The winter rains began, and the whole island smelled of earth. I loved the season, the cold sands, the white hellebore blooming. Odysseus had put on flesh and did not wince so often when he moved. The worst of his tempers had ebbed. I tried to find satisfaction in it. Like seeing a garden well tended, I told myself. Like watching new lambs struggle to their feet.
The men stayed close to the house, drinking themselves warm. For entertainment, Odysseus told them heroic stories of Achilles, Ajax, Diomedes, making them live again in the twilight air and perform their glorious deeds. The men were rapt, their faces struck with wonder. Remember, they whispered with awe. We walked among them. We stood against Hector. Our sons will tell the tale.
He smiled over them like an indulgent father, but that night he scoffed: “They could no more stand against Hector than fly. Anyone with a brain ran when they saw him.”
“Including you?”
“Of course. Ajax could barely hold against him, and only Achilles could have beaten him. I am a fair enough warrior, but I know where I end.”
He did, I thought. So many closed their eyes and spun fantasies of their wished-for strength. But he was mapped and surveyed, each stone and hummock noted with clear-eyed precision. He measured his gifts to the scruple.
“I met Hector once,” he said. “It was the early days of the war, when we still pretended there might be a truce. He sat beside his father, Priam, on a rickety stool and made it look like a throne. He did not gleam like gold. He was not polished and perfect. But he was the same all the way through, like a block of marble cut whole from a quarry. His wife, Andromache, poured our wine. Later, we heard she bore him a son. Astyanax, Commander of the city. But Hector called him Scamandrios, after the river that ran past Troy.”
Something in his voice.
“What happened to him?”
“The same that happens to all sons in war. Achilles killed Hector, and after, when Achilles’ son, Pyrrhus, stormed the palace, he took the child Astyanax and smashed open his head. It was a horror, like everything Pyrrhus did. But it was necessary. The child would have grown up with a blade in his heart. It is a son’s highest duty to avenge his father. If he had lived, he would have rallied men to his side and come after us.”
The moon had slivered down to a shard outside the window. He was silent, turning through his thoughts.
“It is strange how comforting the idea is to me. That if I am killed, my son will take to the seas. He will hunt down those men who laid me low. He will stand before them and say, ‘You dared to spill the blood of Odysseus, and now yours is spilled in turn.’”
The room was still. It was late, the owls long gone to their trees.
“What was he like? Your son?”
He rubbed at the base of his thumb, where the awl-puncture had been. “We named him Telemachus after my skill with the bow.” Distant fighter, it meant. “But the joke was that he screamed his whole first day as if he were living in the battlefield’s heart. The women tried every trick they knew, rocking, walking, swaddling his arms, a thumb wetted with wine to suck. The midwife said she had never seen such passion. Even my old nurse was covering her ears. My wife had gone gray, for she feared there was something wrong with him. Give him to me, I said. I held him up before me and looked into his screaming face. ‘Sweet son,’ I said, ‘you are right, this world is a wild and terrible place, and worth shouting at. But you are safe now, and all of us need to sleep. Will you let us have a little peace?’ And he calmed. Just went quiet in my hands. After that, you could not find an easier child. He was always smiling, laughing for anyone who’d stop to speak to him. The maids would invent excuses to come and pinch his fat cheeks. ‘What a king he will be one day!’ they would say. ‘Mild as the west wind, oh!’”
He went on with his memories. Telemachus’ first bite of bread, his first word, how he loved goats and hiding beneath chairs, giggling to be found. He had more stories of his son from a single year, I thought, than my father had of me in all eternity.
“I know his mother will keep me in his mind, but I was leading the hunts by his age. I had killed a boar myself. I only hope there will still be something to teach him when I return. I want to leave some mark upon him.”
I said something vague and soothing, I am sure. You will leave a mark. Every boy wants a father, he will wait for you. But I was thinking again of the relentlessness of mortal lives. Even as we spoke, the moments were passing. The sweet baby was vanished. His son was aging, growing, sharpening into a man. Thirteen years Odysseus had lost of him already. How many more?
My thoughts returned often to that quiet-eyed, watchful boy. I wondered if he knew what his father expected, if he felt the weight of those hopes. I imagined him out on the cliffs every day, praying for a ship. I imagined his weariness, his soft, inward grief before he went to sleep each night, curling on his bed as he had once been cradled in his father’s hands.
I cupped my own hands in the dark. I did not have a thousand wiles, and I was no fixed star, yet for the first time I felt something in that space. A hope, a living breath, that might yet grow between.
Chapter Seventeen
THE TREES WERE JUST beginning to bud. The sea was still foam-capped, but soon its waves would calm, and it would be spring and time for Odysseus to sail. He would race across the sea, tacking between storms and Poseidon’s great hand, his eye fixed on home. And my island would fall silent again.
I lay beside him in the moonlight each night. Just one more season, I imagined saying to him. Just till summer’s end, that is when the best winds come. It would surprise him. I would catch the faintest flicker of disappointment in his eyes. Golden witches are not supposed to beg. I let the island plead for me instead, speaking with its eloquent beauty. Every day the stones shed more of their icy chill, and the blossoms swelled. We ate picnics on the green grass. We walked on the sun-warm sand and swam in the bright bay. I took him to the shade of an apple tree, so that the scent would waft over him while he slept. I unrolled all Aiaia’s wonders like a rug before him, and I saw him begin to waver.
His men saw too. Thirteen years they had lived beside him, and though his twisting thoughts were mostly beyond their ken, they sensed a change, as hounds scent the moods of their master. Day by day, they grew more restless. Ithaca, they said, loudly, every chance they got. Queen Penelope. Telemachus. Eurylochos stalked about my halls, glaring. I saw him whispering in corners with the others. When I passed by, they fell silent, gazes down. In ones and twos, they made their creeping way to Odysseus. I waited for him to send them away, but he only stared over their shoulders into the dusty sunset air. I should have left them pigs, I thought.
Death’s Brother is the name that poets give to sleep. For most men those dark hours are a reminder of the stillness that waits at the end of days. But Odysseus’ slumber was like his life, tossed and restless, heavy with murmurs that made my wolves prick up their ears. I watched him in the pearl-gray light of dawn: the tremors of his face, the striving tension in his shoulders. He twisted the sheets as if they were opponents he tried to throw in a wrestling match. A year of peaceful days he had stayed with me, and still every night he went to war.
The shutters were open. It must have rained in the night, I thought. The air that drifted in felt washed and very clear. Each sound—bird trills, fluttering leaves, the hush of waves—hung in the air like a chime. I dressed and followed that glory outside. His men still slept. Elpenor was up on the roof, wrapped in one of my best blankets. The wind rippled past me like lyre notes, and my own breath seemed to pipe in harmony. A dewdrop fell from a branch. It struck the earth like the ringing of a bell.