A Thousand Ships

by Natalie Haynes

  You have humiliated me, and I am sorely tempted to return the favour. A young man would be delicious. And grateful. But, oh, Odysseus, they are all so stupid. I cannot abide it. I would rather my clever old husband came home than set myself up with a witless young one. What would we ever talk about? Although I suppose they would not want to talk much. Young men so rarely do.

  I have delayed them for three years (nothing to you, of course, but a lifetime for a woman with a house filled with unwanted guests) by telling them I cannot marry until I have woven Laertes’ shroud. They believe me, of course. He is so bent and tired, they cannot imagine he will last the night. And it is such a blameless task for a woman: weaving. I have always been good at it, as you know. But the shroud is never finished. As I said, they are stupid. So it never occurred to them that I spent my day weaving the shroud, and my night unravelling it again. It would have occurred to you straightaway, if you had seen so much industry going nowhere. Perhaps it did not enter their minds that a woman would put so much time into deceiving them. It takes precisely as long to unweave as to weave, of course. The shuttle must pass across the loom in exactly the same way. So I have spent three years doing and undoing, advancing and retreating.

  They would not have guessed my scheme even now, had one of those maidservants not betrayed me to her lover. I could have strung her up. But it was too late by then, she had his protection. And I had lost mine.

  The bard tells me that you gaze out over the ocean and pine to come home. That you plead with Calypso to release you. That you promise her I am less beautiful than she, especially after so many years have passed, but that I am your wife and you love me nonetheless. I can’t lie, Odysseus, I would have preferred it if you had not said that. No one wishes to hear about their age and lack of beauty in a song.

  So perhaps I should give up on you altogether, no matter how you long to return. Perhaps I should leave you to Calypso, who needs a husband so desperately that she stole mine and kept him for seven years. But the bard sang something else the other day. He said that Calypso offered you immortality if you would stay with her on her island of pleasure. The consort of a nymph, you would receive the gift of endless life. And, so the bard sings, you refused.

  One of the suitors – drunk, of course, on my wine – slurred his disbelief. No mortal man would give up the chance of eternal life, he said. It doesn’t happen in any story I’ve ever heard. And – drunk as he was – he was quite correct. There is no other story where a mortal man is offered the gift of immortality and turns it down. But you did.

  Come home, Odysseus. I can wait no longer.

  Penelope

  39

  Clytemnestra

  Ten years was a long time to bear a grudge, but Clytemnestra never wavered. Her fury neither waxed nor waned, but burned at a constant heat. She could warm her hands on it when the nights were cold, and use it to light her way when the palace was in darkness. She would never forgive Agamemnon for murdering her eldest child, Iphigenia. Nor for the thuggish deceit of his wife and daughter with talk of a wedding. So all that was left to think about was how she would take her revenge upon him, and how she could persuade the gods to sanction her actions. She was sure Artemis would be her ally, because everything had been caused by Agamemnon’s affront to the goddess all those years ago at Aulis. The slaughter of Iphigenia had been the priest’s idea to win Artemis back to the Argive cause and give them a fair wind to Troy. But if the goddess had been angry with Agamemnon once, she would be angry with him again. If anyone knew that, it was his wife.

  Clytemnestra did not set out to murder him at first. For a year or two, she prayed daily that he would be killed in the war, and she prayed that his death would be ignominious. That he would not die on the Trojan battlefield (which was hardly likely, given his tendency to skulk behind his men), but be stabbed in the night by someone he knew and trusted. Yet the years came and went, and still he lived.

  Once five years had passed, she decided on a new strategy. Every day he was not killed was a day she spent planning how she would kill him on his return to Mycenae. Her plan was complex and she luxuriated in it. She would wake up at first light and stretch out in it, considering all its angles and corners until she was fully satisfied. She needed to be in a perpetual state of readiness, because who knew when the endless war would end? And she needed the revenge to be apt. Killing him would not be sufficient to repay him for the horror of what he had done.

  The first step was to send a messenger to Aegisthus, Agamemnon’s cousin and bitter enemy, inviting him to the royal house of Mycenae. It was a drawn-out process, and it was some months before he could be persuaded that it was not a trap. Her own servants were aghast that she should make any contact with the son of Thyestes. But Clytemnestra did not require their approval, or their understanding, of her actions. In fact, she was relying on the opposite.

  She was resourceful and she was persistent and eventually Aegisthus arrived in Mycenae, attended by his guards. Slaves ran through the lofty halls of the palace to find their mistress and tell her that the great enemy of the royal household was outside, claiming an audience. They were startled when she rose from her seat and strode towards the palace gates to greet the man, chiding them for the abuse of guest-host friendship because they had left four armed men outside the halls instead of making them welcome.

  Clytemnestra had never met Aegisthus before (the family enmity was an old one), and she was surprised to see so little resemblance between the cousins. He had the same womanish mouth as Agamemnon, a man she could no longer think of as her husband but only as her enemy. His hair sprang back from a similar point in the middle of his brow. But Aegisthus was younger, and taller, almost willowy. His expression was uncertain, as if he were nervous but trying to disguise it. She wondered if he had ever wielded a sword in battle. But she did not wonder for long.

  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 journe
y,’ 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.

