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Penelope dreams of the end of the war every night. Each dream is slightly different, seven thousand one hundred and forty two variations, give or take, upon the same accursed theme.
In none of them does Odysseus return.
Sitting at the loom, working the weft with hands that never tremble, she sees Athena sometimes. Always in the corner of the room, a hot, glowing imprint in her peripheral vision that dissolves as soon as she turns her head to look.
"Why are you here?" she asks, the third or fourth time it happens. "My husband is your favorite, not I." She thinks Athena laughs, but perhaps that is only the sound of the wind outside, howling as it rolls off of the sea, one of the few features of the island she has never learned to endure. If it is a laugh, it is a monstrous thing indeed.
Sometime during the seventh year after Odysseus has left for Troy, Penelope finds, clearing out space for clothes for a son who is growing more rapidly than she would have guessed, a raggedy and misshapen fabric doll. She does not remember keeping the doll into adolescence; she certainly does not remember packing it and bringing it with her to Ithaca; still, here it sits, dusty and threadbare at the bottom of one of the many chests of belongings she had brought with her as a new bride and forgotten about in all her marital bliss.
The studs she had sewn in for eyes have long since fallen off, relics of long summer afternoons spent learning the essential household arts from her older cousins. At seventeen Clytemnestra had thought herself far too old for toys, only intervening to critique her needlework or to complain about the heat. It was Helen, beautiful even at thirteen, who had gently corrected her stitches, winking at her when Clytemnestra eventually abandoned them to go spy on the newly-arrived princes in her father's court. Helen, who had helped her pick out the perfect length and thickness of wool for the doll's hair. Helen, who had held the doll up to the light, its head lopsided even then, and said in a tone of great seriousness: "Now this-- this is a prize worthy of all of Hercules' labors."
Penelope holds the doll to her chest, clutches it tightly. Then she walks across the room and casts it into the fire.
Telemachus reaches that age where each instruction from his mother or grandparents is a battle dearly fought. He must play outside after it rains, even if that means immediately soiling his new clothes with mud (Eurycleia pinches his ear for that, and he cries until he falls asleep); he refuses to spend a perfectly pleasant summer day inside learning to write, when he could be practicing his archery instead (Laertes ruffles his hair, and there are ghosts in his eyes when he smiles); he does not want to sit still for hours at the long, formal dinners when guest-friends visit, listening to men who are not his father make war sound boring (with this Penelope cannot help but agree.)
"He's like his father," Anticlea says, watching Telemachus tussle with an older boy over-- Penelope has lost track. Some slight, an overzealous boast? "Always so eager to prove himself."
"Odysseus was subtler," Laertes observes, when a man arrives bearing vague, unhelpful reports from Troy, an Argive who looks distrustfully at Penelope and speaks Helen's name like a curse, and she has to dismiss Telemachus before he throws a fit in front of an audience. "Less hasty to act."
"Is he much like his father was at this age, do you think?" she finally ventures to ask Eurycleia one night, once Telemachus has been located in one of his favorite hiding spots and sent discontentedly to bed.
Eurycleia only chuckles, fond, bittersweet. "Sometimes I think Odysseus was never this age. He wasn't ever--"
"What?"
"Naive. Carefree. I don't... He was an uncanny child, after the boar."
Penelope remembers: the air smelling of sweat and olive wood, limbs tangled in sheets, his fingers running through her hair, her hand tracing his skin. She remembers asking him about each mark and faded scar, learning each story like a bard learns poetry. She had wanted to study him. To know him like a second skin. She remembers thinking: I could be good at this. "How do you mean?"
"He was different, somehow. People noticed. They whispered. Said it meant he was destined for greater things than Ithaca. That the gods wished it to be so."
Penelope absorbs this. She thinks about Telemachus standing in the courtyard when he thought she couldn't see him, stringing and unstringing his bow until his fingers bled. "Was he happy?"
A happy child, was what Penelope had meant. The question comes out more like: was he happy with me? "Yes," the nurse says finally. "In his way, I think he was."
In her uncle's palace she had learned this lesson at an early age: beware a god's attentions, for they never come without a price. Penelope has started to think that the interest of a goddess is a far more fearsome thing to hold.
Ctimene's visits grow fewer and further between, especially once men start returning from Troy.
They could have been allies, could have found comfort in each other: two women who spent their days scanning the horizon for sails, raising sons without their fathers, bound by their mutual love for the same man. They could have been friends, but it does not work that way. Telemachus dislikes his cousin. Ctimene makes her excuses. Laertes stops asking about his daughter, for the most part. They all learn to pretend that Same is as far as Ethiopia.
"You remind me too much of him," Ctimene admits, on one of the rare occasions she makes the trip to Ithaca.
