Circe(66)

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 Ae?tes’ 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.

Pasipha? would have counseled me to make a love draught and bind him to me. Ae?tes 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.



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?