The Young Lion

by Laura Gill

  An hour passed, then another, and the sun climbed higher, hotter, beating down on the walls, glaring off the white pavement. Some of the courtiers grew bored. The ladies fanned themselves and started gossiping. Elektra became restless. Chrysothemis disliked the bloodshed and complained about the heat. Hermione watched with interest as my mother maintained her rigid goddess-pose under the gold-fringed canopy. As my future queen, she would one day called upon to do the same.

  Then the horses died, balking at the stench of blood and slipping in it. It took four men holding each horse’s rawhide tethers to hold it steady for the axe. Arion went second to last. I looked away when Aegisthus plunged the labrys into his neck.

  It was done. The sacred Perseid grave circle had become a slaughterhouse. Blood and viscera spattered the entrance stelae and smeared the grave markers of the kings. Slaves beat away the flies swarming over the carcasses, and brought buckets of water to wash down the pavement, but the miasma of death would cling to the stones for many months afterward.

  No human victim went to the altar that day. Hyrtios sanctified Hippasos’s death and proclaimed to the people that the youth was the offering Poseidon demanded, that he had consented to the sacrifice by approaching the king bull. I wondered what his family must have thought, hearing that, but remembered then that I had not seen Mnessos or his wife among the courtiers that morning.

  By afternoon, greasy smoke from all the burnt offerings hung like a pall over the citadel; one could not smell the air without tasting charred meat and fat. Everyone that day drank red wine and feasted on beef and horseflesh. I had no appetite. It sickened me, all that death and waste.

  Chapter Twelve

  “So you wish to know how the High King conducts a war, do you? I walk around the camp each day, exchange words with my men, and confer with the other Hellene kings. When we fight, I don my armor and rally the men. We clash before the walls, and then withdraw to tend our wounds and collect our dead, but that is not every day. War is more business than fighting. Any fool with a spear and shield can fight, but any king who wants to wage war must be prepared to plan, to negotiate, and to wait. He must be resourceful and ruthless, and very patient.”

  Father had answered my request to tell me more about himself. I drank in his words, along with his advice. “Although it pleases me to see you take an interest in these matters,” he continued, “you may not join me here in Troy, even to visit. A war camp is no place for a boy, no matter who he is or how badly he wishes to prove his mettle.” I sighed, even though his refusal was not unexpected. “Attend your lessons, obey your mother, and wait for my return. There will always be wars to fight.”

  Remembering his long-ago laughter, I imagined Father’s voice as stern and rumbling but affectionate. I knew he had not written this letter himself, as the script did not match that from his earlier missive, but he had surely dictated. As a warrior and king, he knew his business, and his personality seeped through every word.

  Father was not so loving, however, when it came to incident involving the king bull. Dreading his reprimand, I forced myself to read it, anyway. “Never again are you to go near a sacrificial animal, unless you are the one carrying out the rite, or unless some god instructs you to do so. Mark my words, boy. Poseidon Earth-Shaker might have seen you there among the youths and decided that the royal heir of Mycenae made a better offering than the son of Mnessos.

  “Make no mistake, had I been there, I would have whipped you raw for your presumption. I heartily pray that your mother has had the good common sense to do so.” I wondered what he would have said had he known that Aegisthus had done so instead. “Yet I forgive you because you have been forthright with me, as a son should be with his father, and also because you did not bait the bull or encourage the boy who did so.” So everything was all right; he still loved me. “You are young, and have not yet learned all the methods by which a man can offend the gods. You must remain pious and observant, for one day, as Zeus wills it, you shall follow me as king. And when a king sins, it is a greater and more terrible thing, because his impiety stains the people.”

  Of course, Mother also read the letter. “Hah! As though your father would know anything about piety!” she snorted. Then she fell strangely silent, regarding me thoughtfully. “He’s right, though, about your ignorance. You’re old enough, I think, to be schooled in the offices of blood sacrifice. You will report tomorrow after your morning training to the high priest. He will instruct you further.”

