“She will leave you. You know this.”
Clytemnestra doesn’t wait for his answer. She comes out of the shadows, and Leon looks at her, surprised. Electra covers her ringed hand with the other instinctively, as if her mother might take away the jewels.
“Leave us,” Clytemnestra tells Leon. He obeys, and as soon as he is gone, a cold breeze is blowing, bringing raindrops as small as grains of sand. They scatter on Electra’s face, glistening. She doesn’t wipe them away.
“You are wearing your sister’s rings,” Clytemnestra says.
“I polished them first.”
“They suit you. You have the same long fingers.” It isn’t easy to say, but she knows Electra needs this. Her daughter opens her eyes wide, then offers her hand. Clytemnestra takes it, touching the precious stones—onyx, amethyst, lapis lazuli.
“Aegisthus told me of your talk,” Clytemnestra says.
“I thought he would,” Electra replies.
“Did you find what you were looking for?”
“I can’t say I did.”
“You should have asked differently, more directly.”
Electra surprises her by saying, “I agree.”
“Why does he interest you so?” She knows the answer to her question but she wants to hear Electra say it. Here is a riddle her daughter can’t solve, so she becomes stubborn.
But Electra says, “Broken people fascinate me.”
Thunder rumbles loudly, and rain is flooding the courtyard now. Electra hurries under the portico, hair plastered to her face. Clytemnestra stays where she is: she enjoys watching everything dissolve in the rain, the outlines of objects and people fading.
“Mother, you are soaked,” Electra calls, but Clytemnestra ignores her. It’s as if her daughter’s words have suddenly cleared a murky river and now she is looking at her mirrored feelings. Broken people fascinate me.
Is that why she is drawn to Aegisthus? There are no answers in the pouring rain.
*
Dawn comes, bright and quiet, her rose-red fingers stroking the roofs of the citadel. Clytemnestra sneaks out of the palace, enjoying the thickness of the silence. There is nothing she likes more than being awake when the city sleeps. It gives her a sense of power, an illusion of control.
She creeps out through the back gate of the citadel, a warm shawl wrapped over her peplos. The road up the mountain is steep and muddy. Goats and sheep are bleating somewhere on the slopes, where the land is ripe with grapes. Above her, pine and oak trees thicken, casting long shadows on the ground.
She stops to rest by a small rock pool, the water so clear that it looks like a slice of sky. Though it is still autumn, the winter ice has already appeared on the mountains, covering the peaks with white sprinkles. She sits on the rock and touches her bare feet with her palms, warming them a little before plunging them into the freezing water of the pool. Her muscles scream but she keeps still, enjoying the pain.
“I didn’t expect to find anyone here.”
Her hand flies to her dagger. Aegisthus is standing by a tree, watching her. His hair is held back and the scars on his face are stark in the pale light. She takes her feet out of the cold water and puts down the dagger. “Were you following me?”
Maybe the elders were right and she has underestimated him. She empties her mind of the sudden fear: a man like Aegisthus can probably smell it, as a wolf would.
“I always come here,” he says. “I used to come here when Thyestes still ruled.”
“To do what?”
“I just stayed away from everyone else. The palace was different then from what it is now.”
“How so?”
“It was grayer. And bloodier.”
She doesn’t like his tone. He speaks as if she couldn’t understand, as if she grew up with nymphs, spending her time with combs and pretty dresses.
“How many dead men have you seen?” she asks.
He pauses, and displeasure grows on his face.
“I have seen hundreds,” she says. “In Sparta, the elders would take the criminals, and my father and brothers would drag them to the Ceadas. Then they pushed them off the cliff. Most were killed instantly. But others lived for a day or two, moaning, while the birds pecked their broken bodies until they bled to death or died of thirst.”
She wills herself to remember. An image of herself as a child, crouching among the bushes and hearing the men’s cries, comes to mind. There were other cries too, fainter, but they slip away, like shadows.
Aegisthus comes to sit on the rock beside her. The dagger lies between them, easy for either to reach.
“Atreus used to say that it takes only one to deliver a message,” he says. “So he would send his men into the woods whenever a group of envoys came and shoot them until only one remained. Then he would send back the envoy with the heads of the others in a sack. Agamemnon and Menelaus would take part in those hunts, but I couldn’t.” He must have been punished for it, though he doesn’t say.
“And how many men have you killed?” she asks.
He shrugs, and she watches the wind stir his hair.
“There was a boy I butchered once,” he says, staring at his hands. “When I had finished with him, his face looked like mud.” The water in the pool changes color as it reflects the sky. “How many times have you been whipped?” he asks.
It feels almost like a game now, comparing the scars inside them, waiting to see who crumbles first.
“Twenty. Or more. I can’t be sure. The priestess in Sparta hated me. She was worse with my sister, though. She would whip her whenever she could, yet Timandra would still find ways to make her angry. You?”
“Thyestes liked to flog his servants. He would do it until their backs were blood-soaked. He saw traitors everywhere. He was saturated with malice and mistrust, especially after his sons’ deaths.”
His other sons. He is good at avoiding the answers he doesn’t want to give, she considers. His words feel like smoke through her fingers.
“And Atreus?” She knows something of Agamemnon’s father already, because her husband told her. Atreus was strong and vengeful. He once killed a boar with his bare hands. He slept with a different servant every night, so the palace was filled with pregnant women.
“Atreus did far worse.” He stops there. They both know what Atreus did anyway. “No one was a match for my uncle’s cruelty,” Aegisthus adds. “No one but his wife.”
Clytemnestra frowns. “Aerope?” She doesn’t know much about her, except that her affair with Thyestes started the endless chain of violence and revenge between the brothers.
“It was said in the palace that whenever Aerope whispered in Atreus’s ear, ten men would die.”
“Was it true?”
“I never found out. I kept my distance from her, never talked to her unless she talked to me first. Once she told me that boys born with eyes as cold as mine should be skinned alive.”
“Maybe Atreus and Thyestes loved her because she was vicious.”
“I believe so. Whatever poison they had in them, she had it too.”
They keep silent for a while, their unspoken words like fish that can’t be caught. Questions slip into her mind, tickling her like water drops. How many women have you been with? How many servants? Do you know pleasure or only pain?
When she turns to him, he is staring at her, motionless. He has the stillness of animals about him. She wants to lean forward and trace the scar on his cheekbone. The desire is so strong that she can almost feel it under her finger—it is like a crumpled leaf.
“My queen,” he says. Nothing else. The morning sun falls on his olive skin, makes his eyes glisten like snow in the sunlight.
She is breathless, and she can’t bear it. She picks up her dagger and walks away.
29
Lovers
NO MORE FEAR, she decides. No more surprises. It is her turn to follow.