Nestor

The beach at Pylos is loud with ceremony when Telemachus lands. Eighty-eight black bulls burning for Poseidon. Nestor at the center with his sons around him, a father who came home from war and prospered. He sees the strangers land and sends his son down the beach to bring them in. Food first. Questions after. This is the order of things, and Nestor has not prospered through decades of war and politics by treating divine law lightly. He looks at the boy across the table, holding himself well but with his jaw tight and his hands very still, and he sees Odysseus’s face. Among all the Greeks at Troy no one had matched his father for cunning or for counsel, he says, and watches the shift in Telemachus as he hears it. He gives the boy what he can: the truth of the ugly aftermath of Troy, the story of Agamemnon murdered in his bath, the suggestion to seek out Menelaus in Sparta. Then he sends him on with his own son for company.