I heard them wake. My son first, then Penelope, and last Telemachus, who had gone to bed so late. One by one they came into the hall, and I felt them pause as they saw me at the window, like rabbits checking at the hawk’s shadow. The table was bare, no breakfast laid. My son hurried to the kitchen to clatter plates. I liked feeling their silent glances at my back. My son urged them to eat, his words heavy with apology. I could imagine the speaking looks he was giving them: I’m sorry about my mother. Sometimes she is like this.
“Telegonus,” I said, “the sty needs fixing and a storm comes. You will attend to it.”
He cleared his throat. “I will, Mother.”
“Your brother can help you.”
Another silence, while they exchanged their glances.
“I do not mind,” Telemachus said, mildly.
A few more sounds of plates and benches. At last, the door closed behind them.
I turned. “You take me for a fool. A dupe to be led by the nose. Asking so sweetly about my spell. Tell me which of the gods pursues you. Whose wrath have you brought upon my head?”
She was seated at my loom. Her lap was full of raw, black wool. On the floor beside her lay a spindle and an ivory distaff, tipped with silver.
“My son does not know,” she said. “He is not to blame.”
“That is obvious. I can spot the spider in her web.”
She nodded. “I confess that I have done what you say. I did it knowingly. I could claim that I thought because you are a goddess and a witch that the trouble to you would not be much. But it would be a lie. I know more of the gods than that.”
Her calmness enraged me. “Is that all? I know what I have done and will brazen it out? Last night your son talked of his father as one who takes from others and brings only misery. I wonder what he would say of you.”
The blow landed. I saw the blankness she used to cover it over.
“You think me some tame witch, but you were not listening to your husband’s stories of me. Two days you have stayed on my isle. How many meals have you eaten, Penelope? How many cups of my wine have you drunk?”
She paled. A faint graying along her hairline, like the creeping edge of dawn.
“Speak, or I will use my power.”
“I believe you have used it already.” The words were hard and cool as stones. “I brought danger to your isle. But you brought it to mine first.”
“My son came of his own accord.”
“I do not speak of your son, and I think you know it. I speak of the spear you sent, whose venom killed my husband.”
And there it was between us.
“I grieve that he is dead.”
“So you have said.”
“If you are waiting for my apology, you will not get it. Even if I had such powers as could turn back the sun, I would not. If Odysseus had not died on the beach, I think my son would have. And there is nothing I would not trade for his life.”
A look passed across her face. I might have called it rage, if it were not pointed so inward. “Well then. You have made your trade and this is what you have: your son lives, and we are here.”
“You see it as a sort of vengeance then. Bringing a god down on my head.”
“I see it as payment in kind.”
She would have made an archer, I thought. That cold-eyed precision.
“You have no ground to make bargains, Lady Penelope. This is Aiaia.”
“Then let me not bargain. What would you prefer, begging? Of course, you are a goddess.”
She knelt at the foot of my loom and lifted her hands, lowering her eyes to the floor. “Daughter of Helios, Bright-eyed Circe, Mistress of Beasts and Witch of Aiaia, grant me sanctuary on your dread isle, for I have no husband and no home, and nowhere else in the world is safe for me and my son. I will give you blood every year, if you will hear me.”
“Get up.”
She did not move. The posture looked obscene on her. “My husband spoke warmly of you. More warmly, I confess, than I liked. He said of all the gods and monsters he had met, you were the only one he would wish to meet again.”
“I said, get up.”
She rose.
“You will tell me everything, and then I will decide.”
We faced each other across the shadowed room. The air tasted of lightning. She said, “You have been talking to my son. He will have implied that his father was lost in the war. That he came home changed, too soaked in death and grief to live as an ordinary man. The curse of soldiers. Is it so?”
“Something like that.”
“My son is better than I am, and better than his father too. Yet he does not see all things.”
“And you do?”
“I am from Sparta. We know about old soldiers there. The trembling hands, the startling from sleep. The man who spills his wine every time the trumpets blow. My husband’s hands were steady as a blacksmith’s, and when the trumpets sounded, he was first to the harbor scanning the horizon. The war did not break him; it made him more himself. At Troy he found at last a scope to equal his abilities. Always a new scheme, a new plot, a new disaster to avert.”
“He tried to get out of the war.”
“Ah, that old story. The madness, the plow. That too was a plot. He had sworn an oath to the gods—he knew there was no getting out. He expected to be caught. Then the Greeks would laugh at his failure and think that all his tricks would be so easily seen through.”
I was frowning. “He gave no sign of that when he told me.”
“I’m sure he didn’t. My husband lied with every breath, and that includes to you, and to himself. He never did anything for a single purpose.”
“He said the same of you once.”
I meant it to wound her, but she only nodded. “We thought ourselves great minds of the world. When we were first married, we made a thousand plans together, of how we would turn everything we touched to our advantage. Then the war came. He said Agamemnon was the worst commander he had ever seen, but he thought he could use him to make a name for himself. And so he did. His contrivances defeated Troy and reshaped half the world. I contrived too. Which goats to breed with which, how to increase the harvest, where the fishermen could best cast their nets. Such were our pressing concerns on Ithaca. You should have seen his face when he came home. He killed the suitors, but then what was left? Fish and goats. A graying wife who was no goddess and a son he could not understand.”
Her voice filled the air, sharp as crushed cypress.
“There were no war councils, no armies to conquer or command. What men there had once been were dead, since half were his crew and the other half my suitors. And every day there seemed to come some fresh report of distant glory. Menelaus had built a brand-new golden palace. Diomedes had conquered a kingdom in Italy. Even Aeneas, that Trojan refugee, had founded a city. My husband sent to Orestes, Agamemnon’s son, offering himself as counselor. Orestes sent back that he had all the counselors he needed, and anyway he would never want to disturb the rest of such a hero.
“He sent to more sons after that, Nestor’s and Idomeneus’ and others’, but they all said the same. They did not want him. And do you know what I told myself? That he only needed time. That any moment he would remember the pleasures of modest home and hearth. The pleasures of my presence. We would plot together again.” Her mouth twisted in self-mockery. “But he did not want that life. He would go down to the beach and pace. I watched him from my window and remembered a story he’d told me once about a great serpent that the men of the north believe in, which yearns to devour all the world.”