Georgios looked worried. ‘I didn’t think of that.’
I looked back at the imposing sweep of the palace behind us. I’d left Chrysothemis and Orestes in the courtyard; what if he came after them? I should have stayed there with Methepon as protection for us all. My legs felt shaky, and I didn’t know if I could run if I needed to. I wished so desperately that my father was here. I took a great, juddering breath, about to cry – and then I heard it. A sound I hadn’t heard since before she went to Aulis, a sound rising up from what felt like the ancient past. The sound of Clytemnestra laughing.
I pressed myself against the wall, close to Georgios. I could feel his breath on my forehead and I held mine, trying not to make a sound. As she got closer, I could hear the soft murmur of her voice, not the forced effort she made when she found it in herself to talk to us, but a rapid and animated flow. I steeled myself to peer around the corner and I saw them, Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, walking together around the palace grounds. He was gesturing towards the dip of the valley and the mountains in the distance, flinging his arm in an expansive arc to take in everything he could see from here. Both of them were smiling. I felt cold, despite the warm sunshine. She hadn’t laughed with me for so long. I’d forgotten what it sounded like.
The terror that had seized me was giving way to a steadier feeling of dread. He wasn’t running at my mother with a sword; he was walking with her as though they were the best of friends without a care in the world. And my father was on the other side of the ocean, not knowing anything about it. I didn’t know how it could be, but somehow, this felt worse.
15
Clytemnestra
How would Helen have done it? That was what I wondered the first time I woke beside Aegisthus. My sister, who had boarded Paris’ ship in the dead of night, who now took her place as a princess of Troy. Sometimes I saw her dragged away, other times stepping coolly and with dignity on to the creaking deck, her head held high and a new horizon in her sights. I hoped for the sake of the love we’d had for one another back in Sparta that it was the latter, but when I thought of what it had cost me – my daughter’s life spilled across the sand, Helen’s daughter whole and living, left behind like the rest of us – then it was harder to endure. Would it be better if she had resisted, if she had been overcome, if it was the fault of Menelaus for leaving her unprotected and defenceless, for having been too dull to notice the covetous gleam in the Trojan prince’s eyes? If she had screamed behind the hot press of his fingers clamped over her mouth, if she had sought to tear the flesh from his hands with her teeth in her desperation to get back to Hermione, to hold her daughter in her arms, to stay with her and never bear the blame for this disastrous war?
Whatever the truth of it was, I was certain of one thing. Whether she kicked and clawed and fought as she was taken from Sparta, I was sure that the woman who stepped off Paris’ ship on to a distant and unfamiliar harbour was the cool and regal Helen once again. I didn’t know what, if anything, might have seethed beneath the surface, but I knew in my bones that she would never betray a whisper of it to the world. She would walk through the streets of Troy as though they had always belonged to her, as though she was the rightful princess of it all, and even if her beauty didn’t make them fall at her feet, she would never feel the burn of their smouldering resentment – or if she did, she wouldn’t care.
I didn’t know if I loved her or hated her, or some curdled mixture of the two, but I needed that poise for myself. I needed her confidence; I needed to move through the world with the placid certainty that everything I did was right, just as she did.
If Helen had sneaked her lover into the palace whilst her husband was at war, she would not be lying frozen in anxiety with no idea how to proceed. She would stride into the throne room with him at her side, and arch a disdainful eyebrow at anyone who dared to question her.
Aegisthus stirred sleepily and turned his head towards me. I held my breath for a moment, not wanting him to wake. His face was shadowed, the flesh around his eyes dark and hollowed. The image of his skull swam up in my mind unbidden, smashed by Agamemnon’s axe, his skin hanging in tatters, the exposed bone crawling with insects.
The light filtering through the window drapes was warming, grey turning to gold. His eyes flickered open. Not Agamemnon’s eyes. They might share the burden of their blood, but they were not the same.
He reached his hand towards me. Not Agamemnon, not Iphigenia. I had felt stuck on that desolate beach, her funeral pyre burning beside me, the ships long gone across the empty ocean. Even as I walked the corridors at Mycenae, even when my daughters tried to talk to me, even when my baby son cried, I was still there, powerless and raging, not knowing how to move forward. Now I had an idea.