“No. I thought it would be…” He trailed off. Indelicate, of course.
“So who first mentioned it?”
“It may have been the queen. I remember she said that she would prefer not to go to Sparta. That she would have a little time.”
He was choosing his words carefully. I felt a humming beneath my skin.
“Time for what?”
“She did not say.”
Penelope the weaver, who could lead you over and under, into her design. We were passing through thickets, angling upwards beneath the dark, wet branches.
“It is strange. Did she think her family would not have wanted her? Was there a rift with Helen? Did she speak of any enemies?”
“I don’t know. No. Of course she did not speak of enemies.”
“What did Telemachus say?”
“He was not there.”
“But when he learned you would come here, was he surprised?”
“Mother.”
“Just tell me her words. Say them exactly as you remember.”
He had stopped on the path. “I thought you did not suspect them anymore.”
“Not of vengeance. But there are other questions.”
He took a deep breath. “I cannot remember exactly. Not her words, nor anything at all. It is gray like a fog. It is still gray.”
The pain had risen in his face. I said no more, but as we walked my mind kept picking at the thought, like fingers at a knot. There was a secret beneath that spider-silk. She had not wanted to go to Sparta. Instead she had gone to her husband’s lover’s island. And she wanted time. For what?
We had reached the house by then. Inside, she was working at the loom. Telemachus stood by the window. His hands were tight at his sides and the air was stark. Had they quarreled? I looked at her face, but it was bent to her threads and showed nothing. No one shouted, no one wept, but I thought I would have preferred it to this quiet strain.
Telegonus cleared his throat. “I’m thirsty. Who else would like a cup?”
I watched him broach the cask and pour. My son with his valiant heart. Even in grief, he sought to bear us all up, to carry us through one moment to the next. But there was only so much he could do. The afternoon wore on in silence. Dinner was the same. The moment the food was gone, Penelope rose. “I’m tired,” she said. Telegonus stayed a little later, but by moonrise he was yawning into his hands. I sent him off with Arcturos. I expected Telemachus to follow, but when I turned he was still at his place.
“I think you have stories of my father,” he said. “I would like to hear them.”
His boldness kept taking me by surprise. All day he had hung back, avoiding my gaze, diffident and nearly invisible. Then suddenly he planted himself before me as if he had grown there fifty years. It was a trick even Odysseus would have admired.
“You likely know all I have to tell already,” I said.
“No.” The word rang a little in the room. “He told my mother his stories, but whenever I asked, he said I should talk to a bard.”
A cruel answer. I wondered at Odysseus’ reasoning. Had it been merely spite? If there was some other purpose, we would never know it. All the things he had done in life must stand now as they were.
I brought my goblet to the hearth. Outside, the storm had returned. It blew in earnest, muffling the house in wind and wet. Penelope and Telegonus were only down the hall, but the shadows had gathered around us, and they felt a world away. This time I took the silver chair. The inlay was cool against my wrists; the cowhides slipped a little beneath me. “What do you want to hear?”
“Everything,” he said. “Whatever you know.”
I did not even consider telling him the versions I had told Telegonus, with their happy endings and non-fatal wounds. He was not my child; he was not a child at all, but a man full-grown, who wanted his inheritance.
I gave it. Murdered Palamades and abandoned Philoctetes. Odysseus tricking Achilles out of hiding and bringing him to war, Odysseus creeping at moondark into the camp of King Rhesus, one of Troy’s allies, and cutting the men’s throats while they slept. How he had devised the horse and taken Troy and seen Astyanax shattered. Then his savage journey home, with its cannibals and piracy and monsters. The stories were even bloodier than I had remembered, and a few times I hesitated. But