‘I think Mother is doing well, all things considered,’ a voice said. Elektra sat down next to me, folding her legs neatly.
I remembered Clytemnestra’s unhappiness the night before the wedding and felt ill. ‘Did she know?’ I demanded. ‘Did Agamemnon tell her what he was planning?’
Elektra scrunched up her face. ‘Of course not. Mother would never have brought Iphigenia here if she thought Father would do something like that.’ She drew her knees to her chest and rested her chin on them, staring out at the sea. ‘Father isn’t Mother’s first husband, you know.’
A chill wind danced over my skin. This child was wise beyond her years. ‘Then who was her first husband?’
‘I don’t know his name, but he was the king of Pisa. I heard Iphigenia and Mother talking about it once when they thought I was asleep. Father was hired to fight against Pisa, and he won. Mother was his war captive, and Father decided to make her his wife. I think she had a baby when Father took her, but I’m not sure. Anyway, Father would have killed it.’
I shuddered. For years, I’d wondered why Clytemnestra treated her husband like a rabid dog. Now I understood.
I thought about what it must be like to lie down every night with the man who had killed your child. I wondered if Clytemnestra had loved her first husband, this nameless king of Pisa, but it didn’t really matter. That world was lost forever. I had a better understanding now of the woman’s obsession with respectability. Clytemnestra had been a slave in her husband’s household, however briefly, and she had not forgotten the indignity of it. For Clytemnestra, the world was nothing more than an ornate cage, and her only hope was making sure it was at least orderly.
The Messenian slaves watched us, wide-eyed and alert. I wondered where they had come from, if Agamemnon had won them in a long-ago campaign as he had Clytemnestra. I thought about all the women and girls of Troy and shuddered at what would happen to them if their city fell.
Clytemnestra let out another scream, one that had blood in it.
Elektra did not run to her mother, neither to ask comfort nor to give it. Instead, she simply watched her with weary, bruised eyes that seemed to belong to someone much older. ‘I don’t know when Father will return from Troy,’ Elektra said. ‘But when he does, Mother will kill him.’
She said this without dread or judgment, as though discussing when the tide would go out or the sun would rise. ‘And when Mother kills Father, then my brother Orestes will kill her. He’s always been Father’s favourite. And when that happens … I don’t know what I’ll do.’ A sigh shook Elektra’s slight form.
A strange feeling came over me. I lifted my gaze to look at the disappearing sails on the horizon and knew with complete certainty that not one in ten of the young men who sailed with my uncle that day would return alive. Agamemnon sailed with the largest army that Greece had ever seen, but it was nothing compared to the size of the armies that the eastern kingdoms could call to muster when they drew on their allies among the Hittites and Assyrians.
The soldiers would die in a thousand ways: thrown from their ships by storms, gutted by Trojan soldiers under unforgiving skies, burning with the fevers that tore through crowded military encampments, raving from wounds gone septic. The few who did come back would be shells of men with eyes that forever reflected the campfires of distant shores. I wondered how the poets would craft something beautiful from the carnage.
Elektra’s voice broke in, drawing me back to the windsweptbeach. ‘I think I will help Orestes kill Mother, if I have to choose,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Orestes is young and strong. He’ll be king after Father.’
I stared at her in horror. ‘Don’t say such things. That’s matricide – the Furies would torment you for eternity.’ Even a child would know about those dread goddesses, bat-winged and eagle-clawed, who pursued murderers to the ends of the earth.
Elektra glanced up at the clear sky, then back at me, her eyes burning like a banked fire. ‘My father just killed my sister, and there are no Furies here.’
She was right. Iphigenia lay beneath the earth as her father sailed off to war. No one would avenge her. Not even me.
Elektra brushed off the sand and wandered back to the tent, murmuring about getting something to eat. I watched her go, but food was the furthest thing from my mind.
Something within me snapped. I was on my feet before I realized what I was doing, and I began to run. I had fled from the ruins of the seaside house, and now I fled from this. This horror, this tragedy, the death of Iphigenia whom I could not save, the atrocity of the Trojan war. To remain was intolerable, like standing in the middle of a fire. So I ran.
Atalanta had been ruthless in her training, and I could keep up a low loping run for miles. It was only when I paused for breath that I realized how far I had come. The women’s tent was only a dark speck far down the beach.
30
Psyche
I would not go back to Aulis. Clytemnestra and Elektra had attendants to escort them back to Tiryns, but there was nothing for me there now. My parents were dead, Atalanta was dying, and Agamemnon’s heirs held sway in Mycenae. And Iphigenia …
I did not want to live in a world where a daughter was worth less than a fair wind to Troy. I did not want to raise my own child in such a place.
I made my way up the rocky hills that surrounded the beach until I found a small plateau high above the ocean. Only the hardiest grasses grew here, constantly buffeted by the sea winds, and the cries of gulls were my only company. I sat on a low rock and thought of Iphigenia, and for the first time since her murder I allowed myself to weep.
If Iphigenia had lived, she could have soothed tensions between her father Agamemnon and her husband Achilles, and cooled heads that could be put to work cracking Troy’s walls. She could have become a queen of immortal fame. Instead, her bones would lie forever beneath that lonely beach, and the son of Thetis would ride to war under the command of the man who had killed his wife on their wedding day.
Tears poured down my face, tears I could not have shed whenI worked alongside Clytemnestra to put her daughter’s body to rest. My beautiful Iphigenia, now nothing more than dust.
What hubris to think that I could pull Mycenae from the war or influence its course. The city itself was bent on conquest, heaving itself into the war effort. There was gold to be found in the east, and the glory of lands and fields that could be ours. I could never have stopped the wheel. I would only have been crushed beneath it.
I realized I would never achieve my hero’s dream, not because I was too small for it but because the dream itself was too ugly.Heroes are butchers, Medusa had said, and now I saw the truth of that statement. I thought of the griffins, dead in the dust. I thought of Iphigenia, sprawled in the centre of the dais at Aulis.
I thought of my naivete upon hearing the tales of the blind poet all those years ago, when I thought a glorious kill was what made a hero. I saw now that the legends were drenched in blood, the blood of women.
