Part II
10
Elektra
When Clytemnestra came back from Aulis without Iphigenia, her face was streaked and puffy, and her hair hung in tangled ropes. Chrysothemis had brought me out to greet the returning wagon, but when we saw this woman who barely even resembled our mother, I turned and hid my face in the drapes of my sister’s skirt. Even her voice was different – hoarse and ragged and guttural as she spat out her words like poison dripping all over us.
Once, Chrysothemis had taken me to the harbour, and I had seen the fishermen hauling great barrels of sea snails, their spined shells rattling together. When I asked her what they were for, she told me how they would be crushed and the purple dye squeezed from the pulpy fragments of their bodies. ‘It’s how we get such pretty clothes,’ she said teasingly, flicking the deep colour that edged my dress. Suddenly, the trimmings I had taken such pride in before struck me as revolting. The deep reddish-purple hue that spoke of luxury and wealth all at once seemed to me to look more like bloodstains, and I could not push away the image of those slimy bodies squashed until the thick, dark mucus spurted from them. Where I had felt beautiful and dainty, I now felt stained and spoiled. That was what my mother’s words made me think of then. Like toxic venom, sour bile, heaved from her guts and showered over us.
Iphigenia was dead. I tried to understand it, what it really meant. She hadn’t come back; she was not going to return. I wouldn’t hear the light patter of her footsteps; she wouldn’t be there to sit and play dolls with me. I would never again be allowed to climb on to a stool so that I could crown her with the flowers I liked to pick from the gardens and twist together.
And Mother was telling us that Father had done it. That made no sense at all.
I looked up at Chrysothemis. Did she know why? Her face was pale, her eyes wide as she listened. I tightened my grip on her hand, trying to make her look at me. No one seemed like themselves and I was scared.
‘It was a trick,’ Mother said. ‘No wedding. He slit her throat for a fair wind.’ Her face crumpled as though she was about to cry. I reached my arms out to her, not understanding what she meant, but afraid to see her so broken, so strange. But she just stared for a long moment as though she didn’t recognise me. And then she walked away, leaving us there.
It was Chrysothemis who wrapped her arms around me. Even though she was only a few years older than me, she was the one to comfort me, to explain it as best she could. ‘Artemis demanded it,’ she told me later, her voice scratchy with sobs. ‘Father had to give up something he loved, to prove how brave he is.’
I nodded slowly. If the gods told you that you must do something, you had no choice. That was something I knew. Something I could understand.
‘It had to be him – not another soldier,’ she went on. ‘He’s the leader of the army, so he had to be the one.’
‘It isn’t his fault,’ I whispered. Breathing out the words made me feel lighter: the crushing weight our mother had deposited on us lifted all at once with the revelation, with the truth of it. Artemis had spoken and so Iphigenia was dead.
But my mother was not dead, so I didn’t understand why she was behaving as though she was. She locked herself away, and even when she came out, she was like a ghost drifting among us. I was scared to look at her blank face, her empty eyes. My legs ached and my head hurt, but no one seemed to notice. Where was our mother? Why didn’t she come to bathe my forehead and sit by my bed again?
Out in the courtyard, I stood facing away from the palace, looking out to the rolling mountains, past the domed building that stood further out on the plain. That was the tomb that was supposed to house the bodies of our family one day. They hadn’t brought Iphigenia back, though, and that thought was unsettling: that she’d gone beyond our reach, that we couldn’t even say goodbye. I looked up to the wispy clouds wreathing the mountains’ summits and I turned my palms up to the sky. ‘Artemis,’ I whispered. I tried to think of the priestesses, of how their faces would go slack and their gazes distant when they prayed, as though they were outside themselves. How would I know if she was listening? I stared at the clouds until my vision swam. I didn’t know how to address her, how to ask her for what I wanted. All I knew of Artemis was that she hunted, that she ran through the forests, that she was fierce and wild. I didn’t know why she’d taken my sister or what she wanted with my family. Just let it be enough, was all I could think. ‘Let my father come home,’ I said aloud, desperately hoping that she heard me, that she’d listen to a child’s bargaining. ‘Please don’t take him, too.’