A Sea of Sorrow

by Libbie Hawker

  Penelope looked taken aback. “Telemachus, it is a wife’s duty to miss her spouse,” she said.

  “Duty, aye,” he agreed. “But grieve in private, mother. It is time for men to talk now.”

  “Let me know when one shows up!” Antinous called out and cracked up at his own wit. But his laughter bounced empty and hollow around the silent hall. He’d clearly expected others to join in, but his mirth faded as his embarrassment grew. He cleared his throat and fell silent, his dark eyes on the boy now, glittering with the malevolence of the angry drunk.

  Telemachus didn’t see it—his own gaze was locked with that of his mother’s. Amphinomus could imagine what those eyes were trying to convey: obey me, I am now the man of this house coupled with mother, please don’t shame me. Amphinomus felt some empathy—despite their similar ages, Telemachus still seemed to be a boy battling with the burgeoning man, still vulnerable to the scathing putdown of a parent. Silence reigned for but a moment; Penelope rose then, gave her son the slightest nod of her head and withdrew.

  Even more to everyone’s surprise, the son of Odysseus strode to the middle of the hall at the foot of the dais of his parents’ thrones and declared, “I am master here. I’ve kept my peace because I respect Zeus’s laws for guest-friendship. But no more! You—all of you—came here first as our guests…now to pay suit to my mother. That is your right. What is not your right is that you—to a man—act like the basest beggars, filling your guts with my father’s food…my food…and pissing…my wine into your pots…”

  “Ah, fuck off,” Antinous rose—unsteadily—to his feet, his voice full of booze-fuelled anger. “If you can, that is. Your balls sprouted any hair yet?” By the gods, Amphinomus thought, he was crass. “If not,” Antinous went on, “go tease one out…boy…and leave we men to our diversions. Ithaca needs a man…a real man…to get on top of her and govern her. To plough her fields, barren and scrubby as they are and hope against hope that something good might yet spring from the fallow ground.”

  Rage spiked through Amphinomus: he knew—they all knew that he spoke of Penelope and not the kingdom. But Telemachus, though his face reddened, kept his wits. “You’re drunk,” he stated and refused to take a step back as the big man balled his fists. “And you’re still a guest-friend, bound by those rules—before the gods. And before the gods, as I have said, I will be king here.”

  “The boy’s right on one thing,” Eurymachus called. “You are drunk!” This caused a round of guffawing from the suitors. Eurymachus had that way about him, able to win men over with a sly line or a witty quip. Antinous took the crack on the chin, inclined his head and sat down—demanding more wine. “And you,” Eurymachus turned his attention to Telemachus. “You have found your balls. I salute you,” he raised his cup and paused, taking a sip. “Though I can’t help but think that the old man you were speaking to put you up to this. Who was he?”

  “It doesn’t matter who he is,” Telemachus lifted his chin.

  “Then it doesn’t matter if you tell us.”

  “That man was Mentes—a friend of the family,” Telemachus said after a moment. More than a friend, Amphinomus guessed, based on the exchange of smirks around the room. Fools. The older man was clearly one of Odysseus’s retired warriors. The nature of their “friendship” didn’t matter—what mattered was that the prince appeared, for the first time, to be getting good political council. And finally acting on it.

  “As I said, it is of no matter,” Telemachus went on. “What is important,” he raised his voice, “is that my patience is at an end…”

  “Mine too,” Antinous interrupted. “Can’t you shut up so the bard can get on with his song?”

  “Phemius will continue, when I am finished,” Telemachus snapped. “Before the gods, I call for an assembly. Tomorrow.”

  “You have your assembly,” Antinous scoffed, “for your swine and sheep-herders. Better men will avail themselves of better things.”

  Sober, Amphinomus would have kept his peace. But half-drunk and maudlin over the queen, he had no resistance to the long but useless habit of trying to help Penelope’s son. It was a matter of principle too—he could not allow the invocation of the gods to be insulted in his presence. He was on his feet in less time than it took to think. “Antinous,” he said, his voice loud in the silent wake of the exchange between man and boy.

  All eyes turned to him.

