In the adjoining room of the rambling cottage, I found a familiar, pacing shadow. He had thankfully stopped screaming now and was muttering to himself, his frantic, senseless words painting the dark with streaks of madness.
“The boar…can you see it? Over there…”
I approached the shadow with cautious steps, as I had learned was best.
“Master Laertes, you need to go back to bed. You need to rest.” I reached out a hand to stop his ceaseless pacing.
“Rest? No, no time for rest. The boar! We must stop the beast!”
“There is no boar, Master Laertes.”
“Come see, come see.” He strode toward the door, flinging it open and motioning to the darkness beyond. “See! Do you see? It is coming. Quick. We must take up arms. Where is my sword?”
“You are safe,” I said, as gently as I could.
Laertes gripped my wrist, his touch cold and unpleasant. Then something shifted in his face, urgency loosening into confusion.
“Who…who are you?” He released me, backing away. “Wheream I?”
“I am Melantho,” I told him, as I had done countless times before. “And you are in your home in Ithaca. The one you retired to after you left the palace.”
He stared at me, eyes milky with age. It was hard to imagine this man had been a king, that he had fought beside famous heroes and songs of his greatness were sung around campfires. Now he was barely even a whisper of that legend, just an old man whose shriveled hands could no longer keep hold of reality.
“Melantho.” He nodded, though the recognition had not yet slotted into place behind his eyes. “Yes…Melantho.”
“Shall I take you back to bed, master?”
He nodded again, and I locked my arm around his, feeling his soft, pliable skin slipping over thin bone.
Laertes’s room was almost as simple as my own, just a bed and a hearth, with a large chest for his belongings. It seemed too modest for a former king.
“What else would I want? I have nothing left,” he had told me the day I arrived.
As Laertes eased himself into bed, I moved to stoke the fire back to life.
“Do you need anything else, master?” I asked once he was settled.
Laertes muttered something incoherent. Then he reached for my hand, and the calluses on his palm rasped against my own. I knew there were far more exciting stories etched into his, tales from far-off lands I would never see.
“You are good to me,” he whispered. “My dear Eurycleia.”
It was not the first time the old king had confused me with the woman, and I had given up correcting him.
“Thank you,” I said instead, staring at his hand in mine, my eyes tracing those protruding blue veins snaking like rivers beneath his mottled skin.
“I would like to visit my son’s grave tomorrow,” he murmured.
“Master Laertes, your son is not dead,” I told him, the familiar words worn between my teeth.
“No?” He seemed to sit up a little straighter in bed. “Then where is he? Bring me Odysseus.”
“He has not yet returned from Troy.”
The old king met my gaze, a glimmer of understanding flickering across his face. “The war. The war…has ended?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
