Elektra(23)

Elektra was too young, really, to understand why it was that Iphigenia and I were leaving, but she was quite composed as they waved us off in the first rays of dawn the next morning, holding on to Chrysothemis’ hand, Agamemnon’s dog at her side. She yawned and turned to her big sister to ask if there were fresh figs for breakfast before we had even got beyond the palace gates.

The rising sun was just staining the sky golden over the tops of the mountains as we climbed into the chariot. The journey would be long, and all the cushions heaped upon our seats would not do much to protect us from the bumpy road. I felt I should use the hours that lay before us to impart some useful maternal advice on what was to come for Iphigenia. I wondered what I could really tell her about marriage.

When Helen and I had talked of our husbands back in Sparta, I could see that we were naive, grasping at the prospect of sophistication and womanhood before us without understanding what it would be like. Even at sixteen, neither of us had really mentioned love. The bards would sing of it, but it seemed more the stuff of myth and legend than reality. My youthful heart might have swelled when I heard how Orpheus adored his bride Eurydice so much that, when she stepped upon a venomous snake on their wedding day, he followed her all the way down into the depths of the Underworld and, despite his quaking fear, played his lyre for Hades so beautifully that his wife was released. I might have shed tears when I heard how he walked ahead of her, leading her towards the light of the world above, but could not help but glance back once – just once! Alas, the condition that Hades had set was that Orpheus must not look at her until she was safely restored to the mortal world, and so she crumpled at his feet, her body, which had been gradually transforming back to flesh, becoming insubstantial air once more. Lost to him forever.

Those were the romantic stories of girlhood. They weren’t the truth of marriage. So, I could not tell my daughter of love, exactly. I could hope that when she looked at Achilles, she would see enough of a kinship in his eyes to know that they might lead a peaceable, contented life together. I could tell her that the joy of true love would come when she held her first baby in her arms – before then, even, when she felt it roll and squirm within her, when she sang to her growing belly and placed her hands on the warm, taut skin and marvelled at the unimaginable miracle that was to be hers. But I could remember the panic I had felt myself at contemplating such a thing: the fear that walked hand in hand with the happiness, the shadow that hung across that joyful prospect. When I looked at my slim, lithe daughter, I could not help but feel the worry stir within me. We would lay down our lives for our children, and every time we faced birth, we stood on the banks of that great river that separated the living from the dead. A massed army of women, facing that perilous passage with no armour to protect us, only our own strength and hope that we would prevail.

It didn’t feel like the right conversation to have on the way to her wedding.

Fortunately, she spoke first. ‘I’m glad we get to see Father again before he sails to war,’ she said.

‘I am, too,’ I replied. ‘We didn’t part on the happiest of terms; I’m glad of the chance to make peace before he goes.’

‘Why not?’ She was intrigued, and something about the intimacy of the chariot ride made it easy to talk, to say the things that had been turning over in my mind.

‘Helen is my sister,’ I said. ‘The way the men speak of her . . .’

The chariot jolted harshly beneath us, and the sun was climbing higher in the sky, beginning to beat down on the thin canopy that shaded us. Dust flew from the wheels, and I wondered what state our fine dresses would be in by the time we arrived. Iphigenia shifted a little on her cushions. ‘I have heard some things,’ she said, cautiously.

No doubt she had. Hardly anything else had been talked of since we found it out. ‘Menelaus is angry,’ I said, ‘and I don’t blame him. But your father should have enough affection for me to think of protecting my sister. He did not, and so I was angry when he left. I didn’t bid him a very kind farewell.’

‘He says the war will be won within days. Even if we were not to see him now, you would have had your chance to reconcile soon.’

My kind girl, always seeing the best in everyone. I wasn’t so sure. My tongue had been sharp in my last conversation with Agamemnon, and I regretted some of it, though I still felt the injustice of his words.

‘Menelaus should have made a wiser choice of bride,’ he had scoffed. We were in our chamber; his ships were ready in the harbour and already I looked forward to the quiet that would fall once he had sailed. I felt restless and agitated, my mind on fire with questions for my errant sister. How I wished I could talk to her, that I had been there in Sparta, that I could have seen this Paris for myself, that I had more than wild speculation to fuel my imaginings.

‘All the men of Greece wanted Helen,’ I said. ‘You should remember that, surely.’

He cast me an irritated glance. ‘If they wanted her that much, why have they all been so reluctant to bring her home?’

Again, this familiar grumble. It had been a constant refrain as he and Menelaus tried to summon the armies.

‘War is not an easy thing to contemplate,’ I said. ‘They have wives of their own, children to think of . . .’

He scoffed. ‘Troy is ours for the taking. They will sail home with riches they have never dreamed of, which they can lavish upon those wives and children.’ He strode to the window and stared through it intently. ‘But that they dared to shrink back from their duty when I called them to arms, the king of them all. Odysseus, feigning madness. Achilles, disguised as a woman. They should have been eager to fight this war when I summoned them.’