I frowned. ‘So what if I can’t weave? I can shoot down a bird on the wing! Atalanta herself taught me.’
I was satisfied to see the girl’s eyes widen. ‘You’ve met Atalanta? And you know how to shoot a bow? Amazing! Will you teach me?’
A flush spread over my cheeks. For so long now, I had spent most of my waking hours with Atalanta, separated from the other children of the palace. I was too rough for the girls and too girlish for the boys, who didn’t like to be challenged at their games by a rogue princess. I’d never before had a friend my own age.
‘I’d be delighted to teach you,’ I told her. ‘But don’t Spartan girls already know such things?’
Iphigenia dropped her voice. ‘I’m not Spartan. I’ve always wanted to learn archery, but Father says it isn’t proper for a girl. But my—’
‘Iphigenia,’ Clytemnestra snapped. ‘Stop chattering. It isn’t proper. “Silence is a woman’s greatest adornment,” never forget that.’
I had heard the proverb once or twice before from my nurse Maia, who usually used it as a jest. I had always considered it satire, a bit of mockery, but Clytemnestra seemed deadly serious. Iphigenia fell silent at once. I met my aunt’s glare, unwilling to be cowed, until she finally turned back to her task with a disapproving sigh.
A low sob startled me, and I looked up. Helen was weeping, fat tears rolling down her flawless face and onto the cloth of her loom. She hiccupped theatrically, snot dribbling from her nose.
Clytemnestra’s lips narrowed disapprovingly, but it was Penelope who spoke up first. ‘Helen, we have guests,’ she said, her fingers not straying from the weaving. ‘Do try to pull yourself together.’
‘I can’t help it,’ Helen wailed. ‘I’m being sold like a cow to some man I’ve never met!’
‘He’s your husband, Helen, and youhavemet him. You actually got to choose him, if you recall.’ Penelope’s voice held only a hint of scorn, but it was clear that her patience was growing thin.
‘I picked him out of a lineup! I don’t know anything about him. What if he hits me? Or drinks until he’s blind? Or chases the servant girls?’
‘You ought to be grateful you had any say at all in who your husband would be,’ Clytemnestra said sharply. ‘Most women don’t.’
Helen sat up straight and glared at Clytemnestra. ‘No onegave me any choice in the first place! Everyone was pressuring me to choose a husband, and the suitors were going for one another’s throats. Sparta needed a successor.’ Helen sneered, showing her teeth like an animal and yet still managing to look more lovely than other women at their most alluring. ‘I was made for better things. I wanted to see the world and fall in love, not spend my life chained to some hairy lout.’
I glanced at her. I had been so taken with Helen’s beauty that I had missed the glint of intelligence in her eyes. I had the feeling this happened to her quite often.
‘Helen.’ Penelope’s voice was hard now, all indulgence gone. She paused her weaving, pinning her sister with a glare. ‘None of us had a choice. You think I wanted to marry Odysseus and go to Ithaka, where sheep outnumber people and rocks outnumber sheep? We are women, and we must follow our duty. At least you get to stay in Sparta.’
‘I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: “Silence is a woman’s greatest adornment,” ’ Clytemnestra pronounced primly. I wanted to throw her loom into a river.
Helen’s shoulders sagged. Finally accepting that there was scant sympathy to be found, she turned back to her loom. But she did not bother to staunch the flow of tears that continued down her cheeks.
My mind churned as I added more lumpy rows to my weaving. Helen’s predicament troubled me, and the thought only worked itself deeper when I tried to dislodge it. Though the concept of my own marriage had always felt distant and nebulous, I was only a few years younger than Helen. Soon I too would be expected to submit to a union with a man I barely knew. I had always thought about weddings as grand parties full of music and food; I had never given much consideration to what happened to the brides after the festivities.
I had long noticed that the stories of heroes were mainly about men, Atalanta being one of the rare exceptions. Women, when they had roles to play at all, appeared only as mothers or lovers or sometimes monsters.
I had the Oracle’s prophecy, but what was a prophecy against the silence of legend?
I realized, with creeping unease, that the gulf separating me from Perseus and Bellerophon was not one of divine parentage after all, but one of sex. The sons of the gods received a hero’s training, divine gifts, and everlasting fame. Their daughters, like Helen, were prizes to be won.
Zeus had come upon Helen’s mother, Leda, as a swan, people said, but he wasn’t acting very much like one now. I had seen swans nesting on the high lakes in the forested mountains; they were dedicated parents, leading their rows of fuzzy children everywhere. The gods, on the other hand, left their mortal children to fend for themselves until they were useful. If the look in Helen’s eyes was any indication, marriage was a pit of lost possibility. A chain binding her to a man she did not know, who ruled her body and her future.
If this was the best that the daughter of a god could hope for, then what was there left for me, mortal-born on both sides?
The wedding was a riotous affair. The men were in good spirits, red-faced with drink and shouting songs off-key. There was a tradition in Sparta, Iphigenia had warned me, that the groom would carry away his bride. It was an old custom, meant to preserve the woman’s chastity before she was snatched by some bad spirit or a trickster attracted by the festivities; it predated even the worship of the Olympian gods in these lands. At least, that was what Iphigenia told me in between whispered instructions to correct my weaving.
Clytemnestra scoffed when she heard this. ‘No, it’s for the benefit of the men. They’re not used to women who aren’t screaming.’
Still, when my uncle Menelaus tossed his bride, Helen, over his shoulder like a sack of grain and carried her out of the room, I found my hand flexing at my hip, wishing it held a weapon. Helen did not bother to blink back her tears, and I understood that her watery eyes represented a kind of bravery, a refusal to hide her opinion of the proceedings. She would not smile prettily for her captors.
The rest of the men followed after Menelaus. Once their shouting had faded, Penelope gestured for the rest of us to rise and follow her.
My mother waited for us in the feasting hall, cheerful despite the lingering dark circles under her eyes. My father sat on the other side of the room with the men, next to the enormous man I recognized as my uncle Agamemnon. I hadn’t seen Alkaios among the men who had taken Helen, and I tried unsuccessfully to assure myself that my father would never participate in such barbarity.
I did not tell my mother about what had come to pass in the women’s quarters, though I watched her from the corner of my eye, wondering. Had my fragile mother wept like Helen before her own wedding? Had she been carried away by my father to shouts and boasting? My parents had always seemed like such a natural match, but now I knew what secrets might lie in the dim shadows of the women’s quarters.
