Outside the great hall, the prince of Ithaca stood alongside the leather-skinned, white-haired islanders who normally avoided the palace. Beside him stood an ancient greybeard, the soothsayer, Halitherses, whose incessant predictions of “fates dark arrows” for them all had grown tiresome.
“Today,” the old seer quavered, holding the caduceus staff of the herald, “the Son of Odysseus will address the assembly, before the gods, as is his right.”
Telemachus stepped forward and took the caduceus from Halitherses and offered the old fellow a hand to steady him before he began his oration. “People of Ithaca…I know the assembly is usually called when threat is imminent. Don’t worry,” he added with a smile, “there are no marauding pirates…at sea anyway.”
The quip was directed at the suitors and it made the islanders roar with laughter—weak as it was. “No,” Telemachus went on, “I come before you all to address an issue pertinent to my house, the house that was…and yet maybe…Odysseus’s. I know not if my father is dead or alive and if so, if he will return to these shores. But I do know that the actions of those men—the suitors—who have come to win my mother’s hand in marriage are destroying everything he—and you,” he waved an arm to encompass the Ithacans, “have built. The suitors drink my wine, eat my food—”
“Fuck your serving girls!” Antinous interrupted and roared with laughter at his own joke.
To be fair to him, Telemachus was unruffled and pressed on. “…and take other advantages, which I thought unfit for discussion at the assembly but our guest-friend Antinous has illustrated very well. Guest friends are always welcome in this house,” he continued, “but there comes a time when a guest becomes a resident. And a resident must do his share…” he trailed off. “Three years?” his voice rose. “Three years some of you have paid suit to my mother and yet more of you came as her guest-wards before that. I was a boy then and have grown to manhood and still…not one of you…has done right by her or this house.”
“We have paid suit,” Eurymachus drawled, “but it is for her to choose.”
“Any decent man would have gone to her father, Icarius, and asked for her hand,” Telemachus shot back.
“She doesn’t want us to,” Antinous put in. “You’re too blind to see it. But we do. The parting of her lips, the idle touch of her hand on her breast as she watches us—her gaze seeming for you and you alone, yet somehow it falls on each and every one of us. She tempts us with the promise of her body—a promise she won’t deliver on. We are men—she is driving us mad, taunting us in this way!”
“Well, not you,” Eurymachus sniped. “You spend a lot of time fucking the serving girls. You said so yourself.”
“She said she’d make a decision when she’d finished Laertes’s Shroud!” Antinous shouted over the chuckles at Eurymachus’s comment.
That was true, Amphinomus acknowledged to himself. Penelope had been working on the burial sheet for Odysseus’s father for two years now, the promise that when she had quit the work, she’d make a decision on which of the men she would take. Any fool—except Antinous who seemed genuinely to take it at face value—could tell that it was a ploy to delay them in the hope her husband would miraculously return.
“The shroud will never be finished,” Eurymachus stated, no lilting inflection in his tone now. “Penelope unpicks the shroud each night…” A gasp from the crowd, Amphinomus noted; even Telemachus looked aghast at the revelation. “…unpicks it so that it will never be finished. So she will never have to choose.”
He rounded on Telemachus. “Whose door then does the blame of your apparent ruination lie? The suitors or your mother’s? I rather think that—at her age—she enjoys the attention of we young men and wants it to last.”
Bastard, Amphinomus tought. He took a step forward, deciding on a course of action he’d likely regret, but Eurymachus richly deserved a punch in the face for citing Penelope’s age.
But Antinous stilled him with his words: “Send her to Icarius, then!” he demanded. “Send her back to her father so he may make her choose and we’ll put an end to this matter once and for all.”
Amphinomus’s anger fled, replaced by sickening dread. For once—and why now—the idiot Antinous had come up with an idea that was logical. It made complete sense. But Amphinomus knew there was no way that Icarius would chose him over Eurymachus—nor even Antinous himself for that matter.
He would die if Penelope were taken from him so cruelly. He had behaved well whilst the others had reveled and feasted…in the quiet, hopeful corner of his heart Amphinomus dared to hope that she had noticed him—a decent man amongst wolves and perhaps she looked kindly upon him.
“You think I’d send my own mother away!” Telemachus shouted—his voice wavering between high pitch and low. “At your bidding?” He shook his head. “I will not. And even if it was my wish, you people have eaten me out of house and home. I have no dowry for her…”
“LOOK!” Halitherses’s voice cut through the clamor. He appeared to be a man touched by the gods in that moment, his geriatric and near skeletal frame suddenly full of power and life. “Look!” he thundered again, pointing skywards. Everyone duly looked, squinting against the sun. “A sign from the gods! A sign I tell you!”
Try as he might, Amphinomus couldn’t see anything—though that meant little. The gods worked through their seers in mysterious ways. Perhaps he hadn’t been meant to see it (whatever “it” was), and perhaps Halitherses wasn’t such a bad soothsayer after all.
“I can’t see anything!” Eurymachus dismissed.
“Two eagles, the messengers of Zeus!” Halitherses declared, his voice broaching no doubt. “One tearing at the other. It is a sign!” He clenched his fist. “A sign from the god-king.”
“Bollocks.” This again from Eurymachus, garnering some laughter from the suitors around him. “You’re making it up, you old fool.”
“AM I?” Halitherses was all flying spittle and wild hair. “AM I?! Ignore it then, boy. But I tell you this…ALL of you,” his crazy eyes swept the armored men at the front of the assembly. “Odysseus is not dead. He will return…he will return and your shades will fly to Hades without even the time to snatch the coins from your eyes to pay the ferryman…”
This time, the words, said with such conviction, scared Amphinomus. Scared Eurymachus too, he could tell, but the man was still acting the wag. “This again?” his drawl was a little more terse than usual. “Old man—enough of your threats. Leave us.”
The touch of the gods seemed to leave the old man at that moment and he all but collapsed into the arms of Telemachus. Amphinomus noted the new set in Odysseus’s son’s jaw. “Know this,” the young prince declared and made off, supporting the soothsayer with his arm. “I will see you leave these halls.
“I swear it upon the gods.”