Odysseus was there, next to my husband; Menelaus on the other side. I did not recognise another face. My breath came in sharp gasps. I searched for Achilles, though I would not know him if I saw him. Against all evidence to the contrary, I searched for signs that this was indeed a wedding, that somehow this could be explained.
At the altar, Agamemnon drew forth a knife. The blade shone in the glow of the sunrise behind him.
I saw the growing realisation on my daughter’s face in the moment that she saw what he intended, and the fear leapt into her eyes. A shriek tore from my throat and reverberated through the still air.
He had her in a moment, and spun her around to face the army from behind the altar, his arms holding her fast against him. He must have smelled her hair, felt its softness against his chest. She looked at me, my daughter, from her father’s grip. In that paralysed moment where nothing moved, I still thought that it was not real, that this could not happen.
His arm was so fast. It was a blur of movement, a slash through the air against her neck, her soft and precious neck. Before she slumped across the grooved wood of the altar, I saw the blood streaming across that beautiful yellow dress, and for a second I thought how it would be ruined now, how the stain would never fade, no matter how hard it was scrubbed between stones down at the river. The river, back in Mycenae, where Iphigenia would never return after all.
I do not know what noise I made, only that the arm at my neck suddenly loosened. Although my legs gave way beneath my body, I hauled myself across the sand, towards the broken body of my child. I wanted only to hold her, to see life flicker in her eyes, although her blood was spilling down from the altar, across the wooden slats beneath, dripping dark on to the sand. The wood was rough beneath my fingers, splintering the flesh as I gripped it and pulled myself to my feet.
A swirl of wind whipped my hair across my face, plastered it to my streaming eyes. I heard the wind ripple across the water, the splash of waves all at once against the shore. The rumble through the crowd of realisation. Appreciation.
Iphigenia’s body slid from the wooden altar, thudding against the platform. I pushed my hair out of my face. The blood, the blood was everywhere, smeared across her drained skin, thickening in her hair, her hair that I had run through my fingers that morning.
He was walking away already. His cloak rippled out behind him in the new-sprung breeze. He had not spoken a word.
The army sailed almost immediately. Everything was ready; they must have had it all prepared before we even arrived at Aulis. As we had rattled along that hot and dusty track, they would have been loading the ships, anticipating a swift reward from the goddess in the form of a blessing of winds to blow them far away from the bloodstained sand.
A long time later, I would hear the bards sing of my daughter’s death, along with all the other stories they told of Troy. Often, they would say that at the very moment Agamemnon raised the knife, Artemis took pity on Iphigenia and swapped her for a deer. In this version of the story, my daughter lives on as a priestess and favourite of the goddess on an island somewhere. Crucially, in this telling, Agamemnon did nothing more than slaughter a simple animal. It’s poetic and pretty, and so very clean.
But I saw her body convulse in her father’s arms as he drew that blade across her throat. I held her, warm and bleeding and dead on the beach, whilst the sun climbed higher in the sky and the winds whipped up around us. I remember how the crimson-streaked saffron fabric fluttered around her ankles, and how I stared for so long at her face, not believing that her eyes would not open again and that she would not look at me and call me mother and kiss me.
How long I might have sat there, my child cradled in my lap, I do not know. How many hours had I sat pinned by her soft little weight when she was a baby? On those nights when her eyes had fluttered closed at last and I had not dared to put her down lest she wake, so had stayed there, in my chair, charting the passage of the moon through the sky and listening to her breathe. I felt my own chest rise and fall, here on the bloodied beach, and I wondered how it continued, how my heart still beat in my chest when this had happened.
In a daze, I watched them come. The women. We had seen only men since we had arrived at Aulis, but now the women walked across the beach towards me. Women from the village perhaps, women who had tended to the soldiers whilst they had camped here. I did not know or ask. Somehow, women always came after a death. In the past, I had been among them myself, tended to a stricken mother, gently loosened her hold on the corpse she cradled. Plagues, poxes or accident; it was not an uncommon thing to lose a child. I felt the soothing touch of gentle hands, heard the murmurs, the words I had probably said myself to another mother, in another life. When they tried to lift me to my feet, I resisted at first, but they were saying the baby, the baby, and at last I realised they were not talking about Iphigenia. They wanted me to come to the shade, to drink some water for the sake of the baby in my womb. Iphigenia’s head was resting in my lap, and I laid her down on the rough wood as tenderly as if it had been her crib, as though I feared to wake her. Then I let them pull me up. It seemed impossible that the waves still lapped at the sand, that my feet could take a step and then another. Whilst two of them helped me along, others knelt around my daughter’s body. She was so slight, so small, that they could lift her with ease, but I was glad even in my shattered mind that they touched her with such care, as if she was made of glass.