  Hyrtios was a pitiless taskmaster, put out by the effort of having to instruct a boy, addressing me like an ignorant babe when I was hardly as stupid as all that. It did not take me long, though, to notice that he treated all his subordinates with the same impatience. Only absolute perfection was acceptable, because the rites and offerings had to please the gods, so naturally it was impossible to please him.

  A boy should learn about the gods from his father or another close male kinsman. He should learn from his sire how to select the animal and bring it to the altar, how to wash his hands, and grip the knife just so, so that the death was as clean and swift as prescribed by the ritual. He should have his father beside him to help him overcome his uncertainty when dispatching a sacrificial offering for the very first time.

  No such mentor was there to guide me through the process. Timon did not have the authority to instruct me, and Aegisthus... I shuddered to think about him polluting me with his presence. So I hesitated when Hyrtios handed me the ritual knife, and pitied the yearling lamb trussed up on the altar before me. The result was a mess. Hunting was one thing, a gift from Artemis, but this was another. I wept more for the animal’s suffering and my own failure than from the high priest’s remorseless reprimand.

  Father would be ashamed when he heard.

  *~*~*~*

  Jab-jab-jab. I punched the air with my fists, first the right, then switching to the left. Again and again, imagining the enemy before me. Sometimes he wore a Trojan face, and he became Hector, Paris, or Dardanian Aeneas. More often than not, the phantom enemy was Aegisthus.

  Philaretos would have thought me possessed, coming out here by night to spar with imaginary enemies. Timon would have shaken his head. Kilissa would have been horrified, seeing me stripped to the waist and barefoot outdoors on a chilly spring night, but she knew nothing about my midnight excursions. Her hearing was not what it used to be, and once she was sound asleep I found it easy to slip past her cubicle.

  The owls and stray cats prowling the night pronounced no judgment on my nocturnal wanderings.

  At midnight, the palaestra wore a very different air, a lingering miasma that raised the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck. Physically, I was alone in the dark, with only the moonlight and my lantern to see by, yet I knew that something other than owls and cats was there with me. It was not malicious, that I knew, otherwise I never would have dared venture into the courtyard alone at that hour. It was nothing more than a sense of movement at my periphery, a cold brush against my arm, a scent of old perfume, all things with which I had become familiar.

  One night, though, it manifested on the portico across from me. I was not surprised to find the apparition was a woman, after the signs she had left. I could make out her face, beautiful but very sad, the slope of her shoulders, even her slender torso, but below that her figure dissolved into a mist. I could see through her, and knew that if she came closer, if she touched me, she would be ice cold. Full lips parted slightly as if to speak, yet at the very moment when she would have spoken, told me who she was and why she was so sad, she dissipated, unraveled like vapor blown to ribbons in the wind.

  “Come back!” I left the sand to explore the portico and adjoining corridor, to seek out some trace of her, but she was gone. Who was she, anyway? No one had ever mentioned a woman’s ghost haunting the palaestra.

  Servants sometimes claimed to have seen ghosts in the citadel, specters of sacrificial animals, dead sentries or servants, a court lady missing her right eye, even old
King Atreus hacked to ribbons. Sometimes Timon’s cat raised his hackles and hissed at shadows—perhaps, as Timon once told me, at the ghost of a mother cat that had been drowned in a sack along with her kittens. But I had never seen an apparition—not even the ghost boys, who never materialized—until now. I wondered why the woman had chosen to appear to me, when I did not even know her name.

  A week later, a second specter visited me, but this time he was flesh and blood, and strolled onto the sand carrying a lantern. I stiffened at the sight of him.

  “Orestes, dear boy!” False solicitude dripped from Aegisthus’s tongue. “What are you doing out here so late at night? You will catch your death of cold.”

  I jogged two steps back. “I feel fine.”

