Of course, he’d heard the rumors that Odysseus still lived, alone among all his men, with a woman on a small isle. But he didn’t believe it. If his father had lived, he would have come home to him. No father would turn his back on his only son—leaving him to be ruled by women and wolves.
A strong wind gusted behind him, stinking of goat dung, making his cloak stick to his back. With an irritated grunt, he shook it off, staring at the finely woven edges of the material as he did so. He had to admit his mother and her workshop women did fine work. If he had the power and respect due him, he would probably be proud his mother excelled in the female arts. If only she hadn’t made the whole of Ithaca dependent on her little economy.
Whenever he complained about the lack of honor, she’d say, “My ‘little economy’ is keeping our people from starving. Our sheepherders provide our wool, keeping their families fed; our craftsmen build and repair our busy looms; our blacksmiths make the loom weights; our woodworkers the spools and spindles. Our traders exchange our cloth for food we could not otherwise afford. How else do you suppose Ithaca would’ve survived all these years?”
He never knew what to say to that.
His grandfather, old Laertes had always talked a big game about teaching him the manly arts when he was little, but he’d changed over time. He lost the sparkle in his eyes and his back bowed under the angry stares of the people as they turned on his house during the hard years. Laertes hid in his orchards. And he never called for Telemachus. Never showed him how to work the earth or hunt for game.
Old Mentor—the retired warrior his father had assigned to keep an eye on his family—was no better. He took little interest in Telemachus, often insulting him for taking after his mother in looks and build rather than his strong and muscular father. Always, just under the surface, was the suspicion that maybe he wasn’t Odysseus’s son at all, which galled.
One more insult to add to the endless list. Telemachus had not complained when Mentor also became scarce at the palace.
Before his house filled with the children of the lost men, he thought nothing of the hours he spent in the women’s quarters. With a grunt, he remembered how one day, seeking old comforts, he’d picked up the distaff. Hot shame still roiled in his stomach at the memory of how the boys, the new playmates who’d begun to mysteriously fill his house during that period, had howled and laughed at him for doing women’s work.
But how could he have known wielding women’s tools was a shameful thing without a father or grandfather to tell him? His mother should’ve seen the danger, should’ve kept him from doing women’s work, even if it did keep him busy and out from underfoot when he was younger. It was her fault for not insisting, for not making Laertes or Mentor show him the things his father would’ve—the spear, the hunt, boxing, wrestling.
By the time all his “guest-friend” boys of the kingdom began taking root in his own palace, it had been too late to begin to learn the manly arts. They’d always known more about being boys—how to insult, race, box and fish and climb and hunt; how to form alliances and dominate others—than he could’ve ever learned sitting at the feet of women.
And what he learned, he did so too late—that only brawn mattered, that only the strongest and fastest boys became admired leaders. The weak and the slow became the most reviled.
Telemachus’s name and bloodline made no difference to the boys who could out-throw, outrun and outwrestle him. If only his father—or his grandfather—had been around to train and prepare him. They would’ve shown him how to claim his rightful dominance. If he’d had that, he’d be ruling his house and kingdom without question.
Instead, bastards like Antinous and Eurymachus ruled the other suitors over him, the true royal son of Odysseus!
The “suitors” should have been obeying his every word, taking orders under his command. He’d heard enough descriptions of his father to know he was broad and not tall—strong but not the strongest. So how had he done it, then? How had he led men who were bigger and stronger?
Anytime he tried to assert his rightful dominance, all he got back was laughter and jeering.
Well, he would change that. Somehow, he would find a way to make them all kneel at his feet, as they were born to do.
Telemachus rolled his shoulders and ran fingers through his curls as he climbed the third hill past the wild olive trees to Mentes’s house. Maybe he shouldn’t have come.
But how could he not?
Mentes was one of the few older men left in town during his father’s long absence. Although he’d been a fine warrior who’d served his father well, he hadn’t joined Odysseus’s campaign to Troy due to a freak accident on the dock as he prepared the war boats. A trunk full of weapons slipped from its rope moorings, crashing down on his right leg. Legend was that you could hear the crack of bone all the way to the twelfth and last boat in the fleet.
His father had Mentes sent to the palace to have the royal healers treat him as Odysseus sailed away to Troy. Because of the severity of the break—at the thigh—everyone thought the formerly strong young warrior would die. But Mentes survived, though with a strangely bowed, deformed leg that kept him from ever serving as a warrior again.
After recovering under the care of his mother’s best healers, Mentes had made himself scarce. Until, Telemachus thought wryly, that fateful day in his thirteenth year—or maybe it was the fourteenth, he couldn’t quite remember—when he suddenly appeared in his hall, sharing a table with him and his mother.
How sweetly Mentes had smiled at Telemachus throughout the night. How Telemachus had flushed with warmth at the attention from the handsome older man.
Telemachus always stood up straighter and talked tougher whenever the muscled, broad-shouldered former warrior appeared in his home—which had suddenly increased in frequency. He felt special when Mentes shared his battle stories and promised to show him how to hunt boar in the hills.
Telemachus had fallen fast and hard for the man, especially when his caresses grew more intimate and pleasurable.
Finally! A man in his life who loved him and guided him and schooled him in the ways of men. Some of the other boys grew jealous. Their choices for finding a mentor of such power and dignity were slim, after all (though Telemachus preferred not to dwell on why that was so, since it had been his father’s responsibility to bring home those very men).
And Mentes had, as promised, taken him hunting and worked with him on javelin throwing and wielding the bow and arrow. His confidence grew in tandem with his physical skills. But then everything changed.
“Welcome young master,” said Mentes’s gardner, who was weeding the herb garden in the courtyard. “Shall I announce you?” He made to get up off his knees.
“No, no need,” Telemachus said quickly. “I can see myself in.”