Chapter 42
A harsh shriek ripped through my dreams, wrenching me awake.
I sat bolt upright in bed, panting. The sound came again, this time more of a shout. Grabbing my oil lamp, I slipped from my sheets, the stone floor cool beneath my feet.
In the adjoining room of the rambling cottage, I found a familiar, pacing shadow. He had thankfully stopped screaming now and was muttering to himself, his frantic, senseless words painting the dark with streaks of madness.
“The boar…can you see it? Over there…”
I approached the shadow with cautious steps, as I had learned was best.
“Master Laertes, you need to go back to bed. You need to rest.” I reached out a hand to stop his ceaseless pacing.
“Rest? No, no time for rest. The boar! We must stop the beast!”
“There is no boar, Master Laertes.”
“Come see, come see.” He strode toward the door, flinging it open and motioning to the darkness beyond. “See! Do you see? It is coming. Quick. We must take up arms. Where is my sword?”
“You are safe,” I said, as gently as I could.
Laertes gripped my wrist, his touch cold and unpleasant. Then something shifted in his face, urgency loosening into confusion.
“Who…who are you?” He released me, backing away. “Where am I?”
“I am Melantho,” I told him, as I had done countless times before. “And you are in your home in Ithaca. The one you retired to after you left the palace.”
He stared at me, eyes milky with age. It was hard to imagine this man had been a king, that he had fought beside famous heroes and songs of his greatness were sung around campfires.
Now he was barely even a whisper of that legend, just an old man whose shriveled hands could no longer keep hold of reality.
“Melantho.” He nodded, though the recognition had not yet slotted into place behind his eyes. “Yes…Melantho.”
“Shall I take you back to bed, master?”
He nodded again, and I locked my arm around his, feeling his soft, pliable skin slipping over thin bone.
Laertes’s room was almost as simple as my own, just a bed and a hearth, with a large chest for his belongings. It seemed too modest for a former king.
“What else would I want? I have nothing left,” he had told me the day I arrived.
As Laertes eased himself into bed, I moved to stoke the fire back to life.
“Do you need anything else, master?” I asked once he was settled.
Laertes muttered something incoherent. Then he reached for my hand, and the calluses on his palm rasped against my own. I knew there were far more exciting stories etched into his, tales from far-off lands I would never see.
“You are good to me,” he whispered. “My dear Eurycleia.”
It was not the first time the old king had confused me with the woman, and I had given up correcting him.
“Thank you,” I said instead, staring at his hand in mine, my eyes tracing those protruding blue veins snaking like rivers beneath his mottled skin.
“I would like to visit my son’s grave tomorrow,” he murmured.
“Master Laertes, your son is not dead,” I told him, the familiar words worn between my teeth.
“No?” He seemed to sit up a little straighter in bed. “Then where is he? Bring me Odysseus.”
“He has not yet returned from Troy.”
The old king met my gaze, a glimmer of understanding flickering across his face. “The war. The war…has ended?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Four summers ago.”
***
I rose early the next day, as I often did.
Outside Laertes’s cottage, the world slumbered on, draped in pale mist. Overhead, the moon still clung stubbornly to the sky, a faded slash cut through the morning light.
Laertes’s home was nestled amid rolling fields bordered by thick woodland, a tiny pocket of solitude.
It was a strange life here, serving a reclusive, half-mad master.
Some days, it felt as if I were not really living at all but rather lost between existences.
Like an unburied soul trapped on the edge of the river Styx, denied entry to the realm beyond yet no longer welcome in the land of the living.
I sometimes feared I would go as mad as Laertes.
Solitude had a way of creeping into my mind and taking root in the gaps there.
Yet there was peace to be found in the stillness.
The unending silences were an empty void for my thoughts to fill, forcing me to acknowledge that voice in my head I had so often ignored.
For the first time in a long while, I allowed myself to think on my past—the good and the bad—and gradually, I began to realize how tired I was of hiding from those memories.
I walked through fields, following the familiar path my feet had trodden many times before, until I began to hear those slow, sleepy sighs.
The sound beckoned me forward until the trees thinned and spilled out onto a small, sandy beach.
I took off my sandals and stood at the water’s edge, letting the waves kiss my feet in eager greeting.
