The Young Lion

by Laura Gill

  “What do they teach you Mycenaean savages?” he spat.

  I scrambled for my crutch, which had fallen when he pushed me down. “You’re not going to bully me!”

  “You’re the one who head-butted me!” he shouted back.

  “And you’re the one who threw me on the ground.”

  Pylades scanned the sand, then, holding my gaze, jabbed his finger at the discarded himantes. “Pick those up, Orestes. And give your tunic to the attendant before you ruin it.” Defiant, I remained standing. He issued the order again, as though addressing a recalcitrant child. “I won’t tell you again.”

  He matched me with a good-natured older youth named Boukolos, who led me through the usual boxing paces of feinting and jabbing until it became obvious that my wound was troubling me again. We sat down on the steps below the portico to watch the other youths exercising, upon which several of them meandered over to introduce themselves.

  As the morning grew hot, we retired into the bath. A slave massaged warm oil into my scar while we oiled and scraped and sponged down. Boukolos sat down alongside me and shared his sea sponge. He was handsome, with curling brown hair and gray eyes, and stared at me in a way guaranteed to make me blush.

  “Does Prince Pylades always behave that way with guests?” I asked.

  Farther down the bench, my kinsman overheard me. “Behave in what way?” he called out.

  A lesser man, ashamed to have been caught talking behind someone else’s back would have shut his mouth. I, however, answered his challenge, “Do you always shove guests around?”

  “Do you want me to coddle you?” Pylades ran his strigil along his right bicep. “You need fresh air and exercise, unless you would rather shut yourself indoors and weep. I very much doubt your father would approve you moping around and mourning like a woman.”

  “You shut your mouth about my father!”

  Instead, Pylades stood, crossed over to me, and evicted Boukolos in order to take his place on the bench beside me. Apparently it did not concern him that more than a dozen men had stopped bathing and conversing to watch what promised to be a memorable quarrel. “Agamemnon brought his fate on himself.”

  “Shut up,” I hissed.

  Pylades assessed my hostile stance. “I met him once,” he said casually, “when he was here gathering allies for the Trojan expedition. Father refused to accompany him because he knew even then how the campaign would turn out.”

  What drivel was this? Another derogatory comment and I would knock out his teeth. “Yes, we won.”

  “Oh, did we?” Scraping under his arm, he wiped excess oil and sweat onto his towel. “How many men survived to return home to their families? How many men left their bones on Trojan soil or at the bottom of the ocean when their ships sank? You know nothing, Orestes. You haven’t seen all the war veterans flocking to Delphi with their scars and missing limbs and other afflictions to beg Apollo for a cure. Troy wasn’t such a victory.”

  I felt cold, imagining a hundred—no, a thousand broken men congesting the pilgrim route. Pylades, however, had insulted me, heaping scorn upon my father’s deeds, and I was damned if I allowed him to see how his words affected me. “Blame the Trojans,” I retorted. “Paris asked for war by abusing his guest-right.”

  Pylades snorted. “Had Agamemnon simply sent an envoy to the Hittite emperor, Menelaus would have gotten Helen back, and your sister Iphigenia would not have died.” He toweled under his arm where he had scraped earlier, while contempt dripped from his tongue. “Open your eyes and see what the rest of us see. Your father wanted this war all along.” He turned to scrape under his other arm. “You and your sisters meant less to him than glory and gold.”

  I burned with rage and shame. “That’s not true!” Yes, it was. Father had sliced Iphigenia’s throat rather than send the hosts home and let her live. Had the seer told him otherwise, he would have done the same thing to me.

  Pylades kept talking, when the mere sound of his voice wearied me. “Agamemnon got his war because he wanted a war, and thousands died because of—ho, there!” He seized my wrist to keep me from striking him. “I never said what your mother did was right, or that you deserved to watch your father die.” His voice softened, though not his hold. “Obviously you don’t understand that the world has been turned upside-down for everyone, not just for you.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Some evenings, Strophius and I dined alone together. He ostensibly wanted to discuss my future and ask about my ambitions, but instead he plied me with questions about my education, my military training, and my sisters.

