“I can feel its head,” the woman calls, and suddenly there are more people in the room: Helen, Timandra, and her mother.
Leda crouches next to Clytemnestra and holds her hand. “It is almost done, Clytemnestra. Push hard now—push!”
She pushes and screams, sweating. The midwife is praying to Eileithyia, goddess of childbirth, but Leda shouts angrily, “Help her! You can pray later.”
Clytemnestra’s breath catches in her throat. She makes a choking sound and then she sees it. Her baby.
“It’s a boy!” The midwife is holding it in her white hands, a fragile lump of mucus and blood.
“Give him to me,” Clytemnestra orders, shuddering, exhausted. The woman takes a clean kitchen knife and cuts the cord. Then she hands the baby to his mother. Clytemnestra feels the wetness, the softness. She looks at the minuscule hands, each as perfect as a petal, at the head that fits into her palm. She stares at her son, and feeling her presence, he opens his eyes, light and blue as the morning sky.
11
Nightingale
HER SON AND Tantalus: there is nothing else.
Outside, spring awakens. The plain grows greener, and the trees share the first buds, soft and frail. The days are longer, the sun warmer. Snakes and lizards come out of their holes, resting and sunbathing on the dark brown earth. The midwives gut the fish and hang them up outside to dry while servants wash skins and tunics in the river.
Inside, the baby cries and screams, screams and cries. He never sleeps. Clytemnestra complains and Tantalus laughs.
“What did you expect?” He smiles. “You never sleep.” He is making a sling to carry the baby, his warm, long fingers expertly tying together pieces of leather. How handsome her husband is. She rests her head on his shoulder, the baby in her lap.
Clytemnestra has noticed that the baby sleeps better with his father. She sings and hums to him, she gives him Leda’s soothing herbs, but the baby stares back at her, delighted and a bit defiant, his tiny hands reaching for her face. And when he gets tired, he cries. But when Tantalus rocks him, when he kisses him, he relaxes.
The elders welcomed him soon after he was born. They took him naked as he was and brought him to Mount Taygetus. The baby kicked and wailed but he was safe. Safe because he was healthy. The elders checked him and found him perfect, strong.
She walks for hours, carrying him in her arms. He is a curious child. She shows him flowers, takes each petal and holds it to his face. Crocuses, laurel, lilies, anemones. She tells him stories about them. The Phoenician princess Europa was lured into Zeus’s arms when he breathed a crocus from his mouth; the nymph Daphne turned into a laurel tree to hide from Apollo, who desired her; the goddess Persephone was abducted by Hades, king of the underworld, while picking lilies in a meadow. The baby likes the anemones most, so Clytemnestra tells him of Adonis slain by a boar and Aphrodite who loved him, remembering when she and Tantalus spoke of the myth on their first night together.
Leda loves the baby very much. She takes him in her arms when Clytemnestra is too tired and lets him play with her earrings, shiny miracles in his eyes. She becomes the woman she was when Phoebe and Philonoe were born, when she would spend her days singing and talking to them, their small heads in her hands. It is a joy for Clytemnestra to see her mother like this, to see the softness behind the strength, the eyes shining with purpose.
When Timandra touches the baby’s feet, Leda whispers, “Be careful. Babies are fragile.”
When Clytemnestra has fed him, Leda tucks him in a blanket and traces his tiny features with her finger: eyes, nose, lips, ears.
Tantalus starts planning their trip to Maeonia. He sends a messenger to the port to carry the news to the other side of the Aegean Sea. An heir is born and the king is ready to return, the queen at his side.
*
She is sitting in a corner of the town square, lulling the baby under the shade of an oak. She has escaped the dining hall in an effort to avoid Agamemnon and Menelaus; she doesn’t like the way they glance at the baby, with a mixture of coldness and distaste. Sometimes it looks almost like pity.
“We are leaving soon,” she tells him, and he opens his eyes wide, smiling. “We are going to your father’s land.”
It is quiet here. Two young women are passing, jugs filled with water on their shoulders, a dog following them, licking their ankles. A man is gathering baskets of olives and onions outside his door. The smells dance in the air, filling the square, and a child peeps out a window, a hungry look on his face.
Clytemnestra lifts her eyes. Helen is walking toward the square, stepping slowly in her direction as if she’s nervous to approach her. When she is close enough, she pulls her mantle back and comes under the tree. Silence stretches between them until the baby coos, and Helen smiles. “He looks like you,” she says.
“He reminds me of his father.”
“He has Tantalus’s eyes and hair,” Helen concedes, “but the way he looks around, that is you.”
Clytemnestra savors the warmth of her sister’s words, like a bite of a sweet apple. Across the square, the man counts the olives in his basket, and a boy comes to sit on the ground next to him in the warm sunlight. On the roof of the house, two girls are singing, playing with mud.
“I talked to Mother,” Helen says, looking at the girls. “She told me she kept my father a secret so that Tyndareus wouldn’t send me away.”
“I am glad you spoke to her,” Clytemnestra says. She is reminded of Castor’s words when they were little. When the tide recedes and leaves something on the sand, one mustn’t worry. Sooner or later, the water will climb again and take it back.
“You protected me,” Helen says.
“What else have I been doing since you were born?” Clytemnestra jokes. Helen laughs, and the girls on the roof stop singing and look at them, curious. Clytemnestra wants to talk to her sister about the life that awaits her in Maeonia, yet she can see a small shadow on Helen’s face.
“I was just . . .” Helen stops, searching for the right words. “We never held secrets between us before.”
Clytemnestra smiles. “Everyone has secrets.”
Helen blushes, looks down. “I kept no secrets from you.”
For a moment, Clytemnestra sees Helen as a child, blond hair falling around her shoulders, a cascade of gold, tiny hands stained with apricot juice. “We’re like two halves of an apricot,” Helen had told her, holding the fruit out for her. “See? We share the kernel, and in it we hide our secrets.”
Clytemnestra rests her head against the oak, the baby’s skin soft under her hand. As a child, she refused to see it, but now it is as clear as a mountain stream: they will never be the same. And maybe that is not such a shameful thing.
*
“What should we call him?” Tantalus asks. They are sitting on the terrace, the baby resting on Clytemnestra’s thighs, the sun gentle on their skin. Birds scatter in the sky, and the baby follows them with his big eyes.
“Let us wait until we get to Maeonia,” she says. “Let us wait until he meets his home.”
A tiny brown nightingale flies to the terrace and starts singing. The baby giggles. He is staring at the little bird.
“That is a nightingale,” she whispers to him. “He sings for all those who do not have a voice.”
The baby smiles and reaches out to it, but the nightingale flies away.
*
In the night, there is a storm. They hear thunder and raindrops beating on the roof. Clytemnestra holds the baby close to her heart, though he isn’t crying. He listens, eyes wide open, staring at the darkness of the sky.
“Is something troubling you?” Tantalus asks her.
She turns to him, rocking the baby gently. “Yes.”
“Are you going to tell me?”
She waits for a roll of thunder to pass, then says, “I wish I could see my brothers one more time before leaving.”
“They will come to visit us. And you will be able to come back here.”
There is a knock on the door, so quiet she almost thinks she has imagined it.