  “Telemachus calls an assembly before the gods,” he said, forcing steadiness into his voice. “You speak of better men? As better men, it is for us to set an example to those whose birth is not as fortunate as our own. I will attend as I honor the gods—you should too, lest we show disrespect to the…” he was about to say “boy” and corrected himself, “…prince and by proxy his mother whose hand we are here to win.”

  “I’ll keep my own council,” Antinous snapped, his eyes blazing—a dangerous sign.

  “Then don’t attend Telemachus’s assembly.” Amphinomus knew his bravado was coming from the wine—but he’d had enough of Antinous. “This is still Telemachus’s father’s house and so before the gods, in honor of the law of xenia, I will be there. I offer the rest of you only friendly advice on following the gods’ rules on the matter.”

  He shut his mouth then because prodding Antinous was like prodding a bear. Amazingly, the bear sat heavily back down. There was no point in pushing his luck, so Amphinomus turned and left the smoky fug of the overrun hall with his head held high.

  He had thought not to bother with war-gear. It was only when he looked out of the small house that, like so many others, Penelope had built for them, and saw Antinous being driven in (and throwing up over the side of) his chariot that he decided gird himself in armor. No need for a helmet, he decided, glancing sunwards. It was likely going to be a hot day and he’d drunk too much the night before. Cursing softly under his breath, he eyed the armor on its stand. It was rich—befitting a prince, the sword that accompanied it long and sharp.

  And unpocked by the clash of battle.

  As he struggled into the heavy gear, Amphinomus wondered if the other suitors felt as much of a fraud as he did sometimes. The war was, after all, over. Agamemnon’s War that had defined an era. Achaea against Troy, The High King of Mycenae against Priam, Achilles against Hector…the stuff of legends. Their names would echo down the ages; but his name and those of his fellow suitors? Dust soon after they became dust, he did not doubt.

  For princes like Amphinomus and the others, it was as though the warriors at Troy had stolen their glory. It was a war like no other and even now, if battle was joined, it was little more than a skirmish of men and boys either too old or not old enough to hold a spear. All Achaea had bled out its best on Ilium’s field.

  Outside the great hall, the prince of Ithaca stood alongside the leather-skinned, white-haired islanders who normally avoided the palace. Beside him stood an ancient greybeard, the soothsayer, Halitherses, whose incessant predictions of “fates dark arrows” for them all had grown tiresome.

  “Today,” the old seer quavered, holding the caduceus staff of the herald, “the Son of Odysseus will address the assembly, before the gods, as is his right.”

  Telemachus stepped forward and took the caduceus from Halitherses and offered the old fellow a hand to steady him before he began his oration. “People of Ithaca…I know the assembly is usually called when threat is imminent. Don’t worry,” he added with a smile, “there are no marauding pirates…at sea anyway.”

  The quip was directed at the suitors and it made the islanders roar with laughter—weak as it was. “No,” Telemachus went on, “I come before you all to address an issue pertinent to my house, the house that was…and yet maybe…Odysseus’s. I know not if my father is dead or alive and if so, if he will return to these shores. But I do know that the actions of those men—the suitors—who have come to win my mother’s hand in marriage are destroying everything he—and you,” he waved an arm to encompass the Ithacans, “have built. The suitors drink my wi
ne, eat my food—”

  “Fuck your serving girls!” Antinous interrupted and roared with laughter at his own joke.

  To be fair to him, Telemachus was unruffled and pressed on. “…and take other advantages, which I thought unfit for discussion at the assembly but our guest-friend Antinous has illustrated very well. Guest friends are always welcome in this house,” he continued, “but there comes a time when a guest becomes a resident. And a resident must do his share…” he trailed off. “Three years?” his voice rose. “Three years some of you have paid suit to my mother and yet more of you came as her guest-wards before that. I was a boy then and have grown to manhood and still…not one of you…has done right by her or this house.”

  “We have paid suit,” Eurymachus drawled, “but it is for her to choose.”

  “Any decent man would have gone to her father, Icarius, and asked for her hand,” Telemachus shot back.