  I found it rather odd, his wanting to know so much about Elektra and Chrysothemis, when he made no promises to assist them. Straightaway, he said he could do nothing for Chrysothemis, immured as she was inside citadel walls, but nevertheless he took pains to reassure me. “She sounds like a harmless young lady. I doubt she’s in any real danger, as long as she remains quiet and biddable.”

  Elektra was living in a herdsman’s hut somewhere in the Argive hills and could be rescued, but all Strophius ever said on the subject was, “We will see what can be done.” A noncommittal response, the type adults always gave to disguise the fact that the answer would turn out to be no.

  He urged me to make thanksgiving offerings to Athena and Hermes for safeguarding me during my journey. To that end, he examined my bow and sword, weapons which I had scavenged from the first tracker’s corpse, and asked. “Which one of these would you rather keep?”

  I indicated the bow.

  “Then you will offer them the bow.” Strophius studied the sword further. “We will make this fit for a king, and you will offer it as well.”

  I ground my teeth in frustration. “Those are my trophies.”

  “You’re still young, Orestes,” he assured me, “and one day will take many more trophies.”

  Strophius had his smith gild the sword’s hilt, replace the studs, and craft a splendid scabbard, all for the gods. I never touched the finished weapon, except to offer it on Athena’s altar.

  Carrying resentment into a sanctuary was as grave a sin as entering with no offering at all; my uncle took pains to remind me of that. “The gods can look into your heart and see everything,” he said gravely. “They know what you fear or desire, even before you yourself know, and they can hear the restless thoughts whispering in your head as if you spoke them aloud.”

  “I hear them, too.” He was a priest-king; he would understand what I meant without thinking me mad. “When I fight, I hear Ares raging in my head, and have felt other gods warning me of danger.”

  An acolyte brought water in a silver ewer to wash our hands before presenting our offerings. Strophius went first. “Have you?”

  “I’m not lying,” I insisted.

  Strophius turned his hands over, wiggled his damp fingers, and shook them out before drying them on the towel draped over the acolyte’s arm. “I never said you were. In fact, I believe you. Poseidon gave your great-grandfather Pelops a gift for breaking horses. He often felt the god’s presence nearby.” I washed my hand and dried them on the towel. Then we ventured into the inner sanctuary to make the offering.

  Only when we were outside again did Strophius return to the subject. “You’ll find charlatans down in the agora and all around Delphi who swear Apollo speaks to them.” He uttered an ironic laugh. “I doubt they would recognize Lord Apollo’s voice if they actually heard it.”

  That sounded exactly like Hyrtios. So someone else had noticed that there were charlatans, that some priests and oracles were deaf to the gods. “Has the god ever spoken to you?”

  He uttered another, mellower laugh. “Anyone who takes the pilgrim road up to Delphi and stands there in pious silence looking down the mountain can hear the god’s voice,” he answered. “It might come in the form of a shepherd’s pipe, or the wind moving through the trees, but when we recognize his divine voice for what it is, it humbles us, and reminds us that the world is ancient and vast. It is then that
we realize that in the schemes of the gods mortal men amount to very little.”

  I had never before heard anyone describe a sacred encounter in such terms. “Even kings?”

  “Even kings,” he affirmed. “Our names might live forever, Orestes, but inevitably our flesh fails, we grow old and become dust, and our shades go down into the darkness. Even heroes die.”

  Because my wound was again giving me trouble, we paused to rest on the stairs, underneath a shady plane tree. I leaned my crutch against the bench. “Have you ever gone to war?”

  Strophius nodded. “I lead regular raids against the brigands who plague the pilgrim routes. I know that does not sound like a glorious war to you, but maintaining the peace is nevertheless a constant struggle.

