His fingers tighten against the table.
“You say you want to be with me and protect me,” she says. She feels a surge of emotion inside her, anticipation and exposure. “Then you will stay in the palace when my husband comes back from the war. You will hide as I welcome him and his soldiers. Then you will help me murder the man responsible for my daughter’s death.”
32
Friends and Foes
THE TREES BLOSSOM, the branches heavy with cascades of white and purple flowers. The sky grows lighter, the days longer. Yet no news of Troy arrives at the citadel.
Clytemnestra is restless. She doesn’t sleep at night, and in the mornings, her eyes are swollen and her head hurts. As she hears the people’s requests in the megaron, she often stares out the windows, trying to glimpse a fire lighting up the mountains. But each day, the horizon is the same, the valley bright and warm under a cloudless sky.
Orestes is fidgety too. At night, more and more servant girls visit his chamber, and Clytemnestra worries. She doesn’t want her son to end up like Menelaus, making his wife miserable because of his stupidity. There is also Aegisthus, who seems to trouble Orestes with his presence. Sometimes, at dinner, Clytemnestra catches her son staring at her lover with a challenging, playful face. It reminds her of Castor’s childish face before he made mischief.
“Isn’t Hermione too young to be married?” Chrysothemis asks one evening. They are dining all together, the torches spilling light, like flowers of gold. Chrysothemis is frowning as she plays with her food. Clytemnestra understands her worry: her daughter is her niece’s age, after all.
“For a Spartan, yes,” Clytemnestra says. “But in other Greek cities, girls marry young, as you know.”
“At least she’ll have someone experienced beside her,” Electra says, staring at her brother. Her eyes are as bright as polished silver. Orestes laughs, unbothered by his sister’s teasing.
“Do you and the warlords share your spoil now?” she insists, her voice carefully expressionless. “I’ve seen Kyros in an alley with one of the new servant girls.”
“I’d never go so low as sleeping with a woman who has been in Kyros’s bed,” Orestes replies with a smile.
“And yet you fight with him,” Electra says. “A man who once tried to rape your sisters. Do you think he is different now, a better man?”
“Electra,” Chrysothemis says quietly. Her voice fades in the silence, like the last light of the day.
Electra sips her wine, her lips the faintest shade of purple. “What do you think, Lord Aegisthus? Do people change?”
Aegisthus looks up, as if surprised to hear her talk to him. “Once greedy, always greedy,” he says quietly.
Orestes smirks. “Isn’t it curious that you would say so? Surely then you agree with me when I say once a traitor, always a traitor.”
Aegisthus slams his knife onto the table. The servants slide back into the shadows with heavy platters of food. Orestes remains in his chair, relaxed, though his eyes are shining, like burning coal.
“If you wish to quarrel, leave me,” Clytemnestra orders. “Taunt one another, tear each other apart, I do not care. I won’t listen to any of it.”
Her children keep seated, quiet as tombs. Aegisthus drinks his wine, his anger under control. Clytemnestra tries to focus on the food, her mind tired, her body drained. Once, it was Leon who soothed the tension with kind words, who shielded Clytemnestra from her children’s moods. Now he is gone, and in his place, there is Aegisthus, who struggles with his own suffering.
She feels she has woven a web too large and complicated, and now she is caught in it too.
*
Aileen wakes her, shaking her arm. Clytemnestra springs up, panting. She was dreaming about her sister, captured by the Greeks and executed on the walls of Troy. The nightmare still lingers on her skin.
“What is it?” Her eyes are dry, her limbs tired as if she has spent the night fighting.
“Orestes and Aegisthus are fighting in the practice yard.”
She slips into a peplos and hurries outside, followed by Aileen. She is running fast, and her servant is hard-pressed to keep up.
“Maybe they are just playing,” Aileen says tentatively, breathless, “but I have heard some men cry out, so I thought . . .”
They are not playing. Aegisthus doesn’t fight with anyone except her. Orestes must have challenged him, taken him by surprise. And though she knows her son is strong in close combat, Aegisthus can be dangerous.
They run down the stone steps that lead to the yard. They can hear the grunts and cries, the clashing of blade against blade. There is a small crowd around the dusty ground, young boys who were probably meant to train at this hour. They are staring at the two figures dancing in the yard, swinging their swords to strike each other down. Clytemnestra makes space between them and stops at the edge of the yard, Aileen’s breath on her neck.
Orestes is fighting with his newly forged sword, his curls bouncing on his sweaty forehead. In front of him, Aegisthus is using two daggers, and there is blood running down his face. He is moving like a wolf, his blades hitting her son’s sword like lashes.
“Look who’s here,” Orestes says, amused, seeing Clytemnestra out of the corner of his eyes. “Do you wish to join us, Mother?”
Aegisthus looks in her direction, and her son’s blade cuts him again on the temple. He doesn’t complain, but Clytemnestra sees the fire in his eyes, the fury. He would cut Orestes’s throat if she weren’t here. He leaps toward her son, slashing at his head. Orestes ducks under his blade and moves aside. When he stabs at him, Aegisthus bends and throws himself forward, dragging Orestes down with him. Their blades keep clashing on the sand, and when Aegisthus hits Orestes in the throat, he gives a choked laugh. Aegisthus moves back, his blades held forward as a warning.
Clytemnestra grabs a spear and throws it. It sinks into the ground between them, and the combatants turn to her. Orestes’s smile doesn’t fade, and she feels the need to slap him, to remind him that this is no game. The rage on Aegisthus’s face is gone, and in its place, fear. He’s afraid of her reaction.
“It is time for the boys to practice,” she says and walks away. The sky above her is empty, and she is reminded of when she ran on the sand to save her sister from Cynisca. An easier time, when friends and enemies were stark and clear and she thought she always knew what was right.
*
Aegisthus follows her inside the palace, a guilty dog desperate to earn back her love. When she turns to him under the torches near the dining hall, he stops abruptly, his muscles tense.
“He attacked me,” he says, his mouth a thin line. His eyes are wild. She has never seen him so angry. “He would have killed me if I hadn’t fought back.”
How many times had he endured this while he was growing up, young men taunting him, forcing him to fight back? It must be exhausting.
“My son would never do such a thing,” she says, walking inside the hall. He follows close behind. She can feel the air around them thickening with his fury.
“He is jealous of our relation,” he blurts out. “He is poisoning everyone in the citadel against me!”
“You are bleeding,” she says.
He touches the trickle of blood that runs down his temple and wipes it away carelessly. “You must send him away,” he says. “Or it will be the end for me when Agamemnon comes.”
“I won’t.”
“So you would choose him instead of me?”
“He is my son. There is no choice to be made.”
His face turns cold, his eyes bitter. “But you must make a choice. What happens if Orestes stays here when your husband comes home?” Your husband. He must really be angry to refer to Agamemnon so. “What happens when you put a blade in his heart? A son must avenge his father. It is the law.”