The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood Read Free Book Online

our room a lot – the room I shared with Odysseus. It was a fine enough room, with a view of the sea, though not so fine as my room back in Sparta. Odysseus had made a special bed in it, one post of which was whittled from an olive tree that had its roots still in the ground. That way, he said, no one would ever be able to move or displace this bed, and it would be a lucky omen for any child conceived there. This bedpost of his was a great secret: no one knew about it except Odysseushimself, and my maid Actoris – but she was dead now – and myself. If the word got around about his post, said Odysseus in a mock-sinister manner, he would know I’d been sleeping with some other man, and then – he said, frowning at me in what was supposed to be a playful way – he would be very cross indeed, and he would have to chop me into little pieces with his sword or hang me from the roof beam.
    I pretended to be frightened, and said I would never, never think of betraying his big post.
    Actually, I really was frightened.
    Nevertheless our best times were spent in that bed. Once he’d finished making love, Odysseus always liked to talk to me. He told me many stories, stories about himself, true, and his hunting exploits, and his looting expeditions, and his special bow that nobody but he could string, and how he’d always been favoured by the goddess Athene because of his inventive mind and his skill at disguises and stratagems, and so on, but other stories as well – how there came to be a curse on the House of Atreus,and how Perseus obtained the Hat of Invisibility from Hades and cut off the loathsome Gorgon’s head; and how the renowned Theseus and his pal Peirithous had abducted my cousin Helen when she was less than twelve years old and hidden her away, with the intent of casting lots to see which one of them would marry her when she was old enough. Theseus didn’t rape her as he might otherwise have done because she was only a child, or so it was said. She was rescued by her two brothers, but not before they’d waged a successful war against Athens to get her back.
    This last was a story I already knew, as I’d heard it from Helen herself. It sounded quite different when she told it. Her story was about how Theseus and Peirithous were both so in awe of her divine beauty that they grew faint whenever they looked at her, and could barely come close enough to clasp her knees and beg forgiveness for their audacity. The part of the story she enjoyed the most was the number of men who’d died in the Athenian war: she took their deaths as a tribute to herself. Thesad fact is that people had praised her so often and lavished her with so many gifts and adjectives that it had turned her head. She thought she could do anything she wanted, just like the gods from whom – she was convinced – she was descended.
    I’ve often wondered whether, if Helen hadn’t been so puffed up with vanity, we might all have been spared the sufferings and sorrows she brought down on our heads by her selfishness and her deranged lust. Why couldn’t she have led a normal life? But no – normal lives were boring, and Helen was ambitious. She wanted to make a name for herself. She longed to stand out from the herd.
    When Telemachus was a year old, disaster struck. It was because of Helen, as all the world knows by now.
    The first we heard of the impending catastrophe was from the captain of a Spartan ship that had docked in our harbour. The ship was on a voyage around our outlying islands, buying and selling slaves, and as was usual with guests of a certainstatus we entertained the captain to dinner and put him up overnight. Such visitors were a welcome source of news – who had died, who’d been born, who was recently married, who’d killed someone in a duel, who had sacrificed their own child to some god or other – but this man’s news was extraordinary.
    Helen, he said, had run away with a prince of Troy. This fellow – Paris was his name