A Thousand Ships(78)

His widow stood over his body and smiled. Everything was going according to plan. She watched his blood taint the water red. How typical of Agamemnon to despoil something even after death, she thought. She felt warm and flushed with a savage joy, as if she, too, might dance on the roof, licked by black fire. This reminded her that her revenge was not complete and she walked calmly to the altar room.

The priestess was still there, kneeling on the floor, calmly awaiting her fate. Clytemnestra hesitated for two beats of her racing heart, but she knew that she must kill again. Nothing of Agamemnon’s could remain, except his blood running through her surviving children. Cassandra had foreseen it and her god demanded it. Clytemnestra stood behind the girl, and raised her sword to draw it across her neck. She must die, but unlike Agamemnon, there was no need for her to suffer. As she was about to bring the blade across Cassandra’s vein, the girl opened her eyes and stared up at her murderer. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry for what will come.’

And in later years, when Clytemnestra thought about this moment, she was always sure it must have been her who spoke these words. Because what could the priestess have to be sorry for?

*

Up on the palace roof, the Furies ceased their dance. They looked at one another, nodding excitedly. Their work was done; their will had been carried out at last. It was the longest they had ever waited anywhere, dancing through the halls and across the warm stone floors, warming their bare feet and their cool snakes as they went. But after a year or two they had grown bored. They had clambered onto the roof to try and spot the guilty man returning, so they could scream into his ears as he woke or tried to sleep, and drive him from his senses. They had waited and waited and waited for his return. They did not speak of all the other guilty men who had gone unpunished in the years that they had spent on the roof of the palace of Mycenae. The Furies would catch up with them soon enough. In this moment, they felt nothing but exuberance at the final settling of matters here.

And yet – one of them turned her head, as if she had just caught the edge of a sound but wasn’t quite sure. The snakes paused their writhing and the flames shrank away. A second sound, and then a third. The Furies said nothing, but they began to climb down from the roof, all vipers and fire and elbows and knees. Where was it coming from? They scurried along the outer walls of the palace and the sound grew louder. A hammering noise was emanating from the storeroom. The door was made of thick wood, banded with blackened metal, but as they stood outside they heard someone pounding on the door, begging to be let out. Electra had been locked in there for hours and she was no fool. She knew by now that her father was dead, killed by her mother. Had the slaves told her? Had Aegisthus? The Furies neither knew nor cared. All they heard was her fists pounding on the locked door, and her tears as she begged to be allowed to see her father’s corpse.

The Furies did not concern themselves with doors or walls. They appeared beside her and wreathed her in their black fire. Their snakes nestled in her hair, and although she could not see the women who encircled her, or the snakes which writhed around her, Electra felt their fiery warmth and knew what she had to do. She must find her brother, find Orestes. And then they must avenge their father.





40


Penelope


Beloved goddess Athene,

I raise to you my prayer of thanks. I compose it in the last hour of darkness, before the rosy dawn streaks across the sky. Odysseus is upstairs, asleep in our bed, something I never thought would be true again. My husband, in Ithaca, after twenty years’ absence. Telemachus is asleep, too, safely back from his travels. They have only just begun to tell me what happened and how they both returned to me on the same day, from who knows where. But the stories will come. I already know that it is you I have to thank.

It is you who has protected them. I know you always did like Odysseus: so clever, just like you. I don’t think it can be hubris to point that out, can it? Forgive me, Athene, if it is. The long years without my husband have made me sharp-tongued. I imagine you know how that feels. And I know I have you to thank for persuading the nymph, Calypso, to give him back. They say you entreated Zeus himself to intervene. That you summoned a council of the gods to demand that Odysseus be freed to return home. They say you compelled Poseidon to let him sail unharmed and coaxed the Phaeacians to give him safe harbour. Without you, my husband would assuredly be at the bottom of the sea.

He came back in disguise, of course. Typical Odysseus. Never approach a problem directly if you can come upon it sideways. And I’m sure we have you to thank for the efficacy of his disguise: his own mother would have struggled to recognize him. His own wife could not be certain it was him. Even when I looked him in the eyes, I could not be sure.

But before he came to me, he hid himself away for a day or two with the swineherd, Eumaeus. The bards sing of the great homecomings of all the Greek heroes (some of which, let’s be honest, went rather better than others). But I feel sure that only in my husband’s story will pigs play a crucial role. If his men aren’t being transformed into them, he’s sleeping next to them, all rather than coming home to his wife. I presume word had got back to him about Agamemnon, and how Clytemnestra welcomed the old coward home. They say she cut him down like an old tree as he stood beside his bath. They say she felled him with an axe or pierced him with a knife – the details vary depending on who does the telling. But one thing is certain: those daughters of Leda are a plague on their menfolk. Did Odysseus worry that he would receive a similar welcome here on Ithaca? That I, the devout Penelope, would treat him as Clytemnestra had treated her husband? The idea is preposterous. My name is a byword for patience and loyalty, no matter which bard sings it. But that is my Odysseus. And your Odysseus. Always finding things out the hard way.