I closed my eyes and listened, though it was not the sea I heard before me. It was her. Those sweet, drowsy breaths as she slept beside me.
Four summers.
It was hard to describe how it felt to be without Penelope.
It was like missing a piece of my body I could not name, her absence painfully ineffable yet constantly present.
In the stillness of the night, I often imagined I could feel her missing me, too, like a cry through the darkness that only my heart could hear.
Sometimes, that was enough, just knowing that Penelope longed for me, that our distance hurt her also.
Other times, it felt like torture—to know she wanted this as desperately as I did, and still, we could never have it.
I would return to Penelope one day, I promised myself. I just had to learn first to control my feelings for her. But loving Penelope was in my blood, my bones, my soul.
How could I unlearn that?
I walked toward the rocky cliff that cupped the beach like a weathered hand.
Here Laertes had erected a grave for his son, carving a statue of Odysseus straight into the rock face, rendering him with impressive detail.
Laertes might have lost his grip on reality, but his artistic hand was still staggeringly skilled.
I stared at Odysseus’s cold face and felt a familiar rage stir inside me.
Four summers and he had not returned.
Four summers.
What could have kept him for so long? The war was long over, so what reason could Odysseus possibly have for not returning to his wife? His son? His throne?
He was not dead, that much was known. Sightings had been reported since Troy had fallen, rumors of Odysseus’s adventures with Cyclopes and sirens and witches.
I only knew such stories because heralds visited Laertes’s cottage to relay news of his son.
Though it was a futile exercise. These days, the old king only listened to the voices in his head.
“You do not deserve her,” I told the stone-faced Odysseus. “You never did.”
The statue just stared back at me with dead eyes.
***
I spent my days working in the fields surrounding Laertes’s home.
The king had once been a proficient farmer, but his expertise seemed to have wandered with the rest of his mind.
Often, I found him digging in the dirt, muttering to himself about something he had lost. I usually left him to it and did what I could to tidy up his mistakes, though I knew very little about tending to plants.
Still, there was something soothing about working the land, getting my hands dirty, and keeping my mind focused, wearing out my body so that sleep would find me quickly each night.
I was busy planting seeds when I heard the distant bleating. Squinting, I spied shifting dark forms spilling across the fields, accompanied by a familiar figure. I raised my hand in greeting, and the figure waved back.
“Hello, sister,” Melanthius said once he finally reached me.
His nut-brown eyes were clearer than I had seen them in a long while.
“Wait there. I’ll fetch you something.” I rose, dusting the dirt from my knees.
Melanthius nodded gratefully as I disappeared into Laertes’s house. Despite it being midmorning, the king was still fast asleep. He often slept through days at a time, and I knew better than to wake him.
I returned to my brother with a plate of bread and cheese. He took it with an appreciative nod, and we sat down together in companionable silence.
This was the one gift my isolation had given me—my brother.
It had been during my first winter serving Laertes that Melanthius had stumbled upon the cottage.
He had been seeking shelter from a brewing storm, completely unaware of who dwelled there.
When I opened the door, we stared at each other for a long, tense moment.
We had not spoken since that terrible argument so long ago.
“Come in,” I said.
When I offered him wine, he shook his head and replied, “Water would be better.”
Though there was so much left unsaid between us, we spent most of that night in silence. He ate the meal I fixed for him and then went to sleep. The next morning, he thanked me and left.
Since then, my brother had visited regularly.
“A wolf got some of the goats the other night,” he told me as he ate. “I asked your Thracian friend to hunt it for me. She’s nasty with a bow, that one.”
I nodded. “I went hunting with her often.”
Melanthius laughed. I had forgotten how infectious the sound was. How much I had missed it.
“What’s so funny?”
“I’m just picturing you holding a weapon. Terrifying stuff.” I nudged his arm, and he grinned before adding, “She misses you, you know.”
A sting of guilt shivered through me. “I know.”
“She said she’d visit again soon.”
Over the past four summers, my friends had visited as regularly as they could. They were the threads that kept me tethered to the world. Without them, it would have been so easy to lose myself in this solitude Laertes had entombed himself within.
“Is there…any other news?” I ventured, trying to keep my voice neutral.