The Young Lion

by Laura Gill

  Upon the sanctuary threshold, the women blindfolded me so that I should not glimpse their altars or idols until the proper moment, then they took my hands to lead me within. The stucco floor felt irregular and cool under my feet, a tactile sign that I had passed from the sunshine and open space of the male domain into the claustrophobic womb of the women’s mysteries. Myrrh, saffron, and frankincense smoke sweetened the air, mingling with the floral fragrances the women already wore.

  I heard a door shut behind me, registered it like the closing of a snare, then heard the murmur of numerous female voices, and the snuffling of an animal nearby.

  The high priestess asked the ritual questions. “Who is this man?” Elektra was commanding and cold.

  A priestess standing at my elbow answered, “This man is Orestes, son of Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra.”

  “Is he fit to meet Mother Gaia?”

  “He has fasted and purified himself. He has forsworn manful exertion and sexual intercourse. He has sworn upon his own manhood that he will maintain the silence of the goddess’s mysteries.”

  “Then let his eyes be opened.”

  The blindfold was removed. I blinked against the light of more than a dozen flickering oil lamps, then slowly focused on what must have been the inner sanctum. Frescoes of priestesses and griffin-headed creatures making offerings to a seated goddess were splashed across the walls. Gaia’s cult image stood seven feet tall; she wore gold and jewels, and an elaborate robe woven by Anaxibia and her handmaidens. Her carved wooden hands cupped enormous chalk-white breasts.

  Beside the altar with its painted offering table, a pair of sturdy middle-aged priestesses held the tethers of a dazed and garlanded bull. A third held the labrys, whose bronze double blades gleamed in the mellow lamplight. I saw young acolytes holding vessels to catch the sacrificial blood.

  “Gaia is our primeval Mother. She rules the high Mountains, she rules the bountiful Earth. Hers is the womb of Creation.” Scarlet suns dotted Elektra’s white face. Red ochre rouged her nipples, and her rounding belly swelled under her priestess’s apron; she was no longer my sister, but the greatest of goddesses made flesh. “Kneel, Orestes, and do her reverence.”

  The women removed my white robe, to make me naked before the goddess. I shivered despite the warmth issuing from the braziers and the bodies crowding the chamber, and knelt down.

  Elektra sprinkled me with salt and water, and intoned her chant with a strident voice. “Orestes, son of Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra, receive now these gifts of the earth who is your Mother. Gaia formed you from these elements. She molded your limbs from earth and water.” Her fingers smeared dust and ashes on my cheeks, sprinkled my shoulders with water. “She breathed into you the very spark of life.” Elektra circled my head with a burning taper. “And when your days upon this earth are done, you will return to the elements from which she formed you.”

  I remained on my knees, the hard stucco digging into my skin, as the women positioned the bull for the sacrifice. A priestess sprinkled sacred meal between his horns; another stood ready with the mallet. Elektra raised the labrys high. “Gaia, Great Mother Goddess, grant us your benevolence. In return, we offer you this sacrifice, a king bull. Let his blood be charged with your potency.”

  The mallet struck the bull between the horns. With a flash of bronze, the labrys descended to sever the bull’s spine. An exultant shout went up from the women. I shuddered, remembered how Mother used to dispatch victims at the altars of Mycenae, how she had embodied the dark goddess at the entryway of Iphigenia’s tomb. In the unsteady lamplight, Elektra manifested the epiphany of the goddess, became one with the ravenous spirit of our mother.

  Acolytes collected the blood in basins. I blinked to try clear my head of the cloying incense. Once again, my sister stood before me, washing her hands. Blood had sprayed her painted breasts and embroidered apron. I glanced away from her, toward the dead bull, experiencing a surge of nausea at the sight of his glazed eyes and lolling tongue. By my own hand, I had dispatched scores of bulls to honor the gods. I was accustomed to the sight of bleeding animals and quartered carcasses, so why did this particular sacrifice make me so uneasy?

  Elektra finished her ablutions. “Rise, Orestes, son of Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra, and receive the blessings of the Great Goddess.”

  After so long kneeling on the hard and uneven floor, it was difficult to stand up; a priestess had to assist me.

  “Orestes, here is Mother Gaia’s gift to you.” I eyed the bowl of blood in my sister’s hands with trepidation. Kings occasionally drank bull’s blood during rituals, but the blood had to be fresh, mixed with wine, lest the draught bring death. The dark fluid in the basin Elektra was holding had begun to congeal.

