Electra

by Henry Treece

  I huddled up to her, already half-asleep, and said, ‘You and my father will never die, mother. Don’t say such things.’

  Then I was fast asleep.

  10

  Now men gathered about Mycenae like flies about carrion. Some of them were so dark-faced that I thought they were from the hot sands of Libya. Others were almost white-haired, with eyes so pale that they looked empty and blind. They often fought because they could not understand one another’s languages.

  My father took all of us children on one side late one afternoon, when the sun flung long shadows from the cypress trees across the courtyard, and said, ‘The time has come for me to tell you this, my children. It is no longer safe for you to go out among the tents to listen to the soldiers’ songs, or to watch them wrestling and throwing the javelin. In Mycenae now are men from all over Hellas, and beyond. Some of them have been a year in coming to us from the island of mist at the earth’s end. You will know them by their red hair and the blue war-paint they wear on their faces and arms. Do not go near them, for they are not like other men. They pray to stones set in the ground, not to the god, and they offer children in their sacrifice, just as we offer horses to Poseidon. These men are too savage and ignorant to know that you are the children of kings and lords, so do not go near them. Stay safe in the palace. I have put a guard of Achaeans inside the walls. They will not let these Outlanders come inside—but you must help by staying where I tell you.’

  My sister, Iphigenia, who was older than most of us, said boldly, ‘I have heard that these Outlanders have gold enough in their own streams; why do they come to share that which we shall gain from Troy?’

  The king gave her a hard look. I am not sure that he ever really loved her, she was often too sharp and did not pay him the homage he thought due to a High King. He answered sharply, ‘If I say it is frosty, you say it is warm. If I say a creature is a bull, you say it is a cow.’

  Iphigenia smiled up at him and said, ‘I am not talking about frost or bulls, but about these Outlanders who want our gold when they have some of their own.’

  Agamemnon pulled hard at his beard and turned away from us. ‘Just remember not to go outside the walls,’ he said. Then, as he reached the door, ‘However much gold a man has, he can still do with more.’

  We thought the king was acting strangely: but we were also cross with Iphigenia for angering him so uselessly.

  One morning we got a sight of these Outlanders, though, without going outside the walls. We stood on the upper steps and saw four of them climbing over the walls. Our Achaeans soon caught them when they dropped down onto the ground. How small they were! And one of them was so old, he could hardly jump off the wall.

  Iphigenia said, ‘They won’t make much of a showing against the Trojans, I’ll be bound.’

  They had only strips of wolfskin about their middles and light deer-hide shoes. They had their red hair done up in buns on top of their heads, and held with bone pins. Their axes and knives were of flint, not like our splendid bronze ones. But the blue war-paint on their faces was certainly fearsome. It made them like strange animals, not men.

  The old fellow who was with them wore a ragged grey gown of wool and a crown of oak-leaves round his head. It slipped sideways when he landed and made him look very silly. His hair was quite white and hung down his back. His beard almost reached the belt of clacking shells round his waist. He had a holly stick with a cat’s white skull fastened to the top, and with this he tried to beat our Achaeans back.

  But they had their orders and closed in with their short swords. 1 looked away while it was done, but Hermione told me about it afterwards. She said that the younger Outlanders were laughing all the time, even when the swords went in, and that the old man in the wool gown almost blinded the Laconian captain with his cat-stick before three of the other guards tumbled him down.

  After that I did not want to go outside the walls! I almost prayed for the wind to change, so that these terrible men could be gone from Mycenae, even though it meant that Agamemnon would go, too. I felt it would be a good bargain.

  But if our distant allies frightened me, our closer friends seemed more and more noble and trustworthy. They were still allowed inside the palace and I got to know many of them very well.

  The most handsome of them was Ajax, who came from Salamis, where they still prayed to the Mother. The rough inland barons used to tease him about this, but, though I was only a young girl, I could tell that they meant nothing by it. Ajax was a foot taller than any other man, save my father, and was so strong that all men wished to be his brother. Actually, he had a brother, or a half-brother rather, called Teucer. This Teucer was just as black as Ajax was golden, an d he was no great hand with the heavy bronze sword. His weapon was the bow which, being shaped like the growing moon or the bull’s horns, was often the weapon of those who prayed to the Mother. Teucer’s bow was a small thing, of layers on layers of horn, bound round with wire and gut, until its strength was such that only an expert could use it. Teucer would draw it to the breastbone, not to the ear as the long Hellene bows were drawn, and let fly arrow after arrow with such rapidity that he could stand easily against five javelin-men. Over a distance of fifty paces, not one would have reached him alive. But Teucer was no use at in-fighting. A girl of twelve could have beaten him at wrestling or dagger-work. It was laughable to watch him, when the armies were practising for the war to come: he would let loose a dozen short stick-arrows at the approaching ‘enemy’ who, if touched, fell down and pretended to be dead. But if he missed any of them and they still came on with their clubs, Teucer would run for shelter behind Ajax’s enormous shield, and would not come out again until the ‘enemy’ had been beaten off. They always fought together, ate together and slept together. That was the custom among warriors who fought in pairs when I was a young girl. It dated back beyond the time of my great-uncles, Castor and Polydeuces, the Laconians who came from their mother’s body together and looked so alike that not even she knew which was which.

