Leda’s face is hard, her hands clasped tight. She stares at the fire as if it were holding her fears and nightmares. Her eyes were already red and her breath had smelled like spiced wine when Clytemnestra arrived. When Leda stood and stumbled out of her chair, Phoebe held her and straightened her.
Timandra stands next to her as the fire heats her face and dances in her eyes. On the way to Sparta, she told Clytemnestra what Tyndareus had done to her when he discovered she was still with Chrysanthe before marrying Echemus. The priestess had found them in the stables, and despite Chrysanthe’s desperate pleading, she had gone to Tyndareus. But Chrysanthe wasn’t punished. The king had forced Timandra to fight three other Spartiates in the gymnasium until they hurt her. One sank a spear in the soft place where the neck meets the shoulder, and Timandra almost bled to death before Chrysanthe’s and Tyndareus’s eyes. But then, before he died, he told her that his children were his greatest pride and that he didn’t know how to show them love without violence. Timandra had pitied him.
You hurt me, Father, Clytemnestra thinks. And I don’t know how to forgive. She looks to her right, where her brothers are standing. Castor gazes back at her. The horse-breaker, their people call him now. His brown curls have grown longer, his face more sunken. The journey to Colchis has wearied him, changed him.
Helen stands with her back straight, her golden hair dancing in the wind, her arms around her child, Hermione, though she is old enough to stand. She watches the pyre until every last ember has gone out. When the priest collects the ashes to place them in a gilded urn, people start leaving, their faces still warm from the blaze, their hair smelling of ash. The torches they were holding are left on the ground, and the land seems painted with a hundred strokes of fire.
Seeing her father walk back to the palace, little Hermione leaves her mother, running to catch up with him. Helen shifts. When she turns to her right, she sees that everyone has gone except Clytemnestra. They look at each other. Sorrow is written on their faces, but they know better than to speak of it. So they take each other’s hands and walk away, leaving their father behind.
*
They take the path that leads to the mountain. Castor and Polydeuces follow. There will be a banquet in the dining hall soon, but none of them care. Menelaus will entertain the people: it is what he does best.
They walk for a while in the shadowy darkness, roots tugging at their feet, red and blue berries growing along the way. Above them, the sky is filling with stars. Polydeuces’s hand clasps Helen’s arm, guiding her as though she doesn’t know the path, though she and Clytemnestra always came here as children. Still, Helen doesn’t draw away. When she came to the palace last night, Clytemnestra found her brother in her sister’s room, his lips close to her neck as she plaited her hair. Clytemnestra didn’t ask or want to know. In her mind, Helen and Polydeuces were always as close as twins, as intimate as lovers. Once, when they were little, Helen had told Clytemnestra that her brother tried to kiss her.
“I told him no,” she said, confusion in her eyes. “Because it’s wrong, isn’t it?”
“I think it is,” Clytemnestra said. They never spoke of it again.
As they walk higher and higher on the trail, the air grows colder and the darkness thicker. Castor stops in a small clearing, the ground mossy, and starts to collect wood. Helen sits on a patch of leaves. Their breath is visible in the chilled air, and their hands are stinging with cold.
“He wanted to see you before he died,” Helen says, her bright eyes on Clytemnestra. “He said, ‘I wish my daughter was here.’”
“You don’t know he was talking about me.”
“All his other daughters were there.”
Castor lights the fire and flames rise. The heat on their faces is welcome, and they move closer to it.
“What he did to you was unforgivable,” Polydeuces says, “but he is still your father. Loyalty is a difficult thing.”
“It shouldn’t be,” Clytemnestra replies.
“We should have been here to protect you,” Castor says. The pain in his face strikes her, and she wishes she could wipe it away. She has thought about this often, and every time, it has hurt her, made her choke. If her brothers had been here fifteen years ago, would they really have protected her? What if they had taken Tyndareus’s side and thought an alliance with the Atreidai was the most fruitful thing?
“You gained your fame in Colchis. It was worth it,” she says.
“Colchis was a bloodbath,” Polydeuces says. It is what he has repeated since they came home, the words sharp and cutting on his lips.
“But you survived,” Helen whispers.
“The gods protected us,” Polydeuces replies. Castor scoffs but his brother ignores him. Clytemnestra thinks he will keep silent now, as he always does after mentioning Colchis, but Polydeuces goes on. Maybe it is the darkness—it makes them feel hidden from everything else.
“Ae?tes is a monster. He rules Colchis with terror. He enslaves every ship’s crew that dares come to his kingdom and tortures them with fire and chains. Slaves, warriors, women—he cares nothing for anyone. He just takes pleasure in tormenting them.”
“What about the fleece?” Clytemnestra asks. She has heard the songs that speak of Jason’s courage, how he managed to do what no man before him had done: kill the beast that guarded the fleece and snatch it away before Ae?tes could stop him.
“It was Medea,” Castor says. “Ae?tes’s witch daughter. She told Jason every trick to survive his father’s tasks, then took the fleece herself. She used drugs to put soldiers and animals to sleep and ran away with us when we left Colchis.”
“How is she?” Helen asks. “People say she is beautiful.”
Polydeuces shakes his head. “Not in the same way as you. She has hair like spun gold and skin as white as a goddess’s. But her features are like those of a hungry lion.”
“Our people call her mad,” Helen says. “They say she murdered Jason’s new wife with a dress steeped in poison.”
“She grew up in a place of darkness, with no mother and a tyrant as a father,” Castor explains. “When we were leaving Colchis, she begged Jason to take her with us. Who knows what her own father did to her while she was growing up?”
“She saved your lives,” Clytemnestra says.
“She did.” Polydeuces nods. “She gave up everything for Jason. And in return, he left her for another woman.” He is polishing his hunting blade by the fire, his blond hair falling around his head.
Stories of the journey spill from them like snow-melted streams. The women they met on the island of Lemnos, whose husbands were all dead. Bear Mountain, where they had slaughtered all the locals after they tried to attack them. The land where Polydeuces defeated a savage king in a boxing contest. The island of Dia, where they found shipwrecked men, naked and starving, their bones jutting out of their skin. And finally Colchis, where Medea fell in love with Jason and helped them escape from Ae?tes.
Sparks fly around them, and so do Castor’s words, filling the air with memories. When silence comes once more, they lie down, staring at the sky, thinking about each other’s scars.
“Sometimes I see everything,” Castor says. “All those memories lined up in my head when I close my eyes.”
I do too, Clytemnestra thinks. Every single night.
“What do you do when you see them?” Helen asks. “How do you sleep?”
Castor turns his face to her. “Every day you try to forget, but at night, you dream of the past. This is what dreams are for. To make us remember what we were, to tie us down to our memories, whether we like it or not.”
The fire crackles. Clytemnestra takes Castor’s hand and looks back at the clear dark sky. Selene is the goddess of the moon and is said to have the power to stop bad dreams. Spartans call her “benevolent.” But her brother is right when he scoffs at the mention of gods. They are alone.