  Aegisthus set the lantern on the steps beside mine and stripped down to his kilt. With feline grace, he took immense pleasure in flexing his limbs and displaying his physique. What a peacock!

  Marking my disdain, he spoke, “You don’t like me very much, do you?” Aegisthus positioned his body in the boxer’s starting stance. “I have a son, you know. About five years old.” He punched the air with his right fist.

  I knew all about the brat. Aletes lived with his slave mother and younger sister in the town. Mother refused to allow them into the citadel, and Aegisthus never traveled beyond the Lion Gate, so they never saw each other. Did he expect me to like him, just because he had children? I kept my silence.

  “Such a quiet boy!” Aegisthus moved closer. “Do you still see the ghost children outside your room?” He chuckled. “It was much worse when I was your age. They used to walk around headless, with their entrails spilling out.”

  “Do you find it funny?” Was that what the ghost boys looked like when they materialized, or was Aegisthus toying with me again?

  “One should always try to find the humor in things,” he told me. “You must lie awake at night, listening to them. They chatter almost as much as dear Chrysothemis.” Aegisthus laughed, and jabbed at me, even though we stood four feet apart. “I hear you come out here regularly. Surely by now you must have seen my mother. She roams the palaestra on spring nights like this, the way she used to do when she was alive. She could never sleep when the almond trees were blooming.” Another jab. “Poor thing.”

  His arrogant smirk disgusted me. So the sad but lovely shade I had encountered a week ago was Pelopia, Aegisthus’s sister-mother. No wonder she mourned, no wonder she had become a lunatic, having borne a son like that. “Have you no respect for your mother?” I retorted.

  “Of course!” he exclaimed. “I adored her.”

  “And yet you mock her?”

  Aegisthus jogged a step closer, still wearing that obscene smirk. “Ah, but you didn’t know her. Poor mad creature! She used to wander around at night, mumbling to herself, swearing she could hear the grass grow. She used to give me all the odd or broken things she found during her excursions. I had quite the collection of trash. Agamemnon and Menelaus used to tease me about her strange ways. They laughed at her behind her back.” His eyes narrowed. “So did everybody else.”

  Timon once told me that Aegisthus had been a bright pupil, but also a strange, solitary child. In moments such as these, his oddness showed. “Why are you telling me this?” I asked warily.

  “Why not? Don’t you also pick through trash to find pieces of your father?” Aegisthus snickered. “At least Clytaemnestra doesn’t weave feathers and bird skulls into amulets for you to wear.”

  I moved back from him. “I know you broke that cup.”

  At that, he stopped and straightened, dropping the pretense of the congenial boxer; the grin melted from his face. “Go to bed, Orestes,” he ordered coldly. “Tomorrow, I’m sending you out to help shear the flocks.”

  It took me a moment to comprehend what he was saying. “That’s peasant’s work!” I cried.

  A cruel smile played at the corners of his mouth. “Young man, do you not one day intend to become king, wanax, shepherd of the people? Well, then, a shepherd of the people should at the very least know what to do with sheep.”

  Aegisthus did not go so far as to send me to my father’s estate at Midea. That would have been all right, to spend time away from the palace on my father’s own land. I labored instead in the sheep pens in the lower town, under an overseer who obviously owed his allegiance to the House of Thyestes. I performed as well as a nine-year-old boy could who had never worked with sheep before, but would have liked it better had Pikreus not constantly berated me.

  As spring turned toward summer, he curtailed my martial training and lessons with Timon, ended my instruction under the high priest—which I did not mind at all—and set me to planting, herding cattle, and harvesting under the direction of men like Pikreus, who did not spare me their criticism, only the lash. Like a common farm slave, I tended vines and trod grapes, scythed grain, and pressed olives. Aegisthus’s policy of working me like an ox left blisters on my hands and bitterness in my heart, made all the worse by Mother’s refusal to end my torment. “Your father would make you do the same,” she said icily, “so do not complain about it.”

