Aphrodite

The Fifth Year

Aeneas had both hands around the gatepost and would not let go.

Aphrodite could have lifted him with one finger. She had carried him over ravines that morning, his cheek warm against her neck, while the mountain nymph followed with his little bundle. But beyond this gate a man stood waiting, and she wanted the boy to walk to him.

“That is your father,” she said.

The boy pressed his face into the wood.

Anchises lowered the arms he had opened. There was a strip of leather hanging from one hand. He had come out of the house so quickly that he still held his awl in the other.

“He is tall,” he said.

“He has been growing.”

“Yes.” His eyes passed from the child’s fingers to her face. “I supposed he would.”

Five years had put a line between his brows. Aphrodite remembered that brow untroubled, tilted toward her beneath the rafters. She had come down from the mountain in the shape of a mortal girl then. Now she had brought their son, as she had promised, and the man would not take a step toward her.

The nymph crouched beside Aeneas. “The bundle can come too.”

He shook his head.

“Your carved ram is in it.”

Another shake. He had driven a splinter under his thumb. Aphrodite saw the small bright swelling and reached for his hand, but he tightened his grip.

“Leave it,” Anchises said.

She looked at him.

“The gate. I mean the gate. Let him hold it.”

He put the awl down on the wall and backed into the yard. After a while, when no one tried to loosen his fingers, Aeneas let the nymph carry his bundle through. He followed her, dragging one foot. Aphrodite came last.

Inside the house stood a cradle.

It was too small for him by years. Anchises saw her looking and moved a folded cloak over it, though the curved runners still showed beneath the cloth.

“I made it early.”

On a bench beside it lay two pairs of sandals, one barely longer than Aphrodite’s thumb, the other almost a man’s size.

“I did not know what to tell the leather-worker.”

Aeneas stayed near the door. He studied the cradle, then the sandals, and finally the stool by the hearth, as if each object might prove that this was the wrong house.

Aphrodite drew a gold clasp from her mantle.

“There will be no lack here.”

Anchises caught it before she could lay it on the table. His fingers closed over the gold; then he opened them and gave it back.

“I have sheep.”

“For his future.”

“I have sheep for that as well.”

The nymph took Aeneas outside to wash his thumb at the trough. Water splashed against stone. Through the open door Aphrodite could hear the boy insisting that it did not hurt.

Anchises waited until he had finished insisting.

“What does he know of me?”

“That you are his father. That you will take him to Troy.”

“Does he know my face?”

“He knows it now.”

Anchises rubbed his palm over the edge of the table. It was newly planed. A pale shaving caught on his wrist.

“And of you?”

The clasp lay cold in Aphrodite’s hand.

Outside, Aeneas asked the nymph whether she was staying for supper.

“He must not speak of you in Troy,” Anchises said. “That was your command.”

“It keeps him safe.”

“Will he be safe if he calls for his mother?”

“He may call for me.”

“And who shall I say is coming?”

She could hear no accusation in his voice. That made the question harder. He was asking how to manage tomorrow, and the next day: the things that would have to be done after she had gone.

“You will say what I told you. A nymph of the mountain.”

He nodded once.

Aphrodite stepped closer. He still smelled of leather and the smoke of this hearth. She had remembered his beauty perfectly; she had forgotten how carefully he moved around her.

“Are you afraid of him?”

“Of losing him.”

“You have not yet taken his hand.”

“No.”

She touched his wrist where the shaving clung. Beneath her mantle the embroidered girdle lay warm against her. She let a little of its sweetness enter her voice.

“Then take it. He has come home.”

Anchises drew a breath. His hand turned beneath hers.

The line between his brows eased, and for a moment he was the man she had first found alone in this room. He looked only at her. The leather, the table, the five years of waiting fell away from his attention.

That familiar yielding pleased her before she saw where his eyes had gone.

Aeneas stood in the doorway with a wet thumb held upright.

The boy looked at the joined hands. Anchises did not turn.

“Father,” Aphrodite prompted gently.

Aeneas said nothing.

Anchises blinked. His fingers tightened, not around her hand but around the edge of the table, until the knuckles blanched.

“No,” he whispered.

Aphrodite’s smile remained. Outside, the nymph had become very still.

“Do you refuse me?”

He swallowed. She felt the struggle in him, and knew how easily she could finish it. A word spoken nearer his ear; her thumb against the pulse in his wrist. He would welcome anything she brought him.

“Look at him,” Anchises said.

She did.

Aeneas was trying to hide his wet thumb inside his fist. He had stopped asking whether the nymph would stay. His eyes moved between the adults, waiting to discover which of them was angry.

“Let me see him,” Anchises said. “You fill the whole room.”

For an instant she wanted to take the child and leave. There were bright chambers in Paphos. There were hands that would reach for him eagerly and voices that would never hesitate over her name. He need not stand in a doorway while a mortal man resisted happiness.

Then Aeneas shifted his weight. One of his worn sandal straps had come loose on the road. He was holding his foot crooked to keep the sole beneath it.

Anchises had noticed too. Even now, fighting the sweetness she had laid upon him, he was trying to look down at that small foot.

Aphrodite withdrew her hand.

She reached beneath her mantle and loosened the knot of the girdle. The embroidered band slipped through her fingers. She folded it once, twice, and laid it inside the cradle beneath the cloak.

Anchises shut his eyes. When he opened them again, the line had returned to his brow.

No embrace followed. No sudden cry of recognition came from the child.

Aphrodite stood beside the useless cradle and waited.

“Your sandal,” Anchises said at last.

Aeneas looked down.

“Was it the thorn path?”

A nod.

“There is a shorter road. It is worse.”

The boy considered this. “More thorns?”

“Much more.”

Anchises fetched the strip of leather from the yard. He returned slowly, taking the stool rather than approaching the doorway.

“I can mend it. You need not take it off.”

Aeneas glanced at the nymph. She lifted his bundle onto the bench and began untying it. His carved ram emerged, one horn worn smooth from his thumb.

The boy took three steps into the house.

Anchises knelt. When he reached toward the broken sandal, Aeneas jerked his foot back.

“All right,” the man said. He set the leather on his own knee. “Watch first.”

He made a hole with the awl, well away from the child’s foot, and passed the end of the strip through it. His hands were broad and scratched. Aphrodite remembered those hands uncertain on the fastenings of her robe. Now they showed the child each movement before making it.

“Can you pull this?”

Aeneas pulled. The strip slid out of Anchises’s fingers.

“Not that much.”

The boy looked alarmed, until the man reached under the stool to retrieve it and bumped his head.

Aeneas laughed.

It was a small, surprised sound. Aphrodite had heard laughter rise through feasting halls because she wished it. She stood motionless beside the cradle while this laugh escaped her son without her help.

Anchises rubbed his head. “Hold it here.”

This time the child bent close. His hair brushed his father’s cheek.

Aphrodite retrieved the girdle and folded it into her mantle. The nymph had set out the carved ram, a smooth river stone and a tunic with a patched elbow. There was scarcely enough to fill a corner of the bench.

She put her gold clasp away.

At the door she paused. Aeneas was standing on the repaired sandal while Anchises pressed the sole to see whether it sat straight.

“Walk a little,” his father said.

The boy crossed to her. He stamped once, testing the leather. Then he caught her hand, and she bent so he could speak close to her ear.

“Next time, come through the gate.”

“Where else should I come?”

“Not out of the sky. I cannot see you until you are there.”

She kissed the place where his hair parted.

“Through the gate,” she said.

He went back to the stool. His father held the second sandal ready, and this time Aeneas put his foot into the waiting hand.