They are in the kitchens long after the servants have retired for the night, sitting cross-legged on the floor, refilling their cups with scantily-watered wine like they're teenagers with a pilfered amphora. Penelope wants to protest that she could say the same. Ctimene has his eyes-- that particular shade of hazel, like a pond murky in the summer-- and his nose, though hers has not been broken in so many places. She moves like him too, stretches her limbs and occupies couches in a way you might call lazy, catlike, if you were not paying close enough attention. She talks quickly, and with her hands; she makes jokes that are often clever, and sometimes cruel. "Do I?" Penelope says instead.
Ctimene looks at her out of the corner of her eye. "I told him not to marry you, you know. I said he would tire of Spartan arrogance and you would grow bored of rustic Ithaca, and that you'd bicker until the end of your days and bicker in Hades after."
This does not sting as much as it should. "What made you change your mind?"
"I didn't," says Ctimene, and when she laughs, it is not unkind. "I said it to him the day he met you, and again the morning he married you. And each time he looked at me, paused, like he was deep in thought, and said-- all serious-- 'Well, sister, you may be right, but I'm afraid she's far too good-looking to refuse.'"
There are days when Penelope walks around the island, listening idly to the conversations of peasants and traders, and thinks: you're pronouncing that wrong. You don't voice your 't's enough. There are days when she hates the sea, hates the way sand feels under her sandals, despises the scent of saltwater she can never quite scrub out of her cloak. Days when the food all tastes wrong, too bitter or too spicy or not spicy enough.
Worse are the days when she tries to remember the songs her mother used to hum before bed and comes up short. When she realizes she has forgotten the name of Clytemnestra's favorite dog. When her father dies and she hears about it months later, from a herald with an accent that is familiar and a face that is not.
She would burn Ithaca to the ground if she could. She would burn Sparta too, if only he would come back.
Athena watches her weave and smiles. Athena watches her undo each stitch of the shroud and grins, leaning against the pillar in the corner with an easy, careless grace. Athena watches her massage feeling back into her fingers, listens to her practice the excuses she'll make to the suitors in the morning, and offers no words of comfort.
"The problem with you," Athena says one night, casually, conversationally, as if they are old friends, "is that you love him."
"He's my husband," says Penelope.
"Yes," Athena agrees. She pushes off the pillar and comes to stand behind her; Penelope can feel her presence at her back, an uncomfortable heat that grows hotter when she squirms. "And wives are supposed to tolerate their husbands, or so I'm told. Share their beds, bear them children. Like them, even. But love. Hm. It's-- inadvisable."
"I don't love him," says Penelope.
She can hear the pity in Athena's laugh. It is almost worse than the indifference.
Clytemnestra has killed her husband, she hears. There is a girl, a seer, if the stories are true, a shameless creature brought from Troy. There is a new lord of Mycenae, says the messenger, as the hall erupts in shouts. There is a new lord, and so much blood staining the palace floors.
"Do you believe it?" Telemachus asks her, once they're in private.
She had only met Agamemnon once. She had thought him harsh, then. Good-looking, perhaps, in that broad, square way that Clytemnestra liked. Stubborn; cutting, when he needed to be, but not cold.
"I don't know," Penelope says. She does not think it matters what she believes.
She thinks, sometimes, that she could do it. Choose the least-offensive suitor, remarry. Give him sons with her brown eyes and his hair. They are not all complete oafs. Some, she will admit, are even handsome.
It is a lie she tells herself when she wears that necklace he always used to like on her, when she catches a glimpse of her reflection and notices new lines in her skin, when she rolls over and finds that the other side of the bed is cold. She might have even convinced herself, if she did not wake every morning with his name on her lips, the feeling of his hands on her waist like a brand upon her skin.
"It's cruel," she whispers, her words hanging in the drafty air of an empty room, "the way you possess me. Nineteen years. A lifetime." Dawn peeks through her curtains, rests gentle fingers upon her window sill. "I would have you let me go."
Another lie. Penelope prides herself on being a good liar, but in this she has never quite been able to fool herself.
Penelope does not have Athena's favor. But they both love him, in their own ways; it is what makes their arrangement work, why they share their nighttime vigil, why her fingers do not callus no matter how long she spends at the loom.
"Don't thank me," Athena says, standing at the side of her bed, pressing a hand to Penelope's aching head. Sleep has already begun to obscure her senses; she will not remember, when she wakes, the slight softness in the goddess's voice.
"I won't," Penelope agrees, yawning. But in the morning she will make sacrifices to the gods: to Zeus, to Poseidon, to Apollo. And to Athena, because Penelope was a weaver before she ever was a wife.