*
The winter sun is long gone beyond the mountains, and now the sky is the color of the sea at night. She walks the streets of the citadel, the darkness soothing her. Dogs rest in every corner, looking up at her as she passes, and a few men are drinking in the artists’ quarter, huddled around a small fire. If she lived in a palace by the sea, she would go for a swim now, scrub herself in the salted water until her skin was raw. But here, in the narrow streets of Mycenae, all she wants to do is set something on fire. A tree, one of those in the main streets, or a granary: the flames would build and build until the fire lapped the sky. Just the thought of it makes her drunk with power.
“You have so much rage inside you,” Helen had told her once. “It is like one of those fires for the dead that look like they will never burn out.”
“And you don’t?” Clytemnestra asked. “Don’t you ever feel rage?”
Helen shrugged. They were ten, and a helot was ministering to some wounds on their shoulders, a courtesy of the priestess’s whip. Helen winced as the servant cleaned hers, but she kept silent. She never talked about her own anger, yet Clytemnestra knew it was there, hidden under the layers of goodness. She would see it at dinner sometimes, when the men’s hands found their way under the servants’ tunics as they passed to pour their wine. Helen would look at them as they asked for more mutton, forcing the girls to come back, and Clytemnestra would see a flicker of rage in her sister’s eyes. It was always the small things that made Helen angry. A wrong comment, a sharp pinch, an unsaid thought. Clytemnestra, on the other hand, kept her anger for the whipping and the fighting, for the beatings and the executions. If Clytemnestra’s rage was a fire, Helen’s was a lamp, warm and thin in the darkness but burning if you came too close.
And now Menelaus has made her sister angry, and she has left. Did Helen leave before Castor was killed? How could she leave Polydeuces alone and little Hermione behind? She tries to picture her sister on a ship to Troy with Paris, but the thought slips away like sea breeze.
Some drunken men stumble in the street, walking back to their houses. The trees are one with the sky, and the last sounds of the night are dying out.
“Do goddesses sleep?” Castor asked her once.
She chuckled. “I don’t think so. Why?”
“I want to catch one. I want to see what they look like.”
“And then what will you do?”
“Seduce her, of course,” he said, and they laughed. So that night, when everyone slept, they sneaked outside and walked to the river. There they waited and waited for Artemis to appear until Clytemnestra fell asleep on Castor’s shoulder. Artemis never came, and for years after, Castor would make fun of that night spent together shivering, wishing to see a goddess who wouldn’t pay them any attention.
Clytemnestra feels her heart clench.
He’s gone. He’s dead and now you must live with that.
*
In front of the door that leads to the gynaeceum, Calchas is waiting for her. His head looks like a crumpled, sickly leaf in the torchlight. She has the urge to walk past him but instead she asks, “Have you come to give me the news of someone else’s death?”
“No,” he says. “Your remaining brother and sisters will live for a long time.”
“That is good to hear.”
He tilts his head as if to study her better. “Do I unnerve you?”
“I am not easily unnerved.”
“I thought so. Yet you don’t respect me. You should be careful with that. Disrespecting me means disrespecting the gods.”
She has never heard such a sweet voice speak such menacing words. It is like drinking mulled wine, savoring it on the tongue before realizing it is poisoned.
“We each serve the gods in our own ways. You kill a sheep and tear open its belly to look at the liver. I rule a city and its people.”
“Your husband rules.”
“We both do. I am sure he would agree with me.”
Calchas sighs. The sound is a hiss. “Power is strange. All men want it, but few achieve it.”
“I am sure you have something to say about the gods now.”
“The gods have nothing to do with it.”
“Then what?” she asks. “Who gets it and who doesn’t?”
The light casts moving shadows on his scarred face. One moment, he looks like an ordinary man; the next, he seems monstrous.
“If you ask the people of Mycenae who rules their city,” he asks, “what do they say?”
“King Agamemnon,” she replies.
“And yet you say you rule the city with your husband.”
“There is the truth, and then there is the lie that keeps a kingdom together.”
Calchas’s mouth twists into a smile. “Yes. And so it is with power. Some men hold it in the open, like a sword. Others hide it in the shadows, like a small dagger. But what matters is that the people believe someone has it and wields it.”
Their shadows on the floor are lengthening, two rivers of blackness merging where they meet the wall.
“You still haven’t said who acquires power among all the people,” she says.
“Ah, that depends. Some people are born into the right families. Others understand that fear can be a key that opens many doors.”
“Then there are the ones like you. You see the people’s thirst for knowledge, their fear of the gods, and you find ways to quench it.”
“Sometimes the truth of the gods is hard to accept. But their will always prevails. There is power in acknowledging that.”
The first lights of dawn gleam out of the windows and she shivers. There is no colder moment than the early morning in winter.
“I will sleep now, seer.”
She tries to move past him but he catches her arm, his palm sweaty against her skin.
“You have a part to play in the war to come,” he says.
She shakes him off, resisting the urge to wipe the arm where he touched her. When he turns to leave, his shadow follows him, like a dog.
*
Over the next few weeks, the palace sings with the sounds of war. Chariots are fixed and readied, men shout orders, horses are harnessed in the stables.
Clytemnestra makes her way outside, past envoys and men building shields with bull hide and bronze plates. The frost is melting; spring is coming. The sky is a warm white like the top layer of milk, the cream. Down by the armory, Leon is teaching some boys to shoot. Earlier, Clytemnestra asked him if he had to leave too, and he shook his head. “I am your guard and protector,” he said. “I stay where you and your children are.” The words filled her with calm, though she didn’t show it.
Agamemnon is standing under a large oak by the entrance of the palace, speaking with Calchas and two men-at-arms. He is dressed in bronze, his boar’s-tusk helmet in his hand, and looks tired. When Clytemnestra walks to them, the men leave. She stares at Calchas as if inviting him to do the same, but the seer doesn’t move.
“We are gathering the biggest army the world has ever seen,” Agamemnon says.
“How many?” Clytemnestra asks.
“A hundred ships for the Mycenaeans and sixty for the Spartans. Forty more from Locris and Euboea each. Fifty from Athens. Idomeneus’s men told me eighty more will come from Crete.”
“Everyone who swore to protect Helen of Sparta will have to come,” Calchas says.
Clytemnestra freezes. She had almost forgotten the oath. Thirty princes and kings or more—she can’t even remember, it feels so long ago—swearing allegiance to Sparta in the case of war. How could anyone predict that Helen’s marriage would cause such a thing? Odysseus did.
“So you have sent envoys to everyone who was there,” she says.
“Yes. And I have dispatched Odysseus and Diomedes to convince . . . any who need convincing.”
“How many ships has Diomedes?”
“Eighty. And he claims that the men of Argos are so well trained they fight twice as hard as any Greek soldier.”
“And Odysseus?”
“Just twelve. But I don’t need his men. I need his mind.”
“You once said you didn’t like him.”