Whether the goddess was moved or not, my father was gone, across the sea to somewhere I couldn’t even imagine. Iphigenia was in the Underworld, somewhere I couldn’t follow. My mother was behind a closed door and somehow further away from me than either one of them. I couldn’t understand why Clytemnestra wouldn’t come out, why she wouldn’t smile at us like she used to and tell us stories again. But even when I knocked on the solid wood and called to her, she never answered or gave any sign she heard me at all.
If my father came back, he would make her, I was sure of it. Everyone in the palace did as he said. If only he was here, he could tell her. Every evening, I took out the dagger he’d left me, which I kept wrapped in cloth and hidden beneath my bed. I cradled it carefully, traced the outline of the lion. I hoped my father would snarl in the face of the Trojan warriors just the same. He’d be unafraid of their spears and their war cries; they would crumple in his path, and he would come home victorious, I knew it. I looked out towards the distant sea every day, searching the empty waves for the approach of his long ships. But day after day passed, every one of them the same, and still he was gone.
11
Clytemnestra
I feared the impending birth like I had feared no other. I was not afraid of the pain. I didn’t fear for my own life, or even for the baby’s. Above all else, I was terrified that I would look into my new baby’s face and see Iphigenia. Perhaps it could have been a comfort to me, but all I could feel was an aching dread that yet more untapped grief lay within me, and that the storm of motherhood would wreck me against still more jagged rocks. I cringed away from the prospect, weak and cowardly.
I fought the swelling surge within me when it came. I paced the floor as long as I could, bracing my fists against the wall, swallowing my howls. Sweat bathed my forehead and I whimpered. I could no more stop it than I could go back to that beach, which I saw whenever I closed my eyes, and drag my daughter away.
He was a son. A baby boy, whose arrival I had thought would crumble the cold shell of my existence and leave me squirming in the harsh sunlight, exposed and raw. The truth of it, perhaps, was worse, for whilst I braced myself against the agony of love and grief renewed, I held my baby and felt nothing at all.
He gave us some version of normality, I suppose. I could not lie, dull with pain, all day any longer. He was only a baby, and I pitied him the lifetime that awaited him. I had not dreamed I would bring my children into a world that could drain their blood in the light of dawn before they’d had a chance to live at all. I felt a swell of sympathy for a blameless infant born to parents such as Agamemnon and me: his father a monster beyond all imagining, and me, his mother, unable to summon a scrap of the devotion I had lavished on my girls. It was a mechanical kind of mothering I brought to Orestes. I cradled him and fed him and kissed his tiny face, but I did not build his future in dreams. I handed him off to the nurses whenever I could. I did not turn to the smoking altars in the city and pray he would be granted a life. I knew those prayers would go unheard. Every mother in Mycenae made these fervent bargains – not just that their babies be spared plague and fever, but that their husbands would sail home from Troy. That latter prayer, I joined. But it was the only entreaty I would make of the gods now. Better for Iphigenia if she had succumbed to sickness before she could talk, before she could dream of her future herself.
So, I tended to the baby when I had to, and left my chamber to resume my other maternal duties, though Chrysothemis and Elektra could see through my tired attempts; the numbing shroud that lay about my heart. To what end did I teach them to weave or dance or sing? How did I know I did not raise another child for slaughter? If the tide turned on the Trojan beaches, if Agamemnon’s army was beaten back, would a mob charge the palace for innocent blood to pay the price to the ravenous gods once more? The thought of such pain again was a burning brand to my flesh. Better to protect myself, to hide behind the only armour I could construct. I looked over my children’s heads; I stared past them and did not listen when they talked. I wanted no more tender memories to shred my heart when they too were taken from me.
Besides, Agamemnon had left a gulf behind him. Not only was the king gone from Mycenae, but all the men of fighting age. He had taken them with him, determined to have the best and most powerful force among the Achaeans. All that was left in Mycenae were the older men, too frail for war, and boys too young and raw to go. I heard the old men, plaintive and fretting when I walked by. How to run the kingdom, how to arbitrate every dispute, how to manage the stocks and stores for the winter ahead when the men would still be at Troy. How to defend ourselves against marauders, when they saw how unprotected our king had left us in his eagerness to win glory on foreign shores. I paused behind the pillars of the throne room, hearing the anxious whine of the men’s voices. Down the corridor, the scatter of my daughters’ laughter echoed. I searched for the note of Iphigenia’s voice among them before I could stop myself, before I could shield myself. I flinched away from them, turned on my heel and strode into the great, airy chamber of the throne room before I could think.