He bowed to me. “Just so, your majesty. For further proof, behind me I was sowing salt into the earth. I wonder if it will take seeds, even now. But, to the tale! Agamemnon and Menelaus nearly left me there. However, they had collected another clever man already.” His brow darkened with real anger. “Palamedes. He plucked my infant son from my wife’s arms and put him in the path of the ox. I had to pull up and dive to rescue the boy myself. Thus I gave away the game, and had to go.” His face underwent a sea of emotions, coming to rest on regret. “Palamedes paid for that. I lured him with his great vice: gold. He was accused of intriguing with the Trojans.” He looked down at his hand. “I was the first to cast a stone at his execution.”
A silence fell, uncomfortable for the depth of its honesty.
“But why not go?” asked Nausinous suddenly. “A war, and a great one at that?”
Odysseus looked at my son with genuine disappointment. Even after seven years, the lad longed for war and glory. Then my Odd Zeus laughed at himself. “My own folly, for thinking that youth should be wise. Why not go? Because an old trot with ne’er a tooth in her head had predicted that, should I go to that war, I would not return home for twenty years.”
“How long ago was that?” asked Nausithous.
“Seven thousand two hundred and forty-eight days ago,” he said.
Silence fell as men did the math. Nineteen years and ten months, give or take.
“But you could have left!” cried Nausithous. “You could have left, and been home years ago!” His eyes turned accusingly to me.
With slow gravity, Odysseus answered him. “I had sins to expiate. But more. A king must be more than clever. He must be wise. He must be more than himself. As a leader, I failed, often. Time and again my own men turned against me. The fault was not in them. I had to prove myself capable of being what I ought, and not what I wanted. My time here has made me the best of myself. And I have watched a wise and selfless ruler set me an example.” He bowed to me. I was having trouble drawing breath, and he rescued me by ruffling my sons’ hair, thus drawing everyone’s gaze. “And, as I missed fathering my own son, I felt the need to see two young men into their manhood.”
Swallowing the lump in my throat, I said, “Go on with your story. What of this Menelaus, who loved so deeply, and found his affection unreturned?”
“He was a fool to chase her,” said Odysseus feelingly. “Force does not bring love, only obedience. Better to prove her unworthy of his love by letting her go.”
Slowly, with care for each word, he rolled out his story, from the long years of siege to terrible victory to failed voyages. We all sat rapt, and even the air seemed to still to listen to him give voice for the first time before us all that had befallen him. He spared himself nothing, reciting the names of each and every man whose life he had failed to save. He even listed men who had died through no fault of his. Telling the story of Elpenor, who broke his neck while on a witch’s roof, he paused long enough for Nausithous to object, “That wasn’t your fault!”
“It was all my fault. He was under my care, and I was careless.”
It was a balm to my heart, listening to his devotion to his men. That mention of a wife had murdered me where I sat. Penelope. Had I been a substitute for her, I do not think I could have borne it.
But no. I was a substitute for those he had failed. Those he had broken with. Those he had deserted, or abandoned, or simply been helpless to save.
I was his redemption. But not his love.
Penelope. It was good to have a name. To hate. To pity. To staunch the festering wound of his self-possession. Penelope. By his telling, she had him only two years. I, seven. That was victory, was it not?
No. Not if he still wished to return to her. Or was that another oath he meant to keep. And how awful it must have been, to be tied by one oath to me, another to her, and longing to keep them both.
When the tale was over, it was only natural that there be a feast, and he was plied with questions, my sons demanding more and more from him, wringing each ounce of heroism and adventure their young hearts could absorb.
I departed in silence and, for once, unobserved. Or so I thought.
The path up the cliff at night was far more treacherous, yet somehow more beautiful. Cut off by shadow, vision gave way to the other senses. The crisp scent of the cypresses, the rush and hush of the waves. And tonight a crescent moon reflected on the sea, illumining only a narrow path from the Azure Gate out into the vast beyond.
From the palace, one could climb the cliff to my grove, or else descend to the caves. But the caves had been flooded ever since the storm, and unused by all save one.
I chose to climb. There was no falter in my step now, no unbalance as I crested the vine-covered gate and stepped into the Grove of Calypso. The goddess was restored. At the cost of the woman.
In the light of Orion, of the Plowman and the Wagon, I gazed at my own likeness carved in stone, wondering what it was like to be her. So tranquil. So beautiful. So very, very large, towering over me like a mother before her babe. And like a babe, I sat at her feet and gazed at the unseeable world, feeling feelings and thinking thoughts I could not yet comprehend. But at the core was peace. No, not peace. A sorrowful contentment. Certainty of what was right, made sweet by the exquisite pain of sacrifice.
Sacrifice. To make a thing holy. It was beautiful to think my love was holy. And my happiness. For those were the sacrifices this night.
An owl hooted, and the breeze rustled the trees. Athena’s blessing. I had heeded Hermes’s message, and she was pleased. But had he not called himself her champion? Was it for Athena that I was freeing him? If that was her wisdom, I could not dispute it.
Below, there came a grinding of sandal on stone. He let me hear his step, giving me time to rise and compose myself. He had followed me, then, as I had both hoped and dreaded. Emerging into the grove, his dark hair turned silver by the moon, he paused to gaze at us both, stone goddess and flesh woman. Like her, I held out my hands.
He took mine, not hers. “Why tonight?”
A simple question, that. The answer, complex.
Because seven years is long enough.
Because my sons are men.
Because I can ask no more of you.
Because I can no longer bear your smiles.
Instead I broke yet another vow made to myself. “Because I am with child.”
His brow rose—his left brow, the sinister trickster. “I wondered if you would tell me.”
He had known. It was enough to force an uncertain laugh from me. “Monster. How you divine my secrets.”
“And do you now hope that, free, I will decide to stay to raise my daughter.”
No less than I deserved, yet far more than he ought to have said. “What a wicked thing you are. Just because your mind bends to tricks and deceits, you see them in everyone.” I gestured to my stone self behind me. “Let her be my witness, by the grimmest oaths a goddess can swear, I have no plot to keep you. Nor would I harm you. Ever. Not stone, trust me, is the heart within this breast.”
He had the good grace to be ashamed. “Forgive me. You do hope it will be a daughter? Another Calypso to rule after you?”
“I do.”
Placing his hands on my shoulders, he kissed the crown of my head. “Then I hope so too.”
Unbidden, unwelcome, unworthy, tears welled hot behind my eyes. “She will never know you.”