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?
My thoughts returned often to that quiet-eyed, watchful boy. I wondered if he knew what his father expected, if he felt the weight of those hopes. I imagined him out on the cliffs every day, praying for a ship. I imagined his weariness, his soft, inward grief before he went to sleep each night, curling on his bed as he had once been cradled in his father’s hands.
I cupped my own hands in the dark. I did not have a thousand wiles, and I was no fixed star, yet for the first time I felt something in that space. A hope, a living breath, that might yet grow between.
Chapter Seventeen
THE TREES WERE JUST