  Elektra dipped her fingers into the blood and smeared the repulsive mess across my breast. “Here is the substance of life.”

  A dozen hands slathered warm blood onto my limbs, my back, and my face; the priestesses even reached between my thighs to bathe my manhood in black gore. I shrank from their touch. “All men and animals of the field are born in the blood of a woman,” Elektra chanted, “she who is the goddess made flesh. Blood brings about and nurtures life. Blood means strength.”

  Blood was death. My gorge rose at the stench of the congealing mess drying on my body. Had there been anything in my stomach to vomit up, I would have desecrated that sanctuary with black bile.

  Taking me by the arms, the priestesses escorted me from that blood-drenched sanctum into a lustral chamber. A terracotta tub sat against the wall. I froze. Oh, gods, no. There I stood, covered in sacrificial blood, and now the women, those maenads, those murderers, required me to step into the bath, to become in my turn the sacrificial animal, the human offering, the year-king... No, I lacked the courage to willingly go where my father had unwittingly gone, and so took an involuntary step back.

  Elektra emerged from behind her ritual façade long enough to clasp my hand in reassurance. “This is life, Orestes, not death,” she said, tugging on me. “After the sacrifice is made, the altar must be washed clean.”

  The nightmare was mine alone; she could not understand. Stepping into that tub took more courage and resolve than she realized. I sat down, hugged my knees to my chest, and waited for the net and axe. What had the priestesses done with the labrys? I had not seen it again after Elektra delivered the fatal blow. Cold water sluiced over my head and shoulders, washing away the blood. The priestesses gathered around the tub like magpies, urging me to open my thighs to receive Gaia’s purifying gift. I shivered uncontrollably, and squeezed my eyes shut so as not to see the reddened water pooling around me.

  After the sluicing, the priestesses washed me down with sea sponges. Then they raised me up, and dried me with soft towels, and anointed me with scented oil. “You are the young king, the king reborn.” Elektra was chanting in a strident voice. All around me, women began clapping in unison, a jubilant celebration of my potency. Blood from the bull sacrifice still smeared their painted faces and ritual aprons, and their naked white breasts, but they did not appear to notice.

  I lay awake throughout that night curled into a fetal position, feeling unmanned and insignificant. Elektra came to my chamber at dawn, no longer the painted, inscrutable high priestess, but my sister once more, bearing oat cakes and honey-sweetened barley water with which to break my fast. But I could not eat after last night’s nightmarish rites. “You have no idea what you’ve done,” I told her. “The ritual bath, the blood... You’ve made me relive Father’s death.”

  “Yes,” she admitted, eyes sparkling with determination. “It was to sanctify you, and to show you the way through the darkness. Seeing him die polluted you, tormented you, but you have been washed clean of those horrors. You have received the goddess’s blessing of blood, fire, and earth.” Her fervor revealed no falsehood, only a genuine desire to aid me, and I understood the cathartic nature of her reasoning, but that did not mean that I wanted what she had done.

  Elektra grasped my
hand, and kissed it. “Orestes, you will go down into that same darkness that swallowed Father, but this time you will defeat it. You will be reborn. You will become king.”

  “Did an oracle reveal that to you, or is that simply what you want to believe?” I suppressed the urge to snatch my hand away. “Because you know that isn’t the fate Apollo decreed for me through the Pythia.”

  She scoffed. “The Mother of the Mountains was here long, long before the Far-seer usurped her sanctuary.”

  Elektra was feverish in her denial of what I already knew to be true. No blessing she granted, no ritual she performed could alter my destiny. I was doomed to descend into the darkness she claimed that I would vanquish and be swallowed. Buried somewhere deep, deep down in her conscious, perhaps she even comprehended that the Fates had already spun and measured my thread.

  But I did not want to leave her dwelling on my fatalism, and so thanked her, and attempted to eat something. I knew, too, that Strophius was right, that it served a king ill to behave as though the fight was lost before he ever took the field. Who would follow a leader mired in despair and thoughts of defeat?

  There was a story going around which the Dorian Boagrius had shared with me, a peculiar addendum to the growing legend of Achilles: the choice between surviving to old age and obscurity or dying young in eternal glory. Provided the story was true, which was not important, Achilles had known his days were numbered. He knew that he would not survive Troy, yet nevertheless he had found the fortitude to lead his Thessalian Myrmidons to great glory. In short, he had gone consenting to the sacrifice. So I shook away the cobwebs, and forced myself to focus.

