House of Odysseus

Book 2: Songs of Penelope

by Claire North

Genres: Historical Fantasy; Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology; Ancient

Synopsis

This "powerful, fresh, and unflinching" reimagining from the award-winning author of the Penelope trilogy breathes life into ancient myth and gives voice to the women who stand defiant in a world ruled by ruthless men (Jennifer Saint).

On the isle of Ithaca, queen Penelope maintains a delicate balance of power. Many years ago, her husband Odysseus sailed to war with Troy and never came home. In his absence, Penelope uses all her cunning to keep the peace—a peace that is shattered by the return of Orestes, King of Mycenae, and his sister Elektra.

Orestes' hands are stained with his mother's blood. Not so long ago, the son of Agamemnon took Queen Clytemnestra's life on Ithaca's sands. Now, wracked with guilt, he is slowly losing his mind. But a king cannot be seen to be weak, and Elektra has brought him to Ithaca to keep him safe from the ambitious men of Mycenae.

Penelope knows destruction will follow in his wake as surely as the furies circle him. His uncle Menelaus, the battle-hungry king of Sparta, longs for Orestes' throne—and if he can seize it, no one will be safe from his violent whims.

Trapped between two mad kings, Penelope fights to keep her home from being crushed by a war that stretches from Mycenae and Sparta to the summit of Mount Olympus itself. Her only allies are Elektra, desperate to protect her brother, and Helen of Troy, Menelaus' wife. And watching over them all is the goddess Aphrodite, who has plans of her own.

Each woman has a secret. And their secrets will shape the world.

Release date: August 22, 2023

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 464

Sample

They came at sunset to my temple door, torches burning. The fire they carried was thin against the scarlet west and picked the bronze lines of their helmets out in gold. The last of the devoted scattered before them as the shield-hearted men climbed the thin path along the curve of the hill, piling the scent of jasmine and evening rose with the heaving of their really rather lovely contoured chests. Such a fanfare of oiled arm and curving leg could not help but be noticed from a valley away, and so it was that my priestess, fair Xanthippe, was waiting for them at the top of the three rough steps that rose to the columned portico. Her hair was set high above her face, her gown low about her bosom. She had sent one of the younger girls to grab a bunch of yellow flowers from the shrine that she might hold in her arms as a mother could coddle her babe, but alas, the girl was slow on her feet and did not make it back in time to complete the pleasing image, and instead had to huddle at the back of the priestly assemblage gripping her petals between twisting fingers as if there were a scorpion in the bouquet.

“Welcome, fair travellers,” Xanthippe called when the first men of the approaching column were within reach of her low voice. It is not acceptable to ask a lady her age, but she had grown well into her beauty, wearing the lines about her eyes with mirth, a twist about her smile and a flash of her fragrant wrist as though to say “I may not be young, but what merry tricks have I learned!” Yet the approaching men did not return her courtesy, but instead lined up in a half-circle a few paces from where the women stood, encasing the mouth of the temple as if it might belch snakes. Below, to the west, the last of the setting day pricked pink and gold off the thin waiting sea. The town that rested beneath the shadow of my altar was crowned with gulls, and the bright banners stretched from column to pine about my temple twitched and strained against their string.

Then, with no word spoken, the men in bronze, helmets upon their brows and hands upon their swords, moved towards the women. I was having a bath at the time in my lofty Olympian bower, enjoying the nectar pooled in my belly button – but the instant their heavy sandals slapped upon the sacred timbers of my sacred temple below, I raised my eyes from contemplation of my fairer parts and bade my naiads cease their cavorting, which they did with some reluctance, and turned my gaze to earth. In credit to her priestliness, Xanthippe immediately stepped forward to block the passage of the nearest man, her nose coming up to a little below the round lip of his breastplate, her smile giving way to something tinged almost with disappointment.

“Good travellers,” she proclaimed, “if you have come here to give thanks to the bountiful goddess Aphrodite, then you are welcome. But we do not profane her shrine with weapons, nor offer anything in her name save with the greatest piety, friendship and delight.”

The soldier who led this group – a man of notched chin and significant thigh that under normal circumstances I’d find really quite enthralling – considered this a moment. Then he laid his hand upon my priestess’s shoulder and shoved her – he actually shoved my priestess, upon my sacred hearth! – so hard she lost her footing and half fell, caught by one of the waiting women before she could tumble entirely.

