I pressed myself against the wall, close to Georgios. I could feel his breath on my forehead and I held mine, trying not to make a sound. As she got closer, I could hear the soft murmur of her voice, not the forced effort she made when she found it in herself to talk to us, but a rapid and animated flow. I steeled myself to peer around the corner and I saw them, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, walking together around the palace grounds. He was gesturing towards the dip of the valley and the mountains in the distance, flinging his arm in an expansive arc to take in everything he could see from here. Both of them were smiling. I felt cold, despite the warm sunshine. She hadn’t laughed with me for so long. I’d forgotten what it sounded like.
The terror that had seized me was giving way to a steadier feeling of dread. He wasn’t running at my mother with a sword; he was walking with her as though they were the best of friends without a care in the world. And my father was on the other side of the ocean, not knowing anything about it. I didn’t know how it could be, but somehow, this felt worse.
15
Clytemnestra
How would Helen have done it? That was what I wondered the first time I woke beside Aegisthus. My sister, who had boarded Paris’ ship in the dead of night, who now took her place as a princess of Troy. Sometimes I saw her dragged away, other times stepping coolly and with dignity on to the creaking deck, her head held high and a new horizon in her sights. I hoped for the sake of the love we’d had for one another back in Sparta that it was the latter, but when I thought of what it had cost me – my daughter’s life spilled across the sand, Helen’s daughter whole and living, left behind like the rest of us – then it was harder to endure. Would it be better if she had resisted, if she had been overcome, if it was the fault of Menelaus for leaving her unprotected and defenceless, for having been too dull to notice the covetous gleam in the Trojan prince’s eyes? If she had screamed behind the hot press of his fingers clamped over her mouth, if she had sought to tear the flesh from his hands with her teeth in her desperation to get back to Hermione, to hold her daughter in her arms, to stay with her and never bear the blame for this disastrous war?
Whatever the truth of it was, I was certain of one thing. Whether she kicked and clawed and fought as she was taken from Sparta, I was sure that the woman who stepped off Paris’ ship on to a distant and unfamiliar harbour was the cool and regal Helen once again. I didn’t know what, if anything, might have seethed beneath the surface, but I knew in my bones that she would never betray a whisper of it to the world. She would walk through the streets of Troy as though they had always belonged to her, as though she was the rightful princess of it all, and even if her beauty didn’t make them fall at her feet, she would never feel the burn of their smouldering resentment – or if she did, she wouldn’t care.
I didn’t know if I loved her or hated her, or some curdled mixture of the two, but I needed that poise for myself. I needed her confidence; I needed to move through the world with the placid certainty that everything I did was right, just as she did.
If Helen had sneaked her lover into the palace whilst her husband was at war, she would not be lying frozen in anxiety with no idea how to proceed. She would stride into the throne room with him at her side, and arch a disdainful eyebrow at anyone who dared to question her.
Aegisthus stirred sleepily and turned his head towards me. I held my breath for a moment, not wanting him to wake. His face was shadowed, the flesh around his eyes dark and hollowed. The image of his skull swam up in my mind unbidden, smashed by Agamemnon’s axe, his skin hanging in tatters, the exposed bone crawling with insects.
The light filtering through the window drapes was warming, grey turning to gold. His eyes flickered open. Not Agamemnon’s eyes. They might share the burden of their blood, but they were not the same.
He reached his hand towards me. Not Agamemnon, not Iphigenia. I had felt stuck on that desolate beach, her funeral pyre burning beside me, the ships long gone across the empty ocean. Even as I walked the corridors at Mycenae, even when my daughters tried to talk to me, even when my baby son cried, I was still there, powerless and raging, not knowing how to move forward. Now I had an idea.
‘What will we do?’ he asked. His voice was quiet. Gentle. No kingly timbre.
‘Agamemnon took his men with him. He took all the men with him.’
Aegisthus’ eyes stayed intent on mine. ‘All of them?’
‘He doesn’t want the glory to belong to Achilles or Odysseus or any of the rest of them. He wants it to be his. He took every man of fighting age; he only left the old ones and the boys. There is no one to stand against us here.’
He frowned. ‘They can’t all be so frail. There must be enough to cause us trouble if they choose. Agamemnon is their king. What if this war is done quickly? They won’t want him to return to find them disloyal.’
‘Is Agamemnon their king?’ I asked. ‘All of them? The men still here are old enough to remember Thyestes, to remember you. Their loyalty turned from one to the other before; it can happen again. I know that there are those here who loved your father. Who pitied you your fate, who would welcome you back. All we need to do is to find out who they are.’
‘And what about the others?’
‘Agamemnon is not well loved,’ I said. ‘Even less so now that he has taken the men. Husbands, sons and fathers, all swept away – and who knows how long this war will last? How many will return? The Trojans have their mighty warriors, just as we do; they have gods who love them, too.’ I hesitated over my next words. ‘And all for a woman, they will say. A faithless woman who ran away with a foreign prince. Is she worth a thousand of our ships, tens of thousands of our men?’
He wanted to believe me. The sound of my voice was convincing, even to me. I heard it as though it was Helen’s, soft but certain, and I felt a giddiness spiralling within me that I had not felt since before the moment Menelaus arrived, grey with shock and despair, with his shattering news of Helen. The looks on everyone’s faces would be worth it.
Worth it, yes, but we had to wait for our moment. Aegisthus had slipped unknown into Mycenae, and keeping him hidden was paramount. We needed strength behind us; he had come recklessly, fired with his passion for revenge, intent upon sharing it with me, but I wanted to move carefully. I had my guards already, but we sent for more; men young and strong, from far away, who had not been taken to war.
When I took the slave-woman into my confidence, the woman who had told me, early on in my marriage, of the curse, her face lit up. ‘Aegisthus lives?’ she asked, and when I told her yes, it was true and he was here, her eyes shone with delight. There was love for the boy who had been chased from the palace, pity for his grief and anger at his exile. We were not alone in Mycenae, Aegisthus and I. She helped to send our messages, discreet and protective, and when we had quietly gathered enough men, the time came to act.
I was satisfied with the stir it created among the elders of the court, the old men that Agamemnon had left behind to rule, when I led Aegisthus into the wide chamber, where he had watched his father die. I felt it like the keen edge of a knife blade: not the nerves I had expected, but excitement. Behind us, our guards stood tall.
‘Many of you saw Thyestes die; many of you served him as your king before Agamemnon slit his throat here.’ I paused and let them think of it; the man they had known slaughtered before their eyes as his son looked on. ‘You saw my daughter grow up here; you waved her away to her new life and husband, and you know what happened instead – the cruel trick Agamemnon played so that he could take our men, your sons and your nephews, to fight his war. I can tell you that he did not flinch, did not waver for one moment when he murdered Iphigenia. Sweet Iphigenia, loved by all of you. He turned his back on Mycenae, killed its loveliest princess and sailed away.’ I let my words hang in the air and I settled my gaze on each of them in turn. Some stared back, arms crossed over their sunken chests; others lowered their eyes or looked into the distance as though squinting through heavy fog. Always, our guards loomed, silent and impenetrable. Beside me, I felt Aegisthus standing rigid, but the words rolled from me as smooth as pouring honey. I didn’t need to be Helen, I thought.