Ithaca (The Songs of Penelope, #1)

by Claire North

I was a queen of women once, before my husband bound me with chains and made me a queen of wives.

Of course, if he had not died at Troy, Achilles would just have been a whiny little mummy’s boy who dressed himself as a girl to avoid being called to service; but there’s nothing like a really good war, a decent massacre or two, to get the poets’ attention.

Eos – of one day being as Ourania is, a lady of shadowed power and secrets. She will manipulate men to her whim, her might will be whispered of across the seas, and yet no one will know her name. She thinks that is the greatest power of all, and smiles to think of all the men who would give up their lives to be remembered by the poets, when she would rather live, live, live in wonder, and be forgotten immediately upon the end of a long and happy life.

“We married when I was sixteen. He was nice, it was nice, I was very pleased it was him instead of . . . practically anyone else. I remember looking round my father’s court at the men of Greece and thinking ‘Well, praise Hera – that could have gone worse.’ Is that love?”

No songs are sung of a life lived quietly, of a man and a woman growing old in contentment.

“The poets don’t sing about . . . about childbirth. The poets don’t care whether a mother’s milk flows easy or slow. The only mother worth naming is the one who welcomes her warrior child home! The only songs they remember, the only songs that are sung in the palaces of kings, are of the men who make something of themselves! The warriors and the heroes who die fighting to make a name! Who the fuck cares about the fucking mothers?!”

The poets do not sing of the women, and the women sing only at funerals, or away from the ears of men.

“Take it from a queen – the greatest power we women can own is that we take in secret.”

“This is the world we live in. We are not heroes. We do not choose to be great; we have no power over our destinies. The scraps of freedom that we have are to pick between two poisons, to make the least bad decision we can, knowing that there is no outcome that will not leave us bruised, bloody on the floor. You have no choice. Your choices have been taken from you. I have taken them. I will use you as readily as any man. I will bend you to my will, I will hurt you, if it serves my purpose and my kingdom. And if I were offered mastery of all Ithaca in exchange for discarding you, I would do it in an instant. Andraemon and I are the same in that. The only difference is that he does not know it. He . . . thinks he is of the heroic sort. And he will never understand.

“My son must be his own man. I know that. But until he can defend himself, I will defend him even if he hates me for it.

“How do you hide an army?” “Medon,” Penelope tuts, “what a foolish question. You hide them in precisely the same way you hide your success as a merchant, your skill with agriculture, your wisdom at politics and your innate cutting wit. You hide them as women.”

if you marry even the wisest, the gentlest man in all the isles, his servants will be men, his councillors will be men, the voices that tell him what it is to be a man will come from men who themselves were told by their fathers and their fathers before them that to be a man is to rule. That to be a man is to be set above, to possess those qualities of mastery that a woman can never have. You will never be a queen, Elektra. Not like your mother was. No matter what you do. We have raised too many sons who will never understand. Clytemnestra is the last of us. She does not deserve to die.”

“Pick your fights,” he would say. “You only have so many arrows.”

Three daughters of Sparta became three queens in Greece, and I love them, power in their voices and fire in their eyes, even Penelope, even the one who smiles and says she does it for her husband, I love her, I love her. But no one ever said the gods did not have favourites, and it is Clytemnestra I love best, my queen above all, the one who would be free.