Golden nectar splashed around the lip of the bath, spilling in shimmering pools about the white marble floor as I sat upright, the bones of my long, silken hand standing out white. I cursed the soldier who so dared touch my devoted one, barely noticing what I did: he would love and he would bind his heart to passion and when he had given his all, then he would be betrayed. And then genital disfigurement. One does not cross Aphrodite without some thoroughly explicit consequences.

When the next man crossed the threshold of my shrine, and the next, oblivious to the sacred rites and duties owed to me, I bade the earth tremble a little beneath their feet, and lo, it was so, for though I am no earth-shaker, the soil beneath my worshippers knows better than to resist the will of even the loveliest of the gods. Yet these fools continued on, and when all men had crossed and were looking round the inner sanctum of my temple as one might inspect a sheep at market, I raised my fingers, still pouring golden fluid, and prepared to smite them with doom unnameable, heartbreak perpetual, with broken soul and broken body so vile that even Hera, who has a knack for the grotesque, might turn her face away.

Yet before I could obliterate them all, transform every cursed man who dared knock the flowers set upon the altar with their grubby hands or pull back the covers on the warm beds where was celebrated that most sacred communion of body and flesh, another voice rang out from the dusty webbing of paths and crooked houses that surrounded my shrine.

“Men of Sparta!” he cried, and how well he said it, a lovely ring to the sound, a sonorous quality that spoke of a captain of the seas, or a soldier upon the falling ramparts of war. “Profaners of this sacred space, it is us you seek!”

The men within the shrine ceased their searching and, hands upon blades, emerged again, the bloody sunset burning through the plumes of their high helmets. I cursed them all anyway to a weeping of vilest fluid from their nethers, which condition would come upon them slow yet unstoppable until they flung themselves at the feet of one of my ladies and implored mercy. This done, I permitted myself a little curiosity as to the scene unfolding before my shrine; what petty mortal malady was it that was bringing such disturbance to my evening bath?

Where there had been one line of armoured men stomping about my shrine, now there were two. The first, the cursed men armoured in bronze, arrayed themselves in a straight line of soldiery with fading sun at their backs, mouths set and visages part hidden by the helmets that still weighed upon their brows. The second wore cloaks of dusty brown and green, and no helmets, but were gathered in a loose knot about the mouth of the path from which they had emerged. “Men of Sparta,” continued the lovely leader of this second pack – unyielding, that was an excellent word for him, so very unyielding in both tone and the furrowing of his brow; I do sometimes appreciate a fellow of that sort – “why have you come here with weapons? Why have you committed sacrilege in this most peaceful of places?”

One of the armed men – one of those who would shortly be finding his manliness bursting into a misshapen swollen protuberance beneath his tunic – stepped forward. “Iason, is it not? Iason of Mycenae.”

Iason – a very pretty name, I decided – had one hand on his sword beneath his cloak and did not dignify these impudent men with a smile or a nod of courtesy. “I will ask you one last time, and then I will bid you leave. Sparta has no authority here. Consider yourselves lucky you still breathe.”

Hands tightened on hilts. Breath slowed in the lungs of those who knew how to fight, grew a little faster in those who were not yet familiar with the bloody course of violence. Xanthippe was already ushering her people into the shrine, pushing shut and barring the heavy doors against the outside world. The last curve of the setting sun hung for a moment too long on the horizon, a little curiosity perhaps overwhelming the sacred duty of the celestial charioteers, before it dropped beneath the western sea, leaving firelight and the last scarlet echoes of the fading day.

Iason’s hand tightened on his hilt and I throbbed in his heart, yes, yes, do it, yes! He shuddered with my celestial touch, as all people do when Aphrodite walks among them, honing desire to a single point within his breast. Draw your blade, I bade him, strike down these defilers! His heart beat a little faster; does he feel the strength of my hand upon his wrist, does he quiver with an arousal that he cannot place, the rushing of blood, the clenching of muscles in his chest? Many a man of war there is who has felt the place where fear, rage, panic and lust meet; when I am slighted, I will joyfully meet them there.

Then another voice spoke, cutting through the busy, raging silence of hand tightening upon sword, breath rushing in chest – one both new and familiar. I started with surprise to hear it, and felt too the shock of recognition in Iason’s chest as the speaker’s words spilled like oil through the dusk.

“Good friends,” he said, “this is a place of love. And it is with love that we have come.”

