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Peisistratus makes the rings on his left hand roll against each other.
It has only been two weeks since he said goodbye to Telemachus, but every day drags like a year, the always present sensation of waiting making him uncomfortable even when he’s not thinking of his friend. The season is moving on, warmer and warmer by the day. How long before he gets news from Ithaca?
He unconsciously digs his thumb on the ridge between his ring finger and his palm and smiles, feeling the absence of the thick band of silver that used to pinch the flesh, there where the ring used to be; that rascal finally managed to steal one of his rings on their departure, after all. It was a comfortable ring that would not get tangled in his clothes and matched perfectly the stone he wears on the same finger, Peisistratus can't recall on which campaign he plundered it. It carries no story with it but the one now Telemachus has imprinted on it.
He’s still considering whether to let Telemachus have it, or sail to Ithaca and take it back.
Life in Nestor’s palace has always been the same; it’s Peisistratus who needs to adjust to its rhythm again. It’s not hard, he has done this every time he comes back from a mission: the long hours between meals, the small chaos ever present. Big gatherings again, all this big family — and he can’t skip them like he and Telemachus would do in Menelaus’ house.
Nothing has changed in the one month he spent in Sparta, but he keeps wondering how things are in Ithaca. Do those 108 men still pester Telemachus? Would he do anything about it yet?
“Good news!”
Nomion son of Numa shakes Peisistratus off his cavilations, he trots through the porch of the Pylian palace and crosses the main yard.
Peisistratus immediately leaves whatever he’s been doing, sitting in the single small bit of the colonnade where the sun hits best, and shots the esquire an inquisitive look. But instead of telling him, Nomion loses a bit of his smile, seeming to reconsider himself.
“Ithaca?” Peisistratus gestures with his lips, and Nomion nods before getting inside the megaron where Nestor is.
A hitch of doubt hits Peisistratus’ heart. Nomion was enthusiastic, but not as much as he should be for a man who knows he’s been waiting for the news that Penelope’s suitors have left the Ithacan palace without making a fuss.
He scoffs at himself. Well, one can only dream, can they?
………………………………..
Nestor receives Nomion sitting on his tall chair, not his throne, and not standing up as he would like to. He doesn’t like showing off his power by sitting there and getting admired like a jewel but with words and with actions. But this is out of necessity: his back and knees have started giving up with time, and he has spent much more than he wished standing all day.
“King, there’s good news from Ithaca!”
The word “Ithaca,” so repeated between Telemachus and him throughout last month, makes Peisistratus’ ear twitch, but he’s not sure he’s not tricking himself. It would not be decorous to listen through the closed door, but he can sit silently and hold his breath for sounds that might escape the room where his father has locked himself all day.
Nestor, instead, holds the braces of his chair and straightens himself in expectation.
“Sir, Odysseus Laertiades has come back to his kingdom!”
Nestor’s raspy throat releases a whimper as he covers his mouth.
“He has been back for one week now, and he’s safe and sound. His kingdom restored, his house freed,” Nomion continues.
“Oh, blessed be the gods!” Now Nestor cries standing up and grasps Nomion’s arms. “Oh Zeus and beautiful Hermes, lord of travelers, how happy you make us!
“We have to make offerings. Get them to find the fattest heifer we have, and get the goldsmith here.
“Oh and bring my son Peisistratus to me, immediately!”
His eyes are watering down now; all his prayers have been heard. His heart beats like he had never expected it to do at his age, and for the Laertiades nothing less.
Here is when Nomion’s eyes fall, and his voice falters.
“Sir, wise king of Pylos, son of Neleus. You must forgive the improper way I’m delivering this news. But, you must know this to decide what we should do next… the Odysseides hasn’t survived.”
