“Maybe he killed all our fathers and brothers on purpose so he wouldn’t have to share the riches,” another one said.
He’d charged at that boy, but it hadn’t gone well, as evidenced by his still swollen, purple left eye. Worse, it had taken his grandfather’s old guard to save him from the melee.
The elderly guard, he’d noted, always managed to be nearby, which only shamed him more because it meant either his mother had sent him to keep watch, or the man had such little confidence in Telemachus’s abilities to defend himself, he’d appointed himself his protector.
Among boys who were supposed to serve him! And yet they dismissed him with such disdain. And he couldn’t do anything about the attack because he’d learned it wasn’t manly to “tell”. So he bore it, even though he constantly seethed.
After stalking off the playing field, Telemachus snuck into his own silent, empty hall. Staring up at Odysseus’s bow, he whispered, “What was your secret, father? How did you command men who were bigger and stronger than you?”
His mother said he used charm and humor. But what did that mean? And how could he employ something that didn’t come naturally to him? Telemachus closed his eyes and prayed under the symbol of his father’s great strength for what seemed like the millionth time, “Please bring my father home, mighty Zeus, Lord of the Sky and of Justice. I need his help. I need him.”
* * *
PENELOPE
It seemed like months rather than years, but Penelope had only to look out among her wards to be reminded of the passage of time. Seven years since taking on her guest-hostages. Seven years to transform her palace from a sanctuary for silly boys into a den of drunkards.
She continued to be amazed at the sight of so many bearded men crashing through her hall. And that night, the funk of man-sweat, stale wine, and roasting meat was so great, it was a wonder she could still smell the oil of iris Danae had dabbed on her forehead before she’d headed downstairs.
Where had all her young princes gone? Yes, they’d been silly and crude in the beginning, but now…she shook her head. Now it seemed her house had become a barn overcrowded with immense shaggy bulls, lowing and spitting and sweating and trying to rut any creature that walked by.
Out of habit, she scanned the tables for Telemachus. There. He was talking to Mentes, the old family friend who had taken her son under his wing. Antinous had, thank the Goddess, finally finished his “song”—which was more of a caterwaul—and he and Eurymachus were now challenging each other to see how much wine they could ingest in one go without pausing for breath.
The queen sighed.
For years, her plan of keeping the peace with her “guest-wards” had gone well. The arrangement had diffused the people’s rage. And although it had been challenging for Telemachus, the plan had also succeeded in stabilizing Ithaca and helping the economy recover somewhat. Still, she held out hope her son would find the inner strength to lead rather than demand, a distinction she’d not been able to impress upon him.
An empty wine bladder shot up the high-vaulted ceiling, catching Penelope’s eye. Who had thrown it and for what reason, she could not guess. Still, she cringed as it almost hit Odysseus’s famous bow on the way down. She really should have removed it years ago, but it did serve to remind all her “little” princes that she was still married.
It was an important reminder. If she could’ve lit it up in a circle of hanging oil lamps without worrying about setting it aflame, she would. As a coarse roar filled the hall, Penelope considered how much had changed over the last several years. She had not anticipated, indeed, could not have even imagined, how reaching sexual maturity would transform her sweet, silly, playful boys. It was as if once the daimon of the ceaseless drive for Aphrodite’s pleasure hit them, they lost all sense of humility, reasonableness, and straight-thinking. They pursued her women—and some of the houseboys—endlessly. They growled at each other like mindless beasts. And they drank until they pissed and vomited all over themselves. Penelope had been wholly and completely unprepared for the tidal wave of aggression and priapistic competitiveness that the newly bearded young men displayed daily in her halls.
Most shocking and distressing of all, however, was the fact that they’d convinced themselves, to a man, that they were not her guest-wards at all, but her suitors.
Suitors!
The unmitigated gall of it. She had nurtured them as their queen mother and saved many of them from starvation after being abandoned by their own families. And now they wanted to bed her? And take her throne?
But she’d had to tread carefully. She could not insult them lest their families considered rebellion again. So she put them off. They’d fallen easily for her best trick—telling them she would make a decision on which suitor to take after finishing her father-in-law’s shroud (sadly, Laertes had not taken the hint). But really, she’d been working out designs and patterns and dyed-wool combinations to meet the demand for her workshop’s high-quality textiles. It was the products from her looms, after all, that had kept Ithaca afloat in Odysseus’s absence.
Eurymachus had once spied her unpicking one design that had displeased her and had made a great infantile fuss about how she was “tricking and misleading” them about Laertes’s shroud. She’d rolled her eyes and let him go on as she tried to work out the problem of how to create a pattern of white-winged creatures emerging out of a dark blue background. If she could perfect a technique that her women could easily follow, she had no doubts her rich Achaean neighbors would pay handsomely for it.
She took a sip of well-watered wine and noticed one young “suitor” across the hall staring at her with moon-eyes. Ah, yes. Amphinomus. She could tell he fancied himself in love with her, as did one or two of the others. They were still young enough not to have learned how to disguise that lovesick look. But she’d always had a soft spot for the admittedly graceless, stocky young man since the day she saw him trying to guide her son away from his foolhardy entanglements with some of the bigger, stronger boys.
There was something about his stocky, barrel-chested build too. His resemblance—in form anyway—to a young Odysseus often caught her off guard. She would catch him sitting in a certain way and be flooded with memories of resting her head on Odysseus’s broad shoulders or of snuggling into his strong chest to sleep.
The bard plucked his strings and began yet another interminable ballad about lost kings and lonely wives. Penelope brought two fingers to the bridge of her nose as the bard’s yowling continued.
Finally, she could take it no longer. “Bard, by all the gods, sing a song of joy instead,” she commanded over the din.