The sea had no mercy for children.
It called them down to the shore with whispers, with the scent of salt and the cries of gulls wheeling overhead. It lapped at their feet, warm and harmless, curling over their toes like a cat seeking affection. It let them believe it was soft. Eumaeus had been a child when he last saw the waves of his homeland. He remembered figs bursting in the sun, the air thick with their sugar. He remembered his father’s halls, where the scent of roasting lamb curled through the stone corridors, where men laughed with mouths full of wine. He remembered being held, his mother’s hands braiding his luscious hair, his nurse whispering stories of gods and monsters while he drifted to sleep, safe, always safe.
And then the sea came for him.
The Phoenician woman arrived like a summer storm: sudden, dazzling, dangerous. She was not like the women of his father’s court. She was a flame, golden bracelets clashing like a warrior’s shield as she beckoned him forward. Her voice was sweet as pressed honey, sticky with promises. "Come with me, little prince. I will take you where the ships go, where the world is larger than this small island. There are treasures beyond the horizon, more than you could ever dream." Eumaeus had been too young to know that hunger could hide behind beauty. His naivety got the better of him and he followed her to the docks, his heart drumming with something bright and reckless. He expected to return before nightfall. Instead, the ship rocked beneath him, the sail unfurling with a snap, and the wind swallowed his cries.
The sea does not love. The sea only takes. By the time the ship reached Ithaca, Eumaeus had learned to silence his sobs. He had learned to sit still with his knees drawn to his chest, his fingers gripping the splintered wood of the deck. He had learned that the sailors would not hit him if he did not whimper. He had learned that the world did not care if a prince was stolen, if he was left to sleep curled between coils of rope like a stray dog. His view of the world as a kind place was forever shattered. Laertes paid a fair price for him, a pair of oxen and some bronze blades. Eumaeus stood silent as he was traded, as hands guided him toward the hills, away from the sea.
"You belong here now," the old king said.
And Eumaeus, who had nowhere else to go, believed him.
The pigs were warm when they pressed against his legs, grunting and rooting in the dirt. They did not know who he had been. They did not care that his father had ruled a kingdom across the waves. They cared only for the acorns he scattered in the dust, for the steady hand that guided them from one pasture to the next.
Eumaeus learned the language of the hills, the way the earth cracked beneath the summer sun and turned to sucking mud when the rains came. He learned how to track wolves in the dark, how to silence his breath so that they did not scent his fear. He learned how to belong. The boy who had been a prince shrank into a man who was nothing more than a swineherd. And perhaps, Eumaeus thought that was for the best, but he couldn’t help but wonder what would happen if someone discovered who he truly was.
The stranger came when the storm broke. Eumaeus stood in the threshold of his hut, the fire guttering in the wind, the pigs restless in their pen. The man on the path was hunched and ragged, his tunic stiff with dried salt, his hands black with road-dirt. Eumaeus had seen beggars before. He knew them by the slant of their shoulders, the hollow hunger in their eyes. He knew them by the silence that clung to them, by the way the world had already forgotten their names.
But this one was different. There was something in the way he held himself, even beneath the grime. Something in the way he stepped into the light, the way his gaze flickered too quickly, assessing, measuring, searching. Eumaeus fed him. Because the land had taken so much from him, but this, this, he could still give. The man spoke in riddles. A lost king, a fallen house, a war fought over a woman across the sea. Eumaeus listened, but his pigs shifted uneasily in the mud. The hills were old, older than Ithaca, older than any kingdom men had carved into the earth, and they knew when something was not as it seemed.
Eumaeus, who had spent his life listening to the hills, knew better than to ignore their warning. And when the man finally lifted his head and the firelight caught his face, Eumaeus knew. The sea had come back. But this time, it had not come to take; it had returned to reclaim what was lost. In the quiet that followed, Eumaeus found his hands trembling. The beggar’s face was familiar now, shaped by a thousand stories told around Ithaca’s fires. The scars that webbed across his brow were like fault lines in the earth, remnants of wars that had stolen men from their homes, leaving women and children to grow old without them.
This was Odysseus. The king who had sailed into legend, who had been swallowed by the sea and spat out onto foreign shores, only to return cloaked in rags and silence. The man who had left Eumaeus behind, a forgotten prince tending forgotten animals on a forgotten hill.
Eumaeus knelt, not out of duty, but out of the strange, spiraling understanding that fate is a river that circles back upon itself. Odysseus reached out, his hand heavy with the weight of years. When their fingers clasped, Eumaeus felt something shift, as though the earth had tilted beneath him. He was no longer just a swineherd. He was a guardian of secrets, a witness to the return of a ghost. Odysseus spoke in low tones, weaving a plan that would undo the men who feasted on his legacy, who devoured his house like carrion birds. Eumaeus listened, his heart thrumming like the wings of a sparrow trapped in a snare. When dawn bled across the hills, Eumaeus led his king to the palace gates, their steps careful, shadows slipping between the columns. He did not flinch when Odysseus revealed himself, when the suitors fell beneath his arrows, their blood pooling on the stones like spilt wine. The boy who had sailed away on a Phoenician ship was not the man who stood beside his king. His home was not in royal halls, but in the mud and bramble, in the low grunt of pigs, in the earth that drank deeply of rain and blood alike.
And so he returned to the hills, to the quiet life that had shaped him into something more than a prince, more than a servant. He was Eumaeus, swineherd of Ithaca, and in his humble tending, he had become the keeper of the island’s soul.
Eumaeus learned the language of the hills, the way the earth cracked beneath the summer sun and turned to sucking mud when the rains came. He learned how to track wolves in the dark, how to silence his breath so that they did not scent his fear. He learned how to belong.
Aurelia Shaitelman, St. John's School, Texas
MURUS
Eumaeus’ Journey
Winning 10th grade submission, 2024-2025 NJCL Creative Writing Contest
Summer 2025 · Torch: U.S. · CREATIVE WRITING
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