  “She doesn’t want us to,” Antinous put in. “You’re too blind to see it. But we do. The parting of her lips, the idle touch of her hand on her breast as she watches us—her gaze seeming for you and you alone, yet somehow it falls on each and every one of us. She tempts us with the promise of her body—a promise she won’t deliver on. We are men—she is driving us mad, taunting us in this way!”

  “Well, not you,” Eurymachus sniped. “You spend a lot of time fucking the serving girls. You said so yourself.”

  “She said she’d make a decision when she’d finished Laertes’s Shroud!” Antinous shouted over the chuckles at Eurymachus’s comment.

  That was true, Amphinomus acknowledged to himself. Penelope had been working on the burial sheet for Odysseus’s father for two years now, the promise that when she had quit the work, she’d make a decision on which of the men she would take. Any fool—except Antinous who seemed genuinely to take it at face value—could tell that it was a ploy to delay them in the hope her husband would miraculously return.

  “The shroud will never be finished,” Eurymachus stated, no lilting inflection in his tone now. “Penelope unpicks the shroud each night…” A gasp from the crowd, Amphinomus noted; even Telemachus looked aghast at the revelation. “…unpicks it so that it will never be finished. So she will never have to choose.”

  He rounded on Telemachus. “Whose door then does the blame of your apparent ruination lie? The suitors or your mother’s? I rather think that—at her age—she enjoys the attention of we young men and wants it to last.”

  Bastard, Amphinomus tought. He took a step forward, deciding on a course of action he’d likely regret, but Eurymachus richly deserved a punch in the face for citing Penelope’s age.

  But Antinous stilled him with his words: “Send her to Icarius, then!” he demanded. “Send her back to her father so he may make her choose and we’ll put an end to this matter once and for all.”

  Amphinomus’s anger fled, replaced by sickening dread. For once—and why now—the idiot Antinous had come up with an idea that was logical. It made complete sense. But Amphinomus knew there was no way that Icarius would chose him over Eurymachus—nor even Antinous himself for that matter.

  He would die if Penelope were taken from him so cruelly. He had behaved well whilst the others had reveled and feasted…in the quiet, hopeful corner of his heart Amphinomus dared to hope that she had noticed him—a decent man amongst wolves and perhaps she looked kindly upon him.

  “You think I’d send my own mother away!” Telemachus shouted—his voice wavering between high pitch and low. “At your bidding?” He shook his head. “I will not. And even if it was my wish, you people have eaten me out of house and home. I have no dowry for her…”

  “LOOK!” Halitherses’s voice cut through the clamor. He appeared to be a man touched by the gods in that moment, his geriatric and near skeletal frame suddenly full of power and life. “Look!” he thundered again, pointing skywards. Everyone duly looked, squinting against the sun. “A sign from the gods! A sign I tell you!”

  Try as he might, Amphinomus couldn’t see anything—though that meant little. The gods worked through their seers in mysterious ways. Perhaps he hadn’t been meant to see it (whatever “it” was), and perhaps Halitherses wasn’t such a bad soothsayer after all.

  “I can’t see anything!” Eurymachus dismissed.

  “Two eagles, the messengers of Zeus!” Halitherses declared, his voice broaching no doubt. “One tearing at the other. It is a sign!” He clenched his fist. “A sign from the god-king.”

  “Bollocks.” This again from Eurymachus, garnering some laughter from the suitors around him. “You’re making it up, you old fool.”

  “AM I?” Halitherses was all flying spittle and wild hair. “AM I?! Ignore it then, boy. But I tell you this…ALL of you,” his crazy eyes swept the armored men at the front of the assembly. “Odysseus is not dead. He will return…he will return and your shades will fly to Hades without even the time to snatch the coins from your eyes to pay the ferryman…”

  This time, the words, said with such conviction, scared Amphinomus. Scared Eurymachus too, he could tell, but the man was still acting the wag. “This again?” his drawl was a little more terse than usual. “Old man—enough of your threats. Leave us.”

  The touch of the gods seemed to leave the old man at that moment and he all but collapsed into the arms of Telemachus. Amphinomus noted the new set in Odysseus’s son’s jaw. “Know this,” the young prince declared and made off, supporting the soothsayer with his arm. “I will see you leave these halls.

