A Thousand Ships(77)

‘Apollo’s mind is made up,’ Cassandra said. ‘It ends today.’

‘You will not fight the will of your god?’

Cassandra removed the priestess’s headdress, which she had worn since one of the Mycenaean men had given it to her on the voyage home. He had pinned new ribbons to her hair, not realizing that Cassandra knew he had looted them from the temple of Hera in Troy. But she did not complain. She sat patiently muttering while he took the stained ribbons from her headdress and replaced them. He murmured platitudes quietly the whole time, as if he was speaking to a wild animal. ‘There, there,’ he said, as he stepped back to admire the garland he had rejuvenated.

Now she wrenched the pins from her hair. Clytemnestra was surprised to see that she did not wince. Cassandra dropped the headdress on the ground and placed her small left foot on top of it. Clytemnestra felt a sudden rush of memory of Iphigenia’s beautiful white feet. ‘You spurn the god at last?’ she asked.

‘He has left me,’ Cassandra replied. ‘He is my god no longer.’ It was the only explanation for why the queen believed her when no one had for so long. Apollo’s curse no longer twisted her words on their way out of her mouth. The god was absent.

‘He would have protected you,’ Clytemnestra said.

Cassandra laughed, a terrible scratching sound, rusty from disuse. ‘He would have guided your hand,’ she said. ‘He may still. Take me inside. You have your altar ready.’

Clytemnestra nodded. ‘All that’s needed is the sacrifice,’ she said.

‘We’ll conduct the sacrifice together.’

*

Clytemnestra had waited for so long to have her revenge that sometimes, in the darkest hours, she wondered if killing Agamemnon would be enough. Because then what would she do? She could hardly kill him twice. What if – a small voice, a daimonion, spoke in her mind – she looked down upon his corpse and felt no rush of victory? What then would be the force which impelled her forward?

But she need not have worried. Killing him was every bit as satisfying as she had hoped. Partly because he had skulked behind a war for ten years, growing older and more bitter with each passing month: while the men around him died so lightly, he had clung to life. And so she knew – knew in every part of her mind – that she was taking from him something he valued highly. Too highly.

She moved quickly through the halls, making sure everything was being done in the right order. She checked his bath was being drawn the way he preferred it: hot, scented like a temple offering. She took the priestess to the altar room inside the palace and bade her wait there. She threw incense on the fire, and the girl – mute again – knelt on the ground before the hearth and mouthed her prayers and prophecies in silence. The sweet smoke almost choked Clytemnestra, but it seemed to make the girl calmer. A priestess was used to burning incense, Clytemnestra supposed.

‘I will return for you,’ Clytemnestra murmured. ‘You still have time to flee.’

But the girl was deaf as well as mute, and so the queen pulled the curtain across the doorway and left her in prayer.

She walked through to the bath: a huge circular indentation in the floor of the palace. The water was steaming and she paused so her eyes could adjust to the flickering torchlight and the suffocating haze. She could see Agamemnon – pudgy and shrunken – sitting in the middle of the room. She scooped up the purple robe she had woven so carefully for this moment. ‘Here, husband,’ she called out, and walked towards the water’s edge. ‘Let us envelop you in purple and take you next door. We will cover you in scented oils and scrape the last remnants of Troy from your skin.’

‘You startled me, woman,’ said the king, as if she hadn’t noticed. ‘Can the slaves not bring the oil in here?’

‘We have a couch laid out for you,’ Clytemnestra said. ‘With wine and honey waiting in your cup.’

The king rolled his eyes gracelessly and stood. He walked up the three small steps from the pool to his wife and reached out his arms. She helped him place his right arm into the right sleeve and quickly pushed his left arm into the left one before he realized that the robe was no robe, but a net, a trap, an ambush. The sleeves had no ends, they were sewn shut and attached to the body of the garment, so once his arms were inside them he was pinned. He clutched at the fabric with his fingers but she had sewn layer after layer into the sleeve ends, so there was nothing he could grip. She spun him off balance, and tied the strings at the back of the robe into a quick knot.

‘What are you doing?’ he shouted. Angry now, not afraid. Not afraid until he saw the sword glinting in her left hand. He had not noticed a sword, propped up against a pillar in its shadow. He did not recognize it: it was a short womanish weapon. Where could his wife have found such a thing?

She drove the sword into his gut, above his paralysed arms, and he screamed. She wrenched it back and drove it in higher, splitting the gap between two of his ribs on the right-hand side. He screamed again and fell forward onto his knees as she drew the sword out a second time. His screams were deafening, but no one came running to help him. No one came.

She stood above him now and drove her sword down, through his ribs once more. He felt the air disappear from his lung as she sliced into that, too. He opened his mouth to make a sound but his voice had left him. He looked down to see his innards spilling out onto the ground, the purple of his viscera lost in the purple of the treacherous robe.