  Clytemnestra grew increasingly sure the gods would take her side. She knew that Agamemnon had offended them during the Trojan conflict. Boorish, stupid man – of course he had. Any god would be offended that such an oaf walked in the light, let alone that he could boast himself a king. They had punished him at Aulis, rightly, for his hubris. But she had no belief that they had wanted the price to be paid by her beloved daughter. Why should they? Iphigenia was just a child.

  And the murder had been – she hesitated in her mind to find the appropriate phrase – so dishonest. To kill a girl, a daughter, was bad enough. But to do so in a ritual which had made a mockery of her youth, of her maidenhood. A false marriage! Had any mother ever suffered something more vicious or cruel? To dress the girl up, promise her a great warrior to be her husband, and then to cut her down. At the very least, she knew her husband had earned the enmity of Achilles for dragging his name into the whole disgusting affair. What Greek prince could be anything other than appalled to see his name used as a trap for a defenceless girl? Agamemnon might be so shameless that he could stoop to this, but other men had higher standards.

  Clytemnestra knew who to pray to and she prayed to them all. To Artemis, against whom the original outrage had been levelled. To Hymenaeus, the god of marriage, whose institution had been so affronted by this despicable crime. Then she prayed to Night, who would conceal her plans for vengeance. Lastly she prayed to the Furies, who would accompany her as she worked their will.

  And all the while, she sent scouts in every direction across the mainland to bring her news of Troy.

  *

  Nine years after Iphigenia had been slaughtered like an animal, Clytemnestra sent her watchmen out for the last time. Don’t come back, she told each man, unless you bring me news of his return. And send a message here every ten days, so I know you are alive and watching. She knew they complained about their postings, these men sent from the fine city of Mycenae to wait on the cliff-tops and demand news of any travellers coming into any port from the east. But she did not care.

  And after a year – a whole year of waiting – the message finally came back. It came in the form of fire, like her fury. Her watchmen lit beacons on the top of each mountain, one after another, and the news reached her before it reached any other Greek city.

  She sent her most trusted slaves to find out more. They returned on foot, having ridden their horses to exhaustion. The Argive ships had left Troy, the slaves reported. The city was in ruins: its temples had been overturned and emptied. Its wealth had been spread among the Greeks, its towers had fallen. Its horse-taming men were killed, its women enslaved. Agamemnon – long-lost king of Mycenae – was returning home in his ship laden with treasure and concubines. She had only days to prepare a fit welcome for her husband. Clytemnestra greeted this news quietly. She was ready.

  First, she explained to Aegisthus one more time why he must hide when Agamemnon returned. He must hide and perform a vital task: to keep Electra from speaking to her father, lest she give away their plan before the time was right. Aegisthus was such an impetuous boy: he would have rushed at the king with a sword as he stood on the palace steps, if she let him. He could not see, until she explained it, how this would lead to an uprising from the Mycenaeans. There was little affection for their absent king in the city, but not so little that she could afford to kill an unarmed man on his return from war. Especially if he brought wealth to spread among his people (although privately, Clytemnestra scoffed at the very idea that Agamemnon would share anything with anyone, even his wife).

  ‘What should I do with Electra?’ Aegisthus asked. ‘She will not come anywhere with me if I ask her.’

  Clytemnestra shrugged. ‘Gag her and throw her in the storerooms if that is what it takes to keep her out of the way.’ Electra had performed a sacrifice of thanksgiving when she heard her father was returning at last and the queen was not in a forgiving mood. ‘Did I tell you they overturned the Trojan temples?’

  Aegisthus nodded but his interest was not caught by this part of the tale. He cared far less than his lover did about the endorsement of the gods. His father had taught him
when he was young that the gods’ approval mattered very little compared to a man’s will. But Clytemnestra relished this news above all. Of course Agamemnon’s men had assaulted the temples and the priests. If the rumour she had heard was correct, they had not even respected Priam’s pleas for sanctuary as he cowered at the altar of Zeus himself. She shook her head, astonished that even men who answered to Agamemnon could have such little respect for the king of the gods. And then there was the second rumour, which filled her with white rage and delight in almost equal measures: that the concubine Agamemnon was bringing home to Greece was a priestess of Apollo. The arrogance made her catch her breath. To take a priestess, whose body was sacrosanct to the Archer, and use her as his whore. Now it was not just Artemis whose support Clytemnestra could count on. Apollo would be on her side, too.

  She counted the days of Agamemnon’s voyage across the water and she told her watchmen to come home. She needed no further confirmation of the rumours: she would know soon enough who travelled with the once-king of Mycenae. She readied herself for his return. A small lie in place about her son, Orestes. Electra out of the way. She looked into her dark mirror and admired her strong jaw. She should try to conceal the lean, hungry expression which had come upon her over the past ten years. She wondered how those years had affected her sister, Helen. Was she still so beautiful that men wept merely to see her? She rolled her eyes in remembered irritation. She probably was.

  She summoned her maidservants and had them plait her hair into neat braids. When she was with Aegisthus, she had grown into the habit of wearing it loose, to reflect his age rather than her own. But as matron-queen, welcoming her adventuring husband, she needed to present a different appearance. As she admired her own long neck (less swan-like than Helen’s, no doubt, but even so) she realized that she was looking forward to the day ahead. She had planned it for so long, and now she had the twin pleasures not just of enacting her revenge after such a long delay, but also of seeing her plan come to fruition.