  “I swear it upon the gods.”

  The next morning, Amphinomus made his way to the stables seeking permission for—and given grudging assent to—repair a chariot so that he might use it to see more of the island. The idea had come to him in a dream where he’d found himself far from palace and Penelope, but clearly still on Ithaca. He’d understood the message from the gods—know this island and its people if you hope to win its queen.

  So, he put his back to the dilapidated carriage, scrubbing and scraping, reworking and repainting—returning the car if not to its former glory at least to a functional state. He was pleased with the final result, the fronting now depicting a dark eyed goddess who he’d swear was Aphrodite but kept in his heart that it was a likeness of Penelope.

  After hitching a stallion named Heracles to the chariot, he set out early the next day, for the first time in a long time, hangover free. Fancying himself a modern-day hero on his travels for a moment, he adopted a cheery mien, waving and offering greetings to the Ithacans who, though politeness and social standing meant they had to respond, were looking at him as though he was still out of his mind drunk from the night before. He couldn’t expect anything, Amphinomus supposed. Years he and his ilk had been on Ithaca and in all that time they had done nothing but take.

  He urged Heracles up a rise and surveyed the island from above. It was a naturally defensible place, mostly rocky shores with a softer interior. Amphinomus was sure the men who first lived here would have seen that, and Odysseus was lucky to have ruled in such a place.

  As he toured the isle, Amphinomus noted that whilst the fields were plentiful, many were not as well-tended as they could be.

  When he and the horse tired, Amphinomus stopped by a pig farm. He ignored the curious looks of the two laborer—she’d seen many that day—and drained the last from his water sack whilst Heracles opportunistically bent his head and supped from the pigs’ water trough. It had been a while since Amphinomus had been close to a farm such as this—and the acrid smell was both welcome and unwelcome at the same time.

  “Wine would do you better than water, sir.”

  Amphinomus turned to see a shit-spattered old-man leaning on the gate to the small-holding, two hounds at his feet. “There’s truth in that,” the prince said, offering the geriatric a smile—which was returned. “I’m…”

  “Prince Amphinomus of Megara,” the oldster finished, inclining his head with the slightest of bows. “I’m Eumaeus,” he offered. “Prince of
all you survey.” A pause. “I have wine. Food. My men will see to your horse.”

  The men, Amphinomus noted, looked none too pleased at the suggestion. He regarded the old man in silence for a moment; all day, he had been treated with veiled hostility and impatient looks that screamed “be along with you”. Could he trust…

  “We wish you no harm, Prince,” Eumaeus said as though reading his thoughts. “Not as though three old men could do you much harm anyway. And I honor the gods. We don’t piss on guest-friendship around here.”

  That made him smile.

  The pig farmer’s home was a small, squat stone construction lit inside by lamps and redolent with the pervasive, acrid smell of pig dung. Amphinomus could see a well-stocked larder and many kraters: clearly, Eumaeus liked a drink. The old man bade him sit and prepared a light meal of flat-bread and olives which he placed on the table before the prince; two cups and a full jug of wine were not long in following. Nor was the libation to Zeus, poured enthusiastically by Eumaeus.

  “What do you think of Ithaca?” the old man asked Amphinomus as he ate.

  The prince was surprised at his own embarrassment when the swine-herder voiced the question. He had been on the island for years, yet this day was the first time he had deigned to take note of it. A good thing, he thought, that the question had not cropped up yesterday. “It is a deceptive place,” he said after a moment. “Uninviting at first glance but yet ripe full of surprises.”

  “Like an old—and ugly—whore,” Eumaeus laughed at his own wit but the old man’s hilarity made Amphinomus smile despite his disgust. “You’ve been here a while,” he said after he sobered. “Yet you are the first prince I’ve seen leave the town.”

  “To my shame,” Amphinomus admitted. He took a sip of Eumaeus’s wine and did his best not to wince. Like everything else in the swine-herder’s little domicile, it was pungent and harsh. “I thought that I should get to know the place. The people. And not confine myself to the great house, my house and a single road in the town.” He paused, regarding the old man for a moment. “You recognized me but I’ve not seen you before.”