A Thousand Ships(72)

She saw him before he saw her, noticed him staring around at the great height of the citadel, gawping at the pair of stone lions which topped the gates through which he had walked to reach her. He was not intimidated, she thought, but he was certainly impressed.

Her slaves opened the doors and she walked outside, tall and assured. She saw his expression shift. Nervous. But also stricken with unexpected desire.

‘Cousin,’ she said, bowing low before him. ‘Please, come inside.’ She appeared slightly flustered, although she was not. ‘I am sorrier than I can say that my slaves have left you standing here while they went to fetch me. The discourtesy shall not go unpunished. I will have them all flogged.’

Aegisthus’ face shifted again into an eager smile. ‘It is no matter, madam. The wait was brief and gave us a moment to enjoy the magnificent view.’ He gestured behind him to the mountains fading into a blue distance. Mycenae nestled in an unparalleled location, Clytemnestra’s land stretching out on all sides around it. It would be – she had often thought – easy to defend.

‘You are too kind, cousin,’ she said, straightening to her full height.

‘Please – don’t have the slaves flogged on my account,’ he said. ‘It is not necessary.’

She watched him believe that he was being magnanimous, and saw the extra confidence it gave him. This was going to be very easy.

‘I will do anything you say,’ she replied. ‘You are my honoured guest. Will you come indoors and let us offer you refreshment?’

‘It would be an honour.’

‘The honour is all mine,’ she said. ‘Would your men care to join us? Or would you prefer to dine alone?’

Aegisthus’ bodyguards were too well trained to show their surprise. A married woman – a queen – offering to dine alone with a man whom she had not previously met? This was hardly customary behaviour. Still, one of them shrugged, who knew what sort of things happened in Mycenae?

‘My men will dine with your servants, if that is acceptable to you,’ Aegisthus said. Clytemnestra nodded and gestured to her slaves.

‘Feed these men, they have had a long journey,’ she said. ‘Not long in distance, I know. But it has been so many years since our halves of the family were united, that it must have felt like an endless road to get to here.’ She reached out to Aegisthus and took his hands in hers. ‘This is our chance to make old wrongs right,’ she said, and she pulled him slightly towards her, almost taking him off balance. ‘Come with me. We’ll begin our friendship with wine.’

And as she laced her arm through the arm of a stranger and steered him along the corridors of her palace, they both realized that the length of their stride – he in his travelling tunic, she in her long, fluid dress – was identical. She pointed out to him the beautiful tapestries – in finest, darkest purple – that hung along the walls. He could see how wealthy she was, even without having his attention drawn to the most opulent work. But as she gazed at the knots of thread which made the intricate patterns so lovely and so precise, she had the unshakeable sense that a new fabric was being woven, by her. And the knots in her tapestry, once tied, would prove impossible to undo. She gave a delighted shiver, and squeezed Aegisthus’ arm more tightly.

*

Seducing him was the easiest pleasure she could remember. He was so keen to be liked and so desperate to be told what to do. She loved his young skin, his lithe limbs, his narrow waist. She loved him in the dark hours of the night, and she loved him more when the morning sun bathed his skin and turned him to gold. Sometimes she had to remind herself that she had a greater ambition in mind than an adulterous relationship with her husband’s sworn enemy. But she never forgot for more than a moment, no matter how distracting he was.

His devotion, once earned, was not easily lost. He had an almost doglike character: it was all she could do to stop him from following her around the palace. He loathed Agamemnon at least as much as she did, which meant they always found something to talk about. He also loathed any reminder that her life had existed before he entered it, despising Orestes and Electra equally. The two boys – she found it hard not to think of Aegisthus in this way – almost came to blows several times. And so she sent Orestes away to live with distant acquaintances. She wanted to keep him safe, and it was the only way she knew. She had no doubt that otherwise Aegisthus would kill him before long and Orestes had not yet proven himself to be much of a warrior. He was his father’s son in this regard, she thought. She enjoyed the way her lover was quick to anger, but never with her.

Clytemnestra would have had little to complain about had she not also been the mother of daughters. The ghost of Iphigenia was never far away: she felt her daughter’s breath on her neck sometimes. She had brought Iphigenia back from Aulis to Mycenae, buried her at the closest priest-sanctioned place she could (though why she should ever listen to a priest again, after what one of them had taken from her, she had no idea). She made offerings of a lock of hair every year, on the day of Iphigenia’s death. But her daughter could not rest, unavenged as she was. And each year, Clytemnestra would bow before her tomb and promise that she would punish the man who had sired her and killed her. But the war dragged on and she could not make good her promise. So Iphigenia never truly left her.

She was also haunted by Electra. Daily, she wished it had been Electra who was sacrificed by Agamemnon rather than Iphigenia. For reasons which were unclear to Clytemnestra, her surviving daughter idolized her absent father, seemingly unconcerned that he had sliced open the throat of her sister for the sake of a following wind. If it was the gods’ will, she once said, when Clytemnestra asked, begged really, to know how she could have so little care for a sister. Of course, Electra had been too young to know Iphigenia. Too young to know her father either. But hating her mother as she did, and hating Aegisthus just as much as he despised her, she chose to ally herself with a murderer. This one thing she and her daughter had in common, Clytemnestra thought. Though Aegisthus was not a murderer just yet.