“No.”
“Then why did you protect her?”
He slams his wounded hand on his knee. The light in his face is frightening. “Why do you care so much about her?”
She walks to him, takes a deep breath. “Those men called you weak, cursed, a coward. You walk away from their cruel words, yet you cut them when they try to take a slave girl.”
He springs up and grabs her arm. His hand on her is a shock to them both. He flinches as if she hit him and steps back from her. Her skin feels tight, burning where he touched her.
“You shouldn’t be so scared,” she says quietly.
“You shouldn’t be so careless.”
He is right, she shouldn’t, but she doesn’t care. She moves forward and her lips brush his. He tastes like salt. A moment passes, the span of a breath. When she looks up, he is still, barely breathing.
Say something. But he is staring at her. She doesn’t like that look: she doesn’t understand it. Slowly, she takes a few steps back.
Well then, she thinks as she walks away, I have made the first move. Now he can either strike back or leave this place once and for all.
*
Aegisthus doesn’t come for dinner. After platters and cups have been emptied, she waits while her family walks out of the hall, the house dogs licking her hands. Leon lingers, but she asks him to go and rest. The smoke in the hall is suffocating. The weapons on the wall look grotesque, like hungry vultures dropped from the sky. She stands, agitated.
The painted walls seem to sway. The windows spill the light of the moon, white and cold.
She doesn’t see the shadow that lurks in front of her bedroom door. When he grabs her arm, she tries to hit him, but he has already covered her mouth with one hand and is holding both of her arms with the other. Together, they move into the torchlight. Aegisthus’s eyes look dark, two pieces of dirty ice. Slowly, he lets his hand drop to let her speak.
“Have you come to kill me?” she asks calmly.
She sees the struggle on his face, raw on his bare skin. Her fearlessness confuses him. His grip on her arms becomes tighter, but he doesn’t speak.
“I could have you murdered for coming in here,” she says.
“And yet you won’t.”
“No. So what will you do?”
He lets her go. The strength of his desire is plain on his face, and so is his fear. She doesn’t like waiting, so she steps into her bedroom, unties her tunic, and lets it fall onto the floor. He follows her, barely breathing, and when his hands touch her again, she shivers for the cold.
They are two knives slicing each other, cutting at the bone and thus giving each other pleasure.
Part V
She is like a lioness,
she stands high on her hind legs,
she mates with the wolf,
when her noble lion is missing.
—Aeschylus, Agamemnon 1258–9
30
Loyalty
SO WHAT WILL you do?
She asked the question and watched the answer forming on his face. Still, she didn’t know what would happen afterward. She expected wariness, fear, violence, but there is nothing of the sort.
His love for her comes like a flood. Sudden, fierce, overpowering. She should have predicted it: to someone who has spent his entire life unloved, unwelcome, it must feel like a miracle to have someone like her beside him.
When he lies in her bed at night, she can feel him watching. Maybe he thinks that if he looks away, she will disappear. She touches his scars, feels the texture under her fingers, as if to remind him, I am here. He never flinches. Pain is a constant for him, a second skin he cannot shed.
He likes to hear her talk, of her memories of Sparta, of her brothers and sisters. She carefully avoids speaking of her life in Mycenae, because she sees that it makes him angry, as though her family here were something he didn’t want. Or maybe he simply likes to pretend that she is all his, no one else’s. But in truth, she likes that he does that. Seeing the look on his face when she tells him something that makes him feel understood is like watching a new flower bloom among rocks.
“You remember when you wanted to know how many dead men I had seen?” he asks her one night. The torches have gone out, and their faces in the darkness are like clouds.
“Yes.”
“You didn’t ask about the women.”
She is lying down, listening to the rain outside. The sound usually soothes her, helps her drift into sleep, but there is no rest to be found with Aegisthus. Only the ever-present longing for more words, more pleasure, more secrets.
“How many have you seen dead?” he asks.
She lifts herself up, pours herself a cup of wine. She knows he wants to hear about Iphigenia, but that is no memory to share with him or anyone else.
“I didn’t see my mother die,” she says, “though I heard it was a pitiful scene.”
“How so?”
“She died in her bed, with a cup of wine in her hand.”
“That sounds peaceful.”
“Not for her. Leda was fierce when I was a child.” She touches the gems embossed on her cup, a gesture her mother used to make before she sipped. “She once told me that I was unhappy, but I think she was talking about herself.”
It is the first time she has spoken of her mother’s death. She fears Aegisthus will ask her if she is unhappy, so she keeps talking.
“She believed in gods too much. She told me they were everywhere, in caves and forests, on roofs and in every village alley, so I would always look for them as a child, but I never found them. I thought there was something wrong with me. I thought, if I can’t hear them whisper, then maybe they don’t like me.”
“Atreus would say something similar. Though his gods weren’t exactly merciful beings who whispered to children.”
She scoffs. “Gods are never merciful. Even in the stories we heard growing up, how much mercy did the gods show? Cronus devours his children to avoid being overthrown by them. Zeus transforms into eagles, swans, and serpents to rape young virgins. Apollo fires his arrows to bring the plague to mortals whenever he is angry.”
Aegisthus stands and pours wine for himself. The sheepskin falls off his naked body but he doesn’t shiver. “How were your mother’s gods, then?” he asks.
“Simpler, less jealous and vengeful. Less like us. She loved them and they loved her back, or so she said.”
The rough skin of his side brushes against her. She presses herself closer to him, her warmth against his coldness.
“My mother didn’t know such gods,” he says. “No one ever showed her any mercy, up until her death.” The crack in his voice makes her shiver. “I have seen hundreds of men die in the worst possible ways, yet Pelopia’s death I’ll never forget.”
“She was your mother.”
“I barely knew her. She left me when I was born, so she was no mother to me.”
“You were there when she died?”
“We were all there, in the megaron. Thyestes had been found near Delphi and brought here with force. Atreus threw him in a cell, then sent me to kill him.”
“Why you?”
“He thought I was weak. He was always looking for ways to test me. I went to the dungeon and saw my father for the first time. See how cruel the Fates are? I met him moments before I was meant to kill him. I didn’t know who he was, but when I unsheathed my sword, Thyestes said it was his. That is how I knew he might be my father. The only thing my mother had left me was the sword of her rapist, whom she didn’t know either, because his face was concealed when he took her. His sword was all she had. So I didn’t kill Thyestes. I went to Agamemnon and asked him to find my mother, and I told Atreus that I would let Thyestes live only for a while. I needed to know if he was my real father. That was my mistake.”