Chapter Text
It’s warm.
Flickering light casts cantering shadows upon the wall, and if he were not so drained of his daytime energies, he would have chased after them with unbridled delight. There is little that he wants for, and little that he does not have. Telemachus’ eyes follow the small, wavering flames as they dance, while voices that he does not yet understand talk softly in the bigger bed behind him.
He’s sleepy.
The bright light of the sun has dimmed, first hiding behind the ramparts, then behind the horizon, golden rays diminishing with every hour. Only the candlelight remains, and the vestiges of the energy that he’s still learning how to ration.
He lies on his side, curled up in his most comfortable position, in one of his favourite places in the world. He’s safe here.
Telemachus is safe here.
A woman crouches down in front of him, holding her index finger out to him. Burbling up at her, he reaches for her finger and grabs it tightly. Her laugh is bell-like, early morning condensation sliding down a blade of grass, and Telemachus shakes the chubby fist holding her finger.
She’s strong, stronger than him.
He doesn’t move her finger all that much.
Other voices murmur behind him, but he’s focused on the woman in front of him with a sort of focus that’s only possible when unimpeded by social convention, still tugging at her. She shifts, and though much of what he sees is blurry, a few threads of golden hair fall forward as she moves.
He immediately loses interest in the finger and bats happily at the threads with one hand, before trying to grab that too. The threads shift away and out of reach. He burbles again, this time unhappily, and huffs and puffs until the woman moves deliberately forward and the hair returns. Grabbing onto it, he squeals happily and pulls.
He thinks the woman hisses and pulls back, but all that he knows for sure is the loss of tension, and then his fingers are suddenly grasping at thin air. The woman is gone too. For lack of any other reaction being available to him, Telemachus takes a deep breath, and begins to bawl.
Crying so loudly that his face goes red, Telemachus screams his lungs out with all the force he can muster.
Over the sound of his own cries, he barely hears the commotion behind him, before he’s lifted up and into the arms of someone much more familiar than the woman who’s just vanished. He thinks. That woman had felt safe too, even though he hadn’t really recognised her. Right now, though, mother feels even safer.
Mother rocks him back and forth, bringing him towards father. Then, father is stroking his head, brushing a finger over his wispy hair while mother hushes him. It’ll be okay, she reassures him, though the shape of the words are all that he recognises at the moment. Father will be alright, she reassures him, though battle is not a concept that he yet understands.
He’ll learn in time.
Telemachus is young when his father leaves for battle, and he learns the shape of a life without a king as he grows up.
Though the comfort that he enjoys, ensconced in the sort of luxury that few others possess, is a privilege unto itself, his father’s conspicuous absence follows him with every step. With one breath he learns how to walk, jump, skip; in the next, he learns of the ongoing war and listens with one ear open to all the fantastical tales that reach Ithaca from across the sea.
His mother entertains nothing, but Telemachus clings to the stories from the outside world with a fervour that vexes his mother. He thinks, at one point, that she had used to listen. He can’t remember when she stopped.
Ana doesn’t like it when he lets his imagination get the better of him, either.
She listens when he speaks, and tells him exactly what she thinks. He’s learned that it’s a good idea to take in and consider her words when she allows herself to speak freely. Ana has perspectives that neither his mother, his tutors, the servants nor the slaves would ever allow to see daylight, and it helps that Ana seems to know when she’s pushed too far – when he would rather stuff his ears with wax than listen to another word.
What he knows of the outside world is in part due to her influence.
Tales of the gods tend to feature most prominently, followed by tales of heroes influenced or who influence the gods, almost always with a comprehensive explanation of the geography of the outside world and a bittersweet ending. He’d asked her, once or twice, why all the heroes had such sad endings to their stories. She’d never given him an answer.
Another thing that he’s learned, growing up with thoughts bigger than the palace he’s been confined to, is that mother doesn’t like it when he brings up Ana.
Once, when he was playing knucklebones with one of the slaves, Ana had appeared and watched them play, quiet, head cocked – not dissimilar to how Argos sometimes looked. This had been before he realised that it wasn’t normal for people to emerge from the shadows of the palace’s corridors without the sound of footsteps to herald their entry.
He had turned to her, after his resounding defeat of the slave boy, eyes glimmering like light bouncing off seawater and filled to the brim with naïve glee. She had smiled indulgently back at him, congratulations warm on her tongue, and he had dragged her with him to his mother to celebrate his victory. Up the stairs they went, to his mothers’ favoured balcony looking out over the whole of Ithaca and the seas surrounding it.
Telemachus had almost tripped over his own enthusiasm as he regaled his mother with his strategic prowess in his favourite game, garnering the very same honey-sweet expression that Ana often wore. He had mentioned as much to his mother, and that was when she shifted.
“Who is Ana?” She had asked.
She hadn’t liked the answer.
Telemachus doesn’t mention Ana anymore, but that doesn’t mean that she isn’t learning about Greece with him. She’ll come and she’ll go, but Telemachus doesn’t go more than a few months without her popping up – as if from cracks in the palace tiles – and vanishing just as suddenly.
From the stories she tells him, and those that his mother and paidagogos tell him, he thinks that she might be one of the deities from her stories. But he’s never gotten a straight answer. Telemachus doesn’t think that he ever will.
And even if she is, she doesn’t act like one; like how he thinks a god would act.
Gods may be capricious, but Telemachus thinks that a god would have better things to do than watch a mortal boy grow up. Maybe she’s a dryad, or something of a similar flavour. Ana had laughed at him when he had asked her if she was a dryad, though.
Either way, she’s his closest companion.
She’s always been there, and she trades him fables in exchange for his mundane stories of what he’s been doing while she’s not around (it’s never anything that interesting). She’s everything that he imagines a friend would be like, if his position had allowed for a playmate his age. After her, his closest companions are Eumaeus, the old shepherd, and Argos, his father’s old hunting dog.
Unlike them, she gets huffy with him, calling him silly nicknames that nobody else would dare to call him – him, the Prince of Ithaca! – and tells him off when he acts on his own reckless impulses. He probably has her to thank for his life, especially after one incident involving the palace rooftops and what would have been a dangerous climbing exercise.
His childhood, in hindsight, is idyllic.
Nostalgia taints his memories, but it’s difficult to imagine a more peaceful time in his life. The war is far off, oceans away and staged in distant lands; battles are more theoretical than bloody reality. Large swathes of men are missing from Ithaca’s population, but for a boy who’s only ever known the emptiness they left behind, the men are the same as the battles.
Distant. Theoretical.
Then, when Telemachus is eleven years of age, Troy falls.