Elektra(28)

He was walking away already. His cloak rippled out behind him in the new-sprung breeze. He had not spoken a word.



The army sailed almost immediately. Everything was ready; they must have had it all prepared before we even arrived at Aulis. As we had rattled along that hot and dusty track, they would have been loading the ships, anticipating a swift reward from the goddess in the form of a blessing of winds to blow them far away from the bloodstained sand.

A long time later, I would hear the bards sing of my daughter’s death, along with all the other stories they told of Troy. Often, they would say that at the very moment Agamemnon raised the knife, Artemis took pity on Iphigenia and swapped her for a deer. In this version of the story, my daughter lives on as a priestess and favourite of the goddess on an island somewhere. Crucially, in this telling, Agamemnon did nothing more than slaughter a simple animal. It’s poetic and pretty, and so very clean.

But I saw her body convulse in her father’s arms as he drew that blade across her throat. I held her, warm and bleeding and dead on the beach, whilst the sun climbed higher in the sky and the winds whipped up around us. I remember how the crimson-streaked saffron fabric fluttered around her ankles, and how I stared for so long at her face, not believing that her eyes would not open again and that she would not look at me and call me mother and kiss me.

How long I might have sat there, my child cradled in my lap, I do not know. How many hours had I sat pinned by her soft little weight when she was a baby? On those nights when her eyes had fluttered closed at last and I had not dared to put her down lest she wake, so had stayed there, in my chair, charting the passage of the moon through the sky and listening to her breathe. I felt my own chest rise and fall, here on the bloodied beach, and I wondered how it continued, how my heart still beat in my chest when this had happened.

In a daze, I watched them come. The women. We had seen only men since we had arrived at Aulis, but now the women walked across the beach towards me. Women from the village perhaps, women who had tended to the soldiers whilst they had camped here. I did not know or ask. Somehow, women always came after a death. In the past, I had been among them myself, tended to a stricken mother, gently loosened her hold on the corpse she cradled. Plagues, poxes or accident; it was not an uncommon thing to lose a child. I felt the soothing touch of gentle hands, heard the murmurs, the words I had probably said myself to another mother, in another life. When they tried to lift me to my feet, I resisted at first, but they were saying the baby, the baby, and at last I realised they were not talking about Iphigenia. They wanted me to come to the shade, to drink some water for the sake of the baby in my womb. Iphigenia’s head was resting in my lap, and I laid her down on the rough wood as tenderly as if it had been her crib, as though I feared to wake her. Then I let them pull me up. It seemed impossible that the waves still lapped at the sand, that my feet could take a step and then another. Whilst two of them helped me along, others knelt around my daughter’s body. She was so slight, so small, that they could lift her with ease, but I was glad even in my shattered mind that they touched her with such care, as if she was made of glass.

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.