Then stepped forward another man. He wore no armour, but a cloak the colour of the rich wine that had fattened him since he sailed from Troy. A crown of thick dark curls adorned his head, traced with grey, and his skull sat upon a neck that expanded in a triangle down to his shoulders, so that head, throat, chest all seemed to be of one matter, rather than three distinct organs. He was no taller than any other man, but his hands – such hands! So thick and wide they could crush a blacksmith’s face within his palm. Spear-throwing, heart-rending, sword-swinging hands of the kind that I do not think we shall see in Greece again. His hands were the first thing all observers might note, but when he spoke again, their eyes would rise to meet his and then immediately look away, for in that wintry gaze was something only the Furies might name. His lips pulled into a smile, but his eyes did not; nor could I, whose memory is boundless as the starry sky, recall a time when I had seen them smile, save once or twice when he was but a mewling babe, before the time of ancient curses and newest wars.

Iason’s grip did not loosen on the hilt of his sword, but even he, my brave little warrior, felt his footing shift before the gaze of this open-armed figure slipping through the defilers’ ranks. And for a moment, even I did not know whether his smile portended worship or sacrilegious burning; whether he was about to offer incense and grain to my glory or bid the timbers of my shrine be set alight. I searched his soul for an answer, and could not see it. I, born of sacred foam and the south wind, I gazed into his heart and could not know it, for in truth he did not know it himself; but only I was afraid.

Then he turned that smile again upon Iason and, in the manner of a scholar who wishes his pupil might form some great idea on his own, said: “Good Iason. Your honour is spoken about even in our little, little Sparta. I had not thought to find you in a place so… quaint… as this, but clearly there has been some miscommunication. When one is concerned for the welfare of those one loves – for the good of a kingdom, for the very heart of Greece, for the blessed land that fathered us – one must learn to cast aside all expectations. All normal expectations, if those normal things stand between a man and his duty, his honour even. I think you understand these things, yes?”

Iason did not answer. That was fine – very few people did when this man spoke.

“The truth is, my men are tired. They shouldn’t be, embarrassing really; there was a time when men, real men, could march without food or drink for five nights and still fight and win a battle at the end of it, but I fear that this time is over, and we must reconcile ourselves to a weaker sort of man. A foolish sort of man. For they are fools to have come here in such a provocative, thoughtless manner. I will give you… three of their lives, if you wish, in recompense. Chose whoever you will.”

The men of Sparta, if perturbed by their leader offering up three of them to immediate dishonourable death, did not show it. This was perhaps something their king had done before – or maybe they were too preoccupied with the growing sense of discomfort about their groins to fully appreciate the matter unfolding.

Iason was slow to understand the sincerity of this moment, but at last shook his head. Yet this was not answer enough. The other man stood with head on one side as though to say “Will you not choose?” so at last Iason blurted: “I… no. Your word is enough. Your word is… more than sufficient.”

“My word? My word.” The man tasted the idea, tried it out in heart and mind, relished the flavour of it, spat it back out. “Good Iason, it is a comfort to me to know that Mycenae has men such as you in it. Men who trust in… words. My nephew is blessed with your loyalty. He needs that now. He needs the loyalty of all of us in these times. Such times.” Again he paused, and there was a place where Iason could speak, and a place where again, Iason had nothing to say. The man sighed – this was a disappointing conversation, but hardly a surprising one. He was used to the sound of his own voice, though had yet to work out why. He stepped closer to Iason, and when the younger man did not recoil, moved closer again, put his hand on Iason’s shoulder, smiled, squeezed. He cracks walnut shells between two fingers, once twisted the head of a man so far that his neck snapped, barely marking what he did. But Iason was brave; Iason did not flinch. This pleased the man. Very little pleases him these days that is not expressed in a language of pain.

“Well,” he breathed at last. “Iason. Iason of Mycenae. My good friend Iason. Well then. Let me ask you – as a loving uncle, as a loyal servant, humble supplicant to our great king of kings, Orestes of Mycenae, your noble master, my dear nephew. Let me ask you then. Let me ask.” Menelaus, king of Sparta, husband of Helen, brother of Agamemnon, he who stood in burning Troy and stamped on the heads of babes; a man who in the most secret place of his soul every night swears himself my enemy as if the oaths of mortals have any meaning to the gods – now he leans into the sweating soldier of Mycenae, now he whispers in his ear with a voice that has commanded the world to break: “Where the fuck is Orestes?”

