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“Weaving?” Circe demanded, the challenging rattle of sword against shield always in her voice.
Penelope did not look at the sorceress’ shade. They had had this exchange before.
“Yes, weaving. It kept them at bay for nearly four years.” Penelope plucked at the asphodel on which the four women sat, rolled a white, odorless petal between her fingers. “Pity I never thought of it earlier, when Telemachus was young and they sometimes came into my rooms late at night, after the moon set and they got drunk enough…”
Nausicaa, ever kind, patted Penelope’s shoulder. The dead talked a lot among themselves, there being little else for them to do. Conversation tended to run along circular paths. Other ghosts roiled around them, indistinct shapes like dusty laundry flapping in a crosswind, rustling like a disturbed cloud of bats. The four women on their patch of asphodel must have sounded much the same to them.
“I used to weave too,” Calypso offered as though this were news, her voice melodious even in death, her face unlined and her hair spun gold. “I had a golden loom and my island all to myself, no need to weave for others, but it passed the time. I got quite good at it.”
Circe uttered an undignified snort. Penelope wondered, not for the first time, whether Circe realized how much her favorite choice of animal into which to transform her victims revealed about her.
“No wonder you clung to him like you did, weather-beaten sack of bones and leathery skin that he was,” Circe taunted Calypso. “Seven years of begging him to share your bed, and he only deigning to do it when the nights turned cold and he bored of unsated lust? Your life must have been honey and ambrosia before him.”
Calypso turned her moonlike face away.
“It was only for one year, not seven, and they had no right to make me let him go,” she whispered. “In my place, Zeus would have turned him into a tree or a bird rather than lose him. But I had to help him build a boat, give him salted fish and wine for the journey, and wave him goodbye from the shore. He never even looked back.”
“Selfish,” Penelope murmured to the pale petal between her fingers. “That does not change with the company a man keeps.”
She glanced up and met Calypso’s eyes. All that time, and still Calypso was wary around her, as though Penelope’s title of wife meant much after death. The nymph’s lips turned up at the corners, a honeyed moment in unchanging eternity. Then it passed, and Penelope looked elsewhere.
Nausicaa, still a child at heart, could not restrain her curiosity. She addressed Calypso. “I always wondered… You were a nymph. Why are you here, then?”
Calypso combed her hair with her long fingers, let it fall over her face. “I was lonely, so I turned into a stone, a tree, a wave of the sea. What does it matter? I am here now, with everyone. With you all.”
“I was terrible at weaving,” Nausicaa burbled. “I always made one of my maids do mine as well as hers, so mother wouldn’t scold me. I suspect mother knew.”
“She knew.” Penelope smiled to sweeten the words.
Nausicaa did not return the smile. “He looked terrible the first time I saw him,” she said softly. “Encrusted with salt like a crab, skin the color of walnut. I thought he might be Pan coming at us from the trees, dressed in leaves.”
“Every maiden’s dream made stinking flesh,” Circe mocked.
Nausicaa hugged her knees. “I thought for a short while he might be the one I’d dreamed of. He wasn’t. It’s just as well, heroes make rotten husbands. I know that now.”
“You all know things now,” Circe retorted. “Am I the only one who thought about strategy then? I should have had his men slaughtered and roasted to feed the islanders while I could. He wouldn’t have been so high and mighty once he’d tasted his men’s flesh and remained alone. As it was, I had to take him into my bed, stinking of wine and salt, and pretend to like it before I could send him away. I knew at once the gods watched over him. They have always favored rogues and thieves.”
Penelope wanted to say it hadn’t been easy for any of them, but that would have only stoked the flames of Circe’s anger.
“I remember,” Penelope said instead, gazing into the middle distance between Nausicaa and Calypso, the view obscured by an absence of color and ghosts clustered thick as wheat. “I remember, his face was a stranger’s when he returned.”
Nobody responded – he had been a stranger to them all. Husband, lover, invader, almost son, always a foreign presence.
“He came to me looking like no one I had ever known, and his clothes were bespattered with blood. There was blood in the lines on his hands and under his fingernails, and he left red footprints behind him, ever fainter the closer he came. And my son… my son looked just like him, a stranger to me.”
All her life, Penelope had feared and respected the gods, for they had saved her when she’d been but a babe. Yet she had never felt kindly toward Pallas Athena, not after the goddess had helped Telemachus subvert his mother and abandon her with the suitors, a woman alone with a pack of wolves. He’d never even said goodbye to her, and when he’d returned he’d brought his father home with him.
“I lay with my husband that first night, and I learned to miss my empty bed, my barred door, the sounds of drunken carousing beyond.”
“You let him kill your maids,” Circe cut in bitterly. “I sent men who took my maids to bed to their deaths.”
The dead could not feel, not really, but Penelope was weary of Circe always picking fights, using her words like arrows. “He was not your husband, you could do as you please,” she pointed out.
“As I please? I protected my people! I gave pigs and mountain lions their true form, and I kept my own people safe. What did you do?” Circe pointed an accusing finger at Penelope. “You wove.” She jerked her chin at Calypso. “You waited.” She scowled at Nausicaa. “And you dreamed.”
Circe stood abruptly and moved away, her outline blurring as soon as she stepped into the multitude of ghosts. They enveloped her like the breached surface of a still pool.
The three women sat in silence a moment.
“I could never walk on Ithaca without feeling people’s eyes on me,” Penelope whispered. “First they envied and resented me, a foreign duck become their new queen. Then they watched me with pity and dismay after the fleet sailed away or they would not look at me at all while their sons devoured my son’s patrimony. After Telemachus brought his father back, the suitors’ fathers and mothers watched me with such hatred. Their eyes burned my clothes to cinders.”
“Nobody’s looking at you now,” Nausicaa remarked softly.
Calypso nodded. “We are all the same here.”
“Yes.” Penelope closed her eyes. “Hungry and spiteful and sad. And always together.”
“All pigs waiting at the same trough.”
Penelope opened her eyes. Circe was standing beside Nausicaa, glaring down her nose at the three women, but her hands hung limp by her sides.
“So why do you keep talking to us, then?” Penelope snapped, and she never snapped.
Circe looked away at the dead massed all around them. Her voice sounded nearly meek. “I don’t know anyone else here.”
That was a lie. They all knew others (parents, husbands, lovers, sons, maids), but rarely saw them. The dead were many and could hide from those they did not wish to see easily enough.
Penelope’s father, a stranger to irony, had called her little duck and tried to prevent her marriage. Her husband had been what he had been, her son had run away from her. She had washed and braided her dead maids’ hair, and she had only ever had one lover. Bards had made him into a hero of many songs and claimed he had gone to the Blessed Isles, but Penelope harbored grave doubts. She was not convinced the Blessed Isles existed, felt almost certain she had seen her husband’s shade more than once, hovering in the distance, far enough to appear as just one of many faceless spirits, close enough that she would notice. She was almost certain it was he.
Nausicaa and Calypso were watching Penelope. She suppressed a sigh. Always having to play the mother, the dutiful, understanding one.
“Sit down, Circe.”
Circe did, and silence descended on their claimed patch of asphodel. Other shades whispered all around them like wind in the trees at high summer, leaves scorched at the edges.
“I wish we had a loom,” Calypso sighed. “Something to do with our hands.”
“So do I,” Penelope replied.
“Me too,” Nausicaa agreed.
No one glanced at Circe.
“Me too,” Circe admitted quietly.
Calypso smiled at Circe, and Nausicaa took her hand. Penelope did not move, but she offered Circe a small smile. For a little while in the unchanging void, peace reigned, as fleeting as it ever had been in their mortal lives.