The Last Song of Penelope by Claire North

Author:Claire North [NORTH, CLAIRE]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2024-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

The men of Odysseus guard the walls of Laertes’ farm.

The walls are high without being extravagant, with a platform around the inner edge along which defenders may array themselves, albeit only one man deep. There were plans to raise up a barrier behind this same walkway, but the workers have not had time to finish their labours and a great many tools and fat logs are stacked in a lean-to beneath the eastern wall, ready for deployment. There is a squat gate in the northern wall through whose square jaws visitors must enter, and the walls about it and the platform overhead, though not great, are at least sturdy, and any enemy who wished to pass through could be herded by their dimensions into a narrow killing ground.

Surrounding the walls there is a ditch. The dirt from the ditch became the base of the wall itself, adding greater height to the otherwise unimpressive barrier. Laertes is proudest of this – he believes a good defensive ditch to be the best tool any soldier or king could require, and he is broadly correct. It is deep enough that a man dropping into it without care runs some risk of twisting an ankle or breaking a leg, and being in it, that same man will struggle to get back out the other side, his head all the time prominent enough to be a good killing height.

“Love a ditch!” Laertes proclaimed, as the women sent by Penelope to rebuild his farm laboured in the pounding sun to dig it. “Give me a ditch and then another ditch and maybe a bit of a palisade and I guarantee the other bastard will have given up before I’ve even finished running away!”

Laertes will not play a leading role in the poem that I shall spin of his son’s life. This is not because he is not in his own strange way beloved unto me.

The land about the farm has been cleared on all sides to be sown with grain and worked by Otonia and the two former slaves who sometimes smelt tin in their crooked workshop on the edge of Laertes’ little dominion. Beyond are the scrubby, grubby woods of Ithaca, thinnest to the east where they curl in ankle-catching scrub and thorn before reluctantly rising through tumbled stone and bitter earth into some sort of sulking greenery, and thickest to the west where black mats of trunk and bark obscure the curve of the hill as it rolls down towards the hidden valley where one might find the temple of Artemis. The farm itself sits at the highest part of all this, and on fair days you can see hints of the sea to both east and west from atop the defensive walls. Laertes is not particularly interested in the view. He likes it, however, when people who come to visit him arrive a little breathless from their climb; he enjoys watching people work for the privilege of his company.

Within the walls, the house. It is excessive for one man and his maid, and humble for a man who was once king.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.