  “And I know what it is to have Ares raging me. When the god possesses you, there’s nothing you can’t do, no enemy you can’t defeat, no wound you can’t bear.” Strophius drew a heavy breath. “But when Ares is finished with you, when the madness passes and you finally gaze upon what you’ve done in his name, you can’t believe that was you. Some men learn to enjoy the bloodshed, or at least they learn to live with it. Others simply want to throw down their arms and run home, and pretend those evil things never happened.” He managed a grim smile, showing his uneven teeth. “There’s no shame in admitting war is a terrible thing.”

  A knot started to form in my throat. “I never said it was shameful.”

  “Men are savages.” Then he gazed up at the tree’s leafy boughs, and contemplated the stairs leading to the next terrace, a way of indicating that it was time to move on. “I believe we were talking about the gods, weren’t we?”

  “Yes,” I agreed, content to take up my crutch again and leave behind the subjects of madness and war.

  *~*~*~*

  My name day fell a fortnight after the summer solstice. In Phocis, my special day coincided with the games and feasting of Apollo’s midsummer rites.

  On the second day of Apollo’s feast, the day before my name day, the servants set up trestle tables and colorful linen awnings in the great court so the king and his nobles could sit outdoors and feast while listening to the bards invited to entertain us. To mark the sacred occasion, most of the bards honored Apollo with songs of his exploits, including his epic battle against Python, and his unsuccessful pursuit of the nymph Daphne, whose father, a river god, changed her into a laurel tree to protect her virginity. A few bards chanted songs about the Trojan war.

  Servants lit torches along the aithousa as the sun went down, and the dessert course of melons and sweet cakes was served. Strophius’s herald announced the next bard, a stately old man whose failing eyesight required an assistant to help him find his place. Pylades, seated beside me, leaned in and observed, “Damastor is the finest bard you will ever hear.”

  Damastor settled his seven-stringed lyre on his lap, tested the strings with his plectrum, and began to declaim to the warm evening air in a hypnotic, honey-mellow voice. I braced myself for yet another tedious song about Apollo or Troy, while hoping he sang something different.

  He set the scene deep within horse-breeding Argos, describing the weariness of the watchmen on Charvati awaiting the beacon. What was this, a song about Mycenae? I sat up straighter and paid closer attention.

  As the long-awaited fire blazed to life, announcing the victory at Troy, Damastor sang my mother’s part. A chill of recognition shivered down my spine, listening to him evoke my mother brooding alone over my father’s triumph, and resentful that he could celebrate when his own daughter was dead. How had the bard known such precise details to be able to sing about them? His description of the joyous scene the night the beacon was fired matched my own memories so closely that it unnerved me. A god must have sent him a dream in which he saw those things.

  Then Aegisthus entered the scene. Damastor sang both their parts, male and female, amorous co-conspirators plotting a murder. He was going to sing the slaughter, make me relive it right here, before all these people. Had no one told him who his audience was? How did he not know, when apparently he knew everything else?

  Dessert sat heavily in my gut. I had eaten too much. Damastor sang the conspiracy as though he had been there. Mother spoke through him. He captured her every tone and inflection, and did the same for Aegisthus, rendering him melodious and oil-slick, dripping with malicious intent. I fought the urge to vomit.

  Damastor had his audience riveted. He was a master singer, and it would have been wrong to stop him. Noticing my distress, Anaxibia ordered a servant to fetch me a cold compress; it helped somewhat, until the bard set the murder scene, and rendered those horrors anew through the pathos of his singing. I focused on breathing to quell my nausea. Pylades placed a reassuring hand atop mine. Father lay dying in the bathtub, bleeding, lamenting his ignoble end, expressing his regret at not being able to see his children one last time.

  It had not happened that way at all. Father had uttered no dying speech. His end had come in agony and bewilderment, not through the noble yielding up of his shade to Thanatos. But then, bards sang only what their patrons wished to hear. No hero in the songs ever voided his bowels or bladder when he was wounded or slain, or vomited from sheer terror. No one wanted to hear about that.

  “I had no idea,” Pylades murmured by way of apology.

  Damastor’s fingers ceased moving over the strings. Setting down his lyre, he primly folded his hands in his lap, and sat staring into a distance he could not see. It had been a cathartic, magnificent song but for the awful memories it elicited. I wondered whether that might have been the point.

