Chapter 27 #2
“I’m not talking about me being punished. I am talking about me being forced to witness your punishment.” Her voice wavered. “I cannot go through that again, Melantho. I cannot see you be—”
She was cut off by a burst of laughter from the street. We both glanced toward the mouth of the passageway, watching the crowds filter past in a steady, bubbling stream.
“We need to go back to the palace,” she said. “Before anyone notices we’re gone.”
“I’m not going back. Not yet.”
Penelope inhaled a delicate breath, nostrils flaring.
Without warning, she stepped closer to me, so close I could feel her chest brushing against mine.
I pressed myself harder against the wall, willing it to swallow me up, to let me escape from the insufferable heat of her body and how it made my insides squirm.
She stared at me for a long moment, gaze burning not with anger but something equally fierce. Something far more confusing.
I could have sworn the air between us crackled.
Whatever Penelope was going to say, she seemed to think better of it, instead turning on her heel and striding toward the mouth of the passageway.
“Where are you going?”
“If we must wait, I’m not doing it here. It smells awful,” she said over her shoulder.
Unsure what else to do, I followed her.
Penelope cut through the crowd with surprising ease, as if she had navigated these streets many times before.
She walked differently here, her usual elegant strides replaced with a casual, bouncing lope.
Nobody looked twice at her. With her threadbare attire and her scarf pulled close around her face, she looked like just another slave girl running errands for their master.
I glanced at the bustle of bodies around us, wondering what any of them would think if they knew their future queen stood among them.
We followed the hill down toward the harbor. Penelope picked her way along the edge until she found a quiet spot.
“What are you doing?” I asked as she sat down on the crumbling harbor wall.
“Waiting.”
“For what?”
She stared at the horizon as she said, “The slaver doesn’t arrive till midday. So we must wait.” Then she produced a small leather pouch from the belt of her tunic and handed it to me.
I felt the weight of the silver inside.
“You forgot these. The ones you spilled onto the table.”
My hand tightened around the second pouch. A heaviness settled over me, and I shifted beneath its awkward weight.
“Why are you giving me this?”
“So you can buy more handmaids,” Penelope said simply.
“But you don’t want any more.”
Instead of replying, she said, “Look there.”
I followed her gaze down to the water’s edge where a group of women were preparing a fishing boat, their shouts falling into chorus with the swooping gulls.
“Those women would have spent their whole lives waving off fathers and husbands as they headed out to fish,” Penelope murmured, a quiet wonder flickering in her voice. “Now they are the ones guiding their own boat, earning their own keep. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
I sat down beside her on the wall. “There’s nothing beautiful about labor.”
“For a slave, no, you are right,” she agreed. “But for women like that, work means independence. It means freedom. That is the gift this war has given Ithaca…space for the women to grow.”
We watched as the fishing boat bobbed out to sea, the women’s laughter dancing over the waves. I found myself smiling at the sound despite myself. But when I glanced back at Penelope, her expression was distant, her thoughts as limitless and unreachable as the horizon taunting us in the distance.
For a while, we said nothing, but there was something in the depth of her silence that made me finally ask, “Why don’t you want any more handmaids, Penelope?”
She let out a small sigh, hands knotting in her lap.
“That summer…when we were children…”
Her eyes flickered to my back, then away again. I’d never heard her so hesitant, words brittle and stumbling.
“It…broke something in me…seeing what they did to you…knowing it was my fault…knowing I couldn’t protect you.”
Callias’s screams filled my mind, and I thought of how it had felt to watch him being branded. The guilt had devoured me whole.
Was that how Penelope had felt all this time?
I felt a shiver of shame that I had never considered it, how that day could have scarred her as deeply as it had me.
She continued, “Afterward, I vowed I’d never take a handmaid again.
I’d never be responsible for a person’s life like that…
never let innocents be hurt because of me.
But then that morning after my wedding…” She flinched at the memory, screwing her eyes tight.
“Your friends…what my uncle did to them…because of me.”
I watched, stunned, as the emotions consumed her composure, leaving her so raw and vulnerable. I wondered if she might even cry. I had never seen Penelope do so before. Not a single tear. But her eyes remained dry when she opened them, her expression steadier.
