Mount Parnassus

A mountain on the mainland, sacred and famous in its own right, but in the retelling it serves a single specific purpose: it is the hunting ground where the young Odysseus, barely more than a boy, went after a white boar with his grandfather’s people and got the wound that marks him for life. Eurycleia was there when it happened. The tusk caught him just so along the thigh. She wrapped it herself. The scar is long, ragged, the kind left by something sharp and violent. [SPOILER: Twenty years later she is washing his feet in his own hall, and her fingers find the scar as they curve around his thigh. She knows. The basin trembles. The sound rising in her throat is the sound of recognition, and his hand closes on her throat to cut it off before any suitor hears. The same scar will come out again at his father’s vineyard, when he shows it to Laertes after telling him the cruel false news. Mount Parnassus is the mountain that wrote his identity onto his body, and the body is what eventually says his name when his face cannot.]