Off the western coast of this land of Greece there is an island dribbled into the sea like the last liquids of an unsatisfactory encounter with a premature lover. Hera would look shocked if I expressed it to her in those terms, but once she had berated me about my choice of language, she would cast her eyes down from Olympus to survey the little spew of geography to which I refer, and she would not in fact disagree.

This isle is Ithaca, seat of kings. There are other islands nearby that are far less wretched and unpleasant. A tiny worm of water separates it from the lovely hills of Kephalonia, where olives grow abundant and lovers may lie upon the western sands, pure as the salt water that tickles their bare, tangling toes. Yet it was on Ithaca, that backwater little nowhere land, that the family of Odysseus, wiliest of all the Greeks, decided to build their palace – a scrubby insignificance of black rocks, secret coves, thorns and foul-smelling goats. Athena would intervene at this point and harp on about its strategic importance, about tin and silver and trade blah blah blah, but Athena is not the teller of this tale, and for that we can all rejoice. I am a far more tender poet, studied in the subtle art of human passion and desire, and though I would never be seen on Ithaca in any guise, mortal or divine, it being so utterly unfashionable and lacking any of the luxuries one might require, yet there is now a question asked whose outcome could affect the gods themselves – and whose answer must bring even one as cultivated as myself to these miserable isles.

Where is Orestes?

Or perhaps more precisely: Where the fuck is Orestes? for Menelaus, king of Sparta, is not above a certain blunt crudity in his words and deeds.

Where the fuck indeed?

Where is the newly crowned king of Mycenae, son of Agamemnon, greatest ruler of the greatest land in all of Greece?

These are not questions that would bother one such as myself. Kings come, kings go, but love remains, and so really these matters of politics and monarchs should be directed to Athena, or even Zeus if he could be bothered to raise his head from his cup to answer them. Yet I will admit that when it is Menelaus who makes such an enquiry, husband of my dear, lovely Helen, even I will raise one perfectly sculpted brow to contemplate its answer.

Come – take my hand. I am not vengeful Hera or Cousin Artemis; I will not transform you into a boar for daring to brush your skin against mine. My divine presence is of course overwhelming, I do understand – even my attending nymphs and naiads are often overcome by my fragrance, and many is the night I have to fetch my own hot milk, finding my staff preoccupied past the point of usefulness. But keep your eyes fixed on a certain distant point, and you may journey with me through matters past, present – maybe even some of those yet to come – and return again, your body and mind mostly intact.

There is a place on Ithaca called Phenera.

Even by Ithaca’s very low standards, it is a miserable little dive. It was once a smugglers’ cove, framed by grey rocks against which the sea grinds like a drunken bawd, squat houses of mud and dung set back from a shingle shore. Then raiders came, men driven by ambition and petty schemes of mortal men, and what little there was of note in the place was plundered, pillaged or burned to the ground. Some still sleep among the few shacks that hold against the wind – fisherwomen and the hard-faced old ladies who carve mussels and scrambling creatures from the deep. But mostly it stands as a monument to what happens when an island is not defended by a king – dust, ashes and the salt wind off the bitter sea.

I would not normally deign to look twice at such a place, no, not even for the prayers of the young lovers who used to fumble crudely at each other by the shore. My prayers should be carried by panting breath, caught in secret whispers or sung in delight at the golden touch of dawn upon a lover’s back; not twisted into a muttered “Go on, get your tackle out.” Yet on this night, with the moon half full across the bay, even I turn my celestial vision to the earth to see a ship powered by the beating of oars and the thrust of the waves drive prow-first up onto the shore at Phenera.

It is a curious vessel; neither smuggler’s bark nor Illyrian pirate come to plunder Ithaca’s land. Though the sail is plain and unmarked, at the prow of the ship is carved a roaring lion, and the first men who jump from it to the wet sand below are wound in fine dyed wool and lit by the dim light of oil burning within bronze.

They are grateful to reach land, for their nights upon the sea have been plagued with restless dreams, with gasping awake and crying out for those lost, with the taste of blood between their lips though they have not eaten meat, and with violent waves that seemed to lurch and buckle most incongruously as they made their way beneath a bruised grey sky. The sweet water tasted of salt, and the salted fish they dined upon had worms in it; and though they could not see it with mortal eyes, there was a black cloud spinning about them that rose up to the vaults of heaven and squeaked, higher than human hearing, in the tongue of the blood-drinking bat.

