I float in silence, for a while.
I have no way of telling how much time has passed. It may have been the fleeting moments from one heartbeat to the next; it may have been the aeons it took our Earth to givebirth to us. All I know is that after some unquantifiable amount of time, I feel corporeal again. I can move.
Slowly, hesitantly, I open my eyes. There is no castle any more; no forest. The world is white. White sharper than snow, more finite than a shroud.
I shiver, although the air is not exactly cold. It’s not exactly anything. There’s an absence of all things tangible in this white place I’ve found myself in. If it can indeed be called that: a place. It looks so different from any hall I’ve ever been in. A blank page that the scribes have yet to bend into submission with their ink. The room that cannot be a room is long, extending like a serpent on both sides, as far as my eyes can see.
But I am still myself. Am I not?
I touch the tips of my fingers, counting the fleshy pads to soothe my mind. My hands are no longer coated in dirt; my skin is clean as if I’m fresh out of the bath. As if I didn’t crawl my way out of a bed turned into a grave. I touch the silky swathe of my nightgown next. Its raven colour is the oddest stain in this static world of white. I am the oddest stain, my bloodied hand more out of place than ever. If this is Heaven, I must be some miasma soon to be cast aside.
I start walking, picking a direction at random, my hands stretched out on either side of me like cat’s whiskers to alert me to threats hidden in alabaster, my feet walking on surfaces I cannot see. It’s a bewildering sensation; like walking on air and expecting it to lift you.
How do I even know what is up and what is down when all is colourless, unchanging?
This can’t be Heaven; Heaven cannot be so empty, so silent. But this can’t be Hell, either. I’m neither inexcruciating pain nor dreading being tortured – merely disoriented and unsure. How long has it been since I was in my castle, evading the ever-growing greenery? How long since I put three wishes to the sisters three? Perhaps this is some kind of trial, a spell to test my character. See if I am strong enough to be the Queen.
I straighten my shoulders, hold my head high. Despite my naked feet, my steps become more sure, the surface under my soles more reminiscent of thick carpet. I keep walking, casting careful glances around, trying not to look too bewildered in case spirits are observing me. After a while, the faintest traces of colours and shapes begin to form amid the white, like afterimages when staring at the sun. There, but not firmly there.
I blink several times, and this new reality settles.
I am indeed walking down an endless corridor, but not one as empty as I thought. There are arches and markings on either side, as if to denote the possibility of doors – yet when I turn my attention to any specific one of them, it vanishes from sight. I sigh, frustrated. There must be some point in all this wandering. Every story has a moral. What would mine be?
I think back to the witches’ words, lest they held some hints on how I could escape this unearthly realm. What was it they chanted in their senseless rhymes? Something about thunder … and a threat, and ‘… Claret,’ I say out loud, my voice barely deigning to collaborate. The strain of speaking after what feels like forever brings an unladylike cough, which I do my best to stifle with my hand. But my cough chokes me when I see it: the bloodstain on my hand, that filthy witness of my wickedness, shimmers.
Alarmed, I push it aside from my face, as if I can disinherit my own limb.
And then I feel it. A magnetic pull. The little drops of dried blood have a will of their own, it seems, stretching my skin and tugging at my hand, my arm, towards an unseen spot to my right. Baffled, I follow.
My hand points me to a door frame that wasn’t there before, one that doesn’t vanish as I approach it. Rather, it turns more solid. The white splits into strips, which in turn acquire weight and texture, not unsimilar to bleached wood. Colour suddenly blooms, so fierce it hurts my eyes.
Claret.
My breath hitches – this could be it, my way back home. My way back to my crown. I grab the bloodstained doorknob with my equally bloodstained hand, turn it, and push.
The door opens. But what greets my eyes is not the grey of castle walls, not the soothing green of any forest canopy. It’s blood. A hot, oppressive gust of air assaults my face as I take in a room formed out of fumes and melting walls, adorned with bizarre monsters, reeking of blood.
How wrong I was! This must be Hell.
Standing proudly at its centre, so drenched in claret only teeth and eyes shine in stark contrast, a female demon stares at me. And she wields a knife.
4. Klytemnestra
‘Goddess! Goddess deliver me!’ Cassandra crawls on bloody floors, her knees and elbows soiled and slipping. She doesn’t spare a glance for Agamemnon’s quickly cooling body in the bathtub – nor for my knife. Her eyes are on the black-clad apparition, this alien goddess who has now breached the palace of Mycenae’s halls. My halls.
The goddess neither lends a helping hand nor casts aside her supplicant. Only remains unmoving, her head slightly tilted back like an assessing raven, her eyes narrowed. Cassandra inches near the raven’s skirts, arms raised in prayer, blubbering strings of syllables in that boorish language of the Trojans, that barbarian birdsong.
Why would a Trojan goddess show up now, when the war is won? Where was she when Troy’s altars were being trampled down by Agamemnon’s army, when her priestesses were brought to bed or to the sword? And why appear now, when my own gods have graciously stood aside and allowed me to harvest all the mutiny, all the murder I was owed, drop by bloody drop?
Who issheto try and spoil what’s mine?
What fleeting fear I might have felt seconds ago turns into fury.
Determined, I stride closer. I grab Cassandra by theshoulder, shoving her aside. My fingers flex around my knife, but now it’s not Cassandra’s neck I’m thirsting for. I already killed a man many considered godlike. Let’s see if this supposed goddess is of sturdier cloth.
I take another step, daring her to stop me with divine force. All she does is glare at me, her eyes greener than a forest, her pupils black like Erebos. Finally her pursed little mouth opens, croaking that same, foreign word from earlier. ‘Claret …’
I never thought I’d hear a god addressing me directly – for all my prayers these ten long years, all I’ve received is silence. Whatever ‘claret’ may mean, be it a curse or warning, her voice admittedly holds power; like pointy thorns all wrapped in petals, deceptive in their softness. But not enough to bring me to my knees. Nothing will ever do that now, ever again.
