Elektra(62)
Now, with his palace in sight, Agamemnon once more gathers together his weary survivors and addresses them in a ponderous tone. He speaks of the glory awaiting them here in Greece, the conquering heroes home at last.
They look away as he strides up and down, affecting grandeur. Their eyes rake the land around us hungrily for the comforting spirals of smoke from their homesteads, the hillsides dotted with companionable green trees instead of the bare, sandy plains where they have lived and fought so long for so little reward.
Despite his words of victory, Agamemnon’s jaw is set grim and hard. I can see that he is angry, but not at the devastation of the storm that splintered his mighty fleet as they sailed home in glory. He does not rage at the deaths of so many of his men, who followed him to my city and laid siege against us for these past ten years, dreaming always of this day. He doesn’t care that they will never again know the embraces of their grey-haired mothers, their long-enduring wives and their children grown up in their lengthy absence.
It does not anger him, even, that Athena, who has long protected his Greeks, turned against them and wrecked their ships. That the treasures looted from my home now spiral and sink through the waves, their glittering finery doomed to rust and fade on the sand, fathoms below. It barely touches him.
He is angry because it is in his bones to be angry. He sees himself slighted again; his authority disrespected. He does not care if his men die, only if they admire him. He hates the way their eyes cut away from him, the sullen curls of their mouths; the way they shrink from me and my madness instead of envying him his captive.
But this man, the king of all the Greeks, he has been angry long before the war even began. I see the rage simmering in his younger face; I see him slighted in a great hall of men all clamouring for the same prize. I see his arm raised, his sword gleaming as he swings it against the neck of a pleading man whose arms are outstretched for mercy, whilst a boy weeps and turns his eyes away from his father’s bleeding body. The whispers of his rage hiss and tumble in my ears.
I let the breeze lift my hair, its gentle touch soothing on my bruised face. I remember how Polyxena died, her silent refusal to cry out or beg for mercy. Her shade walks free in the Underworld, and for that, she is luckier than us all.
Our long march to the palace is drawing to an end. When the storm blew itself out and Agamemnon saw that he was still alive, and that I, his Trojan prize, was undamaged, he took it as a sign that the gods spared him for a reason. I know that they have – and that the reason is one he cannot imagine. He leads me up the winding path to his palace, eager to display his victory. I know it’s been ten years since he saw his wife. I know there is no shred of compassion in his body; I think he strangled the last of it in order to steel himself to cut his own daughter’s throat. But still, I am amazed that he shows no deference at all to Clytemnestra in his homecoming, that he marches back up to their home with me at his heels, the woman he’s enslaved. His arrogance gives him a blind confidence that everything will be exactly as he expects.
But I cannot hope for the future, for I know what it is to become.
24
Clytemnestra
The clouds are feathery, tinged with fading pink as the gold disc of the sun climbs higher in the sky. The air is warm and filled with promise.
Somewhere, far beyond my reach, wreathed in cold shadows, my daughter waits for this.
He is flanked by guards and followed by soldiers as he marches up to the palace entrance. Behind him, someone stumbles, and I wonder if it is a wounded companion, but then a sharp breeze whips up, and I see the long banner of her dark hair stream out behind her. I feel my jaw clench.
I don’t know what I expect to feel when I see the square frame of his shoulders, the imperious jut of his bearded chin, the faint ridiculousness of his cloak fanning out around him as he strides at the head of this weary, battered formation of exhausted men. I had feared that it would all swamp me again, that I would be jerked back to that other dawn and that the tide of grief would overwhelm me. That I would not be able to contain my disgust and my fury. It is not so. His face could be that of a stranger. This is not the young man whose breath caught in his throat when he asked for my hand in Sparta; nor is it the new husband-king, buoyant with the giddiness of victory, who brought me to Mycenae. It is not even the distant figure who stepped forward in the light of the rising sun, knife clasped tightly in his fist, the man I had thought I knew before he destroyed everything I held dear in one strike.
He is older, far greyer and more grizzled than ten years in Mycenae would have rendered him, though I warrant the men at his heels are still more haggard and worn than their leader. Still, even if he conducted his war from the relative comforts of his tent and rarely graced the battlefield with his presence, the toll is carved on the lines of his face and the greying bristles on his chin. Looking at him does not make it all flood back: I do not feel the sagging weight of her body in my arms; I am not tugged beneath the surface by the memory of her empty gaze as her head rolled back under that pitiless sky.
Rather, I feel the momentum building within me; the surging swell that warms my blood. I had feared the distraction of emotion, but instead it primes me, makes me stand taller, curls my lip into a smile that I hope will pass for one of welcome.
He does not pause at the great square entrance, flanked by thick stone and topped with two carved lionesses, but instead he sweeps through without so much as a glance to either side. And then he is right before me, and his eyes meet mine at last.