Penelope’s gaze turned to the other two men. She had already been informed of their names, of course, but could barely equate the battle-hardened warriors before her with the youths she had once known and had watched sail off to war. Eurybates, seated next to Halitherses, was an exceptional sailor who had been keen to make the voyage to Ilium and exact revenge from the Trojans for stealing Helen, the pride of the Greeks. Now, as he sat before her, his short body looked as hard as if it had been carved from rock, and his curly hair was grown long and had been drawn back into a tail behind his neck. His eyes were tough and uncompromising, though as they rested on his queen for the first time in many years there was a noticeable softness in them.
The other man, Arceisius, she had first known as a young shepherd boy with ruddy cheeks and a roguish grin. His father had been murdered by Taphian pirates, so Eperitus – Odysseus’s captain – had taken him under his wing to teach him the profession of war, eventually taking him with him to Troy. Now he was a man, scarred and deeply sunburnt, with eyes that had grown sharp from watching foreign horizons and witnessing horrors that no boy’s mind could survive. And yet his cheeks were still red and, unlike Eurybates, there was a light in his eyes that had survived the cruelty of war. It was like the glimmer of gold at the bottom of a pool, that still spoke of happiness and memories of music and dancing, and of young girls in the long grass of Ithaca’s meadows. It was then she noticed the garland round his neck and the petals in his hair, from the welcome the ships’ crews had received that morning. The sight brought a smile to Penelope’s lips.
‘Welcome back, Arceisius. Welcome back, Eurybates. I hope your journey wasn’t too perilous.’
‘Not nearly as perilous as being home again,’ Eurybates replied, looking around at the walls. ‘I didn’t realize how much I’d missed Ithaca, and the gods only know how we’ll bring ourselves to leave again and return to that forsaken country!’
‘We’ll do it because we’re loyal soldiers, sworn to obey Odysseus,’ Arceisius answered.
‘Aye, we will,’ Eurybates conceded with a nod. ‘But there’s not another man in this world that I’d do it for.’
‘Your words reveal more than the depth of your love for my husband,’ Penelope said. ‘The war, it seems, is not going well.’
‘Not going well, my lady?’ Eurybates replied. ‘That’s the problem – it’s not going anywhere at all!’
‘And you will tell us all about it,’ Penelope interrupted. ‘Every detail of everything that has happened since the last galleys were sent back five years ago. But I’m being a poor hostess. First we will eat; meat and wine will raise your spirits, and then you can tell us about the war and my husband’s part in it.’
She nodded to Mentor, who snapped his fingers behind his ear and brought a servant scurrying out of the shadows. A moment later the steward was running from the hall with his orders, to return a short while afterwards followed by a stream of slaves carrying tables, platters of food and kraters of wine. After washing her hands, Penelope led the libations to the gods by stepping up to the hearth and tipping a slop of wine into the flames. The others followed, muttering thanks to the Olympians as the liquid hissed and sent a puff of steam up into their faces. The rest of the meal was silent as the men helped themselves to strips of roast goat, which they picked up and wrapped in thin saucers of bread before washing it down with mouthfuls of wine, constantly replenished by the waiting slaves. Penelope ate very little, and that only out of politeness, as she watched the faces of her guests. Eurybates quickly lost his surliness as he forgot the war in the taste of Ithacan wine, while Arceisius was enjoying the flirtations of Melantho, the prettiest of the servant girls, who would brush seductively across him every time she refilled his krater and bat her long, dark eyelashes at him. They were men who had seen much hardship, but she could only envy them their trials because at least they had endured them alongside her husband. Indeed, the nearness of the two men – whose arrival had been totally unexpected – gave her a renewed sense of Odysseus, almost as if he were here with them, standing unseen in the shadows. Had they not spent the last ten years with him, listening to his soft voice, witnessing his feats on the battlefield and enjoying the embellishments he would add as they sat around the campfire later? For all the loss of their youth and naïvety, for all their hatred of the thought of returning to Troy, they had still not suffered as much as she had. She reached for Telemachus’s head again and was comforted by the touch of his hair beneath her fingertips.
‘Enough of this silence,’ Halitherses announced, his impatience finally getting the better of him. ‘Speak to us about this damned war. What in Ares’s name is taking Agamemnon so long? Doesn’t he have the greatest of all the Greeks in his army? What about that great oaf, Ajax, and Diomedes, and all those others? Why isn’t Menelaus tearing the walls down with his own hands? After all, Helen’s his wife and he should be leading the way. And what of Achilles? He’s the one they all had their hopes on, isn’t he?’
As Halitherses vented his frustration – built up by years of relative inaction at home – Mentor glanced at Penelope, then held his hand up to silence the old warrior.
‘What about Odysseus? I’d rather hear about our own king first.’
‘Thank you for your concern, Mentor.’ Penelope smiled. ‘As ever, you know where my heart is. But everything in its right place: first Eurybates can tell us about the war, leaving nothing out; and then, if Melantho can leave him alone, perhaps Arceisius will tell us about my husband.’
There was a pause in which the servants trooped out of the hall or faded back beyond the circle of firelight. Eurybates waited until the last sandals had stopped scuffing across the stone floor, then leaned across the arm of his chair and focused not on Penelope, but on the boy who had remained seated in obedient silence at her feet.
‘You must be Telemachus,’ he began.
Telemachus nodded.
‘Yes, now that I look at you I can see you have your father’s eyes,’ Eurybates continued. ‘I was there when he dedicated you to Athena on Hermes’s Mount, when you were just a few days old. He was so proud of you, Telemachus.’
‘Then why did he go?’
Eurybates’s eyes flicked up to meet Penelope’s. The queen nodded.
‘He left because he had to. He’s a king and no man bears more responsibility than a king – to his family, to his people and to his gods, but most of all to his gods. And, as you must already know, Odysseus was bound by a most sacred oath . . .’
Telemachus knew all about his father’s oath, of course – to protect Helen, queen of Sparta, which had been taken by all her suitors – and of all the things that happened because of it. But children love stories, especially when those stories involve themselves and the people close to them, and so he listened intently as Eurybates recounted how Helen had been abducted by Paris, a Trojan prince, while he was a guest in Menelaus’s palace. Supported by his brother, the powerful and ambitious King Agamemnon, Menelaus had called on the oath-takers to honour their promise. A great fleet was assembled and set sail for Troy, where, with Agamemnon as their elected leader, they laid siege to the city, intent on razing it to the ground and reclaiming Helen for Menelaus.
But the auspices had not been good from the outset. For one thing, Troy was not some poor city that would fall at the first attempt. Its walls were thick, high and strong, constructed by the gods and protected by all manner of prophecies. It was also a rich and powerful city and King Priam, Paris’s father, could call on vast, experienced armies of allies from far and wide. Indeed, after the Greeks’ first attempt to draw the Trojans out of their walls had failed, Troy’s allies had arrived in droves and under the leadership of Prince Hector had forced Agamemnon to make camp on the coast, a safe distance away to the south-west. Since then, countless battles had raged across the hills and plains between the camp and the city, killing and maiming thousands of men for little or no advantage to either side. Every strategy that Agamemnon tried, every ruse that Odysseus had thought up to defeat the Trojans, had been frustrated by Hector’s uncanny ability to anticipate their every move. In the end, Eurybates explained with a sigh, the Greeks were too numerous to be pushed back into the sea, while the Trojans always had the safety of their impenetrable walls to fall back on. And so the years had passed, filled with slaughter from spring until autumn, pausing during the cold misery of winter, and then resuming again with the first flowers of spring.