Arch-Conspirator(19)

Eurydice joined me for lunch, as she often did, setting up plates and napkins at the table on the balcony. Today she put a bud vase between the plates with a paper flower in it, folded dozens of times to make geometric petals. It was red, and her dress was red, too. There was a fragility to her that was on display for all to see, but I was the one who saw her strength. Her calloused hands, from working the ground. Her flat feet, from running barefoot as a child. The scars on her knuckles, from bearing the blows of a cruel teacher’s ruler.

When we were sitting across from each other at the table, she said, “About Antigone.”

“I don’t wish to speak of her again,” I replied. “What she did weighs on my mind already.”

“Only remember that she is our niece, and she is just a girl,” she said softly.

“She is not a girl, she is an adult.” I set my jaw. “And as to her relationship to me, well, her brother was just as closely tied to me, and see what he tried to do. See what he did, firing a bullet into his own flesh and blood!”

My hands shook. I gripped the edge of the table, and looked down at the courtyard where I had seen Eteocles’ body. A shameful waste, I had thought even then. Eteocles was not, perhaps, as strong of mind and heart as my own son—not a leader of men, that much was clear. But he had been a thoughtful and capable assistant to me, quick to heed my words and eager to please. And such a thing was not easy to come by.

I had disposed of his ichor after allowing his sister to Extract it. There was no point in storing it. But Ismene was a gentle girl, incapable of the kind of vitriol that readily spilled from the mouth of her sister, and Eurydice had wished to placate her after her sister’s violent reaction to the sight of the bodies. She claimed Ismene would be easier to manage if she was not inflamed to rage like her sister. I resented having to manage them at all. Long had I been held hostage by their impurity, and now my house had been riven in two by deception, with my son straddling the divide as if he could keep the land from parting just by wishing it.

Eurydice laid a hand over my own.

“You will do what’s right,” she said to me. “I know it. I’ll go to the hearing, if you want me to.”

“Yes,” I said. “I could use someone there who will support me.”

“Of course.”

As she was so skilled in doing, she turned the talk elsewhere, to the garden, to her friends’ chatter, to the gossip from the household staff, to anything but what mattered. And I was glad of it.



* * *



I heard the crowd that had gathered in the square before I saw it, the murmur penetrating the walls of my house. As I walked with Nikias at my heels through the courtyard, I almost felt the heat of them. I had never been fond of crowds. The mass of humanity only reminded me of how senseless we were, playing games of maturity and civilization when really we were no different than a flock of birds moving as one, each one reacting to the movements of the one in front of it. I had seen more than one riot start because of a stray impulse.

I saw the shadow of my niece in the hallway adjoining the courtyard, smaller than the soldiers that surrounded her. She would enter after me.

I waved to the guards at the gate that separated the courtyard from the street, and they opened it. Dust swirled across the hard-packed earth, a haze appearing between me and my public. My shoulders back, I strode forward. The street was clear now of my traitor nephew’s body, removed to the safe room beneath the house after my traitor niece’s arrest, so the only thing between me and the crowd was a line of soldiers with staffs in hand. It may as well have been a wall; no one dared breach the invisible line that kept us apart.

I didn’t delay. “We are here assembled for a public hearing, in accordance with our statutes, of a woman accused of treason: my niece, Antigone. Lest I be accused of showing favoritism to my own kin, I present my judgment in this matter before all those gathered here. Bring her forward.”

She emerged from the courtyard framed with ivy. Her hair was loose and long, and I had not seen it so for months. It made her face look rounder, younger. She had changed clothes—she was still in black, but her shoulders were bare now, and there were faint ripples next to her sternum where her ribs were beginning to show. She was spare, though we had not suffered a food shortage in years, thanks to my rule. Distribution was now strictly controlled, each person given a particular allocation according to their work output, an elegant calculation of calories burned and calories consumed.

Today, her spareness spoke to her fragility. I am just a child, her appearance seemed to say, and I was certain this was purposeful on her part. As she had stood before her closet, sorting through black frocks, she had chosen this one for a reason.

I turned away from the crowd—not to hide my face from them, but to position myself as one of them. The head of the flock, the leader of the masses, standing against this woman who had stood against me. It would not hurt to remind them that I was one of them, that I spoke on their behalf and not my own. The crime she had committed was against their survival.

“Antigone,” I said. “Do you stand here of your own free will, ready to be questioned?”

“I do,” she replied, her voice even.

“Then let me recount the circumstances under which you find yourself accused of treason,” I said. “Two nights ago, a group of terrorists stormed the courtyard of this house”—here I gestured to the building—“with the express intent of doing violence to me and my household. In that attack, your eldest brother, Eteocles, rose up in my defense. He was murdered by one of the aforementioned terrorists, but not before delivering a killing blow to the very man who killed him. That terrorist’s name was Polyneikes, and was his brother, and yours, as well as my own nephew.”