Nestor looks at him as if he has been slapped. He stays still, ruminating on the words. Telemachus, the only son of Odysseus, the child he wouldn’t stop talking about all those years back, in Troy. Telemachus, the spit image of his long lost friend, who was right there with him not two moons ago — the naive, inexperienced young man full of doubt who was seeking for his father. The one who brought no presents of xenia with him but his words and his need of help. Telemachus, the one closest to Peisistratus’ heart.
Then Nestor finally sits down again.
“Oh gods, oh gods, what have you done to that family?” He mumbles through his fingers. “Once more the father is exchanged for the son, and this wretched war keeps taking lives left and right.”
He pulls his beard, muttering things to himself, to Nomion, to the gods.
“And what will I say to my son?” he realizes. “Oh, my son, my youngest, having me break your heart like this? Oh, my little lamb.”
He fiddles his fingertips as if moving his ideas back and forth. He can’t find a way.
“Bring my son here,” Nestor finally decides.
Nomion nods but then gets back on his steps.
“Sir, do I set the offerings?” he asks hesitantly.
Nestor also doubts. “Keep it in mind but hold it for now. I have to think better.”
…………………………………..
Peisistratus enters the room a little troubled; he has heard the commotion from where he was sitting, the strange silence charged with something he cannot identlfy. Seen the blank look with which Nomion hurriedly bid goodbye to him, a look that was definitely hiding sympathy.
“Son, my youngest. Sit down, please.” Nestor points him to the chair, but Peisistratus doesn’t dare to do so. “It is better that you sit up,” his father repeats, more like speaking to himself than commanding him to do so.
Peisistratus doesn’t need another word. He has seen it all in his father’s troubled eyes, in the way they look sunken and his face much older. But he still waits with a blank face, for his father’s words.
Nestor takes Peisistratus’ wrists in an old gesture.
“Son. Your friend the Odysseides-” Nestor takes a breath.
When Peisistratus hears the word friend, his arm twitches to get rid of his father’s grasp, but he stops it from moving.
“- has passed away.”
Peisistratus’ face turns as if he has been spat upon. His lip trembles, without daring to mutter a question, without daring to say anything or move. So his father provides.
“He has been killed by his mother’s suitors,” Nestor adds in a calming voice. “We still don’t know exactly how, but it was some sort of skirmish when Odysseus returned home…”
His father keeps talking but Peisistratus isn’t listening anymore. That Odysseus is back, and Telemachus gone? He pulls his hair back, tears trail down his cheeks. His chest is troubled by the moans that break through his throat, and it seems to never end.
“There’s… there’s no way of confusion? Are they sure?” he asks, but he knows his father never makes mistakes, and the phrase breaks inside his throat before he can finish it. There’s no space for this pain in his chest. Peisistratus hits his thighs, he needs to help his grief out, but it’s just not going away; it’s stuck in his chest and pressing on his temples. And breathing is turning into heaving.
He finally collapses on the floor, vaguely feeling the cold of the plaster under his palms, and he cries. And the king doesn’t stop him like he feared he would do. He cries, but his pain is choking him, and he just can’t believe it. He can’t believe this.
Behind him, Thrasymedes has gotten inside the megaron and is changing words with Nestor; Peisistratus doesn’t listen. He is floating in a reality that simply cannot be true. He wishes he could wake up. How have they gotten here?
“Now, now, child. Get up and stand straight.” Nestor is finally back to his youngest. “We will make offerings in Odysseus’ honor and in Telemachus’ name.”
“Offerings?” Peisistratus repeats remotely.
“Yes. Wipe those tears now; we have much to do.”
Peisistratus wipes the tears as directed, and stands tall. Crying will not achieve anything; he doesn’t want to turn into a mess of tears and let this carve into his soul. He doesn’t want the scars because this is not what Telemachus should be for him. If only there was a way to skip all what’s to come and just… Not cry at all.
…………………………………………
The ritual offerings are made in the presence of the people of Pylos: ten men for each of twelve cows that Pylos has bled and burned to celebrate Odysseus’ return, and a heifer with golden horns for Telemachus’ passage to Hades. But it hasn’t stopped there: the celebration will take an extreme amount of time, three full days and nights to conclude.
