“At last when I could fight it no longer,” Odysseus said, “I fell asleep. I did not feel them take the bag from my hand. It was the howling of the winds that woke me. They whirled out of the bag and blew us back as if we had never left. Every league undone. They think I grieve for their dead comrades, and I do. But sometimes it is all I can do not to kill them myself. They have wrinkles, but no wisdom. I took them to war before they could do any of those things that steady a man. They were unmarried when they left. They had no children. They had no years of lean harvest, when they must scrape the bottom of their stores, and no good years either, that they might learn to save. They have not seen their parents grow old and begin to fail. They have not seen them die. I fear I have robbed them not only of their youth but their age as well.”
He rubbed at his knuckles. He had been a bowman when he was young, and the strength it takes to string and nock and shoot taxes hands like nothing else. He had left his bow behind when he went to war, but the pain had followed him. He’d told me once that if he had brought the bow, he would have been the best archer in both armies.
“Then why leave it?”
Politics, he had explained. The bow was Paris’ weapon. Paris, the pretty wife-stealer. “Among heroes, he was seen as cowardly. No bowman would ever have been made Best of the Greeks, no matter how skilled he was.”
“Heroes are fools,” I had said.
He had laughed. “We are agreed.”
His eyes were closed. He was silent so long I thought he slept. Then he said: “If you could have seen how close we were to Ithaca. I could smell the fishing fires from the beach.”
I began to ask him for small favors. Would he kill a buck for dinner? Would he catch a few fish? My sty was falling to pieces, might he mend some of the posts? It gave me a sharp pleasure to see him come in the door with full nets, with baskets of fruit from my orchards. He joined me in the garden, staking vines. We spoke of what winds were blowing, how Elpenor had taken to sleeping on the roof, and whether we should forbid it.
“That idiot,” he said. “He will break his neck.”
“I will tell him he only has permission when he’s sober.”
He snorted. “That will be never.”
I knew I was a fool. Even if he stayed past that spring to the next, such a man could never be happy closed up on my narrow shores. And even if somehow I found a way to keep him contented, yet still there were limits, for he was mortal, and not young. Give thanks, I told myself. A winter is more than you had with Daedalus.
I did not give thanks. I learned his favorite foods and smiled to see his pleasure in them. At night we sat together at the hearth and talked over the day. “What do you think,” I asked him, “about the great oak, struck by lightning? Do you think there is rot within?”
“I will look,” he said. “If there is, it will not be hard to take down. I will do it before dinner tomorrow.”
He cut it down, then hacked the rest of the day at my brambles. “They were overrun. What you really need is some goats. A flock of four would have them flat in a month. And they’d keep it flat.”
“And where will I find goats?”
That word between us, Ithaca, like the breaking of a spell.
“Never mind,” I said. “I will transform a few of the sheep, that will fix it.”
At dinner, my nymphs had begun to linger near the men, to lead the ones they liked to their beds. This pleased me too. My household mingling with his. I had once told Daedalus that I would never marry, because my hands were dirty, and I liked my work too much. But this was a man with his own dirty hands.
And where, Circe, do you think he learned all these domestic niceties?
My wife, he always said, when he talked of her. My wife, my wife. Those words, carried before him like a shield. Like country folk who will not say the god of death’s name, for fear he will come and take their dearest heart.
Penelope, she was called. While he slept, I would sometimes speak those syllables to the black air. It was a dare, or maybe a proof. See? She does not come. She does not have the powers you believe.
I held off as long as I could, but in the end she was the scab that I must pick. I waited for the sound of his breath that meant he was awake enough to talk.
“What is she like?”
He told me of her gentle manner, how her mild direction made men jump faster than any shout. She was an excellent swimmer. Her favorite flower was the crocus, and she wore the first bloom of the season in her hair for luck. He had a trick of speaking of her as if she were only in the next room, as if they were not twelve years and distant seas apart.
She was Helen’s cousin, he said. A thousand times cleverer and wiser, though Helen was clever in her way, but of course fickle. I had heard his stories of Helen by then, the queen of Sparta, mortal daughter of Zeus, most beautiful woman in the world. Paris, prince of Troy, had spirited her away from her husband, Menelaus, and so started the war.
“Did she leave with Paris by choice, or was she forced?” I asked.
“Who can say? For ten years we were camped outside her gates, and she never tried to run that I heard. But the moment Menelaus stormed the city she threw herself upon him naked, swearing it had been a torment, and all she wanted was her husband back. You will never get the whole truth from her. She has as many coils as a snake, and an eye always to her advantage.”
Not unlike you, I thought.
“My wife, though,” he said. “She is constant. Constant in all things. Even wise men go astray sometimes, but never her. She is a fixed star, a true-made bow.” A silence, in which I felt him moving deep among his memories. “Nothing she says has a single meaning, nor a single intention, yet she is steady. She knows herself.”
The words slid into me, smooth as a polished knife. I had known he loved her from the moment he’d spoken of her weaving. Yet he had stayed, month after month, and I had let myself be lulled. Now I saw more clearly: all those nights in my bed had been only his traveler’s wisdom. When you are in Egypt, you worship Isis; when in Anatolia, you kill a lamb for Cybele. It does not trespass on your Athena still at home.
But even as I thought that, I knew it was not the whole answer. I remembered all the hours he had spent at war, managing the fine glass tempers of kings, the sulks of princes, balancing each proud warrior against his fellow. It was a feat equal to taming Aeëtes’ fire-breathing bulls, with only his own wiles for aid. But back home in Ithaca, there would be no such fractious heroes, no councils, no midnight raids, no desperate stratagems that he must devise or men would die. And how would such a man go home again, to his fireside and his olives? His domestic harmony with me was closer to a sort of rehearsal, I realized. When he sat by the hearth, when he worked in my garden, he was trying to remember the trick of it. How an axe might feel in wood instead of flesh. How he might fit himself to Penelope again, smooth as one of Daedalus’ joints.
He slept beside me. Every now and then his breath caught in the back of his throat. Tick.
Pasiphaë would have counseled me to make a love draught and bind him to me. Aeëtes would say I should steal away his wits. I imagined his face empty of all thoughts but what I put into it. He would sit at my knee, gazing up, fatuous and adoring and empty.