Everyone Should Eat His Own Turtle (A Greek Myth Novel) by H.C. Southwark (nonfiction book recommendations TXT) 📕

they seem to be egging Kleto’s hair-swept form on, as though delighted on how easily Tereus has lied, knowing that he was successful, or otherwise this would not be a story at all. A show they would enjoy to the fullest—this was everything Kleto had promised them. A show where they were the main figure—the heroes.

Is this not what the robber on the egg rock had said? Isme wondered, mind lingering back. She recalled him declaring that his honor was in how much he could steal... And the deep well inside Isme, the place of song, reverberates back: No, that is not what honor is, honor is when... But there is no end to the echoing sentence.

While the laugher continues, Kleto must pause, because otherwise she could not be heard above the noise. She pantomimes Tereus, dancing around Isme with savage, jerky movements, and the men cheer. With so much attention on herself, parting her lips, Isme tried to think of a line, but she did not know the song.

All she remembers is the story: poor Philomel, unknowing, had pled likewise with her father to be allowed to go, hoping to meet her sister, helping seal her own fate...

Like me, Isme realized, thinking how she had disobeyed and gone to the turtles. Only... Not like me. I broke my father’s rules. She broke none.

Fortunately, Kleto was continuing, absorbing the audience’s participation and preventing Isme from bungling anything by speaking. She sweeps back and forth, chanting, “They travel—to his homeland!—Not to his palace—they go—to the woods!”

The men cheer again, thumping their feet against the floor. They egg her on, jeering and hooting. Isme feels something like vomit against her teeth, but when she swallows, there is nothing. Not even spit in her mouth. Kleto is a typhoon, formed on the sea, wind whipping water until it hung in midair. She hops from table to table. Her hair flies up like a brush fire out of control, swirling, yet her face remains hidden.

And Isme understood: Kleto was not Tereus. She was Tisiphone.

Head bowed, Pelagia strums the lyre with such force Isme is surprised the strings do not break. Her head nods at her work—

And then Kleto leaps on Isme like a wild animal—and Isme’s first reaction is to fight.

She raises her hands, ready to batter Kleto’s face bruised, and only a huff from the other woman stops her, the reality that this is not an attack, this is part of the performance. Below all the jeering, Kleto urges, “Call some plea, for Hades’s sake—”

My lines, Isme thought. This is a performance.

And she shrieks: “No, brother-in-law! This is forbidden!”

Isme has never heard her voice with such a broken tremor, high and reedy and not the least bit expressive, a melodrama that is so far removed from reality that it is like someone pretending to be someone pretending to be afraid. But the men do not care. They are a pack of animals now, howling and baying as if sighting blood.

Through it all, Pelagia does not slow down the slightest.

Kleto’s hands, about Isme’s waist, jerk her off balance into a dip, turning her from the men’s eyes. They roar louder. And yet somehow Isme still hears Kleto’s hiss in her ear, “Now after this part, you have to say something like—”

Isme interrupts, kicking at the strain of being held at this strange angle, “I know!”

She glares at Kleto, ranting without words: I know the story! I am good for that much—

Underneath her own hair, Kleto’s eyebrows raise, her pupils contract, or perhaps that is merely a flicker of firelight—

Then she hauls them both upright and tosses Isme into a spin, tugging her arm as she is flung away, so that Isme nearly trips and falls off the table into the crowd of yowling men below. She just barely manages to catch herself—who knows what would have happened had she fallen off and into the crowd—

Raising her arms, Kleto calls: “Well, my lords, you know this part!”

The shouting reaches the roof, hands flying up into the air, stomping and thumping like thunder under their feet. Pelagia still plays but not a single note can be overheard in the din.

“But then—” Kleto shouts, and again, not breaking through the noise: “But then!”

She jabs a finger at Isme, practically tossing the attention of everyone on the room to her—and the abrupt change in subject cuts off the noise, dozens of throats falling silent. Isme is all their focus, and she knows that she must speak or die.

“You monster!” she yells. “I’ll tell everyone what you’ve done!”

Partly she is upset at Kleto for placing her in this role. But mostly she is screaming at the men—and Kleto, with her hair thrown over that lovely face, is a convincing substitute.

“Oh—?” said Kleto, a long drawn-out syllable, and the men snigger. Before they can raise their voices and drown her out again, however, she is saying some kind of prompt: “You wouldn’t dare tell anyone—think of your poor sister, my wife! Now she and you would fight over me—one husband, two women!”

And Isme said the line, the one she had learned from her father’s sole telling of this tale, the one that she did not understand but Kleto seemed to be prompting: “I’ll tell everyone because you’ve made me into my own sister’s rival!”

“Rival, indeed,” shouted Kleto, and the men called out, laughing again. But then Kleto moved quick as a spark from the fire, leaping down into the crowd and seizing a knife from the thigh-strap of the closest man, bounding back onto the table with the blade bared. It was dirty, but the spare speckles of rust made it look like glittering starlight in the cast from the hearth fire.

The hush was immediate, the men’s bodies strained—toward Isme, toward Kleto, toward the violence, away from it. They seemed to believe Kleto was ready to kill Isme—and perhaps, Isme thinks, looking at Kleto’s covered face, they are right.

“You won’t be telling anyone,” Kleto said, waving the blade, “Not if