A Thousand Ships(80)
Odysseus arrived at the palace – at his home, at last – still disguised as a beggar. I welcomed him as I welcome any stranger who needs a meal and a roof over his head for a night. You know better than I do, Athene, that it is our duty to the gods to receive every stranger as a guest. The suitors made him as welcome as they have made any vagabond. They jeered at him and threatened him. Antinous threw a stool at him, which hit him in the back. Interestingly, not one of them noticed that this seemingly battered old man did not flinch when a wooden stool bounced off his shoulder. It had been thrown with some force and yet he shrugged it off. I will not claim that I recognized my husband at this point. How could I, when he was shrouded in your concealments? But I did notice this: for an old man, he carried himself remarkably like a warrior. An unseen missile did not hurt or alarm. And when Eumaeus introduced him as a wandering Cretan with news of Odysseus, I did wonder who this vague description might be hiding.
The suitors, of course, behaved exactly as I had come to expect over the years. It was not just Antinous, but Leodes, Eurymachus, Agelaus and all the rest of them. They were not bad men individually, I don’t think. Not all of them, anyway. They certainly did not behave so viciously to begin with. They arrived at the palace in twos and threes: shy, at first, quietly competitive with one another for my affections. It took months, perhaps even years, before they became the aggressive gang of men Odysseus finally met. I used to wonder what had happened to them, and why they were so anxious to stay somewhere they were not wanted. Pausing their lives, refusing to marry girls who would have them, failing to start families. Instead they preferred to be together as men, under the guise of wooing me. It took me some time to realize that this was in fact their war. Too young to sail to Troy, they were children when their brothers and cousins and fathers joined the greatest expedition that Hellas had ever seen. They had missed their chance to be warriors in the great war. And so they waged war upon my storerooms, and upon my virtue, because they had nothing else to fight for. In a way, I pitied them.
But when they gathered together, all better instincts were soon lost. Each one of them became as bad as the worst of them. It was this which made it so easy not to be seduced by them. Not even Amphinomus. And oh, he was handsome. Did you ever notice him, Athene? Or were your owl-grey eyes on my husband the whole time? If you had looked across the room, you would have seen a tall young man, broad-shouldered and strong-limbed, with a kindness in his eyes that the others did not have. You would never have seen him shout at a beggar or hurl insults at a stranger. He had a soft, low voice that was lost in the melee of other, louder men. He had dark eyes and thick brown curls that a woman could twist her fingers into. I imagine.
But like all the other suitors, and the maids who Odysseus believed had conspired with them, he is now dead. And I will never know if that was your design, or all Odysseus’ choosing. What I do know is that I welcomed a stranger into my halls, and he was abused. And he paid back his abusers with arrows and a sword.
The arrows were probably my fault. I could not shake the idea that something needed to come to a conclusion. The self-styled Cretan was in my halls, and there was something familiar about him. The suitors were behaving like a pack of wild dogs. I knew I needed to make a decision, so I offered them a trial of strength and skill: to string Odysseus’ bow and shoot an arrow through twelve axe-heads. It takes real strength to string this particular bow. It has an individual design which most men would not recognize. And it takes skill to shoot an arrow from such a weapon, let alone fire one with the accuracy and force required to traverse twelve axes. Honestly, I doubted any of them could do it. I just thought it might keep them quiet for a while so I could rest. The noise of all those young men could be deafening.
Was I testing the Cretan to see if he was really my husband? Telemachus believes that I suspected it was Odysseus all along. Certainly, I knew that my husband would be able to string the bow and fire the arrow: I had watched him do it countless times in our youth. I don’t believe that was my motivation, but perhaps you – or one of the other gods – put the idea into my mind. It had certainly never occurred to me before, to test my suitors like this. Of course they all failed, and of course Odysseus prevailed. Not only did he prevail, but now he was armed with a weapon and the suitors were not. And he was armed with precisely the sort of weapon that might even the odds between one man and many.
It was not quite one man fighting alone though, was it? My son fought alongside him, and they paved our floors with blood. My husband had revealed himself to Telemachus, to Eumaeus and even (I later discovered) to his old nurse, Eurycleia, before he revealed himself to me. And when he finally did so, he was drenched in the blood of the men who have made my life miserable, and the blood of one man who did not. He had killed Amphinomus with an arrow to the throat, leaving his lovely face unharmed. The boy’s eyes stared at me blankly from beside Odysseus’ left foot.
My husband, meanwhile, stood knee-deep in the suitors’ blood and before the twitching bodies of my maids – each one hanged from the same length of rope – and that was when he told me he was mine. In all my dreams of his homecoming, I never imagined it would be so violent or so cruel. I never thought it would take so long to clean up. And I don’t suppose he gave a moment’s thought to how we are to apologize to the families of these obnoxious young boors. Or indeed, how I am supposed to find a new set of maids, given what happened to the last lot. And so, Athene, the prayer I offer is this: thank you for bringing my husband home, if that is what you have done. If the man who sleeps upstairs in the bed he once carved from an old olive tree is an impostor, I suppose I will find out soon enough. He knows the old stories of our marriage, of that I am certain. And Telemachus is devoted to him, which is fortunate. So perhaps it does not matter if he is the man who left, or a changed man, or even another man altogether. He fits in the space that Odysseus left.