“But who will rule Mycenae?”
“Our family will.” This is what she has always wanted for her children—to take back control of Mycenae and Sparta, to establish a dynasty much more powerful than the Atreidai’s. With her son in Sparta, Electra and Chrysothemis soon ready for marriage, she will build a web of alliances throughout their land. But first, Menelaus and Agamemnon must come back from the war.
Orestes is looking at her. “Yes, but who?” When she doesn’t speak, he adds, “Aegisthus is not our family.”
She leans against the wall. “He isn’t.”
“If he rules with you, the people will judge you, condemn you.”
It is her own fault, she thinks. She has trained her son too well, taught him to be distrustful. “You spend too much time worrying about the people,” she says. “I’ve told you many times that the people do not rule. We do.”
“Perhaps you spend too little time thinking about it, Mother.” He doesn’t mean it as an insult, simply as an observation.
She scoffs. “I am a woman with a crown. Of course I think about the others. I have to, or the crown would be on someone else’s head.”
He looks at the blacksmiths working the bronze, sparks flying across the room. His profile is dazzling, his skin like ripe olives and his eyes dark like charred wood. Like his father’s, Clytemnestra thinks bitterly.
“I will marry Hermione,” Orestes says.
*
When she goes to her room, Aegisthus isn’t there. It is already dark, so she walks to the guests’ quarters, knocking on his door before she enters. He is eating cheese and pears by the window, his daggers on the table next to him. She has been thinking about what to say to him, whether a lie or the truth. Lies have come more easily to her lately, but not with Aegisthus.
Without turning to her, he says, “Have you decided I’m not worthy of your trust any longer?”
“No one is,” she says simply.
“So what now? Will you throw me into prison, like the elders suggested? Or kill me before your husband comes home?”
He is like a child sometimes, she thinks, making such a scene just because she told him to go back to the palace. “If I wanted to kill you, you’d already be dead.”
He turns to her. Under the torchlight, his eyes are the color of ash. “Do you know what the people in the villages say about you?”
“Something horrible, I imagine.”
“They say that you are mad with ambition and distrust. That you execute people who aren’t loyal.”
“I can’t argue with that. What do they say of Agamemnon?”
“That he is a great leader.”
“Ah, of course.” She goes to him, takes one of his daggers, and presses her finger against the blade. “If you heard such stories about me, why did you come back here?”
“To kill you.” He isn’t looking at her. She sees the tension in his shoulders, the white knuckles around the wine cup.
At last, the truth.
“And yet here I stand,” she says. She is surprised to hear the coldness in her own voice, the indifference.
“Yes,” he says, so quietly it feels like a breath of wind.
“You have just told me you wanted to murder me, yet you expect me to trust you with secret information.”
He puts down his cup, softness on his scarred face. “The first time I heard of you was when Agamemnon brought you here. I was living in the woods then. One night as I slept in a shepherd’s barn, I heard him say that the king of Mycenae was marrying a Spartan woman. He said you had already been married, that Agamemnon killed your husband and your infant son so he could have you for himself.”
It is the first time he speaks of this in front of her. Her body feels numb. “I didn’t know shepherds enjoyed that sort of talk.”
He shrugs. “Everyone spoke about you then. The sister of the most beautiful woman in our lands. A Spartan princess marrying a powerful king. I thought you must be either a beaten dog, some unlucky girl doomed to live a life of unhappiness, or a ruthless woman who shared Agamemnon’s cruelty.
“Then I heard that my cousin was off to Troy to fight a war for a woman who couldn’t stay in her husband’s bed. I laughed then, for Menelaus was always the one women never refused, not even when we were boys. It must have been hard for him to see his beautiful wife leave him for the enemy.
“I thought this was my chance to retake the city, to make those loyal to the Atreidai pay once and for all. But then I heard that you were ruling Mycenae, far better and more efficiently than Agamemnon, and that you were both loved and feared by many. I thought I would come here and see for myself. If you were indeed to be loved, I would ask for mercy. If not, I would murder you and make my cousin pay.”
“You were wrong about that. Agamemnon cares only about himself. I am just a tool for him to show others what a strong woman he has managed to bend.”
“I was wrong about many things,” he says.
She puts the dagger down. “Before I executed him, Polydamas said that if a man sleeps with a queen, he will soon expect to be king.”
“You make a far better ruler than I ever would.”
“What do you want then, if you don’t wish to kill me?”
“I want to be where you are. To advise you and protect you.”
Aileen was right then: she will never get rid of him. Does she want to? His eyes are huge and cold.
“I have fought for the respect of my people,” she says. “And your position here threatens my work. They might see you as a traitor, but you are a man, and in their eyes, a man will always be better suited to rule.”
“I have always wanted the throne only to take it from someone else. That doesn’t make me a good king.”
She takes his face in her hands, feels the scars under her fingers. He doesn’t relax at her touch but gazes at her with a fervency that could make even the sky burn. This is a man ready to kill for her, she can see that.
“Troy will fall soon,” she says. “And Agamemnon will come back.”
“How do you know this?”
“The scout told me today.”
His face is barren. “You want to send me away, then.”
“No.” She steps away from him, takes his cup to sip some wine. He looks at her, waiting. Inside her, the familiar anger, raw, relentless.
“I used to tell the story of Artemis and Actaeon to my daughters when they were little. Iphigenia loved it, just like my sister used to love it. They felt safer hearing it, I think. Here is a beautiful woman who isn’t at the mercy of men, a woman who takes revenge. Beauty can be a curse sometimes. It blinds men, makes them do horrible things.
“When Iphigenia was a child, merchants and envoys used to call her ‘goddess.’ They gazed at her with lust, and I would have clawed their eyes out if I could. But she was safe next to me. No one dared to touch her.
“When she was fifteen, a boy tried to rape her. She hit his face with a rock, and when the boy’s father demanded justice, I didn’t give it to him. He was lucky to be left alive.
“When she was murdered . . .” She stops, bites her lip until she can taste blood. “When my daughter was murdered, I spent days obsessing over how she’d be remembered. Gentle, lovely, an innocent virgin sacrificed . . . That is how bards sing of her. She was nothing like that. She was fierce, defiant. She wanted everything from this world. She was like the sun, and my husband took her from me. And for what? He didn’t kill her for vengeance, ambition, or greed. He killed her for a puff of wind.
“I’ve heard the elders talk about that wretched day as if their king had a choice to make. ‘What could he do? Obey the will of the gods or desert the fleet? Pain both ways,’ they said. ‘An impossible choice,’ they said. But that is not the truth. The truth is my daughter died for nothing.”
She puts the cup aside and looks Aegisthus in the eye. He is still, his face dark with pain. She cradles each word carefully in her mind before speaking. “You speak of your own thirst for vengeance, but what about me? What about my revenge?”