Ithaca (The Songs of Penelope, #1)

by Claire North

oh no, she’s off, someone pass me wine, strong wine.”

when a woman has spent that much time staring into another woman’s dilated vagina, you can either shut that other woman out for ever and pretend it never happened, or you can get over yourself and admit to a bond that runs deeper than blood.

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

Old men cowering in their corners, and boys queuing to get between your legs.”

To be patient is to feel burning rage, impotent fury, to rage and rock against the injustice of the world and yet – and yet – to hold one’s tongue.

It seems to Anaitis that the world is full of people trying their best, and that rarely means anything. Yet perhaps trying their best is all she can really ask.

“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. Do you?”

“The gods are foolish and blind – they think the greatest poems are the ones of death in battle and the ravishing of queens. But the stories that will live for ever are of the lost ones, the fearful ones, who through bitter hardship and despair find hope, find strength – find their way home.

They call out for the old man, thinking perhaps that Laertes, being of noble blood, will answer when his name is called as though he were Hector or Achilles, and not in fact hiding in a ditch on the other side of a darkened field that smells of pig shit.

“Also, I bleed from my private places every moon or so and giggled the first time I saw Odysseus’s willy.”

“you who call yourself male, behold how unmanly this title suits you”.

Only she will know if her cry was ecstasy or agony as he drives into her flesh.

The Furies spread their wings across the sea and across the isles; they spin their tapestries in the blood of mothers and the cries of maids, they drink deep of heart broken and brother slain, they laugh, they sing, they spit boiling rain. Oh wonderful freedom, they cry!