Penelope looks at her, head tilted. “So? Who is Helen’s father?”
Clytemnestra walks closer to her. For a moment, she considers lying, but her cousin isn’t easily dismissed. “There was a man at court when Leda was pregnant,” she says. “A foreigner. My brothers told me that. Castor, actually, because Polydeuces claims he doesn’t remember.”
“I see.”
“I don’t know where the man came from, whether or not he was a king. I just know what Castor remembers, which is that Leda often disappeared around the palace with this man and that he left before she gave birth.”
“Ah,” Penelope says. Then, unexpectedly, she smiles. “I see you have inherited your mother’s interest in foreigners.”
Clytemnestra doesn’t smile back. The air is dusky, as if fog is creeping inside the room, blurring everything. “I am tired,” she says, turning to leave. When she reaches the door, her back to Penelope, she adds, “You will speak of this to no one, not even Helen.”
She can hear the menace in her voice and hopes Penelope will hear it too.
*
Word arrives that Jason is ready to leave, that he awaits his men in Iolkos. Rain keeps falling, swamping the banks of the Eurotas and drenching the helots working the fields. Clytemnestra runs to meet Castor in the stables, her sandals splashing in the puddles, her hands hurting with cold.
“I was just thinking about you, Sister,” he says with a smile.
“I want to come with you,” Clytemnestra blurts out.
Castor frowns. “To Colchis?”
“No. To Iolkos, to say goodbye.”
Castor wipes his hands on his tunic. “It is too far. It will take days to ride there.” He stares at her, and she knows he is feeling it too—that they won’t be together for a long time. “I will be back, I promise,” he adds.
“How can you be so sure?”
“Jason is strong. We will be safe with him.”
Clytemnestra snorts.
“You are skeptical,” Castor says.
“Of course I am. Jason has been stupid enough to believe his uncle Pelias. Even if you come back, Pelias won’t give him any throne. He just wants to see Jason die trying. Does Pelias sound like a ruler who keeps his promises? He usurped the throne from its rightful ruler! And does Ae?tes sound like the kind of king who leaves his treasures unprotected? The kind of king a bunch of warriors can defeat?”
“I have gone away a hundred times,” he says. “You know I always come back.”
“This is different. Colchis is far away and dangerous.”
“And you are married and will soon be in Maeonia.” He comes closer to her. “Our lives are about to change,” he says, “and we should let them.”
Rain hits the stable roof, and the horses neigh, restless. Before every journey her brothers made, as soon as she was old enough to walk, Clytemnestra would always come here to say goodbye. And Castor would always reassure her. “Some things never change,” she says.
He smiles and takes her hands. “You are right,” he says. “They don’t.”
Her skin feels warm in his palms. She takes a deep breath and draws away, walking back to the palace as quickly as she can.
*
They all leave at dusk, Uncle Icarius and Penelope riding to the west, Castor and Polydeuces to the east. The land is dark with the thick layer of rain, and on the terrace in front of the main hall, Helen and Clytemnestra watch as they gallop out of the city, past the Spartiates’ houses, the gardens and orchards, past the helot villages. They look tinier and tinier, dwarfed by the dark mountains and the growing blackness, until rain and fog swallow them and they disappear.
Clytemnestra hides her hands in the sleeves of her tunic to warm them. For a moment, her brothers’ departure hits her hard and she feels pain inside, as if two trees were suddenly uprooted and left large holes in the ground of her heart.
When she turns to Helen, her sister’s eyes are on the place where Penelope vanished.
You will speak of this to no one, not even Helen, Clytemnestra had told her cousin, and she is sure Penelope hasn’t betrayed her trust. And yet as she looks at the shadows on her sister’s face, she can’t help feeling that she is holding a delicate shell in her hands and that she is about to drop it.
Part II
Any man’s fortune, kept straight on course, can strike a hidden cliff.
—Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1006–7
6
In the Eyes of the Gods
FALLEN LEAVES COVER the wet sand of the gymnasium. A few helots collect them in large baskets. In their scarred hands, the leaves glow red and golden, like gems. The Spartiates are waiting in the shade of the trees, their bodies covered with oil. They are to fight with spears today, and Clytemnestra is polishing hers in a corner, trying to keep focused.
Last night, the blankets twisted around their naked bodies, Tantalus asked her why Spartan women train. “To bear healthy children,” she replied. “And to be free.” Her answer left him confused, but he didn’t press her. She had let her long hair fall around him, and he had kissed her, his lips soft on her eyelids.
She puts down her spear and looks up. A woman is watching them from a corner of the courtyard, eyes black and sharp like sea rocks. She wears a white tunic that leaves her breasts exposed in the style of Artemis’s priestesses and listens as a girl named Ligeia tells the others about a helot revolt.
“They came in the night and killed two Spartans,” Ligeia says while the other girls gasp around her. “I heard the screams—we all did.”
“Did they catch them?” a tall girl asks.
“Yes,” Ligeia says. “My father and a few others took them away.”
“The Ceadas waits for them!” the girls shriek.
The priestess intervenes. “Not before they’ve been whipped on Artemis’s altar. Murder is the worst of crimes for a slave.” Her voice is hoarse and unpleasant, and the girls look down, afraid to contradict her.
Clytemnestra feels nauseous. She remembers the times the priestess had her whipped, and her brothers. Timandra has been the last of Tyndareus’s children to be punished like that, flogged on the altar on the priestess’s order after Timandra had disobeyed her father. Like Clytemnestra before her, she kept silent while blood trickled down her back and wetted the stone.
Later Tyndareus told her never to trust godly people, though Clytemnestra knew that even he could do nothing against a priestess’s wish. Priests and priestesses can’t be hurt—their gods won’t allow it—but others can. So after Timandra was flogged, Clytemnestra and Castor followed the man who had acted under the priestess’s order. When the night became dark and quiet, they hunted him, like shadows, until he stopped to piss in a tiny moonlit alley close to the helots’ shacks. He had a dagger tied to his belt, and Clytemnestra suspected he was there to kill a few helots for sport, as she had often seen Spartans do. She felt a sick pleasure in knowing she was about to hurt someone who wanted to hurt others, as though she were straightening something crooked. Castor had stepped silently behind the man while Clytemnestra kept watch. Make sure you are not seen is one of the first rules Spartans learn as children. You may steal, you may kill, but if you are caught, you will be punished. So Clytemnestra stood guard while Castor sliced the man’s calf. Then brother and sister ran together into the night, leaving the man screaming behind them.
“Are you feeling well, Clytemnestra?”
The priestess is staring at her. Her hair is thick against her face, her hands as white as bone. For a moment, Clytemnestra fears she can read her mind. “Yes,” she says.
“You look weak,” the priestess insists.
How dare she? “I am not weak.”
The priestess narrows her eyes. When she speaks, her voice hisses, like a heated blade quenched in water. “Everyone is weak in the eyes of the gods.”
Clytemnestra bites her lip to keep silent. She feels her sister’s touch on her arm and turns.