Ithaca (The Songs of Penelope, #1)

by Claire North

Phenera

Teodora stops to gather only one precious thing – the bow she keeps for killing rabbits.

It has been nearly eighteen years

his somewhat short, unimpressive and far too hairy form has grown in stature and personal hygiene, if only in the poet’s eye.

There were twenty of them two years ago; fifty at the last turning of the sun, and now near one hundred men have come to Ithaca, all with one purpose – to win the hand of Odysseus’s mourning, lonesome queen.

We regard them as one might regard a rash – hopeful that it does not spread further – and then move on.

Telemachus never quite finishes his sentences. When he is introduced to people, it is as “Odysseus’s son, Telemachus”. His father’s name is always put first, and it is as if this quirk of language has infected Telemachus’s own voice, so that he can’t quite see his way through to the end of any meaningful sentence that might have something of himself in it.

Penelope protests her poverty, yet she does keep feeding the suitors, a feast every night, as befits her duty as hostess – how is that?

he’s raised his voice, his father wouldn’t have done that, but ah well, ah well, he was raised by women.

She is known to the men as a hunter. Someone on Ithaca has to be. She is known to the women as something more.

It is not apt for a god to envy a mortal; it usually ends badly.

Once upon a time, there were three queens in Greece. One was chaste and pure, one a temptress whore, one a murderous hag. That is the how the poets sing it.

Just when you least expected it, that delicate, innocent creature you nurtured upon your bosom has transformed into the naked form of your brother, hand between your thighs, lips upon your throat.

Beauty is a whim, it changes as easily as the tide. I was once considered the most beautiful, until familiarity bred tedium.

She was already wed, but Agamemnon always fancied himself a Zeus amongst men.

when he drove the sword himself through Clytemnestra’s former husband and ripped the bloodied clothes from her back, the end result was much the same. And when his business was done, he let go of her throat and pulled himself from between her thighs and whispered: “Now you know how much I love you.”

Kenamon of Memphis and leave it at that.

Pray to me and perhaps you need not drown in blood in the great hall, when all is done.

None of the women can remember this question ever having been asked in all the dozens – hundreds – of men who have come through this door.

But most likely Menelaus will take the opportunity to invade from Sparta and annex the western islands in the chaos. He’s always had an eye for opportunity.”

I should say for my part that my mother bore children until she was thirty-six; I have excellent teeth and a solid head for household matters, and am considered adequately good-looking for my age.”

There are three men with them, all armed, all soldiers who fought in Troy. None are from Ithaca. Penelope acquired them over several years from Sparta and Messene,

Someone has closed Dares’ eyes, but that does not stop the bloated insects that burrow through his swelling flesh.

There are few children on Ithaca younger than seventeen, and of those there are, many were fathered by men who were simply passing through. Such things only lend themselves to boisterousness.

Her name is Anaitis. Like most people on Ithaca, she has a secret. Unlike most people on Ithaca, she is not used to having secrets, and is already going a little mad with it.

nature as stubborn as the people of the isle.

Autonoe has mastered the art of selective hysteria, of falling about and weeping at the most pertinent of moments.

It is no wider than her thumb, puncturing windpipe and spine both as it was driven through. There is a slight red roundness around its entry, in the shape of the hilt of the blade – too small to be a sword, a knife for gutting fish perhaps, double-edged and deadly.

Inside is a ring, heavy, a single onyx set in its heart, the curve dotted like leopard spots.

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

Antinous did not learn many lessons from his father, save this: if you make enough people believe you are important, one day it may actually be true.

no, this is entirely, absolutely the stupidity of man without the interference of gods.

Penelope has not personally butchered another man to ravish his wife, kidnapped a child to make her a bride, defiled the corpses of her enemies, bashed the brains out of an infant babe or been sired of a lineage of incest or cannibals. These omissions make her something of an anomaly amongst the monarchs of Greece, and indeed the gods of Olympus themselves.

Phiobe’s mother served in the house of Odysseus before her, and shielded her daughter so much from the world beyond its walls that she was almost fifteen before she touched herself in her private places, and seventeen before she tumbled giggling into the arms of the blacksmith’s boy.

He is a merely adequate lover. The promises he makes, though – they are nectar indeed.

The women, of course, are the impious ones – not the men. My husband Zeus has made this point very clear, and mortals do learn from their gods.

Her name is Leaneira, and in her heart and in her eyes beats a drumbeat that has pulsed against her flesh since the day she was torn from Troy: death to all the Greeks.

this is a piece of stone from the city of Troy. I carried it with me when we left – not gold, nor slaves, for it was not considered fit that one of my station take such rewards. I should wait upon the generosity of my master. My master was not generous, but this stone – still I carry it, to remember.

Two maids also will die, having been seized and ravished by those suitors who, their oaths broken and war unleashed, have no better way to prove their meagre, limp manliness than to express their power upon the unwilling.

And I look again at the Egyptian, and I see the tiny traceries of another god’s touch upon him, the subtlest nudge of divinity, fading from his skin.

“Black sails?” she murmurs, as her mistress adjusts the flow of fabric across her brow. “Never good,” Penelope replies. “And three ships are more than you’d send to simply spread bad news.”

when bones are dust and the dust has blown into the sea before the crumbled ashes of Troy, on that day indeed the poets’ love will be the only love that matters.

She has rejected not merely her mother’s blood, but all qualities of Clytemnestra that could have possibly been transmitted with it. A fondness for music. A love of fresh, warm bread. Long hair worn high in a braid across a woman’s brow. The colour yellow. A delight in words. All these must die with the woman who killed her father.

“You have come to kill Clytemnestra.” Even the lion would take a breath before answering. Elektra does not. “Yes.” “You believe she is in my husband’s kingdom?”

it is the smile of the skinless skull that laughs at jokes only Hades enjoys.

someone to your bed. If not a man, then take a woman. The gods can’t imagine that we could take sexual pleasure when a man is not there to please us. It isn’t breaking the rules, it’s merely… living a little.

because there is nothing quite like sex with a man who’s been out jogging for twelve hours to really set the mood.

He is now capable of jogging a good twenty-five minutes in full armour before collapsing into a semi-fugue state of exhaustion, head pounding and limbs of lead, manly as a dandelion.

(Is that true? A beating of the wings of the falcon, a shape blotted out against the sun – Horus, if that’s you and you haven’t brought some proper offerings, I will do you, cheeky little shit, you get back here right now!) (Maybe it was just a falcon…)

She does not have patience for people who do not say what they mean.