Ithaca (2 page)

“Telemachus.” Eurycleia bustled along the gallery toward me, her face shocked.

“What is it?”

“Antinous is in Penelope's room.”

I can hear the creak of my mother's loom from along the gallery. I race to her door and stop. My mother is sitting at her loom just as I would expect, eyes squinting at her skeins of vividly colored thread, small fingers thrusting her needle in and out of the weave. But she isn't alone.

Sprawled in a chair close by her, one leg hooked over the arm, is a heavily built, handsome young man wearing a silk dressing gown and rows of beads that tangle in the thick fur on his chest. As he watches Penelope weave, he's eating handfuls of nuts and dropping their shells on the floor.

Another line crossed. None of the young men have ever gone into my mother's bedroom before. I ought to shout. I ought to run forward and hit him, or draw a knife on him. But I can't fight Antinous. I know. I tried once, last autumn. Something made me crack and I hurled myself at him, fists pummeling his body, fingers ripping away layers of silk to claw at his flesh. I still remember the moment I encountered hard muscle under Antinous's layers of fat, and the shock of helplessness as he chucked me aside. I don't need another lesson. I'm sixteen years old, not yet fully grown, and no one has ever taught me how to use a sword. The visitors who have taken over our house are grown men. They're fighters.

“One day you'll be a fighter.” My nurse, Eurycleia, used to tell me that.

I hardly knew what fighters were, then. Men on Ithaca are fishermen and farmers. I didn't know about the weapons and tattoos, the peacock clothes and jewelry, the plaited hair, the scars exposed like badges of pride, the furious arguments, knife fights, killings. Fighters—I'm surrounded by them now. They
stalk the corridors of the big house like dogs, their aggression filling every room with a raw animal stench. Every day ends in drunken arguments. Fights—like the one in the courtyard earlier—happen pretty much every week. I still remember the first corpse I ever saw: a young man barely older than me, sprawled in the courtyard with his teeth grinning at his own blood while two others rolled dice for his shirt.

I'm neither a coward nor a weakling—at least I hope I'm not. But I can't do anything against men such as these.

How do I cope? I've learned different survival strategies instead. I've learned how to defuse ugly situations, how to swallow the petty humiliations that would make a fighter reach for his sword. Sometimes I don't feel like a boy at all. At sixteen I'm like an old man, with the skills of a practiced diplomat.

So instead of hurling myself at him, I just say, “Good morning, Antinous.” Keeping my voice calm.

Antinous nods, not even looking at me. His fat tongue appears, searching his lips for a shred of nut. Antinous's features seem too small for his face, as if his pointed nose, girlish mouth, and small, bright eyes were designed for someone more delicate. Seeing him watch Penelope, his expression reminds me of Eumaeus, the farmer, looking over a pig he's fed up for slaughter. The thought makes me feel sick, but I don't show it.

“I thought you were in the kitchen.” I heard him there earlier, giving Melanthius orders for this evening's feast: lambs to be slaughtered and spitted, fish to be gutted and stewed in squid ink. Antinous loves his food.

“I was in the kitchen.” Antinous twists his thick neck and gives me a contemptuous look. “I'm not anymore.”

I glance out the window to calm myself. Outside, sun shines on the olive grove, and the sea is a majestic blue. No sail in sight. It's a habit I've had all my life: to check the window each morning, just in case this morning—
this
morning, of all the
mornings—there'll be a speck of white out there on the endless blue. A ship bringing Odysseus home to Ithaca. This morning I see nothing but a familiar cluster of fishing boats hauling in nets by the little islet of Asteris.

I go up to my mother, ignoring Antinous, and kiss her on the forehead. “How did you sleep?” I ask gently.

Penelope stops weaving and frowns, as if she's thinking hard. “Well,” she says at last. “
Very
well.”

When Odysseus married her, Penelope was said to be the prettiest girl on the islands, and her looks have barely changed. Past thirty, her skin is still smooth, her hair black, her figure as light as ever. It's inside that the years of loneliness have eaten her away. Until recently, she could still dress for dinner, put on her jewels and play the part of a hostess—as if the young men downstairs really were just guests in a big house. Now she weaves all day, sitting next to a window overlooking the harbor where she last set eyes on Odysseus. She eats nothing. She hardly leaves her bedroom. There are good days, but they are becoming fewer and fewer.

“We slept
very
well,” Antinous mocks, in a high-pitched imitation of Penelope.

I look down at my mother's loom. In the past I used to love the pictures my mother conjured from wool: birds and trees, fishing nets and waves. After the first visitors arrived, three years ago, she wove pictures of men fighting, men feasting, men lying drunk on the shore. Then came the episode of the shroud, just after my grandfather's death last year, and everything changed.

The visitors were pushing her to name one of them as her second husband. Other than servants, Penelope had no one but a boy to protect her—me. One day she gave in. She said she had to weave her father-in-law's shroud, but as soon as it was completed, she'd make a decision. The day she began, I
watched her work. Even I could see that it was really Odysseus's shroud my mother was making. I watched the boar turning at bay as it was cornered by a young Odysseus; I watched the stones of the harbor take shape, a crowd of people on the shore, and the billowing sail of the ship that took him away. Penelope worked swiftly, her thin, strong fingers nimbly twisting wool and snapping threads. By nightfall the shroud seemed almost finished. But when I ran into her room the next morning, I found only a few lines of thread at the foot of the loom.

“What happened to the boar?” I asked. “What happened to the ship?”

My mother was already growing thinner, already developing that remote gaze that would eventually shut the rest of the world out. I remember her laughing and rubbing the hair back from my forehead. “You must have dreamed them,” she said.