  No, I would not sack over twenty towns or capture vast treasure and women as Achilles had done. I did not even have his choice. Mine was a mission of vengeance and terrible filial obligation, to restore the honor of my house, but there was to it a certain measure of glory. Men would remember the faithful son of Agamemnon; they would sing songs about my will to fight, that spark of dynamis that made a hero. I did not deceive myself into believing that those songs would be happy ones, because there were no glad songs about the House of Atreus. But I would be brave and loyal, and generations of bards would honor that.

  The legend of Achilles conjured the burgeoning desire to be remembered in song, but was my own faint recollections of Iphigenia that solidified it. Always, those who had been at Aulis praised her courage and serenity in the face of her cruel and imminent death. They claimed that she had agreed to the sacrifice once she understood the necessity. Was that so? I did not know, beyond that single memory of her dressed in white, crowned in wheat ears and poppies. But if a mere maiden could swallow her fear and willingly yield her life to serve a greater cause, then how could her grown brother refuse the call?

  Whatever happened at Mycenae, whether my mother committed suicide or I murdered her with my own hand, and was shunned as a matricide, the curses and recriminations that had plagued the House of Atreus must find their terminus with me. Pylades and Elektra, Chrysothemis and Hermione—they must not bear the cost of those long-ago crimes. Of that, I was certain.

  I spent time with my nieces and nephews, knowing that I might never see them again. Young Strophius and Medon were growing into handsome boys, active and bright, and already attending daily lessons with their pedagogue. They grasped that their father and I were going away for a while, though not where or why. I did not try to explain our errand to them, aside from stating that we had very important business to attend to.

  Three-year-old Antiklea was too young yet to grasp anything beyond the nursery. She was a proper little lady, though, showing me her neatly kept cloth doll, and holding her arms out for a hug. I lifted her onto my lap to admire her doll, while her year-old sister terrorized her nurse.

  Antiklea watched Charis hurl mashed peas onto the floor, then gazed up at me and announced very seriously, “Bad.”

  She had a wise old soul, this lovely little niece of mine. Should I survive the coming ordeal, I would count myself very fortunate if the gods granted me such a daughter. “Yes,” I agreed, “very bad.”

  *~*~*~*

  I slept uneasily on my last night in Krisa. The shadows moved across the walls, the darkness giving life to familiar phantoms. “Be patient, Father,” I said softly. “You will soon have your vengeance.”

  A servant roused me before dawn with breakfast. I dressed in the dark, donning a traveler’s plain clothes, and packing only the necessities.

  Pylades met me outside my chamber. He, too, was dressed for the road, with a shepherd’s canvas bag slung across his chest, and a wide-brimmed hat. “Are you ready?” he asked.

  No man was ever quite ready to meet his death, no matter how long or hard he had prepared. “Let us take our leave.”

  Strophius awaited us outside the megaron. “Remember, Orestes,” he stated firmly. I remembered only that I would spare Pylades, not necessarily myself. “And you, Pylades. Remember your duty.”

  Anaxibia hugged us to her, admonishing us to take care of ourselves. Tears sparkled in her eyes; she brushed them away with jeweled fingers and managed a tremulous smile. Strophius remained grave.

  When her turn came, my sister flung her arms around my neck, holding onto me so hard that it hurt. She was sobbing. “Elektra,” I began. “Please...” I did not want to have to pry her loose.

  Elektra drew back her head to study me with bloodshot eyes; she had been crying all night. Releasing me, she repeated the scene with her husband, making him swear to look after me.

  Boukolos and our five companions awaited us in the court of the lower citadel. We would travel by chariot to Cirrha, from there board a ship and cross the Gulf of Corinth, and continue on to the Argolid by foot. I was heading once again into danger. However, I was now a man of nineteen, prepared to face the threat, accompanied by loyal friends, and—above all—ready to pay whatever price was necessary to bring an end to the strife that haunted my existence.

  Pylades clapped a reassuring hand across my shoulders. “Come, Orestes,” he said. “Let’s go and set things right in your house.”

  The Story Will Continue In

  Orestes: The Outcast

  About the Author

  Laura Gill has a passion for Mycenaean and Minoan culture. She has a Master’s Degree in English Literature from California State University, Northridge, and has worked as a secondary school teacher and florist. She lives in Southern California with her mother and cats. She is also the author of Helen’s Daughter.