The camp had been left in ruins. Scorched circles of earth where fires had been, abandoned wooden stakes that had held up tents, whatever they considered trash just left upon the scrubby earth. They must have stripped it bare with ruthless efficiency in their eagerness to leave.
The tent in which Iphigenia and I had slept was left untouched. Perhaps no one wanted to go near it. It was there the women guided me now. They pulled out a chair and made me sit, splashed water across my blood-smeared skin and held a cup to my lips so I could drink. The pallet on which we had slept, where she had lain beside me, breathing soft and even through the night – they heaved it out, stripped it of its fabric and laid her body out upon it. But as they brought water and cloths, I pushed away their ministrations. This I would do myself.
I bathed her body alone. The cloths were soft, the water warm. I pulled away the ruined dress, her wedding dress. I kissed her clean skin. When she was small, she would shriek with laughter when I buried my face in the plump folds of her arms, the dimpled knees. Now her limbs were long and coltish. Now she lay cold and still, and I might as well have kissed the unresponsive earth.
They brought me scented oils to rub into her flesh. They helped me wind clean, white linen around her body. They brought me a wreath; a crown of flowers twisted and woven together so that I could rest it on her hair. A coin to place on her mouth. The last things I could do for her. The things I did for my child so she could rest, even whilst my body felt like it would split apart, that no one could hold this much pain inside them and not shatter.
When I stepped back to see her, stark and beautiful, framed by petals, draped in soft fabric, her hair ruffled gently by that taunting, endless breeze, I could not understand how the sun shone down from the sky, the same sun that had risen over her death.
I wanted to claw my way down into the damp earth and let it suffocate me. I wanted the dark to close over my face forever. But we had not let her go yet; it was not done. In Mycenae, great tombs were cut into the rocks to shelter the remains of the king and his family. Iphigenia would not lie there beside them. Her bones would not moulder along with the murderers whose line had led down so inexorably to Agamemnon. In Troy, the Greeks would burn their battle dead atop glorious pyres. My daughter, the first victim of their war, would burn before them.
Later, I would force myself to remember all the details of this day. I would pick them over, grimly intent on knowing it all. But the people of Aulis who came to help me, I never knew their names if they told me. My daughter’s body was burned to the songs of strangers; it was their tears that watered the sand, their prayers that accompanied her ashes into the snaking wind and carried them across the ocean.
I remember pouring wine on to the earth, honey and milk and water, too, as the sky darkened. I held a lock of hair in my hand, my hair, and I placed it under her hands, which were folded together over her chest. I know the sunset was magnifi-cent, a burning flame sinking into the sea, setting the clouds on fire with pink and gold. I remember the crackling of the flames as the pyre was lit, and how I dug my fingernails into my palms until the skin bled, to stop myself from plunging into that fire and pulling her body out. I don’t know how I let it be consumed, her face that I had kissed, her hair that I had combed, all blackened and charred to crumbled ash.
My children came from my body; their flesh was born of mine. Their arms reached out for me first, they called for me in the night and I scooped them into my embrace and breathed in the sweet scent of their little bald heads. As they grew, I felt the echo always of their infant selves. My body could not know what my mind did; it ached with her absence.
I had feared to send her to wifehood, to become a mother herself one day. That separation was hard enough. I watched the fire spark into the night sky and wondered where she could be. Making her way down that dank, twisting path to the Underworld alone? I had gone everywhere before her; trodden the paths I sent her down to make sure they were safe before I let her go. How could I let her go now, to where I did not know, without me at her side?
But if I followed her there, how could I avenge her? The thought was cold and clear in my mind amidst the chaos of grief and pain as I kept my vigil through the night. That pain that clawed me apart from within, tearing away at my flesh and stripping me down to nothing. Nothing but this. The hard certainty at my very core; the cold taste of iron and blood in my centre that said: He will feel this too, and worse.
It was not the baby I still carried in my body that propelled me from the sand long after the fire consumed my daughter and left nothing but bitter ash behind. In the light of the rising sun, I prayed that my husband would survive this war and come home safe to me. I wanted no Trojan soldier to take what was mine; no glory-seeking warrior to seize his chance of fame by plunging his sword into Agamemnon’s heart. Let him come back, I hissed into the empty sky. Let him come back so that I can see his eyes as the light drains from them. Let him come back and die at the hands of his bitterest enemy. Let him come back so that I can watch him suffer. And let me make it slow.