But nothing came.
Until she heard the ocean. The roar of angry waters. The hoarse voice of a man crying out to the gods.
Her heart raced as if she herself were struggling for breath in the raging sea. She coughed and gasped at the sensation of swallowing great gulps of cold, bitter brine. The same voice thundered in her ears: “I will not quit this life. Not when I am so close!”
Her heart pounded. She knew that voice. She hadn’t heard it in twenty years, but she knew it.
Goddess, what does it mean? What are you showing me?
Back under the fish-cold sea she went, as if the Goddess herself had dragged her down. When she bobbed back up, she gulped for air as the sound of pounding waves filled her ears.
What do you want from me? she cried aloud. Eerily, her long-lost husband’s voice cried out the same question at the same time and their combined voices echoed again and again throughout the cavern.
She opened her mouth to call out his name, but water filled her throat and she gagged.
Was this how her husband died? Or was the Goddess showing her what was to come? She panted, raising her mouth to the top of the cavern, as if she too fought waves of water. Only her waves were made of confusion and fear.
This man in the sea—my husband—is a stranger to me!
Did she want him to return? After twenty years? After learning he’d spent years in the arms of another woman?
No! He doesn’t deserve to come back! Punish his betrayal by flaying his skin against the rocks. Drag him into the maw of a gruesome sea monster.
But then she would never see him again. A deep groan echoed in the caves. Telemachus would never know his father. She would never again rest her head on his broad chest and listen to his ridiculous tales. She didn’t want that either!
Save him, Goddess!
All throughout the night, Penelope struggled for air, fighting the cold water and stinging salt of twenty years of longing, desire, fear, and rage at being left.
She must have slept for she jerked awake, her eyes snapping open. The blanket was tangled around her legs. She kicked and pushed it away and stood, trembling, trying to make sense of the Goddess’s refusal to answer her.
Did Odysseus live? Or had he drowned at sea? In either case, what was she to do? How was she to respond?
The silence in the dank cave felt heavy with the Goddess’s silence.
A movement caught her eye. She returned to the spot where she had lain. She blinked. Blankets didn’t move, so why did this one?
At first she refused to see, refused to believe. Until the snake’s head poked out of a corner of the heavy fabric. The snake. There. Coiling into the warm imprint her body had left on the cloth.
The snake was meant to disappear into the Goddess’s inner caves or die from the wet and cold. That it lived—that it was by her side—was proof that her sacrifice had been rejected.
The Goddess would not help her. The Goddess, like her husband, had disappeared, leaving her without guidance, without support.
The snake had escaped its basket and sought out her warmth. Her own body had preserved it. It hadn’t been blankets wrapped around her legs, but the snake.
The cavern seemed to fill with a red haze as hot tears burned her eyes. The Goddess would not help her. Her breath seared.
Why, why, was she always left to face the world and all its challenges alone?
She dropped to her knees and scrabbled at the loose stones until she found a sharp-edged rock that fit her palm. Her breathing rasped in her ears. Crouching like an animal, she approached the coiled bundle in her blankets. Her fingers sought out the creature’s head. Raising her trembling arm high, she smashed the rock down with all her might.
Over and over again, she pounded the twisting, turning, flailing thing as memories flashed in her mind like far-off lighting: Odysseus leaving, swearing upon his heart to return to her. Telemachus baring his teeth whenever she tried to guide him. Danae whispering that her husband lived, but in the arms of another woman.
Every betrayal. Every loss. Every moment of despair poured out in a rhythm of rock against flesh until the blanket was flattened and smeared with gore.
Penelope dropped the rock, breathing hard, head bowed. There was nothing left to do but emerge from the cave and do what she’d always done: handle it all. Alone.
The queen lifted the blanket and shook out the creature’s battered remains, smearing herself with dark, sticky liquid and bits of skin and gore, and wrapped the soiled thing around her shoulders.
Straightening, she grabbed the small lamp and began the long climb up from the depths of the Mother’s sacred center.
The queen of Ithaca emerged from the dark of the cavern like Eurydice ascending from the underworld. But unlike Orpheus’s doomed bride, she stepped out into the sunlight, squinting and blinking and furiously alive.
Danae rushed to her. “My queen!” Her maidens stared wide-eyed at the shreds of snakeskin clinging to their leader’s arms. “What…what has the Goddess shown you?”
She shook her head, unable to speak. How could she explain that the Goddess had rejected her offering? That she didn’t know what was going to happen or what the gods wanted her to do?
“We must return right away,” she finally managed, her voice gouged and raw.
“Is the king returning?” Danae asked. “How are we to prepare?”
“I do not know,” Penelope finally answered, throwing off her now ruined blanket. “I know only that we will do as we have always done—face the challenges coming our way—alone.”
* * *
TELEMACHUS
It turned out to be the perfect time to set sail. The winds were right and the sea was calm. Telemachus poured a libation of his best stores directly into the glittering wine-dark sea in thanks to great god of the sea. Perhaps this was a sign that things were finally going to go his way.
He had finally done it. He had taken action. Odysseus, he was sure, would’ve been proud.
The sailors and oarsmen that Mentes had employed on his behalf had stared at their prince as if he were a strange creature from a foreign land when he’d boarded the ship that would take him to his new destiny. Telemachus had kept his face serene and blank—the last thing he needed now was for the kingdom’s sailors to spread the word that the great Odysseus’s son shamefully had no sea legs.
Still, he couldn’t help but overhear some of the comments. “He does take after the old captain-king a bit around the face,” one of the older sailors noted. “But not around anything else,” another quipped. “Needs to put some meat on those soft bones.”