A Thousand Ships(71)

I have delayed them for three years (nothing to you, of course, but a lifetime for a woman with a house filled with unwanted guests) by telling them I cannot marry until I have woven Laertes’ shroud. They believe me, of course. He is so bent and tired, they cannot imagine he will last the night. And it is such a blameless task for a woman: weaving. I have always been good at it, as you know. But the shroud is never finished. As I said, they are stupid. So it never occurred to them that I spent my day weaving the shroud, and my night unravelling it again. It would have occurred to you straightaway, if you had seen so much industry going nowhere. Perhaps it did not enter their minds that a woman would put so much time into deceiving them. It takes precisely as long to unweave as to weave, of course. The shuttle must pass across the loom in exactly the same way. So I have spent three years doing and undoing, advancing and retreating.

They would not have guessed my scheme even now, had one of those maidservants not betrayed me to her lover. I could have strung her up. But it was too late by then, she had his protection. And I had lost mine.

The bard tells me that you gaze out over the ocean and pine to come home. That you plead with Calypso to release you. That you promise her I am less beautiful than she, especially after so many years have passed, but that I am your wife and you love me nonetheless. I can’t lie, Odysseus, I would have preferred it if you had not said that. No one wishes to hear about their age and lack of beauty in a song.

So perhaps I should give up on you altogether, no matter how you long to return. Perhaps I should leave you to Calypso, who needs a husband so desperately that she stole mine and kept him for seven years. But the bard sang something else the other day. He said that Calypso offered you immortality if you would stay with her on her island of pleasure. The consort of a nymph, you would receive the gift of endless life. And, so the bard sings, you refused.

One of the suitors – drunk, of course, on my wine – slurred his disbelief. No mortal man would give up the chance of eternal life, he said. It doesn’t happen in any story I’ve ever heard. And – drunk as he was – he was quite correct. There is no other story where a mortal man is offered the gift of immortality and turns it down. But you did.

Come home, Odysseus. I can wait no longer.

Penelope





39


Clytemnestra


Ten years was a long time to bear a grudge, but Clytemnestra never wavered. Her fury neither waxed nor waned, but burned at a constant heat. She could warm her hands on it when the nights were cold, and use it to light her way when the palace was in darkness. She would never forgive Agamemnon for murdering her eldest child, Iphigenia. Nor for the thuggish deceit of his wife and daughter with talk of a wedding. So all that was left to think about was how she would take her revenge upon him, and how she could persuade the gods to sanction her actions. She was sure Artemis would be her ally, because everything had been caused by Agamemnon’s affront to the goddess all those years ago at Aulis. The slaughter of Iphigenia had been the priest’s idea to win Artemis back to the Argive cause and give them a fair wind to Troy. But if the goddess had been angry with Agamemnon once, she would be angry with him again. If anyone knew that, it was his wife.

Clytemnestra did not set out to murder him at first. For a year or two, she prayed daily that he would be killed in the war, and she prayed that his death would be ignominious. That he would not die on the Trojan battlefield (which was hardly likely, given his tendency to skulk behind his men), but be stabbed in the night by someone he knew and trusted. Yet the years came and went, and still he lived.

Once five years had passed, she decided on a new strategy. Every day he was not killed was a day she spent planning how she would kill him on his return to Mycenae. Her plan was complex and she luxuriated in it. She would wake up at first light and stretch out in it, considering all its angles and corners until she was fully satisfied. She needed to be in a perpetual state of readiness, because who knew when the endless war would end? And she needed the revenge to be apt. Killing him would not be sufficient to repay him for the horror of what he had done.

The first step was to send a messenger to Aegisthus, Agamemnon’s cousin and bitter enemy, inviting him to the royal house of Mycenae. It was a drawn-out process, and it was some months before he could be persuaded that it was not a trap. Her own servants were aghast that she should make any contact with the son of Thyestes. But Clytemnestra did not require their approval, or their understanding, of her actions. In fact, she was relying on the opposite.

She was resourceful and she was persistent and eventually Aegisthus arrived in Mycenae, attended by his guards. Slaves ran through the lofty halls of the palace to find their mistress and tell her that the great enemy of the royal household was outside, claiming an audience. They were startled when she rose from her seat and strode towards the palace gates to greet the man, chiding them for the abuse of guest-host friendship because they had left four armed men outside the halls instead of making them welcome.

Clytemnestra had never met Aegisthus before (the family enmity was an old one), and she was surprised to see so little resemblance between the cousins. He had the same womanish mouth as Agamemnon, a man she could no longer think of as her husband but only as her enemy. His hair sprang back from a similar point in the middle of his brow. But Aegisthus was younger, and taller, almost willowy. His expression was uncertain, as if he were nervous but trying to disguise it. She wondered if he had ever wielded a sword in battle. But she did not wonder for long.