Shadowed poplars loomed and willows trailed their leaves in black water. No birds sang, no beast moved. I knew the place at once, though I had never been there. A great cave gaped, and in its mouth stood an old man with unseeing eyes. I heard his name in my mind: Teiresias.
I threw myself down into the dirt of my garden bed. Scrabbling, tugging up the moly roots, I stuffed a few into my mouth, brown earth still clinging. At once the wind ceased, dying as quickly as it had come. I coughed, my whole body shaking. My tongue tasted of slime and ash. I fought to my knees.
“You dare,” I said. “You dare to misuse me on my own island? I am Titan blood. This will bring war. My father—”
“It was your father who suggested it. My vessels must have prophecy in their blood. You should be honored,” he said. “You have borne a vision of Apollo.”
His voice was a hymn. His beautiful face showed only the faintest puzzlement. I wanted to tear him with my nails. The gods and their incomprehensible rules. Always there was a reason you must kneel.
“I will not tell Odysseus.”
“That is beneath my concern,” he said. “The prophecy is delivered.”
He was gone. I pressed my forehead to the wrinkled bole of an olive. My chest was heaving. I shook with rage and humiliation. How many times would I have to learn? Every moment of my peace was a lie, for it came only at the gods’ pleasure. No matter what I did, how long I lived, at a whim they would be able to reach down and do with me what they wished.
The sky was not yet fully blue. Inside, Odysseus still slept. I woke him and led him to the hall. I did not tell him the prophecy. I watched him eat and fingered my rage as if it were a knife’s point. I wanted to keep it sharp as long as I could, for I knew what would come after. In the vision, he had been back again on Ithaca. The last of my little hopes were gone.
I set out my best dishes, broached my oldest wine. But there was no savor in it. His face was abstracted. All day he kept turning to look out the window as if someone would come. We spoke politely, but I felt him waiting for the men to eat, to go to bed. When the last of their voices had died into sleep, he knelt.
“Goddess,” he said.
He never called me that, and so I knew. I truly knew. Perhaps some divinity had come to him as well. Perhaps he had dreamed of Penelope. Our idyll was finished. I looked down at his hair, woven with gray. His shoulders were set, his eyes on the ground. I felt a dull anger. At least he might look me in the face.
“What is it, mortal?” My voice was loud. My lions stirred.
“I must go,” he said. “I have stayed too long. My men are impatient.”
“Then go. I am a host, not a jailer.”
He did look at me then. “I know it, lady. I am grateful to you beyond measure.”
His eyes were brown and warm as summer earth. His words were simple. They had no art to them, which of course was also art. He always knew how to show himself to best advantage. It felt a kind of vengeance to say:
“I have a message for you from the gods.”
“A message.” His face grew wary.
“You will reach home, they say. But first they command you to speak with the prophet Teiresias in the house of death.”
No sane man could hear such a thing without quailing. He had gone rigid and pale as stone. “Why?”
“The gods have their own reasons, which they have not seen fit to share.”
“Will there never be an end to it?”
His voice was raw. His face was like a wound that had opened again. My anger drained away. He was not my adversary. His road would be hard enough without the hurt we might do each other.
I touched his chest where his great captain’s heart beat. “Come,” I said. “I do not desert you.” I led him to my room and spoke there the knowledge that had been rising in me all day, quick and unceasing, like bubbles from a stream.
“The winds will carry you past lands and seas to the living world’s edge. There is a strand there, with a black poplar grove, and still,