For some minutes these same men, flesh still warm from their pleasing exertions on the oars, make to securing their ship against tide and wind, in a manner not befitting any pirate, while others set out with torches to explore a little the ruined edges of Phenera. A startled cat shrieks and hisses and runs from their passage. Busy burbling birds chatter at each other from the sleepy rocks, disturbed by this unexpected arrival of humanity and its firelight, though even they fall silent as the darker presence that lurks above the deck makes itself known. A fire pit is dug on the beach, fuelled by smoky timber gathered loosely about the shore. A canopy is swung above it, some chairs produced, and boxes on which others sit – women too now descending from the ship to join the men, their eyes sunk from sleepless worry. The moon turns towards the horizon, the stars spin around their celestial point, and on the very edge of ruined Phenera, more than just wolf eyes watch.

Come – it is best not to linger too long by the ship. There are those upon it who even I, born of the foaming scrotum of Uranus himself and thus really rather remarkable in my potency, would rather avoid.

Two men of this vessel prick their way through the ashes of the town, one holding a torch, the other a spear. They are set to guard the edge of this place, but they cannot imagine what they are guarding against – Ithaca is an island of women and goats, nothing more. One pauses to relieve himself while the other politely turns his back, and in doing so, he sees the warrior.

She is dressed in leather and knives. The knives are the most prominent feature, for she has one on her left hip, one across her back, one on her right wrist, and one in either boot. She also wears a sword upon her right hip, and carries a javelin. If one can briefly overcome the distracting failure of fashion that is her garb, one might notice her short, dusty hair, her delightful hazel eyes, and, should one get a little more intimate, the enthralling tapestry of scars both ridged and silvered traced across her poised, muscled flesh.

“Um…” begins the soldier who is not occupied with his bladder.

“You will tell me who you are, and where you are from,” the woman declares, loud and sharp enough to make the preoccupied soldier jump, sprinkling himself with his own urine before scurrying to hide his flaccid shame.

“Who in Zeus’s name…”

The woman does not move, does not blink. The arrow comes from the darkness at her back, passes over her shoulder and embeds itself in a crumbling muddy wall a palm-print away from the head of the nearer soldier.

“Who are you, and where are you from?” repeats the woman, and when neither man answers immediately she adds, an afterthought that someone else has told her to remember: “Ithaca is under the protection of Artemis, the sacred huntress. If you are foes to her, you will not live to tell others to fear her name.”

The men look from the woman to the arrow lodged beside their head, to the darkness from which it has come. Then, rather wisely, the man who a moment ago was performing an act of nature blurts: “She said you would come.”

“Who said? Said what?”

“You must come with us to the ship.” And a moment later, perhaps understanding that this is not a woman for whom “must” is a sensible choice of verb: “We can explain all there.”

“No. This is Ithaca. You come to me.”

These men are not Menelaus’s Spartans. They are Mycenaean, and they stood with eyes open when Queen Clytemnestra ruled her husband’s lands. They are unusually accustomed to women saying no. “We must fetch our captain.”

The woman gives a sharp nod of assent, and the men scurry away.

It does not take them long to return. The threat of an unknown, potentially celestial archer or archers waiting in the fading dark provokes a certain haste among even – if not especially – the most seasoned veterans. When they return to the edge of Phenera, to the place where torchlight meets darkness and the thin, muddy path, the woman is still waiting there, a statue baked in bronze and the skins of animals. Did she blink? Why, yes – she blinked, paced, flapped, exchanged a brief conversation with one of the hidden watchers arrayed in muddy garb about the edge of the village; and then, on hearing the soldiers return, assumed again her fixed position, to create the impression that no thunder nor volcano might rouse her from her duty. Let me assure you, as one who watched the heroes of Troy most particularly, that sometimes even Paris had to take a shit in the bushes, and lovely Hector with his adorable button nose snored like a bear and farted like an ox. So much for the stiff dignity of marbled heroes.

The soldiers have brought with them two others, and those others are wisely unarmed. One is a man dressed much as the men who summoned him, in breastplate and greaves, a sea-battered cloak upon his back, his hair salty and battered around his tired face. His name is Pylades, and his love is of that tragic sort that blazes so bright he fears to express it, lest it be extinguished in rejection and thus snuff out the brightness of his life. The other is a woman, crow-faced and black-feather-souled, her hair long and wildly set free by the tossing of her sea journey, her face pinched with hunger and hands clenched in fists at her sides. It is she who steps towards the knife-armed woman, and without fear holds out her right hand, opens her fingers and reveals within a golden ring.

