pass for an herbwoman coming to ease their aches and fevers. Their gratitude was simple and plain, and ours was the same. No one knelt.
While the boat sailed beneath the blue-arched sky, we would sit together on the boards talking of the people we had met, the coastlines we passed, the dolphins that followed us for half the morning, grinning and splashing at our rails.
“Do you know,” he said, “that before coming to Aiaia, I only left Ithaca once?”
I nodded. “I have seen Crete and some islands on the way, and that is all. I have always wished to go to Egypt.”
“Yes,” he said. “And Troy, and the great cities of Sumeria.”
“Assur,” I said. “And I want to see Aethiopia. And the North as well, the ice-ribbed lands. And Telegonus’ new kingdom in the West.”
We looked out over the waves, and a silence hung between us. The next sentence should be: let us go together. But I could not speak that, not now and perhaps not ever. And he would keep silent, for he did know me well.
“Your mother,” I said. “Do you think she’ll be angry at us?”
He snorted. “No,” he said. “She likely knew before we did.”
“I would not be surprised if we come back and find her a witch.”
It always made me happy to startle him, to see his evenness blown wide. “What?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “She has eyed my herbs from the beginning. I would have taught her, if there had been time. I will wager with you.”
“If you are so sure, I do not think I will take your odds.”
At night we crossed the hollows of each other’s skin, and when he slept I would lay beside him, feeling the warmth where our limbs touched, watching the soft pulse at his throat. His eyes had creases, and his neck had more. When people saw us, they thought I was younger. But though I looked and sounded like a mortal, I was a bloodless fish. From my water I could see him, and all the sky behind, but I could not cross over.
Between the Dragon and Telemachus, we did at last find my old shore. It was morning when we reached the narrow bay, my father’s chariot halfway to its peak. Telemachus held the anchor stone. “Drop, or draw onto the sand?”
“Drop,” I said.
Hundreds of years of tides and storms had changed the shoreline’s shape, but my feet remembered the sand’s fineness, the rough grass with its burrs. In the distance drifted faint gray smoke and the sound of goat bells. I passed the jutting rocks where Aeëtes and I used to sit. I passed the forest where I had lain after my father burned me, now only a stand of straggling pines. The hills I had dragged Glaucos up were crowded with spring: strawflowers and hyacinths, lilies, violets, and sweet rock roses. And at their center, the small clutch of yellow flowers, sprung from Kronos’ blood.
The old humming note rose up as if in greeting. “Do not touch them,” I said to Telemachus, but even as the words were out, I realized how foolish they were. The flowers could do nothing to him. He was himself already. I would not see a hair changed.
Using my knife, I dug up each stalk by its roots. I wrapped them with soil in strips of cloth and settled them in the darkness of my bag. There was no more reason to linger. We hauled up the anchor and pointed the prow towards home. The waves and islands passed but I scarcely saw them. I was drawn taut as an archer sighting against the sky, waiting for the bird to flush. On the last evening, when Aiaia was so close I thought I could smell her blooms drifting on the sea air, I told him the story that I had kept back, of the first men who had come to my island, and what I had done to them in return.
The stars were very bright, and Vesper shone like a flame overhead. “I did not tell you before because I did not want it to lie between us.”
“And now you do not mind if it does?”
From the darkness of my bag, the flowers sang their yellow note. “Now I want you to have the truth, whatever comes.”
The light salt breeze rifled in the shore-grass. He was holding my hand against his chest. I could feel the steady beat of his blood.