Odysseus tells Telemachus they must get the armour down inside. Blame smoke if the suitors ask. The sight of arms sometimes tempts people to use them. Telemachus calls Euryclea to shut the women in their room. Athena goes before them with a golden lamp. They carry helmets, shields, and spears into the store room. Telemachus goes to bed. Odysseus is left in the cloister.
Penelope comes down looking like Venus or Diana and sits by the fire in the silver-and-ivory chair Icmalius made. Melantho rails at the beggar a second time and threatens him with a firebrand. Penelope stops her and questions the stranger. He tells a long Cretan tale. When she tests him on how her husband looked, he names a double purple mantle, a gold brooch with a dog strangling a spotted fawn, a shirt that fitted like the skin of an onion, and the herald Eurybates, round-shouldered and dark-skinned. Penelope weeps as snow wastes on a mountain when the south-east wind thaws it. Odysseus feels for her and keeps his eyes as hard as horn. She herself folded those clothes. She herself gave him that brooch. She tells how she wove a great web by day and unpicked it by torch light for three years, until the maids betrayed her in the fourth.
She offers him a bed of rugs and blankets until morning. He has foresworn them since Crete. He will not let the young maids touch his feet. If she has an old respectable woman who has gone through as much trouble as he has, that woman may wash them. She orders Euryclea to do it. Odysseus turns from the fire, remembering the scar. The old nurse knows it at once: a boar on Mount Parnassus, hunting with Autolycus, the most accomplished thief and perjurer in the world, who named the child for anger. The basin falls. Water spills. She would cry out. He grips her throat with his right hand, draws her closer with the left, and makes her swear silence until the suitors are dead. Athena turns Penelope's mind aside so she does not see. Euryclea wants to wake Telemachus. Odysseus will not have it. The boy already knows.
Penelope then tells her dream: twenty geese eating wheat, an eagle killing them all, the eagle speaking with a human voice that he is her husband. The beggar says the dream is true. She will not grant it. There are two gates, horn and ivory. Those that come through ivory are fatuous. She does not think this one came through horn. Tomorrow she will set the tournament of axes. Odysseus used to plant twelve, one in front of the other, like the stays of a ship, and shoot through all twelve. Whoever can string his bow and do the same will win her. She goes upstairs. Athena sheds sleep over her. The public test is now on the calendar. The private mark has already spoken, and only the nurse has heard it.
Coming Up in Chapter 20
Odysseus lies awake through one last night of fury and restraint while Penelope prays for release. At dawn, thunder and a labouring woman's prayer will align as omens, and the final loyal allies inside the estate will declare themselves.
