The bards had been at the story, no doubt, but I could still see Medea’s bright, piercing face. I believed that she would rather set the world on fire than lose.
“I warned her once that grief would come of her marriage. There is no pleasure in hearing I was right.”
“There seldom is.” Penelope’s voice was soft. She was thinking of those slaughtered children, perhaps. I was thinking of them too. And the dragon chariot that was of course my brother’s. It seemed incredible that she would go back to him, after all that had passed between them. Yet it also made a sort of sense to me. Aeëtes wanted an heir, and there was none more like him than Medea. She had grown up trained around his cruelty, and in the end it seemed she had not learned how to hold another shape.
I poured honey onto the yarrow, added beeswax to bind the salve. The air was musky-sweet and sharp with herbs.
Penelope said, “What makes a witch, then? If it is not divinity?”
“I do not know for certain,” I said. “I once thought it was passed through blood, but Telegonus has no spells in him. I have come to believe it is mostly will.”
She nodded. I did not have to explain. We knew what will was.
That afternoon Penelope and Telegonus went off again to the bay. I had assumed after my abruptness last night that Telemachus would keep his distance. But he found me at my herbs. “I thought I would work on the tables.”
I watched him while I ground the hellebore leaves. He had a measuring string, and a cup he had marked and filled to the line with water.
“What are you doing?”
“Testing if the floor is level. Your problem is actually the legs—they are slightly different sizes. It will be easy to adjust.”
I watched him using the rasp, checking and rechecking the legs with his length of string. I asked him how he had broken his nose. “Swimming with my eyes closed,” he said. “I learned my lesson there.” When he was finished, he went out to do the flagstones. I followed, weeding, though the garden scarcely needed it. We discussed bees, how I always wished there were more on the island. He asked if I could tame them like other creatures. “No,” I said. “I use smoke like everyone else.”
“I saw a hive that looks overfull,” he said. “I can split it in the spring, if you like.”
I said I would and watched him scrape away the uneven soil. “The roof drains there,” I said. “Those flagstones will only wobble again after the next rain.”
“That is how things go. You fix them, and they go awry, and then you fix them again.”
“You have a patient temper.”
“My father called it dullness. Shearing, cleaning out the hearths, pitting olives. He wanted to know how to do such things for curiosity’s sake, but he did not want to actually have to do them.”
It was true. Odysseus’ favorite task was the sort that only had to be performed once: raiding a town, defeating a monster, finding a way inside an impenetrable city.
“Perhaps you get it from your mother.”
He did not look up, but I thought I saw him tense. “How is she? I know you speak to her.”
“She misses you.”
“She knows where I am.”
The anger stood out plain and clean on his face. There was a sort of innocence to him, I thought. I do not mean this as the poets mean it: a virtue to be broken by the story’s end, or else upheld at greatest cost. Nor do I mean that he was foolish or guileless. I mean that he was made only of himself, without the dregs that clog the rest of us. He thought and felt and acted, and all these things made a straight line. No wonder his father had been so baffled by him. He would have been always looking for the hidden meaning, the knife in the dark. But Telemachus carried his blade in the open.
They were strange days. Athena hung over our heads like an axe, yet so she had hung for sixteen years, I would hardly faint at it now. Every morning Telegonus took his brother out upon the island. Penelope spun or wove while I shaped my herbs. I had drawn my son aside by then and told him some of what I had learned of Odysseus’ worsening temper on Ithaca, his suspicions and angers, and day by day I saw the knowledge work upon him. He still grieved, but the guilt began to ease, and the brightness came back to his face. Penelope and Telemachus’ presence helped still more. He basked in their attention like my lions in a patch of sun. It panged me to realize how much he had wanted family all these years.
Penelope and Telemachus still did not speak to each other. Hour after hour, meal after meal, the air between them was brittle. It seemed absurd to me that they did not just confess their faults and sorrows and be done. But they were like eggs, each afraid to crack the other.
In the afternoons, Telemachus always seemed to find some task that brought him near, and we would talk until the sun touched the sea. When I went inside to set out the plates for dinner, he followed. If there was work enough for two, he helped. If there was not, he sat at the hearth carving small pieces of wood: a bull, a bird, a whale breaching the waves. His hands had a precise, careful economy that I admired. He was no witch, but he had the temperament for it. I told him that the floor would clean itself, but he always swept the sawdust and wood-curls after.
It was strange to have such constant company. Telegonus and I had mostly kept out of each other’s way, and my nymphs had been more like shadows flitting at the corner of my eye. Usually even that much presence wore on me, nagging at my attention until I had to leave and walk the island alone. But there was a contained quality to Telemachus, a quiet assurance that made him companionable without being intrusive. The creature he most reminded me of, I realized, was my lion. They had the same upright dignity, the same steady gaze with deep-set humor. Even the same earthbound grace, which pursued their own ends while I pursued mine.
“What’s so funny?” he asked me.
I shook my head.
It was perhaps the sixth day since they had come. He was making an olive tree, shaping the twisting trunk, picking out each knot and hole with his knife’s point.
“Do you miss Ithaca?” I asked him.
He considered. “I miss those I knew. And I am sorry not to see my goats breed.” He paused. “I think I would not have been a bad king.”
“Telemachus the Just,” I said.
He smiled. “That’s what they call you if you’re so boring they can’t think of something better.”
“I think you would be a good king also,” I said. “Perhaps you still can be. The memories of men are short. You could return in glory as the long-awaited heir, bringing prosperity with the rightness of your blood.”
“It sounds like a good story,” he said. “But what would I do in those rooms that my father and the suitors filled up? Every step would be a memory I wished I did not have.”
“It must be difficult for you to be near Telegonus.”
His brow creased. “Why would it be?”
“Because he looks so much like your father.”
He laughed. “What are you talking about? Telegonus is stamped from you. I do not just mean your face. It is your gestures, your walk. Your way of speaking, even your voice.”
“You make it sound like a curse,” I said.
“It is no curse,” he said.
Our eyes met across the air. Far away, my hands were peeling pomegranates for dinner. Methodically, I scored the rind, revealed the white lattice. Within, the red juice pips glowed through their waxy cells. My mouth stung a little with thirst. I had been watching myself with him. It was a novelty to me, noticing the expressions shaping themselves on my face, the movement of the words across my tongue. So much of my life had been spent plunged up to the elbows, tacking now here, now there, spattered and impulsive. This new feeling crept over me like a sort of distant sleepiness, almost a languor. This was not the first speaking look that he had given me. But what did it matter? My son was his brother. His father had been in my bed. He was owed to Athena. I knew it, even if he did not.