After moving to a different chamber years ago, she’d assumed that it—like her marriage—had shriveled and desiccated into hollow memory. Her bridal tree-bed had disappeared from her awareness like threads unbeamed from an old cracked loom, tangled and forgotten in the corner.
Penelope ran her fingertips up the craggy bark, her gaze studiously avoiding the nude man sprawled amid threadbare blankets below her.
Eurycleia must have tended the tree during the many years she’d abandoned it. As her fingertips rubbed the surprisingly leathery top of a lance-shaped leaf, she supposed she should be happy the old woman hadn’t suffocated the thing in her over eagerness to keep it—and her master’s memory—alive.
Finally, she sighed and looked down. A barrel-chested stranger—a man she knew and yet did not know—lay in her bed, one arm thrown over his head. Her body, untouched for so long, was both sore and sated. Still, she wondered:
Who are you?
The planes of the face were familiar, and yet not so. The curls on his head were coarser, shot through with threads of white. They were different and yet the sensation of running her fingers through them felt achingly familiar.
The hair on this man’s torso was fuller. She hadn’t known that the sparse mane on men’s bodies grew thicker with age. It left her wondering what change on her body had surprised him. She was softer and rounder than she used to be, she knew, but he seemed to relish that change.
Only the rumbling of his voice as she lay with her head on his chest was exactly as she remembered. Odysseus, her husband, Ithaca’s long absent king, was home.
Still, she had not wanted him at first. How could she? She’d been numb from the shock of the violence she’d witnessed. And then there were the questions: Did you touch the woman you lived with for years like this? Did you love her? Why didn’t you come home to me sooner? Why now?
He spun tales about loss of honor, the agony of losing all his men, the weight of his mistakes, his attempts at redemption. His words did not appease her, would never heal the wound of his absence, but she could feel the truth behind them. And for now, that was enough.
It helped that he’d wanted her. Wept to hold her again. His tears on her skin melted her resistance like a flame on beeswax. And, oh, to be touched again. The profound hunger for skin on skin—a hunger she had denied herself for so long, a hunger that—once satisfied, changed everything.
Staring down at her sleeping husband, she had a strange sensation of loss of time. One moment she was a new bride, sneaking out of bed to stare in besotted wonder at this man whose energy and capacity for humor outshone the sun. The next she was a grown woman, exhausted by loneliness and fear, staring again in wonder—this time tinged with dismay—at the source of all her pain, suddenly returned.
Another memory: of tiptoeing past her young husband as he slept while soothing a fussy newborn. Her son. Now a man. Now a killer of men. She closed her eyes.
Telemachus. Who are you now?
She knew he would be proud of himself because he’d finally taken a man in “battle”—though how anyone could call the carnage in her hall a battle was a mystery. He would imagine she was proud of him. She would never tell him otherwise, but all of it sickened her.
Images intruded unbidden: Her son’s spear arm rearing back. His rage-contorted expression. The blade emerging through Amphinomus’s chest. The shock on Amphinomus’s face as his gaze locked on hers and he mouthed, “Run,” before he fell.
The recollection was constant. Sometimes each action was static, etched in hard lines, like a freeze. Other times, multiple images ran together almost in a blur—of the bloom of blood on Antinous’s neck as Odysseus’s arrow pierced his throat; of Eurymachus, shot through the heart, his body crumpling in an instant; of Telemachus’s foot pressing on a moaning Amphinomus’s back as he twisted and yanked the stubborn spear from his blood soaked body.
So much blood. The deep-throated moans of horror and pain. Danae screaming Amphinomus’s name. The pull of their hands as they took turns dragging each other up the stairs and into their quarters where they bolted themselves into safety. The sounds of weapons clanging as they stared wide-eyed at each other on the other side of the thick, wooden door. Of the sudden, horrible silence when it was all over.
All of it occurring again and again in a blink.
Penelope shook her head to clear it. Her husband had crashed back into her life like an enormous ship breaking apart against her shores in a violent storm. All she could do was pull the living from the wreckage—and release the dead onto Hades with a prayer for safekeeping.
The queen reached for her crumpled tunic on the floor and shrugged back into it. Her husband’s body twitched like a dog dreaming of running—small desperate movements as he fought some monster near the horn of dreams.
“Sshhhhhh,” she whispered, placing a hand gently on his forehead.
He stilled, sighed, and mumbled something that sounded like “Clemency.” Or, it could’ve been, “Penelope.” She smiled sadly. The two, apparently, sounded very much alike in his sleep-heavy mouth.
The queen climbed up to the rooftop of the palace. Strong sea gusts washed away the smoke of countless pyres. Still, the smell of death hung heavy in the air. She stared up at the vast expanse of glimmering stars.
All those years of longing. All her efforts to keep the peace and avoid bloodshed. To keep Ithaca—and its noble young men alive. All gone in an instant. Why? What did it all mean?
The sounds of soft weeping echoed in her ears and for a moment Penelope wondered if it was the shades of all the dead lingering in her palace. Did they blame her? Could she have done something to stop the slaughter? She shivered, imagining a sea of gray, newly dead faces staring at her accusingly through the veil between the worlds, as thin as a water bubble readying to pop.
But no. This crying was real. There, in the corner, a figure huddled in a blanket. She recognized the shape of her.
“Danae,” she whispered, as she walked toward her handmaiden. “I’m so sorry.”
“Why are you apologizing?” she asked, wiping her eyes with the ends of a blanket she’d wrapped around herself. “You did not slaughter our friends or murder Amphinomus and all the others.”
Penelope sank to the ground next to her handmaiden. “No. I did not.” She didn’t say what she thought, though. That she had appealed to the Goddess in her deathless cave for help in avoiding bloodshed and had been found wanting. The Goddess had turned her face from her. And when the Goddess retreated, the world of men—of murder, bloodshed, honor, and glory—violently rushed in, like floodwaters raging in a violent storm.
“I will never…never stop seeing his death before my eyes,” Danae said.
“Whose death?” Penelope asked, absently. There had been so many.