Crete

A real island, large and storied, but in Teilo’s retelling it functions almost entirely as the setting for Odysseus’s lies. When he needs a backstory that will not collapse under questioning, he reaches for Crete. He tells Penelope he is a Cretan traveler who heard her husband was alive on three different roads. He tells Laertes he met Odysseus at the court of King Idomeneus there, blown off course by storms five or six years ago. The stories are precise, geographically convincing, populated with the names of real men. They cling to the truth so closely that even his scarred face can keep them steady. Crete in the story is less a place than a tool. The king who is too dangerous to name himself uses someone else’s island to do the naming for him.