  “Orestes, accept your lot, and remember that it could be far worse,” Timon said later. “These are tasks which every young nobleman must learn. It should not matter how or where you learn them.”

  I gritted my teeth. “If you’re going to tell me that Father would make me do the same, well, Aegisthus is not my father. He does this to humiliate me.”

  Timon shook his head. “Have you stopped to consider that shearing, planting, and harvesting are essential to your father’s kingdom? It might not be as appealing to a young nobleman as smithing or chariot making, but people have to have food to eat and wool to spin and weave into clothes.” Then, the lines around his mouth crinkled, and he shared with me a rare conspiratorial smile. “Aegisthus apparently does not realize he is giving you a most precious gift.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “You are learning how to become a king.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Timon’s old tomcat Kirros died late that winter. I had never seen anyone grieve as hard for an animal as Timon did for that cat. Sometimes he forgot his place and mysteriously paused in the middle of a lesson, or he suddenly choked up and had to stop and blink away tears. He placed white almond blossoms on the cat’s grave by the laundresses’ court when spring came, and sat there for hours talking to his departed friend.

  Elektra shook her head when I mentioned it to her. “It was just some stupid cat,” she said. “It wasn’t even nice to me.”

  “Because you tied bags on his feet and tried to shave off his whiskers.”

  She shrugged. “Timon’s old and crazy.”

  “And he’s served our family for decades,” Hermione said. “A faithful servant deserves better than to be thrown away on the rubbish heap.”

  I tried to persuade Timon to come outside with me into the sunshine and fresh air, and talk to people, even suggested he write to his family in Argos, but he refused to stir. I asked the neighboring laundresses to look after him, to bring him food and good cheer, which they did because he was always gentlemanly with them, never molesting them or making demands. I even offered to find him a new cat, for there was a young orange tom prowling the granary that looked like he might be Kirros’s son or grandson, but Timon said he was not quite ready for another companion.

  In late spring, as a reward for my diligence and good behavior, Mother granted me permission to skip my lessons for a day and climb Mount Charvati to inspect the watchtower there. I refused to let Timon stay behind, shut up with his cobwebs and grief, and issued an ultimatum: either he accompanied me as a proper pedagogue should, or he would lose me as his student. Of course, I had no authority to dismiss him, as he well knew, but Mother did. She tolerated his eccentricities only for my sake, and would send him away in a heartbeat if she thought he had become odd in the head or was shirking his duties.

  “You are a very cruel young man,” he obser
ved, sighing.

  “No,” I countered. “This is for your own good. You’ll thank me later.”

  Charvati was my very first mountain. It rose on a gentle ascent, till the halfway mark where the grade steepened. Timon climbed as far as his stamina allowed, which was, surprisingly, a good way up the mountain. I left him to rest with a spry old goatherd who watched his flocks above the citadel, then continued the ascent with the guard Mother had assigned to accompany us.

  It was a very warm day. Sweat plastered my hair to my forehead and rolled down my neck. By the time we reached the top, my calves burned and my back ached. Oh, but the exertion was worth it! From the summit, one could see the entire Argolid spread below: patchwork fields and meadows, brown hills dotted with dark groves, and the sun flashing silver on the Inachos as it snaked toward the ocean. I saw Argos on its hill below the snow-capped mountains of Arcadia, and though I could not see great rock of Tiryns or the citadel of Nauplia for the high hills obscuring them, to the southwest I could discern a blue sliver of the gulf of Argolis and a gleam of white that might have been Lerna.

  The watchtower sentries were delighted to have a visitor, as escorting me around their post offered a welcome break in their monotonous existence. I inspected the tower, a square edifice with a single room for sleeping and eating. The older sentry pointed out several other towers stationed down below on hilltops surrounding the citadel, and explained how their positions made it impossible for an enemy force to surprise Mycenae. “Atreus built them all when he built the Lion Gate,” he said. This tower was the highest, though, because it served another purpose.