Elektra(86)

I’m back in the torchlit chamber with the old slave-woman telling me of the curse that creeps throughout our home, twisting around our family, ensnaring us all. My belly rises in front of me, taut and round, but when I see the baby stirring restlessly beneath the thin fabric of my dress, I can’t make out the shape of a foot kicking from inside my womb. It looks like the heavy roll of coiled flesh, something snake-like and inhuman slithering in my body. Then I’m in my chamber, with a swaddled bundle in the crib, but it writhes, a mass of scuttling creatures wrapped in its folds, and when they swarm out, I cannot scream, cannot see, cannot move, as they tear at my flesh, as they gnaw down to my bones. The dream tilts dizzyingly; I am outside on a vast plain, rubble smoking in the distance, the ground sticky under my feet, and it oozes up between my toes, a glistening crimson. There is a river, but its waters run red and dark; the earth is choked with the dead, and the blood spills out to the ocean itself, staining its vast waters.

When I wake, gasping, in the early light, the horror clings to me like a vapour.





36


Elektra

There is no possibility of sleep tonight. Orestes and Pylades spread their cloaks on the floor in the centre of our home in hope of some kind of rest. Georgios, when he comes back inside, studiously avoiding my eye, lies down near to them. I perch anxiously on our hard, narrow bed, listening to the sound of their breathing. The restlessness surging inside me won’t let me relax for a single moment. When I can’t bear to even sit any longer, I rise noiselessly and creep past them, outside to the garden. Liquid shadows ooze, pitch black, from every direction. The tormented screech of an owl makes me freeze, the flesh of my arms prickling into goosebumps. This is the ancient, primordial night that could have given rise to the vengeful Erinyes. It was from such a depth of darkness that they first stepped, from the formless oceans of Chaos, coursing with insatiable fury. Or else, they rose up from the blood-clotted earth, baying in vengeance when the titan Kronos sliced his own father open with the blade of his sickle. Whichever story is true, I can feel their presence, the stench of them carried on the breeze, the serpent-slithering sound of them, the cold hiss of their breath at my ear.

Let them come for me if they will. Whatever torment they devise, it cannot be worse than what I’ve lived already.

However brave my thoughts, I still yelp when I feel a hand closing around my elbow, and I spin around in the darkness, my chest heaving.

‘Sorry,’ he says. It isn’t Georgios’ voice, nor is it Orestes’.

‘Pylades?’

‘I heard you get up,’ he says. ‘I can’t sleep either.’

I should go back inside at once. But a recklessness has taken hold of me. This man is my brother’s trusted friend, I’m safe with him, and I can’t deny my curiosity about him any longer. ‘Why did you come to Mycenae?’ I need to know.

‘Orestes is my friend.’ His voice is calm and measured, soothing in the black void. ‘I saw how distraught he was at the oracle’s word. I wouldn’t let him do this alone.’

I try to discern his face through the gloom. The shroud of night makes me feel freer, bolder. ‘Did you ever know our father?’

‘No. I was an infant when the forces sailed to Troy. Even though my mother is a daughter of Atreus, she never knew him either.’

So Pylades doesn’t bring me any new stories of my father. I’m not as disappointed as I might have been. Tonight, when everything in me shifts with unease and anticipation, all at once I don’t want to immerse myself in the past. Tomorrow is the day that we move into the future.

‘Are you afraid?’ he asks me.

I laugh. ‘Why would I be afraid? You can only fear if you have something to lose, and I have nothing.’

He doesn’t answer, and the silence between us is taut, crackling with an edge I don’t recognise.

‘If I was afraid, I would think of the shade of our father, begging us to take revenge,’ I say at last. ‘The image of his ghost, not able to rest. That’s the only thing that could make me afraid.’

‘Agamemnon will rest tomorrow,’ Pylades says. ‘Orestes, though—’

‘We will be here for Orestes.’ I’m firm and decisive, on steady ground. ‘Whatever happens after – we can care for him.’

‘What about your husband?’

‘He married me to help me escape Aegisthus,’ I say. ‘It is no true marriage.’

I don’t want to think about Georgios; I want only to think of Agamemnon. But then, I’m standing here with the son of Agamemnon’s sister – this is the closest I could be to my father in the living world, besides Orestes. The thought of it rears hungrily inside me for an instant, a sweep of flame, searing and sweet at once.

‘We should go back inside,’ he says.

For the first time since the night I knew my father was coming home, I am impatient for the dawn. The world sings with promise again, my hope as fragile but tangible as glass, and this time our mother won’t shatter it. This time, we are the strong ones, and there is nothing that she can do. I follow him back inside, and, although I thought it impossible, when I lie back on the lumpy bed, my eyes flicker closed and I sleep.





37


Clytemnestra

As I dress in the amber silence of dawn, I marvel that I have stayed here so long. What holds me to Mycenae? The comfort and luxuries of this palace are rotten illusions, its grandeur decaying from within. I’m not afraid to walk away from it all, alone. I have never cared what anyone else might think, and I have wits enough to live on my own, as far away from here as I can get.