Epilogue
The queen of Ithaca’s handmaids died that day.
That is what the poets shall say.
They will sing of the valiant hero Odysseus, who strung up the unarmed women.
They will delight in the gruesome details of how their feet danced as death squeezed its hand around their delicate, swanlike necks.
They will celebrate Odysseus’s triumph, how he single-handedly purged his palace of the rotten suitors and those treacherous slaves. So too will they celebrate his wife’s loyalty, admiring her steadfast devotion.
Everybody loves a good, obedient woman after all.
For the next fourteen years, people will rejoice in Odysseus’s mighty rule.
They will not question the fact that he rarely leaves his chambers or speaks to anyone other than his closest confidants.
Nobody will speak of the madness that has infected the king’s mind nor the years Penelope dedicates to trying to cure it.
For war does not weaken men. No, it makes them valiant and glorious and heroic.
That is the story people wish to be told.
When Odysseus is finally sent to the world below, people will call his death a “tragic accident.” It will be Telegonus who takes the king’s life, his illegitimate child by the witch Circe.
Heralds will tell of how Odysseus mistook his ally for an enemy and was subsequently slain by the son he never had the chance to know.
The stories will fail to mention that in those last years of his life, Odysseus seemed to mistake all allies for enemies.
Once Odysseus passes to the realm below, gossip will spread of the faithful Penelope fleeing to Aeaea. “Why Aeaea?” people will ask. What could there possibly be for her on the island of her late husband’s mistress?
Some will say it was Telegonus who took Penelope there, intent on marrying her.
Never mind that Telegonus is the child of Penelope’s late husband or that Odysseus’s blood still freshly stained his hands.
Some brows will be raised over the fact that Telegonus is younger than Penelope’s own son, but those details will ultimately be deemed unimportant.
For Telegonus is a man and Penelope a widowed woman, and that is all the justification needed.
So when Penelope lives out the rest of her life on Aeaea, people will say it is for love. That part at least will be true.
But nobody will ever speak of who awaited Penelope on that isle, who had been waiting there for fourteen long summers. Those details will slip through the cracks of history, like a beautiful, forgotten dream.
***
A woman strides through crystal waters, the waves lapping at her feet.
Beyond her, across the expanse of golden, sunbaked sand, a figure stands, watching. Disbelieving.
For a moment, they can only stare at each other, too afraid to move, in fear that this moment may shatter.
And then, all at once, they are running.
Their bodies are not as fast as they once were; time has taken that gift from them. Yet still, they run with the wild abandon of youth, as if they were children once again, sand spraying behind them like laughter.
Then they halt, just inches away, both struck by a sudden shyness in the face of all that is between them.
The red-haired woman reaches out; she cannot help herself.
She needs to know this is real, that it isn’t just another torturous dream the morning will soon snatch from her.
With trembling hands, she traces the lines on the other woman’s face—some of them familiar, some new, but every detail just as beautiful as on the last night she beheld her.
Her touch is filled with a desperate kind of reverence, fingers trailing over lovely, salt-stung cheeks, down that sharp nose, winding their way to those devastatingly soft lips.
The gray-eyed woman smiles and whispers against her fingertips, “Melantho.”
“Penelope,” she whispers back.
And they know they are finally home.