Glorious Exploits

by Ferdia Lennon

Gelon heads straight for Homer’s chair. A rickety piece of shit the blind bard is reported to have sat on during a visit to Syracuse a few hundred years back. It’s stuck in the corner, a bronze inscription above that reads ‘Homer’s chair’. Is it Homer’s chair? Well, there are many Homer’s chairs scattered across Syracuse, and can they all be Homer’s chair? Why not? The arse is capricious and does not wed for life, and so perhaps, yeah, it is Homer’s chair.

Hermocrates says we should be thankful for our red wind. That it shows Syracuse’s prosperity, its growth, but Hermocrates is a cunt, and I remain sceptical.

‘It’s poetry we’re doing,’ he whispers. ‘It wouldn’t mean a thing if it were easy.’

I have the feeling that the future and the past aren’t separate at all, just different snatches of a single song, always sung, given consequence when heard.

Common sense is common, has no imagination, and only works by precedent. It leaves the man who follows it poorer, if not in pocket, then in his heart. Fuck common sense.

‘And let’s say you pull them up, what state do you think they’ll be in after being dragged along jagged rock by horses. If the rope doesn’t break, their bones will.’ ‘Then, they die.’ She looks at me then, surprised. ‘And that’s okay with you?’ It is, and I tell her so. See, if it doesn’t work, it’s a quick death, and a quick death is better than this slow starving. Yet if, somehow, we make it, then it’s life. Maybe years of it, and so I think the risk is pretty low. Alekto smiles. ‘The wagon fits but a few.’ ‘A few’s enough. A few is everything.’