I soon worked out what she was doing. Each day she wove the story of her husband's life. Each night she pulled the threads from the loom and burned them.

It didn't take the young men long to work it out either. They weren't fools. They forced her to finish the shroud. We buried Laertes, my grandfather. But Penelope still refused to choose between them. She wouldn't admit Odysseus was dead.

And she never wove pictures again. She works at her loom hour after hour, its noise creaking along the corridors of the big house. But the cloth she makes is filled with meaningless shape, glaring color, empty black space.

Antinous yawns and spreads his fingers in front of his face, inspecting them. “In the kitchen,” he says, “I was planning the feast for tonight. We will eat a slowly roast lamb—a
young
lamb—wrapped in bay leaves and cooked in a pit. Melanthius is digging the pit now. With it we will drink a jar of the ex
qui
site . . .” He pauses and frowns, like he's checking whether the word is appropriate. “The ex
qui
site,” he repeats,
nodding, “wine from the second row at the back of the cellar. I have told Melanthius not to bring it up until after noon and then to leave it outside the kitchen door so that it is raised to the exact temperature”—he closes his eyes dreamily—“of a peach warmed by the sun.”

Antinous is a killer. I've seen him kill. The man-of-luxury talk is an act, as phony as everything else about him—or else one pole of a character so split it leaves Antinous barely sane. I watch his face go slack now. His mood is turning. Suddenly he stands up and goes over to my mother. Putting his hands on her shoulders, he leans over and pretends to lick her cheek.

“I could eat your mother,” he says.

The loom creaks and stops. I can see Penelope tense, eyes scared, then closed. Antinous's fingers, white and fat as worms, creep up her neck. He touches one earring and flicks it with his nail to set it swinging.

“Don't touch her,” I say.

“Why not?” His voice is cold.

“I don't want you to.”

“I don't want you to,” he imitates. “She's going to have to choose.” Slowly, almost tenderly, he cups his fingers around my mother's cheek. He's looking at me, not down at her. “We're going to have to choose.” His voice is a singsong. “Which is the best man? Who do we want for a husband?” He leans forward suddenly and breathes deeply the perfume from her hair. “Who do we want in our bed?”

“Stop it.” My eyes are full of tears. I can't help it, though I know that crying is the most contemptible thing a man—a fighter—can do. “Please . . .”

Did my father ever plead? Of course not. I can see the contempt in Antinous's face—a worthless boy unable to protect his own mother. A man would die rather than swallow an insult like this. All I can think is
If only my father were here.

There's a step in the doorway behind me. Antinous looks toward the door with an expression of annoyance. Eurymachus, another of our visitors, is standing there.

He looks from Antinous, to me, to Penelope, sitting there in dread with her eyes closed. He can see what's going on. Eurymachus is no fool. He may be one of the visitors who have taken over our house, but he's the best of them, in a way. Sometimes I think he's ashamed of what's going on.

Antinous lets go of my mother's hair and takes a step back.

“What are you doing in here? This is Penelope's room.” Eurymachus's voice is guarded. I can sense the tension: two dogs circling before a fight.

Antinous moistens his lips. “I was leaving.”

“Leave, then.”

“Why are
you
here?”

“I came from the gate. A visitor has arrived.” Eurymachus looks at me. His expression seems a little puzzled. “He says he's an old friend of your father's.”

I
find the visitor squatting in the shade of the prickly pears outside the gate, next to a flea-bitten mule with a wooden saddle. The guards are eyeing him nervously. He's an old man, an African with a face so dark it seems to suck light into it, and a shock of wiry white hair. He's wearing a stained leather coat tied at the waist with rope, and a scarf fringed with sharks' teeth. But it isn't his clothes that surprise me, or his color—we're used to travelers on Ithaca. It's his eyes.

They're white. Not cloudy white like a blind person's. White like ivory or horn. So pale the irises fade into the whites, leaving his pupils as piercing black points.

“My house is your house,” I say formally. The standard greeting to a guest, the law of the islands and the whole of Greece. No one turns a stranger away. Visitors are honored as long as they choose to stay. That's why my father's house is full of strangers.

The visitor stands and bows. Around his neck is a goat's foot hanging on a silver chain.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Mentes.” The visitor's voice is deep, his accent foreign. “I am a friend of Odysseus. He traveled with me in Africa.”

“Do you know where he is? Do you have any news?” I can't keep the eagerness out of my voice, but Mentes shakes his head.

“I came here for news. I heard Odysseus was missing. I heard there was a war. Are you his son? You don't look like him.”

It isn't the first time I've heard that. “Delicate, like his mother”—that's what people usually say. “Not made for fighting.” “Small.”

“Yes.”

“Then it's you I came to see.”

I lead him down a back corridor to the great hall, hoping he won't see the chaos of the courtyard. He's beached his ship on the west side of the island, he tells me—that's why we got no message from the port. He has to sail for Corinth in an hour. The great hall is empty except for a maid sweeping the floor from last night's feast. Two logs smolder on the hearth, their smoke rising to the square opening in the roof, which brings in just enough light to see the brilliant images painted on the walls, of bulls tossing their horns and dolphins diving through waves. I call for bread and wine and watch the stranger settle on a chair, his gaze flickering curiously around the pictures.

Then he turns his disconcerting white eyes on me. “I hear there's been a war.”

I can hardly believe my ears. Is there a man on earth who doesn't know about the war? Who hasn't been talking about it for sixteen years? I've never met one before.

“Yes, there's been a war. A great war. That's where my father disappeared.”

“He was killed?”

“He disappeared.”