  I liked Teucer because he was so modest. Once when he shot down an owl from the roof of our palace, with one quick flick of the wrist, I praised him; but he only smiled and shrugged, and said, ‘It is nothing, my lady. I have been doing this for more years than you have been breathing air and drinking milk. What would be strange would be if I could not do it, after all that time.’

  He promised to teach me how to use the short horn bow; but there was no time before the armies went away, and so I never learned. I was sorry at the time, because we girls liked to boast of what we had learned from the soldiers—sword-play, how to hold a shield up under the axe’s blows, chariot-driving, wrestling. We loved the wrestling most of all. In the heat of battle, the men tore off their clothes and grappled with one another all naked, save for a breech-clout. The sweat ran down them, and their big hands slipped in it, as they went at each other with teeth and knees, their hair and beards all over their faces. When the high barons were not about, we girls would strip off our clothes and run in among them, and be thrown here and there in the dust, with the sun over our heads. The younger warriors liked this and got their knees to us just as though we had been other young men. We came away bruised and aching, and some of the older ones with worse troubles, but we loved it. For many of us, it was the first time we had been close to a man, to feel his bone and hair and sweat on us. It was from this beginning that the girls of Achaea gained their name as naked wrestlers. In the generations that followed, such places as Athens grew to be very prim and forbade women even to watch the men wrestling. They called us Mycenaeans shameless hussies for dropping our skirts and plunging into the fray. Not that we cared for what the folk of Athens said: they were born liars, who spoke one word, but meant another. The same elders who frowned and ordered us away from their sports would be just those who tried to take secret liberties with us in the narrow streets or taverns, when the wrestling was over and the wine-feasts began at sun-fall.

  I think my father, the kin
g, knew I went out wrestling, but he never commented on it. Clytemnestra did, though. She met me once, as I came up through the vestibule with my cousin, Hermione, and said,’ Fruit that is bruised will soon go rotten and will spoil the other apples that rest beside it. From now on, you must both keep away from the soldiers. Remember who you are, and which House you belong to. All that may be well enough for slave-girls, but not for princesses.’

  Hermione, who was always bolder towards my mother than I dared to be, said, ‘It is princesses that the men like best. They have told us so.’

  Clytemnestra bent towards her and said, her eyes narrow, ‘What more do they do, after the wrestling?’

  Hermione just threw back her head and laughed. ‘Do you think I am going to tell you that, aunt!’ she said, then ran away, her robe trailing behind her in her hand.

  My mother turned on me then, and said, ‘Hermione is too forward for you. Though you are of the same age, she has picked up too much for her years. Her mother has not kept the watch on her that I have on you. From now on, when you go out with your cousin, you must keep yourself decently covered.’

  Later, one of the sewing-women made a small pair of leather breeches for me and I had to wear them under my skirt. They were very thick and hot, and although Hermione tried to ease me of them, she could not, because they were held about my waist with a thong-knot winch only my mother knew how to untie. I shall never forget those breeches! They were an agony, especially when the hide got hard with my sweat, and the edges got worn and rough. I thought I would be marked for life—but, as I got older, I came to understand that there were worse torments than a pair of leather breeches, and that being marked for life was a small thing in a warrior-land where hardly any fighting-man went about with all his limbs, or his teeth, or his ears and eyes complete.

  But talking of my breeches, which made me look like a boy, reminds me of one of the great lords who looked like a girl. It was Achilles, who was only about fifteen when he set sail for Troy. His beard hadn’t come yet and this made him so aware of himself, among the hairy soldiers, that he always put on a fierce face, tightening his mouth so much that he got the nickname of ‘the lipless one’. This wasn’t the only strange thing about him, though. The rumour was that his mother, having foreknowledge that one day all the princes must sail for Troy, had brought him up as a girl on the island of Seyros. He had been dressed in skirts and had lived among other girls for so long that he was never thought of as anything else, with his long hair and painted eyes, and his clinking jewellery. The story went that Ajax and Odysseus discovered who he really was when they went recruiting soldiers for the war. The tale is variously told, but the version we heard in the palace at Mycenae was that Odysseus got among the court-ladies on Scyros one night and had the ill-fortune to pick Achilles. But I don’t know: as far as I saw, Achilles was as brave and nimble as any of the other young ones, even though his high fluting voice made us all laugh. But he had a vile temper, and never really liked my father.