Peisistratus has borne it all with a stone face, keeping his weeping for moments away from the people, and at this point, he’s exhausted and numb. Sometimes tears come, and he is reminded where they come from.
He can only look absently to the sea, the waves mounting the soft shore made of sand and going away softly. The salty shore where once Telemachus disembarked, and the one from where, if he covered the distance, he’d find Ithaca.
“Father is trying to keep you from doing madness.”
“Madness?” Peisistratus mutters, still eyeing the water.
“He fears you will want to go and kill someone if he lets you go to Ithaca. That’s why the rituals will last three full days.”
Peisistratus laughs, and the tears come again. Madness.
“Maybe I would,” he admits; he can’t vow for what he will do the next hour, let alone the next day. Three days is a world of distance, and four is what it takes to get to Ithaca.
“I’m not even sure I should go,” he says sadly, looking down. “I’m not sure I should trouble two grieving parents when they don’t even know who I am.”
This words struggle to leave his throat once more. Only Telemachus and him knew what they meant in each other's lives, and now he has no claim on the person he held closest to his heart.
Thrasymedes puts his hand on Peisistratus’ shoulder and gives him a consoling nudge.
“Why is uncle crying again?”
Peisistratus hears Sillus’ worried little voice that he’s failing to keep a secret, and he’s probably tugging his father’s clothes. His heart warms up for the child, but he doesn’t turn to his nephew and console him, he doesn’t have the energy and he’d risk shedding even more tears anyway.
……………………………………………
The comitive from Pylos reaches the coast of Ithaca with Nestor, Thrasymedes, and Peisistratus to pay their respects to the royal family. On their ship, they bring many gifts for the king and queen of Ithaca: a golden kalyx, purple cloaks, incense and oils for Telemachus’ tomb, and the longing of ten years of an old man waiting for his friend.
The island is exactly as Peisistratus had pictured it. It’s not strange, and still he’s marveled that Telemachus had painted it so vividly in his imagination. The colors, the hills covered in green towering over the more the ship gets closer. It smells green, dusty and sharp; the sun shines bronze on the dusty sides and the rocks that protrude like teeth from the soil.
When they get to the port, and his father stays behind with Thrasymedes to give a few orders to the men on the ship, Peisistratus has the chance to look at everything by himself. It’s a small island, but everything looks alive, full of hidden, raw energy.
Then he sees it, midway on the road from the port to the top of the hill, lost in the arid green, and the air leaves his chest.
Bright, new, glaring in the sun like an eggshell, the tholos that crowns the city. And he knows.
Peisistratus can’t take a step forward, yet he can’t stop looking at the tumb: it’s watching death to its very hollowed eyes.
The more they approach, the bigger Telemachus’ tholos towers toward the blue sky. The limestone bricks are piled neatly, with much care, in an imposing, huge, crushing structure that feels more like silence than anything else.
Nestor is an exigent man but understanding. He stays nearby with his eldest son to lighten up the offers for the tholos, but he leaves Peisistratus to do whatever he needs to do.
Peisistratus walks carefully, dragging every step, approaching the monument as if it were a sleeping beast. Then he sees the tunneled door, and he is attracted, mesmerized, to its secluded darkness.
Telemachus is right there on the other side of the two feet thick wall. Peisistratus touches the stone — no door, nothing to give him any chance to access what the tholos has swallowed in. This tomb will not serve anyone else in the royal family but Telemachus.
The stone is cold and coarse under his fingertips; he caresses it and digs his fingers into it.
“Telemachus,” he murmurs to the stone. “Telemachus, open up. Let me in. Telemachus.”
He feels the words roll in his tongue with painful familiarity; the name is there but there’s no answer. He knocks softly on the rough bricks, and the tears start pouring. But the stone remains unhearing. Unlike the one in Sparta, this door is not going to open.
