Chapter Text
The thing I found most intriguing about Odysseus’ wife was her veil. The veil was dyed purple, not quite in the shade of murex, and made of a slightly sheer silk. I (much later) learned the colour was achieved by overlaying woad and cochineal pigment. I had wondered if she’d woven the fabric herself.
Penelope was a prolific weaver. In Agamemmon’s house, she worked on a loom during those spring days we spent lying in wait. Servants, and even men, would sometimes stop in their tracks to watch her skillful craft. Even I did. It was so rhythmic and precise. The first time I had stopped like this, Menelaus was there, too. He’d smiled when he saw the wonder in my eyes.
“No wonder they call her Athena’s mortal,” he’d said.
A question began to plague my mind. What beauty or deformation was this queen hiding? Surely, I was not singular in my query, but no man was brave enough to express such a thing. She carried more mystery than Lady Nyx. In the absence of a ‘Helen of Sparta, most beautiful woman in Hellas’, Penelope embodied some awful desire we all had buried.
One evening, I asked Menelaus what she looked like. He laughed in my face. By some odd grace of Athena, Menelaus had a way of laughing at you that felt like comfort rather than humiliation.
“She looks like the suggestion of a woman.” He’d said. “She’s fish-like. Helen always compares her to a minnow.”
In those early days, he still spoke about Helen in the present-tense.
Now, I’d heard women- particularly Helen -called ‘dog-like’. Not ‘bitchy’. Instead, the kind of woman who inspired pack behaviour. But what kind of behavior could a fish inspire in the hearts of men? His answer was of no use to me. I needed a real answer. I needed to find out first-hand.
I let it itch me for a little longer. I drank with Sthenelus in the evenings until I was about ready to throw up if he so much as shook me. I would lie next to him on the floor, sweating for no reason, in complete silence. Then he’d snore loud enough to break me out of whatever I was thinking about, and I’d kick him so that we could actually go to bed and he wouldn’t complain to me in the morning about his back hurting. He was thirteen years my senior and often complained about things that made no sense to me. He would sneeze and speak of pulled muscles; choke on his drink and swear he had coughed out a rib.
[“You’re thirty-one, not fifty-one!” I complained, which he only laughed at.
“Geras will come for you, too, boy.”]
When the itch inevitably became too much, I did not want to fall to my usual vice of asking Sthenelus, even if I knew his solution would be better than mine. I would never hear the end of it if he knew I had any kind of curiosity about a woman. And so I made the beyond-stupid choice to creep into her room at night. It was a crime in more ways than one. This woman pined for privacy in all aspects. Very few men were to know her face, hair and body before we landed in Anatolia.
I brought my oil lamp close enough to see her well. She was as beautiful as I’d hoped, and clearly related to Helen. Black, flowing hair like ink; gentle freckles sprayed across blank white skin; pale pink lips that parted slightly; a nose that Queen Kypris would envy. Her chest was flat, her neck was long and slender, and her hands were strong but delicate, like the rest of her. It took all I had not to touch her, just to see if she was real.
I wasn’t going to rape her- goddess forbid -but if I was a worse man…
She was a queen. She was someone’s wife. Soon, she’d be not just my equal but my superior. Treating her like a whore was out of the question.
Then the light hit a strange angle and revealed a whole other world. We talk all the time of godly beauty, but the beauty of nymphs really is horrifying.
I gasped and some of the hot oil dripped down, marring her perfect skin. Anyone would have woken up. She screamed, hand flying to her arm where she’d been burned. When she saw me, we both knew what was coming.