‘Should I go?’ The sudden intent in his voice surprised me.
‘Go where?’
‘To Troy. I could go and fight. I’m old enough.’
‘How would you even get there?’ I jumped to my feet. ‘The journey there would be long and dangerous. Why would you attempt it?’
He stood up too, and put his hand on my shoulder. I didn’t want to look at his open, honest face. I’d imagined the Trojan battlefield so many times. It was enough to torture myself every day with the ways in which a Trojan sword or spear could pierce my father’s body; I couldn’t bear to think of Georgios in the heart of the fray as well. ‘Your father needs men, Elektra. I’m strong enough. I could be there, helping to win the war. So that he can come home to you.’
Tears prickled my eyes. ‘No.’
‘Why not?’
I hugged my arms close around myself, looking determinedly away from him. ‘You aren’t a soldier.’
‘I could learn.’
I shook my head. ‘It’s madness.’
‘Madness to do something to help, instead of staying here, whilst you suffer every day?’
‘You do help. You help by being here.’ I pictured what my days would look like with Georgios gone. The crashing loneliness of it, enduring the sight of Aegisthus in my father’s place, with no friend for me to turn to. ‘You can’t leave me.’
‘I would never want to leave you. But if I can help . . .’
‘Then don’t suggest it again,’ I said. ‘My father will win this war, Achilles or not.’
He nodded slowly. ‘I won’t speak of it again, not if it upsets you.’
I nodded, blinking away any threat of tears. I hoped it wasn’t selfish, to deny my father another willing fighter. But I’d said it already, one man couldn’t make much difference in a war. Here in Mycenae, though, Georgios’ presence meant more to me than I had known until I thought of him gone. My father’s absence had carved a gaping hole right through the centre of my life. I didn’t think I could face losing my friend as well.
I made my desultory way back to the palace as twilight began to gather. Slipping through the corridors, practised at going unnoticed in the shadows, I passed my mother’s chambers. I could hear the soft hum of her voice, talking to someone – him, most likely. I did not care for what she had to say most of the time, but I wondered if she had heard the same reports of the war as Georgios had relayed to me. I wondered if she exulted in the rift within the Greeks.
I drew closer to the door, which stood ajar.
‘—cannot surprise me, of course,’ I heard her say, her tone high and rapid. ‘And yet – I still wonder how it can be.’
Aegisthus’ voice, whining and thin, saying something to pacify her.
‘He has daughters,’ she said. A note of despair sounded in her voice. ‘I know it is the way of war. I know what he has done already. But this girl, this slave, whom they argue over like dogs fighting for a bone – does he think of her as a person at all, someone else’s daughter, who could be his own?’
I heard Aegisthus more clearly now; I think he had stood and moved nearer to the door where I lurked, maybe to come closer to Clytemnestra. ‘I have not fought in war, but—’
She cut him off as though he had not spoken at all. ‘Why would I think for a moment that he would care about a woman’s feelings, even if she were his own daughter, even if the Trojans chased him and his armies all the way across the sea to Mycenae itself? All that would matter to him would be his own pride – but the cruelty of this . . .’ There was a long silence. When she spoke again, she sounded subdued. ‘He didn’t have the face of a monster. When I married him, I didn’t know; I never imagined . . . And now he takes a woman as though she were a thing, he risks his whole war, the war for which he slaughtered his own child like an animal, for the sake of saying this Briseis is his and not Achilles’.’ Clytemnestra’s voice turned cold. ‘How that poor girl must despise him.’
I had heard enough. I turned away, crept on silent feet to my chambers, a ghost in my own home. It wasn’t until later, as I turned this snippet of conversation between my mother and the hated Aegisthus over in my head, that I prised out its bitter sting.
My mother felt a kinship with this faraway woman, my father’s slave. She imagined her – Briseis – despising the king who had claimed her as his own. I turned over in my bed, pressed my face into the softness of the blankets. I breathed in, long and slow, and felt the heat of my own exhaled air warm my skin. Muffled deep in my nest, I thought about her. I wondered what she looked like; the woman who had halted the war. I imagined that she must stand tall and shapely, with rippling hair and wide eyes. Eyes that she could raise to my father. She could look upon his face, the face I could only see in the haze of long-distant memory. She must be beautiful. I thought of how she must have felt; claimed by Achilles, of whom so many stories were told, the young and ferocious warrior who struck fear into Trojan hearts. And then, the march of Agamemnon’s soldiers to the Myrmidon camp, the crunch of their footsteps in the sandy earth, as they came to take her away, to bear her to the king.
Clytemnestra pitied her for belonging to Agamemnon. I closed my eyes tightly. I could almost feel the sand of the Trojan beach trickling between my toes. The orange starbursts that exploded against my squeezed eyelids could be the flames of Greek torches. The soldiers’ hands would hold her upper arms firmly as they led her towards the tent. She would look down as they approached, her unbound hair falling across her face until she stood before him.
The scene dissolved in my head. I searched for his features: his dark beard, his thick curls – would they be streaked with grey from the years that had passed and the strain of leading the war? I was sure his eyes would flash dark and warm as ever, but perhaps wearier than before.
My mother didn’t care for how he had suffered, the toll that these relentless battles must have taken upon him. She would deny him any comfort, any spoils of war that were rightly his, even as she lolled beside the traitor, the usurper who dared to sleep in Agamemnon’s bed.
My lungs about to burst, I pushed aside the blankets, surfacing from the airless cavern I had made. My hair clung damply to my slick temples. I felt all at once a great and terrible restlessness, a frustrated energy in my limbs that made me wish again that the sea did not lie between here and Troy. If it were the harshest, driest desert that separated us instead, I would walk across it to see my father again.
I was a princess. I slept in a bed draped with the finest fabrics, in a chamber patterned with frescoes, bedecked with sumptuous hangings, with glittering gems piled up ready to adorn my hair and neck, and carved shutters at the window to keep out the burning heat of the daytime sun and to let in a cooling sweep of night air: every comfort I could imagine was at my fingertips. And yet every fibre of my being ached with longing – every part of my wretched body yearned to be amidst the smoke of campfires, beneath the rough canvas of a tent; to change places with a slave who had nothing except the thing I wanted most of all in the world. My father’s arms around her.
17
Cassandra