“I agree. But surely you have not come here to talk about Timandra?”
“No.” He sighs. He watches her sip some wine, then says, “I have to go back to Ithaca before the spring rains. I am not happy to leave. I have enjoyed my time here.” He takes a cup of wine for himself, then looks up at Clytemnestra with a weird expression. “Do you think Penelope will come?”
“Yes,” she says. “I am sure she will.”
He relaxes and his expression shifts back to the usual amusement. “Good . . . Maybe in another life, I would have married you,” he adds carelessly.
She watches him, but his smile is impenetrable. “You wouldn’t have been able to handle me,” she says. “I am too fierce for you.”
He laughs. “And your husband?”
“He likes the fire. He isn’t afraid to burn.” She says it lightly, with a smile, but she knows it is true. Odysseus strikes her as a man who is fascinated by fierceness but also repulsed. He values himself too highly to come close to anything that might harm him.
He passes a hand through his hair. “I wish I could have met him.”
“You would have liked him.”
“I know I would.” He stands, rubbing the cuts on his face. “I will wake Penelope before those brutes come back from the hunt.” She smiles. He knows how funny his stories about his fellow soldiers are. He comes closer to fix one strand of hair behind her ear, then walks out of the hall.
*
The sun is rising to the east, and in a matter of days, the winds will ripen into spring rains. Clytemnestra and Penelope sit on a large rock at the edge of the forest, watching the river in front and the mountains behind them. Helots are already at work in the fields, their hands crusted and their backs bent under the weight of large baskets.
“Odysseus came to talk to me yesterday,” Clytemnestra says.
“He did?” Penelope asks. Her soft brown hair is plaited, and she has dark circles under her eyes. Last night they slept together, and Clytemnestra felt her stirring beside her in the bed, restless.
“He will leave soon,” she says. “Will you go to Ithaca?”
Penelope keeps silent for a while, clasping her hands to her chest as if to hold her heart. After what feels like a long time, she says, “I will go, yes.”
“But something is holding you back,” Clytemnestra says.
Penelope hugs her knees, drawing her cloak around her legs as birds do with their wings when resting. “Remember when I told you that Odysseus reminds me of your husband? Well, I still think that, only there is something darker about him, something slippery . . .” She stares at the rocks on the ground, lost in thought.
“I know what you mean,” Clytemnestra says. “It is like trying to catch the leaves when the wind makes them dance. One moment you have them, and the next they fly away.”
Penelope laughs. “We used to do that years ago, remember? Running around the plain, flying leaves all around us.”
Clytemnestra nods, smiling. She would always catch the most leaves, but Penelope would grab the beautiful ones, bright red and pale orange.
“But yes,” Penelope says, “Odysseus is like that. He is a man with secrets.”
“And yet you like him.”
“Very much.” Penelope’s face is luminous. “My father used to tease me and say that I would marry some forgotten king on a forgotten island.”
Clytemnestra nudges her. “Well, you are.”
Penelope laughs. “Who knows about Ithaca? Who will remember Odysseus?”
“Probably no one. The clever ones are always forgotten.”
“That is why there will be no songs about you and me but plenty about Diomedes the brute.”
They laugh together while the wind starts to smell like spring, and life goes on around them, undisturbed.
*
Clytemnestra sits alone in the mousike room, looking at the flutes and lyres in the baskets lining the wall. The space is small with a low ceiling, the walls covered with chalked drawings—images they used to draw as children. There are Helen’s lyres and Clytemnestra’s lynxes, Castor’s spears and Timandra’s dogs. In one corner of the wall, a noble girl has scribbled Polydeuces is handsome like Apollo.
“Your brother sounds like a charmer.”
Odysseus appears at the door. He moves like a cat, so that even she, who is trained to listen for the slightest sounds, never hears him coming.
She takes an aulos, the double-reeded flute, Polydeuces’s favorite. “Do you play?” she asks.
“Yes,” he says. “Though I can’t say I have that kind of talent.” He takes the flute from her hands. “Ah, this is beautiful. Libyan lotus plant? It’s so light.” He looks at her with a smile. “I imagine Helen was the most gifted in this class.”
She smiles back. “I was gifted too.”
He holds up his hands. “Of course.”
There is a moment of awkward silence in which he puts the aulos in the basket and leans back against the wall. Then, “I must say, Helen doesn’t have much luck with men. I have heard how she suffered with Theseus . . . poor girl.” He shakes his head, mortified.
“That was different. She chose Menelaus,” Clytemnestra replies.
He tilts his head. “Did she really have that choice? In my experience, some men—kings and heroes, men loved by the gods—always get what they want. Call it power, obstinacy, or simply unwillingness to accept failure.”
“You got what you wanted too,” she says. “You will marry Penelope.”
He stares at her as if confused to be compared to powerful men. He hides it quickly and leans forward until his face is only a breath away from her ear. “I am not the only one who has made a deal with Tyndareus.”
She steps back. “Who else?”
“I know nothing for sure, but keep an eye on Menelaus.”
“Menelaus already has Mycenae and Helen. What else does he want?”
“As I said, I know nothing for sure, but you have grown up in Sparta. You know what it means to look out constantly for danger as if you were surrounded by wolves.” He winks, as he often does before leaving. “In that, you and I are alike.”
*
Odysseus’s warning follows her like a snake, creeping behind her, showing its fangs whenever she turns. She cannot pretend it isn’t there.
One afternoon, when Penelope is resting, Clytemnestra ventures to the far end of the guests’ quarters, where she knows Menelaus shares a room with Helen. There is no one around and she moves slowly, her belly vast and heavy. The walls are bare, the windows small, close to the roof. They spill little seeds of daylight and long shadows. This place once felt to her like a dungeon. Tantalus must have thought the same when he first came here, because his room is at the opposite end of the guests’ quarters, close to the megaron and its beautifully lit corridors.
Two voices float from the end of the hall, and Clytemnestra creeps closer, her bare feet careful as if on a road of pebbles. She stops outside the door, her breath held.
“I heard your cousin will marry the son of Laertes.”
“I have heard so too.” Helen’s voice is soft and shy compared to Menelaus’s, like a bee-eater’s call after a hawk’s. “I think they will be happy. They are quite alike.”
“Have you spoken to her?”
A small, delicate moment of silence. Clytemnestra can almost feel Helen’s sadness.
“No,” she says.
There is a clinking sound, as if Menelaus is playing with a knife. “Her looks aren’t pleasing,” he says, “but she is gentle, though my brother believes she is crafty.”
“He is right,” Helen says. “Penelope is clever.”
Menelaus scoffs, and for a while, there is silence. Clytemnestra imagines his lips on her sister’s, his hands on her shoulders. She feels sick.
“What were you discussing with Tyndareus?” Helen asks. She sounds scared, and Clytemnestra hears her effort in trying to steady her voice. “You were in the megaron for a long time.”