“I am Elektra,” she proclaims. “Daughter of Agamemnon. This ring belonged to my mother, Clytemnestra. Take it to your queen.”

The woman with knives observes the gold suspiciously, as if it might uncoil at any moment into a mystic snake. “I am Priene, and I serve only Artemis,” she replies, and might have said more if Elektra hadn’t cut in with a mocking snort.

“I am Elektra,” she repeats, “daughter of Agamemnon. My brother is Orestes, king of kings, the greatest of the Greeks, ruler of Mycenae. On this island he slew our mother in vengeance for her crimes, while your queen, Penelope, stood by, betrayer of her own kin. Make all the speeches you want about gods and goddesses and such, but do it quickly, and when you are done, take this secretly, take it fast, and give it to Penelope.”

Priene considers both the ring – which in her way she regards as a somewhat inferior work, nothing like the moving horses of gold the people of her homeland could beat and curl from even the smallest nugget of metal – and the woman who holds it. She already knows that she despises Elektra and would happily kill them all and be done with the matter, but alas – alas. There are women at her back to whom she feels a certain obligation, and whose lives would be inconvenienced to say the least should all of Ithaca burn in a war of fiery retribution. The seas are full of angry men these days, veterans of Troy who did not get their due, and their sons, who are beginning to understand that they will never be accounted as great as their fathers.

With all this in mind, she takes the ring, slips it into her garb nearest her bosom, watches Elektra to see if this intimacy might arouse a reaction that would justify the unleashing of blade and arrow, and when it does not, nods. “Do not leave the beach,” she barks. “If you do, you will die.”

“I have never feared the forgetful river of Hades,” Elektra replies, soft as a mountain stream, and Priene is familiar enough with killing to see the truth of it, and wise enough to wonder why.

Priene turns her back without fear on the men of Mycenae and their queen, and walks into the darkness, which watches still.

In the palace of Odysseus, a queen lies dreaming.

These are the things the poets say she shall dream of:

Her husband, as she saw him last nearly twenty years ago, with an added gloss of heroism perhaps that broadens his chest, puts a sheen of gold into his hair, puffs up his archer’s arms and sets laughter upon his lips. They were still young when he sailed, she younger than he, and in the nights before the Mycenaeans came to summon Odysseus to Troy, she would find him holding their newborn son and gurgling all his hopes in the chubby baby’s bewildered face, coo-coo-ee, yes, coo-ee, who’s a little hero, yes, you’re a little hero, cooooo-eee!

Or if she does not dream of Odysseus, which surely she must, perhaps she dreams of:

Telemachus, that same baby boy now nearly grown. He has set sail to find his father, or his father’s corpse – either has its pros and cons. He is a little taller than his father was – that would be his Spartan grandfather’s blood – but fairer too, infused with a pallor that verges on the winter sea. That would be the influence of his grandmother, the naiad who bore Penelope and thrust her into her father’s arms with a merry cry of “She’s yours, byeeeee!”

Telemachus did not tell Penelope he was leaving Ithaca. He would not believe that she wept to see him go, though she did, red eyes and runny nose, an ugly kind of crying that only a mother would appreciate.

These are the two dreams most acceptable for a queen. There is of course a third dream that some of the more naughty poets might speak of, should things go terribly, terribly wrong. For in the crooked halls of the palace, in little back rooms built over a sheer cliff edge, in shacks dressed up as abodes worthy of a guest, and throughout the scattered villas, hostels and hovels of the town below, the suitors slumber in their drunken fugue, the young men of Greece all gathered to win the hand – and the crown – of the lady of Ithaca. Does she dream of these strutting fellows? The pious poet cries no, no! Not the wife of Odysseus, not her! Chaste contemplation of wiping her husband’s furrowed brow, nothing more. The poet of the cheaper sort, though – why, he bends in and whispers: it has been a long time to lie in a cold and empty bed…

Penelope knows – why, even Penelope’s dreams understand – that should she fail to be anything other than an immaculately chaste queen, the poets will absolutely sing of her as a whore.

And what does she actually dream of, this sleeping woman upon her lonely bed?

I lean into the tangle of her thoughts to catch the spinning spider’s thread, and there, quivering in its net, she dreams of…

Shearing sheep.

In her dreams, the sheep sits, le