He goes limp, and the flurry of water calms around his still form. The stained petals drift on top of the dark water. I can feel the droplets of his blood sliding down my forehead, and it revives me, like rainfall on a parched field in the deadening heat of summer. My arms fall to my sides, and I hear the axe striking the tiles of the floor.
He doesn’t move. It strikes me as impossible, just as it did when I cradled Iphigenia’s corpse, that minutes ago he lived and now he is dead. I had expected a surge of emotion. Whenever I had pictured this moment, tears had swamped my vision unbidden. I had thought that exultation would seize me, that I would be flooded with a savage joy. I had thought it would rush over me, and Iphigenia too; that I would feel her gratitude from across the gulf that divides us and know she had satisfaction at last.
The silence of the room is as heavy as ever, unstirred by the cold breath of Hades. Agamemnon is nothing but butchered meat, lying slumped in the reddened water. No guards have charged in, no one seeks to drag me away in chains. The palace is mine, and I can walk from here, free and unimpeded, whenever I want.
Perhaps this is what Agamemnon felt when he walked away from Iphigenia into the light of that terrible dawn. I have murdered him, and there will be no retribution.
The thought of Elektra snakes into my mind, but I shake her away. There is nothing that she can do. This is a gift to her, though she does not know it yet.
Agamemnon’s men will be grateful to go home, back to wives and children grown older in their long absence, back to their farms, back to aged parents, back to a quiet and comfortable existence. There is no appetite for any more fighting, I am sure of it. In Mycenae, we will forget the war, consign its heartbreaks to our past. The horrors of the line of Atreus can be banished there too, I tell myself. The men who would kill their own to hold their power are all dead, and I will make this city a better place with them gone. The citizens will be as glad to forget Agamemnon as they will be to forget Troy.
Except for one person, it occurs to me, as I pull myself to my feet. I turn away from Agamemnon’s broken body, from the shattered tiles where the axe fell. There is one person here at Mycenae who cannot put Troy behind her.
27
Cassandra
A high, narrow window lets a sliver of sunlight into the cell where they brought me. A keening sound slices through the air; a girl is screaming somewhere in the palace. I don’t know if I can hear it truly or if it simply echoes inside my head; a gift of Apollo’s light. I can summon no howls of my own. Even when I think of Troy, of my sisters scattered on a multitude of Greek ships, those who survived the storm sailing to every corner of our world, I cannot quite believe it. I can’t make myself know that Troy is gone, they are gone, and there is nowhere for us to return to.
And what victory do the conquerors enjoy? The vengeance of the gods has been swift and clear. Athena revealed it at the climax of the storm, when the horizon glowed with a vast sheet of lightning, and, in the centre of it all, from the deck of the ship, we all saw one man, clinging to a jagged rock amidst the churning waters. The man who had raped me in Athena’s temple. Drenched in freezing spray, howling defiance at the gods. His crime brought this devastation upon the Greeks, and this was her punishment, saved until the last.
I remember how, for a moment, the storm was suspended: the sky shimmered with a baleful glare and the wind dropped abruptly into an eerie silence. I watched his fingers turn white as they slid away from the slick surface of the rock, his mouth stretched wide in a desperate scream. The lightning struck again, its forked tongue igniting blue fire above us, illumin-ating his frantic struggle as he surfaced, gasped for air and sank once more. Again and again, the jagged light struck, and I saw him weakening as he rose, only to be slapped back down, over and over – until, at last, he rose no more. Here in Mycenae, in my enemy’s palace, I picture that man’s bloated body sinking through the dark, picked apart by fish until his bones lie on the lightless sand.
I watched that man die before my eyes, but I can see flashes of Agamemnon’s fate, too, pulsing stark and white with every sickening throb of my head. My captor is dead, bludgeoned and battered, his dignity as shattered as the fragments of his skull. She wields the axe, triumph gleaming in her face, a savage revenge made manifest at last. Now I am the prize of a dead man, the property of a corpse. I feel a shudder of relief that I will never feel his hands upon me again.
Clytemnestra, his wife, Helen’s sister, will be coming to me next. Though she does not dazzle like Helen, I can see a similarity in their bearing. Two women who seem distant from those around them, as though they walk on separate ground to the rest of us. I had thought that Helen seemed far away, even from Paris. Still, perhaps she felt that distance, too. Perhaps she came to me when she did because we were fellow outcasts in the city.
And here in Mycenae, I have found Helen’s twin: the more formidable of the two. With Agamemnon stricken, she will come to me, a woman with no place here in the palace she rules. No place anywhere. I know that the girl screaming must be her daughter, a daughter Agamemnon had left living. What would it be like, I wonder, to have a father like that? I think of Priam, cut down by Neoptolomus. My father did not believe a word I implored him to heed, but he was a kindly man, full of pity for me, weighed down with regrets that he would never voice about the baby boy born to him whom he could not bring himself to kill. A king most unlike Agamemnon.
I would weep for him, for us all, but I am too numb, as though I am already shrouded in the fog that drifts through the realm of Hades, that rises in vapour from the great dark rivers that flow under the earth and drain away the memories of the dead into silt so they can wander the grey shores never knowing what they have left behind. I imagine the chill, damp peace of it. A place where Apollo’s searing light can never reach. A place of quiet and emptiness, where an inhabitant’s mind is no more than a flimsy veil fluttering in a breeze. A vast cavern of darkness where the sun-god will never venture.
I know that she is coming, but when the door swings open to reveal her, I am not ready. She stands, tall and composed, and splattered head to foot with her husband’s blood. I have seen everything up until this moment, and I have ached so intensely with sorrow that there was no space in my body for fear.
Until now. I feel myself come alive, every inch of my skin prickling with it. The door closes behind her and we are alone. Her eyes are fixed upon me through the wash of blood across her cheeks.
I fling myself at her feet before I know what I am about to do. I am so seized with terror, so afraid at what she has come to offer me. I clasp my arms about her knees and turn my face up towards her.
She flinches at the sight of my tangled hair, my begrimed skin, the desperate light of madness that animates me. She cannot step backwards, cannot get away from me.
She speaks, trying at the same time to gently prise my fingers loose, but I lock them more tightly. I cannot make sense of what she is saying, my head too wild to translate the Greek. I shake my head fervently, because I am sure that she means to show me mercy and I cannot bear it.
She looks back into my eyes. I know she is reluctant; that she cringes away from seeing me truly, but I have her now as I hold her gaze, as I try to make her see what I can see.
Emptiness. Nothingness. My home and everything I know annihilated. Dust blowing on the breeze, carried out over the pitiless ocean.
Do not make me live on here, I implore her silently. Do not condemn me to a life among strangers. I have lived an outcast in my own family; do not make me one here in a place where I am nothing but a conquered enemy, forced to live out years of futile yearning for a world that is lost forever.