When he’s exhausted from crying, Peisistratus sits on the floor. The tiles are cold, but he doesn’t feel it.
“What kind of idiot are you?” he whimpers in anguish, moving his back on the seal of the tomb. “What did you do? What did we train so much for?” The tears burn in his eyes as he hits his head gently on the stone. “What was it all for?”
Peisistratus rolls absently the rings on his left hand; there’s one he will never recover.
He numbly remembers the king of Pylos is waiting for him outside, anxious to see his friend again, and his chest releases a strained sigh.
“Once I see your father,” new tears run down his cheeks as Peisistratus whispers, and he really hopes Telemachus can hear him, “once I see your father in the flesh, our story will be finished.”
This new burst of anguish makes his knee twitch, the collar of his chiton is sodded. He wipes his hand down his eyes and cheeks and sniffles. He dreads moving on.
“Once I see Odysseus, it will be over.”
He wonders whether he should just… die. There is no way the pain will subside; he won’t get rid of it, and he doesn’t want to move on anyway.
Now he understands his father’s agony when he lost Antilochus, a name that even when he was his brother, has always remained distant and mythical. Even if Peisistratus could share this pain with someone, even if he spoke of Telemachus to everyone who would listen, his friend will never be more than a story.
There’s no point in living like this. Why put in all the work?
But no; he won’t die. He can’t take another son from his father in his old age, and he won’t let those damned men who ruined Ithaca take another life with them. He’ll live, even if it’s out of spite. Even if it’s to spite fate. And he’ll carry Telemachus for as long as he has to, as if he’s moving the stones of the tholos in his heart.
…………………………………………….
Telemachus’ palace is small and domestic, more of a house than a palace. The cart with the small Pylean train crosses the big carved doors in the main yard, and the palace opens up to them like a flower.
Nestor salutes the returned king of Ithaca warmly, the happiness of his soul not in grand gestures but in the length of their embrace; and Odysseus returns it with all his heart.
Peisistratus is taken aback; the king is like a glimpse of what Telemachus would look like in thirty years. His frame stronger, he’s either shorter, or his shoulders broader. Peisistratus can’t be sure until he’s close enough to stand next to him.
But Odysseus’ voice is different from that of his friend’s, his gestures are entirely wrong, he carries a weight and authority the Pylean prince had never expected.
As xenia commands, there are short speeches — first from the Ithacan King, then from Nestor and Thrasymedes. They acknowledge the gods, the house, the island. They speak of Penelope’s beauty and of the gifts they carry from the mainland.
Then Odysseus turns to Peisistratus, his moment to speak has come. He deepens the plastered smile on his lips.
“I thank you for welcoming my father and us so warmly in your house. There’s nothing more beautiful for a son than to see their old father’s fire rekindle in his eyes, his frame rejuvenated by the joy of reuniting with such a loved friend.” Peisistratus nods politely every time to affirm his words. “This island is a joy to the eye-”
The words get muted in his throat that refuses to keep talking. Xenia constrains him from speaking of the dead yet, but when he tries to offer polite words, he simply cannot hold it together. It is the first time the prince and commander has failed in diplomacy like this.
Nestor gives him a pat on the shoulder, both to comfort him and to offer apologies on his behalf.
“I beg you to forgive my youngest. He holds godlike child Telemachus dear to his heart.”
Odysseus’ eyes brighten up, but there’s recognition and tenderness, not guile, in them.
“My son spoke of you.”
The words rumble from deep in the Ithacan king’s sorrow, like a shoot of grass sprouting from a crack in the stone.
“He did?” Peisistratus asks, and his reddened eyes lighten up with hope.
Odysseus crosses the invisible line that still separates hosts and guests. He puts a heavy, grounding hand on Peisistratus’ shoulder, with a tender smile and pained eyes that see themselves on the prince.
“He did.”