The Oracles of Troy (The Adventures of Odysseus)

She wiped away a tear, angrily crushing it out of existence. Her son was returning, she reminded herself. Telemachus’s presence would be enough to keep her going. And yet, if she had to endure a further decade without Odysseus, where would she get the strength from? His long absence had already drained away Anticleia’s will to live; his mother had been ailing for a long time now, and Laertes believed the news from the oracle would be the death of her. Penelope snuffed out another tear and glared down at the cloying mists that fenced her in on the lonely hilltop.

‘Good morning, Mistress.’

She turned, in surprise, to see the grey head and long grey beard of the lookout a few paces away. Conscious of her tears, she looked away again.

‘Good morning.’

‘If you want I should go back down for a while, then just you say so.’

‘No, no. I was just going anyway.’

The old man ventured a little closer.

‘The fog’s clearing, my lady. It’s often thickest just before the dawn, but it doesn’t last forever. Look south and you can already see the sun on the waves.’

Penelope followed the line of the old man’s outstretched arm and saw the glint of golden light riding the Ionian Sea around the island of Zacynthos, the southernmost point of Odysseus’s kingdom. The sight of a sail made her catch her breath, but in the same excited instant she had already realised it was nothing more than a fishing vessel. But she knew the lookout was right: the fog would not last forever, and one day the sail on the water would belong to the galley that brought her husband home again.

The clouds remained, threatening rain yet refusing to weep for the destruction of Troy. Like the stone lid of a sarcophagus, they continued to press down claustrophobically over the whole of Ilium and to the far horizon of the Aegean. The bright light of morning was stifled to a dull gloom, and the Greeks emerging from the insanity of the night were left reflecting on their crimes and debauched excesses.

When a summons arrived calling for Odysseus to attend the Council of Kings at the Scaean Gate, Eperitus asked, and was given, leave to return to the ships and check on Astynome’s welfare. He passed the heaped booty being stacked in orderly piles on the plain between the walls and the bay, for later distribution among the victorious army, and looked for the familiar, blue-beaked galleys of the small Ithacan fleet. With a thousand vessels beached or anchored in the hoof-shaped harbour it took him a while, but eventually he was greeted by the calls of a skeleton crew as he approached the gangplanks that had been angled down onto the sand. To his surprise, every man was clean-shaven, making them hard to recognise without the beards they had worn for so many years.

‘The oath’s been fulfilled,’ Eurybates explained, seeing Eperitus’s curious look as he helped him up the last part of the gangplank and onto the deck. He stroked his jaw uncertainly, unfamiliar with its smoothness. ‘Troy’s in ruins and Helen’s back with Menelaus, so we’re free to shave and cut our hair again.’

‘I suppose we are,’ Eperitus replied. ‘But all of you? Most of you had beards before the war, and I thought Polites was born with one.’

‘I wanted a change,’ Polites defended himself.

‘Have you seen Odysseus?’ asked Antiphus, approaching from the stern with Omeros at his side.

Antiphus’s hairless face was gaunt and bony, but Omeros’s baby cheeks looked much more natural without the desperate, downy growth that had covered them for the past few months.

‘The king’s alive and well. Where’s Astynome?’

The others all looked at the stern, where a young, helmeted soldier was leaning back against the rear of the ship with his elbows on the rail. As Eperitus stared at him, trying to picture his grubby, smoke-stained face with a beard, the soldier removed his helmet and shook out his long black hair. It was Astynome.

Eperitus left his comrades and hastened to the rear of the galley, where he was met with a warm embrace and a long kiss. When he finally pulled his lips away from hers, he looked down in amazement at her leather breastplate, the greaves about her shins and the short sword hanging from a scabbard in her belt. Astynome stood back and opened her arms so that he could admire her more fully.

‘I had to strap my chest down with bands of cloth before I could get the armour to fit,’ she explained, tapping her fingers on the cuirass, ‘and this sword’s beginning to weigh me down a bit, but other than that I could almost be an Ithacan. Don’t you agree?’

‘You lack one important thing: a sprig of the chelonion flower – the badge we Ithacans wear to remind us of our homeland. Here.’ He took the fragment that remained of his own chelonion from his belt and tucked it into hers. ‘Now you’re an Ithacan warrior. And a more brutal, fearsome figure I’ve never seen before.’

Her grimed face broke with a smile and she slapped his breastplate playfully, before allowing him to take her into his arms and kiss her again.