  Strophius broke the silence by addressing him, “Damastor, we haven’t heard this song before.”

  “Blessed Apollo appeared to me in a dream some weeks ago,” the bard answered, “to plant the seed of inspiration in fertile soil.” An official stood at his elbow, bent down, and whispered something in his ear. Damastor listened impassively, then inclined his head. “Forgive me, my lord.” He sounded genuinely contrite. “I am told Agamemnon’s son sits among you.”

  Strophius turned his head to prompt me with a short nod. Why did he require me to speak. My nerves were so tightly strung that I did not know what to say. “Yes,” I said shakily. “I am Prince Orestes.”

  “Ah.” Damastor acknowledged me with a long, mellifluous sigh. “Perhaps I have the details wrong.”

  “It was very well sung. I-I was moved.” That was no falsehood—not that I could have fooled him, with his sharpened hearing; he would have discerned the quavering of my voice.

  That night, sleep once again eluded me. My mind replayed the bard’s song and the images his golden voice had conjured. I shifted onto my aching belly and whimpered into the pillow, even though it was a very childish thing to do. No bard would ever compose a song in which a hero’s twelve-year-old son cried himself to sleep at night. No one wanted to hear the sordid details of my anguish. I myself was weary of grieving, knew it was counterproductive, but the shock and pain—and above all, the enormous burden of guilt—would not leave me. Pylades had admonished me to be a man and swallow my tears, but how long would it actually take until I felt normal again?

  My name day dawned cloudless and warm. Down the corridor, the slave girls emptied their water jugs into the terracotta tub which I shared with my cousin. Pylades bathed first. I picked at my breakfast, while a servant laid out my clothes for later.

  The bath water was still warm when Pylades departed downstairs. And he left me a pretty attendant, too. I liked the way she kneaded my shoulders and rubbed the oil over my torso. She massaged me vigorously, drawing ever-widening circles down my chest to my stomach. I hitched a breath, wondering then whether she meant to venture even lower and massage my....

  No. She withdrew her hand just short of my groin, and shifted position to kneel beside the tub. She was lovely, maybe a year or two older than me, with soft black hair falling to her shoulders. I wanted to kiss her plump pink lips, but was uncertain whether or not I ought to. I had n
ever kissed a girl before. Maybe I would be clumsy and she would not like the kiss, or maybe I would find it wet and gross.

  As if she could read my thoughts, she suddenly leaned forward and touched her lips to mine. Our kiss was sweet and awkward, sending a delicious shiver racing throughout my entire body. How could I have ever thought kissing a girl would be disgusting when it was so wonderful? She held my gaze as we drew apart. Then her hand, which had been resting upon my shoulder, dipped below the waterline, and she grasped me in her supple fingers, exactly where I had wanted her to touch me just moments before. What she did next made me gasp aloud. I had had no idea it could feel like that!

  Afterward, she continued bathing me. I wallowed there in the warm water, dazed and elated, and wanting to do it all over again. When I rose from the bath and stepped out onto the tiles for her to towel me dry, she touched me again, but in a different way that made me go wobbly at the knees.

  I kept thinking about her and her magical hands all day long, which became a great inconvenience. Pylades chuckled when he noticed my plight. “So I take it you liked your present?” My burning blush spoke most eloquently. “I think you may need to see her again later,” he added.

  Pylades also gave me new himantes and a fine dagger sheathed in tooled leather. Anaxibia gave me with a small lyre called a phorminx, in honor of Apollo. Timon apologized for the plainness of the stylus he gave me, while promising to continue our lessons after the festival ended.

  Last of all, Strophius gave me his gift: a modest estate with a field, groves, and vines. There were cattle, sheep, pigs, and seven servants to tend to it all. I could scarcely believe my ears when he told me. An estate! “Now, Orestes,” he said, waiting until he had reclaimed my full attention before continuing, “you must understand that you do not own the land, but are leasing it from me, and as such you are subject to royal taxes. Your income will supply your needs while you continue to live at court.”