Elektra(6)
Not this time. A child of seven, I was roused by shrieks that tore apart the night and chilled my small bones to their marrow. I rushed in to where she crouched, her midwives hurtling down the corridors in fear that something was horribly awry.
Although the sweat plastered her hair to her forehead and she panted like a hunted animal, it was not the pains of labour that tormented her. Pushing away the helpful hands that sought to soothe her through the birth that was not upon her after all, she cried with a hollow desolation, the like of which I had never heard in my cosseted little life.
I shrank back. The room was busy, confused with the chaos of women, and I hovered uncertainly in the shadows cast by the thin torches that the women lit. The narrow orange flames flickered and twisted, and, on the stone walls, monstrous dark shapes cavorted grotesquely with their snaking rhythm.
‘The baby,’ my mother was gasping, and the violence of the passion that had seized her initially seemed to be ebbing away. She allowed the women’s ministrations, but as they eased her back on to her couch, softly assuring her that the baby was not coming and that all was well, she shook her head and tears streaked across her face. The dark hollows below her eyes and the stringy tendrils of hair made her look not like my mother.
‘I saw him – saw him born,’ she was rasping, but as the women murmured that it was only a dream and nothing to cause concern, I saw her imperial dignity returning. She silenced them all with a wave of her arm. ‘My dreams,’ she went on, ‘are not just dreams. It is known.’
A hush fell over the chamber. I did not move. The stone wall at my back chilled my flesh, but I stayed frozen against it. At the firelit centre of this eerie circle, my mother spoke again.
‘I pushed him into the world like the babies I have borne before him. I felt the burning of my flesh once more, and I knew this pain and that I could bear it again, like I have done before. Only it was different this time – the burning, it felt . . .’ She paused, and I saw her knuckles tighten as she twisted her fingers together. ‘The blaze of his birth, it burned longer and more fiercely than any I could imagine. I felt the blistering of my skin and I smelled my own flesh charred and blackened.’ She swallowed, a harsh sound in the silence. ‘He was no baby; he was a torch like one that you hold, his head a roaring flame, and all about me was smoke, consuming everything.’
I felt the tension, the growing tide of anxiety in the chamber. The women’s eyes flickered to the mound of my mother’s belly.
‘Perhaps it was only a dream,’ one of them ventured. ‘Many women fear the birth; bad dreams are not uncommon at this time—’
‘I have borne a dozen babies,’ my mother snapped. Her dark eyes fixed on the unfortunate speaker. ‘I have no fear of the birth of another. But this . . . I cannot know if it is a baby at all.’
Horror seeped into the room. The women’s eyes flicked one to the other, searching for an answer.
‘Aesacus!’ One of the women spoke decisively, her voice reverberating sharp and sudden off the stone. ‘The seer. We will ask the seer to interpret your dream, Queen Hecabe. Perhaps in such a time as this, perhaps the true meaning of your dream is hidden even from you. We will ask Aesacus, and he will tell us what it signifies.’
Nodding; murmurs of agreement around the room. Anything, it seemed, the women wanted anything that would leach the blank shock from their queen’s eyes. Any chance that the seer could change what she had seen in her vision.
He was summoned to the throne room. The women draped a dress about my mother’s swollen body and guided her from her chambers. No one paid any mind to me, so I followed them there in time to watch as she took her throne beside my father, who had been roused from his bed, his face creased with anguished concern. He held my mother’s hand in his as Aesacus came forward.
The seer’s face was smooth and blank. His age should have carved his skin with wrinkles, but instead it stretched across his skull, thin and papery. His eyes were milky, a film obscuring what colour they had once had. I wondered how he saw through the murk, but perhaps it did not matter to him if the physical world was blurred, for he saw the world beyond it with crystal clarity.
My mother explained the dream to him again. She had mastered herself, and there was scarcely a crack in her voice to give away her strain.
The seer listened. When she fell silent, he did not speak. All eyes were fixed upon him as he crossed the great hall. From a stone shelf, he took down one of the bronze bowls of fire that lit the cavernous room and placed it on the ground. Resinous wood burned within it, casting a flickering glow across the painted scenes on the wall behind, turning the wolves that adorned the fresco into prowling monsters. Aesacus prodded the flames with his staff, pushing the wood over the leaping mouth of the fire until it hissed out, a wisp of grey smoke pluming from the dying embers. His face was shadowed. As I watched him, a breeze whispered through the stone columns and stirred the ashes in the bottom of the bowl.
The ashes settled. I thought of my mother’s dream: the baby with a burning head of fire. The seer’s expressionless face as he suffocated the flames.
‘This prince will destroy the city,’ he said. His voice was soft, like an echo spiralling from the depths of a cave, but so very cold. ‘If he is allowed to grow up, I see Troy consumed by fire, a fire he is destined to start. The child must not live.’
No one questioned him. It seemed that he confirmed what Hecabe knew already; the reason she had woken screaming from the nightmare. And after all, this baby would be one of many sons born to Priam, with plenty of daughters besides. To lose one of so many children and save his city from ruin might seem to be a price worth paying.