“Hippodamia and Autonoe were forced upon me when I arrived here,” she said. “I tried to refuse, but I had no choice.”
“And what about me?”
“I accepted because of your deal with Odysseus.”
“I…didn’t know you knew about that,” I admitted quietly.
“I tried to talk him out of it,” she said with a somber smile. “Not of freeing you of course. But the terms of his deal.”
“Why?”
She looked away. “I hated the idea of you being forced to endure my company.”
I noticed that Penelope was picking at the skin around her nail beds. The old habit made her seem younger—childlike even.
“I just don’t want to hurt anyone again,” she whispered.
Her words were so painfully delicate, yet they clutched at my heart with a fierceness that stole my breath away.
I felt a sudden, overwhelming rush of sympathy for her, as strange as it felt to place such a thing in someone who was supposedly my master.
But had Penelope ever acted like one? She had protected me, cared for me, fought for me.
Never once had she treated me like a slave.
And yet I had continually branded her with the title of “mistress.”
I think we should see people in our own light.
“What happened wasn’t your fault, Penelope.” The thought blossomed on my lips, a truth I had always known but been too blinded by bitterness to let myself see. “None of it was ever your fault.”
She shook her head. “Melantho—”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
The firmness in my voice made her finally look at me, and her eyes were like the waves before us, churning with such devastating beauty.
“I’m sorry I made you believe it was,” I added, then, even quieter, “I’m sorry I’ve been so cruel to you.”
“You were never cruel, Melantho,” she whispered. “You were just hurting.”
We stared at each other for a long moment, the past swirling around us like warm currents.
Perhaps it was being here, away from the palace, lost in the anonymous chaos of the kingdom, that made me feel as if I were seeing Penelope for the first time again.
Not the Spartan princess or the future Ithacan queen but the Penelope I had met that night so long ago.
The beautiful girl wrapped in moonlight and shadows and secrets.
A girl who was just trying her best in this ugly world.
The girl who had kept fighting for me, no matter how many times I pushed her away.
But who had ever been fighting for her?
“Come get your livestock! Pigs! Goats! Slaves!” A voice sounded in the distance, shattering our companionable silence.
On the docks, I could see the slaver leading a procession of people behind him. Their necks were chained together, and the sound of those metal shackles clanged through my bones, making my blood turn cold.
“Melantho?” Penelope was watching me. “Are you all right?”
My voice trembled as I asked, “Will you come with me?”
She nodded. “Always.”
***
We made our way back through the market, pushing into the swelling crowds as we followed the slaver’s shouts.
The owner of the voice was a short, rotund man, his fleshy face dominated by a bulbous, sunburned nose. He was an ugly thing, but uglier still were the words that lifted from his thin, chapped lips.
“Come, come! Take a look at the livestock! The finest you’ll find in Ithaca!”
He stood beside three pens. One was being filled with pigs, the second goats, and the third was where he deposited the slaves.
They looked less than human—covered in filth, their clothes ragged, hair matted.
There were six of them altogether, two of whom were women. Neither was my mother.
One was older, hair silvered and shoulders hunched with age, though she was trying to hold herself proudly. The other was the tallest woman I had ever seen. Her head was shaved, and her muscular body was covered in intricate ink markings.
A finely dressed man approached the slaver. He was old, though I had seen far older men sail with Odysseus. I wondered what ailment this one had lied about to escape the war.
“Why is she stained?” he asked, pointing at the large woman.
“It’s a Thracian thing. They call ’em tattoos,” the slaver said, voice as greasy as his grin. “You won’t find a stronger slave than a Thracian slave, I can assure you. Even the women are tough.”
I stared at the Thracian, and she met my gaze. Her eyes were the color of wet stone—dark and gleaming. There was something about her, something sharp and alive and dangerous. I half expected her to rip off those metal chains with her teeth.
The interested buyer entered the pen and grabbed one of the male slaves by the jaw, turning his face this way and that.
He then barked a command, and the slave opened his mouth so he could examine the inside.
The slave’s eyes were eerily dead, as if he were just an animated corpse. A body without a soul.