena. Because I was a god, and he a man. But it struck me then that at the root of all those reasons was a sort of fear. And I have never been a coward.
I reached across that breathing air between us and found him.
Chapter Twenty-six
THREE DAYS WE STAYED upon that shore. We made no oars and patched no sails. We caught fish and picked fruit, and looked for nothing but what we found at our fingers’ ends. I laid my palm on his stomach, feeling it rise and fall with his breath. His shoulders were wiry with muscle, the back of his neck roughened with sunburn.
I did tell him those stories. By the fire, or the morning’s light, when our pleasures were set aside. Some of it was easier than I thought it would be. There was a kind of joy in drawing Prometheus for him, in making Ariadne and Daedalus live again. But other parts were not so easy, and sometimes as I spoke an anger would come over me, and the words would curdle in my mouth. Who was he to be so patient, while I spilled my blood? I was a woman grown. I was a goddess, and his elder by a thousand generations. I did not need his pity, his attention, anything.
“Well?” I would demand. “Why don’t you say something?”
“I am listening,” he would answer.
“You see?” I said, when I was finished with the tale. “Gods are ugly things.”
“We are not our blood,” he answered. “A witch once told me that.”
On the third day he cut new oars, and I transformed waterskins and filled them, then gathered up fruit. I watched him rig the sail with easy competence, check the hull for any leaks. I said, “I don’t know what I was thinking. I cannot sail a boat. What would I have done if you hadn’t come?”
He laughed. “You would have gotten there eventually, it just would have taken some of your eternity. Where do we go next?”
“A shore, east of Crete. There is a small cove, half sand, half rocks, and a scrub forest in sight, and hills. Overhead, at this time of the year, the Dragon seems to point the way.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“If you get me close enough, I think I will be able to find it.” I watched him. “Are you going to ask what is there?”
“I do not think you want me to.”
Less than a month we had spent together, yet he seemed to know me better than anyone who had ever walked the world.
It was a smooth voyage, the wind fresh and the sun still shy of its blistering summer heat. At night, we made our camp on whatever shores we could find. He was used to living like a herder, and I found I did not miss my gold and silver bowls, my tapestries. We roasted our fish on stick-ends, I carried fruits in my dress. If there was a house, we might offer services in return for bread and wine and cheese. He carved toys for children, patched skiffs. I had my salves, and if I kept my head covered, I could pass for an herbwoman coming to ease their aches and fevers. Their gratitude was simple and plain, and ours was the same. No one knelt.
While the boat sailed beneath the blue-arched sky, we would sit together on the boards talking of the people we had met, the coastlines we passed, the dolphins that followed us for half the morning, grinning and splashing at our rails.
“Do you know,” he said, “that before coming to Aiaia, I only left Ithaca once?”
I nodded. “I have seen Crete and some islands on the way, and that is all. I have always wished to go to Egypt.”
“Yes,” he said. “And Troy, and the great cities of Sumeria.”
“Assur,” I said. “And I want to see Aethiopia. And the North as well, the ice-ribbed lands. And Telegonus’ new kingdom in the West.”
We looked out over the waves, and a silence hung between us. The next sentence should be: let us go together. But I could not speak that, not now and perhaps not ever. And he would keep silent, for he did know me well.
“Your mother,” I said. “Do you think she’ll be angry at us?”
He snorted. “No,” he said. “She likely knew before we did.”
“I would not be surprised if we come back and find her a witch.”
It always made me happy to startle him, to see his evenness blown wide. “What?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “She has eyed my herbs from the beginning. I would have taught her, if there had been time. I will wager with you.”
“If you are so sure, I do not think I will take your odds.”
At night we crossed the hollows of each other’s skin, and when he slept I would lay beside him, feeling the warmth where our limbs touched, watching the soft pulse at his throat. His eyes had creases, and his neck had more. When people saw us, they thought I was younger. But though I looked and sounded like a mortal, I was a bloodless fish. From my water I could see him, and all the sky behind, but I could not cross over.
Between the Dragon and Telemachus, we did at last find my old shore. It was morning when we reached the narrow bay, my father’s chariot halfway to its peak. Telemachus held the anchor stone. “Drop, or draw onto the sand?”
“Drop,” I said.
Hundreds of years of tides and storms had changed the shoreline’s shape, but my feet remembered the sand’s fineness, the rough grass with its burrs. In the distance drifted faint gray smoke and the sound of goat bells. I passed the jutting rocks where Ae?tes and I used to sit. I passed the forest where I had lain after my father burned me, now only a stand of straggling pines. The hills I had dragged Glaucos up were crowded with spring: strawflowers and hyacinths, lilies, violets, and sweet rock roses. And at their center, the small clutch of yellow flowers, sprung from Kronos’ blood.