Springtime cupped my island with merciful hands. Winter thawed away, and at once our forest and fields burst with new life, earlier and stronger than I’d ever seen the season come before. The lush spring promised an excellent harvest by late summer. That would have lifted my spirits, if the bright-green bounty spilling all around hadn’t made the Ithacans more comfortable than ever. Over the course of the winter, they had transformed their slapdash huts into more substantial cabins. They had rooted in place, and I could discern no way to dig them up like the weeds they were.
I had retreated to my chamber since the winter solstice, hiding my face from the women who had once been so loyal to me. I occupied my hands with spinning—I never set aside spindle or distaff anymore, except to sleep, or when Odysseus took them from me—but my mind was never on the wool. Morning and evening I spun, and my mind roved in turns over the two terrains that had become so familiar to me: dark brooding over my misfortune, and the promise of revenge. Thoughts of vengeance were dark to me, but sweet and sustaining. Always I watched the moon, noting the cyclic advance and recession of its power, tracking the way it stirred tides and weather, leaf and seed. I was counting the months until the child arrived, of course, but my communion with the lunar cycle had a purpose of its own. The more I watched the moon—the more attention I paid to its comings and goings—the clearer the voice became within my heart. Each month, as the moon waxed to its fullness, the voice within strengthened. Soon it was no whisper, but a shout. And then it was no longer a shout, but a wild, rushing roar, as a river in flood, or the typhoon winds. My power—whatever that power may be—was growing.
Strength surged in my spirit, higher and hotter with each passing day—yet I was still Odysseus’s captive. My isolation was complete: my friends and I were all but strangers now. I did not even see or hear the wolf pack anymore. Odysseus had stripped me of the freedom I’d enjoyed. At his hands, I had finally met the fate Heliodoros had long ago intended. I was an exile in truth, isolated on the lone rock of my grief and bitterness, surrounded by a sea of desolation. I cursed Heliodoros as I spun my wool; I twisted my hate for my father, and the brothers who had abandoned me to rumors and lies, into the substance of my threads. But my very bitterness seemed to nurture the flame inside me. It licked up hotter with the ripening of every moon, until at last, one night, the very element of my pain burst into a conflagration of power.
That night I spun, as always, beside the small window of my chamber. Moonlight spilled in, brushing my skin with its cool fingers as I perched on my hard chair, working the wool between my fingers. The moon was full—silver and round, as round and great as I was, and as ripe and heavy with quiet, peculiar magic. A distant but compelling sound caught and stole my attention, so the spindle slowed in its rotation and hung trembling from a forgotten thread. I listened. What was that mournful music, the long, jagged harmony? I hadn’t heard it for months. The sound died away, then rose again.
The wolves. Caicias and his pack were howling. They had survived that hard winter, too—how long ago it seemed now. They called to me, lifting their voices in unified song, urging me to come to them, to step out into the full, lavish power of moonlight.
I pushed myself up from my chair, levering my heavy body with care. The child had grown quite large. In a few more weeks, it would arrive—squalling and unwanted in a cruel world. Bearing that awkward weight before me, I left the quiet house and went out into the night. The burden of the child lifted as I walked past the quiet Ithacan encampment and stepped beneath the black roof of the forest. Odysseus’s curse was becoming easier to bear.
I wandered the woodland trails, brushing my hands over the sweet-smelling foliage of late summer, tangling my fingers in dew-beaded spider’s webs. I had no destination in mind; I only listening to the crying of the wolves, going where their songs of freedom led. I had not walked this way for many months—unfettered by grief, glad in the privacy of darkness, the gentle comfort of shadow.
I found myself at the shoreline, and abruptly, as if they thought their work well done, the wolves ceased their singing. I stood still, gazing about, breathing in the clean, crisp salt of the night air, feeling the rhythm of wave against stone. This was not the shore where Odysseus’s ship still waited, abandoned after a long year of torpor. This was the shore where I’d landed upon my arrival at Aeaea. Perhaps, I thought, smiling to myself, the coarse sand still held the first footprint I’d left here, eight years ago. Tonight, I had set aside the sorrow that had plagued me while the Ithacans had occupied my island. I cannot say what had freed me so completely from my ever-present anger, my patient expectation of revenge. It may have been the growing power of motherhood—of a woman’s ultimate magic, to bring forth life. Something lifted the fire within me until it became, not a consuming blaze, but a torch to guide my steps.
My steps across my beach, upon my island. It was still mine, whatever Odysseus might think. I had imbued this place with my very presence, had nurtured it with the labor of my body and the sweat of my brow. The island belonged to me as much as I belonged to it. No arrogant man could undo that magic; no king could take away my birthright.
As I stood on the shore, contented and confident for the first time in more than a year, I was struck suddenly by the tingling knowledge that I was not alone. I concentrated, listening, staring this way and that along the strand. After a few moments I discerned a strange murmur, lifting and breaking—not the song waves, for this sound was less rhythmic, more ragged. On the northern edge of the beach, at the foot of a high, black cliff, a circle of boulders stood, crusted with barnacles and hung with shreds of leathery kelp. I followed the sound to those rocks, moving silently over the sand, stepping as lightly over the pebbles of my beach as any nine-months-pregnant woman could.
Inside the ring of stones, Odysseus crouched at the edge of the water. His hands pressed hard against his face, then tore his dark hair in a sudden excess of agony. He was weeping.
“Odysseus.”
He did not start when I spoke his name. He turned slowly and looked up at me, nodding lightly, as if he had expected me to come—as if my sudden intrusion on his grief was righteousness itself. But as he stared at me, his expression changed. The twisted mask of anguish fell away. A terrible, quaking awe came over him. His eyes and mouth widened with a kind of sacred, holy dread. I seemed to see myself through his eyes—wrapped in my pure-white robe, luminous with moonlight, my face stern in judgment and my body bursting with the generative power of woman—the magic of creation no man, no matter how strong or cunning, could ever hope to tame.
The torch that guided me flared. The calm of certainty came upon me: the moment of my deliverance had come. Silently, I prayed: Hekate, Mother, mistress of my heart…give me the words you wish me to speak. Lead me to my power, my victory.
“You know,” I said to Odysseus. “You know you have done evil to me.”