Arch-Conspirator(13)
“Not alone,” I said. “But if I have help…”
“Help,” she repeated. “From me?”
“Well I’m not going to ask Parth, known rabble-rouser,” I said. “We’re women. No one will think of us as a threat. No one will think of us at all.”
“Until they watch us walk across the square to his body and arrest us!”
“We’ll make a plan.”
“A plan to become invisible?”
“Is it not worth the risk to you?” I said. “Not worth the attempt?”
“He killed our brother,” she said.
“He is our brother,” I said. “And he was the better man.”
“You insult the one in an attempt to salvage the other?”
“Yes!” I said. “I’ll do whatever I have to, to salvage him!”
Silence fell in the room next to ours, as Parth and his mother undoubtedly heard me. Ismene shook her head.
“You’re suicidal.”
“No. I’m just not a coward.”
I regretted saying it a moment later, when she just stared at me with wide eyes, like she couldn’t believe I could think so badly of her.
“It’s not cowardice to run from an inferno rather than spit water at it,” she said. “It’s survival.”
“What good is survival if you trade yourself away in the process?”
She got to her feet and smoothed her shirt, and I knew she was ready to leave.
“Don’t make me hate you, Ismene,” I said. “Not when I love you so much.”
She didn’t look back.
9
Antigone
When the four orphaned progeny of Oedipus and Jocasta—then adults, or nearly so—came to live in Kreon’s house, we took only what we could carry, and we went on foot through a silent city still under military lockdown. Eyes peered at us through darkened windows as we passed, escorted by guards, and every so often, we heard taps as our father’s sympathizers drummed their fingers on the glass. In one quarter, we paused to listen to the patter all around us, like rain blowing against a windowpane.
We walked a long way, as my mother had insisted on living close to the university, which was in the Proetid District, on the far side of the hill where the Archive stood. As we went, I thought about making a run for it. Fleeing the city. Taking my chances in the emptiness beyond it. But there was only death out there; my father had seen it. Every so often the university tried to make contact with anyone else, anywhere on the planet. But there was nothing. No signs of life. There was nowhere to run.
So I kept walking.
Eurydice greeted us at the courtyard entrance, which opened to the street, her warm smile at odds with the soldiers around us, there “for our safety,” as Kreon had put it. What had been strange to me then was not the silence of our city or the guards prowling the streets to make sure everyone stayed inside or the phalanx of soldiers around us, but the game of pretend that everyone seemed to have agreed to without consulting me. Kreon making a show of his generosity, of his responsibility to his family. Eurydice giving us a tour of the house, unleashing us on the east wing to choose our bedrooms like it was a treat. Smile fixed, eyes sparkling.
Only their son, Haemon, had refused to play, his wary eyes meeting mine across the dinner table, his voice echoing through the hallways as he asked his father why there were so many guards stationed in the east wing. He treated us like the hostages we were, and in the weeks that followed our arrival, I found myself grateful for it. At least he was not lying to me.
But Polyneikes had been the reason we all learned to survive there. He learned our guards’ names, developed private jokes with them. Cajoled Eurydice into giving us comforts—a little plant for Ismene’s windowsill, a cup of tea for him every Sunday, a schematic drawing of the Trireme for my wall, and for Eteocles, a position assisting Kreon.
Looking back now, I wondered how early Polyneikes had become a revolutionary. It might have been upon our arrival. Perhaps he had intended Eteocles to become an informant. Perhaps he had thought it was a given that Eteocles would want to help him, just as I had thought it was a given that Ismene would want to help me.
How well, I wondered now, did I really know any of them?
After my confrontation with Ismene in Parth’s kitchen, I took the long way back to the house, my hair bound up in a scarf so I was less likely to be recognized. I slipped into the house through the back entrance, walking through the kitchen, busy with dinner preparations, to the unadorned hallways where the household staff worked. I passed through the little courtyard on my way to the east wing, and Haemon was there, standing beneath the ivy.
After our betrothal was announced, I had heard some of the household staff discussing it—how little I deserved him, how any woman in the city would love to trade places with me. How could Kreon promise his son to such a warped creature? Who knew what her imperfect body, swimming with unedited genes, would do to a child?
But Kreon knew what I knew: that if he did not bind one of us to Haemon, we—or our children—would forever be Haemon’s competition. And Kreon believed in eliminating the competition.
So Haemon and I were assigned to each other, and he became my adversary, the man I had not chosen, who I did not want and who did not want me. Yet standing there beneath the ivy, a look of concern on his face, his shirt pulling tight across his shoulders, I remembered that most people would have felt lucky to marry such a man. It was a shame, I thought, that they couldn’t.