things away, wrapping him in my magic and divinity. Perhaps it was why he had been so happy. An idyll, I had called our time. Illusion might have been a better word.
“After that, he went on some raid every month. Reports came back, scarcely believable. He had taken a new wife, the queen of some inland kingdom. He ruled there happily among the cows and barley. He wore a golden circlet and feasted till dawn and ate boars whole and roared with laughter. He had fathered another son.”
His eyes were Odysseus’. The shape and color, even the intensity. But the expression: Odysseus’ gaze was always reaching out, cajoling. Telemachus’ held fast to itself.
“Was any of it true?”
He lifted his shoulders, let them drop. “Who can say? Perhaps he started the rumors himself to wound us. I sent a message to my mother that the goats needed extra tending and went to live in an empty hut on the hillside. My father could plot and rage, but I did not have to see it. My mother could eat one piece of cheese all day and let her eyes turn gray on her loom, but I did not have to see that either.”
In the fire, the logs had burnt down. Their remains glowed white, scaled with ash.
“Into such miseries, your son came. Bright as a sunrise, sweet as ripe fruit. He carried that silly-looking spear, and gifts for us all, silver bowls and cloaks and gold. His face was handsome and his hopes crackled loud as a fire. I wanted to shake him. I thought: when my father returns, this boy will learn that life is not a bard’s song. And so he did.”
The moon had lifted away from the window, and the room was draped in shadows. Telemachus’ hands rested on his knees.
“You were trying to help him,” I said. “That is why you went down to the beach.”
His eyes were on the fire’s ashes. “He did not need me, as it turned out.”
I had used to imagine Telemachus so often. As a quiet boy keeping watch for Odysseus, as a burning youth bearing vengeance across land and sea. But now he was a man, and his voice was dull and drained. He was like those messengers who run great distances with news for kings. They gasp out their words, then fall to the ground and do not rise.
Without thinking, I reached across and laid my hand on his arm. “You are not your blood. Do not let him take you with him.”
He looked down at my fingers a moment, then up into my face. “You pity me. Do not. My father lied about many things, but he was right when he called me a coward. I let him be what he was for year after year, raging and beating the servants, shouting at my mother, and turning our house to ash. He told me to help him kill the suitors and I did it. Then he told me to kill all the men who had aided them, and I did that too. Then he commanded me to gather up all the slave girls who had ever lain with one of them and make them clean the blood-soaked floor, and when they were finished, I was to kill them as well.”
The words jolted me. “The girls would have had no choice. Odysseus would have known it.”
“Odysseus told me to carve them into joints like animals.” His eyes held mine. “Do you disbelieve it?”
It was not one story that I thought of, but a dozen. He had always loved his vengeances. He had always hated those he thought betrayed him.
“Did you do as he said?”
“No,” he said. “I hanged them instead. I found twelve lengths of rope and tied twelve knots.” Each word was like a blade he thrust into himself. “I had never seen it done, but I remembered how in all the stories of my childhood the women were always hanging themselves. I had some thought that it must be more proper. I should have used the sword instead. I have never known such ugly, drawn-out deaths. I will see their feet twisting the rest of my days. Goodnight, Lady Circe.”
He picked his knife up from my table and was gone.
The storm had passed, and the night sky was clear again. I walked, wanting to feel the new-washed breeze on my skin, the earth crumbling softly beneath my feet, to shake off that ugly image of twitching bodies. Overhead, my