‘Why isn’t he with you?’ Her voice rises.
‘I didn’t take him with me.’ This woman murdered my father today. I want to say it to her, scream it in her face and make her crumple, but I’m wrong-footed by the way this has begun.
‘Did you kill him?’
I almost laugh. Why would I kill my own brother? It isn’t me who is the murderess. Any conversation with her is futile, I can see. There is no point: she has no shame, and, it seems, barely a grasp on reality. I twist away from her, trying to pass her without touching her, but she blocks my way.
‘Did you? Did you take him to the tomb and—?’
I am sure she will grab at me, and I can’t bear the thought of her seizing my arm, the same hands that killed my father on my skin. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ I try to infuse every syllable with the contempt I feel for her, but three words cannot contain the limitless oceans of it.
‘Then where is he?’
I shake my head. ‘Why are you pretending that you care? When did you last even look in his direction? I’m amazed that you remember he exists – as though you’ve noticed any living children of yours.’
She flinches, as though I’d slapped her. I wish that I had. I wish I could steel myself to do it. ‘She was your sister.’ Her voice is low. ‘And he killed her.’
I snort. I try again to contort myself to get around her, but she steps in front of me.
‘Children die every day,’ I say. ‘How many grieving mothers did the war create? They don’t all rise up and take revenge. What makes your grief so special? What difference does it make?’
‘What difference? What difference does it make that your father slit his own daughter’s throat?’ Her words spill out too fast. She really is rattled, maybe for the first time I’ve ever known.
‘Iphigenia was a sacrifice. The gods demand a heavy price sometimes, and it is an honour to pay it. I wonder what they will ask of you, to atone for what you’ve done. If that could even be possible.’
‘Don’t you care? Can you really not care? That your sister was slaughtered, that your brother is missing?’
‘The only danger to Orestes shares your bed. You invited him into our home. You brought him here.’ I watch her eyes widen in shock. ‘Are you really so stupid that you can’t see it? Do you think for one moment that Aegisthus, cowardly as he is, would let the son of Agamemnon live?’
She knows. I can see, through her defensiveness and her worry, that the truth of what I’m saying is not new to her. Perhaps that’s why she panics, on finding Orestes already missing. She didn’t think Aegisthus would strike quite so soon. Maybe she even planned to send Orestes away herself, and she fears her lover has second-guessed her. That she’s been outmanoeuvred after all. Well, she has, but not by the dull-witted Aegisthus.
I can’t resist pressing my advantage further. ‘You brooded so much on Iphigenia’s death that you opened the door to a man who would kill your son.’ I laugh. ‘Isn’t it a little late to play the loving mother? To pretend that you care what happens to Orestes . . . or me?’
She’s confused. She didn’t expect this. I don’t know what lurid scenario she concocted in her mind; some twisted idea of the kind of revenge I might take upon her by murdering the brother I’ve just sent to safety. How she could think me capable of such a thing, I don’t know. She doesn’t know me at all – and no surprise, since she’s spent most of my life staring into the distance, as though she could conjure my sister back from the Underworld.
I’d love to find the words that could wound her even more deeply. But I know her far better than she knows me. She will rally in a moment, gain control of herself again. This sudden vulnerability is temporary, and if I linger to luxuriate in her pain, she’ll be Clytemnestra again, cold and unreachable, and hurling more words at her will be like hammering at these thick stone walls with my bare fists.
I shove past her. I shudder at the feel of her body as I knock her aside, but it’s so brief I can tolerate it. And then I’m free of her, running up the path towards the home I hate almost as much as I hate her.
I stay in my chambers as much as I can. Life in Mycenae has always been a tedious thing, but now I have nothing to look forward to – and, without Orestes, I am more alone than I have ever been. I can sit for an hour doing nothing more than staring at the patterns on the floor, letting my eyes blur so that the lines run together, wondering when I will summon the energy to stand. But why bother? There is nothing to get up for, no one to go outside to see. No point in leaning out over the courtyard walls to scan the distant sea for the sight of sails returning, victorious against the blue sky. I wonder if Georgios has managed to deliver Orestes to his friends, if his friends will hide him away and if I will ever see my brother again, but the thoughts meander without urgency. Maybe I will and maybe I won’t, but even though I know I should be consumed with my revenge and my fury, instead a heavy listlessness has settled upon me. When each day dawns, all I want is for it to be over.
Through the palace, the atmosphere has changed. Aegisthus no longer skulks and trails behind my mother. I watch him, daring to stride ahead of her. I hear his voice, louder these days, ringing through the halls. And I see her face, smooth and inscrutable, watching him. Whatever she thinks of her newly emboldened lover is well concealed behind her smiles. I can’t begin to guess at it.
For me, for the most part, I cannot bear to witness him wrapped in purple cloaks and laden with the gleaming jewels that belong to a man he did not even dare to kill himself. He was no match for Agamemnon, and he must know it, but the knowledge doesn’t choke him, and he carries on stuffing roast meat into his mouth at my father’s table and lounging back in my father’s seat, his face alight with self-satisfaction.
Meanwhile, food curdles in my stomach. I thought that grief would be like a sea of suffering within me, that it would wrack me with its storms and endlessly replenish my tears, but instead it lodges like a heavy stone in my throat. I don’t want to eat; I can barely swallow. The effort of talking overwhelms me, so I fall silent. Besides, with Georgios and Orestes gone, there is no one here to talk to anyway. I can’t even summon the energy to cry, beyond a few trickling tears that I let roll down my cheeks. I think of the dagger, always glinting at Aegisthus’ waist – a man can’t be too careful when he’s married to a woman who thinks nothing of killing a husband, after all – and I wonder dully what the blade would feel like if it pierced my skin. I wonder if my blood would swell out in a river of crimson. I can’t imagine it flowing in my body; I feel like such a shrivelled and dried-up thing. I think of Iphigenia, and how she died pressed against my father’s broad chest, and I burn with the slow smouldering of envy.
They buried the woman, the one I saw walking behind him. No one has told me how she died. I wish that I could have talked to her: perhaps she could have told me stories about my father. The slaves say she was a princess of Troy. She was so lucky to be chosen by a king, the greatest king in Greece, to be brought here to a palace that must be as fine as the one she left. Finer, I’m sure. Whatever wealth Troy possessed, Mycenae had Agamemnon. And she did too, for a little while.