  We laughed at Odysesus, too, for that matter, in spite of all his bragging and his great hairy chest. While he was sitting down at table, he looked the grandest man the god had ever made. But once he stood up, everybody roared, because his legs were so short he looked like a dwarf.

  He was a very strange fellow, this Odysseus, King of Ithaca. He was always angry, for one reason or another, breaking wine-cups or thumping his fist on the board. After a while, no one took his anger or his boasting seriously. Then he would drink more and more, crunching up the clay cups in his teeth, spoiling our best Minyan glaze-ware, until someone would call out, ‘What about your wound, Odysseus? Let’s hear about that!’

  The men had heard about it a hundred times, but it was always good for another laugh. Odysseus would stagger onto his bench and drag up his kilt to show his body. He didn’t care who was present, slaves or women, when he did this. There was a great white and puckered furrow in his brown flesh, that ran down his body into the hair on his thighs, an ugly sight—though he gloried in it. ‘Look, all of you,’ he would cry, ‘this is where the god’s thunderbolt entered when I defied him once on Olympus. Which of you could have taken such a blow? Which of you could have walked down the mountain unaided, as I did, and then have lived to carry the scar as long as I have done? Which of you?’

  Always the warriors would shout out, ‘No one, Odysseus! You are the bravest of all men!’

  Then they would laugh behind their hands and get on with the drinking. Even the slaves used to laugh, and I have seen them, when they thought they were alone, exposing their bodies to one another and saying, in their rough dialect, ‘Which of you could have lived to carry the scar as long as I have done?’ The women and children did it, too; it became quite a catch-word.

  Once my father, the king, drew me aside and said, ‘You mustn’t mind old Odysseus, my love. He is one of my best advisers, but he is a bit of a fool in ordinary matters. That belly-wound of his was got from a boar’s tusks, nothing more. But it’s the only scar he has to show, so he makes the most of it.’

  After that, I got to understand Odysseus better, and men better, in general. I saw how bragging they were, even the grown ones, like little boys. It was from Odysseus and his scar that I learned how rough and hairy old men’s bodies were, like gnarled oak-trees. One can learn many things, keeping one’s eyes open.

  There was one of my father’s counsellors, though, who taught me something else. This was Nestor, King of Pylus, the oldest and, men said, wisest king ever to walk the earth. When Nestor came to Mycenae, he was so bent with age that his servants had to carry him In and from the feast table; and his eyes were so like stones that he could not see his hand before his face unless the sun was at its brightest.

  But he taught me something. I cannot tell you what it was, doctor, yet awhile. Perhaps I will, one day, when I am in the mood, but not now. It is strange, but even though I am so old, I am often as modest as a young girl from Athens. I think that if my father, the king, had known what Nestor taught me, he would have put the sword into him without delay, even though he was an old man and had come so far to join us with all his javelins and horses. Perhaps it would have been as well. Oh, I don’t know. As you get older, things grow more and more confused. Perhaps King Nestor did no harm after all. Perhaps I should have learned about it some other way; from the slave women, perhaps. I don’t know, and now I am too old to care.

  11

  During all this time my sister, Iphigenia, was very dear to me. There were moments when she seemed the only unchanging thing in my life; as firm as a rock when my father and mother were full of the whims of a world I had not yet come into. Chrysothemis was always busy with her rituals, her libation cups and sequinned skirts, her little sacrifices at the hearth-stone, her prayers to be learned (though she was never very quick at learning and made mistakes with the words which even I could hear), while baby Orestes was still cutting teeth and wetting himself and bawling for the breast. Iphigenia was the only one of my blood-kin I could turn to. Hermione was well enough for a romp in the apple-trees, or a song with the boys, but useless to talk to about the things that bothered me at this time—though she changed a great deal, afterwards, as I will tell you.

  But Iphigenia sat, in our secret place among the laurels in the private part of the palace garden, and listened to me patiently. I can see her now, a little on the thin side—though her body was well-formed from the start, and she loved to stroke it when we were alone —her dark eyes big in her narrow face, her lips always shaped into a gentle smile. She could tease, like anyone else, of course, but most often her teasing had a honeyed end to it, of kindness after the sharp word. I told her about Nestor and she waited a while, then said, ‘It is always the same with kings, beloved. They are their own law. I think our father may be the same, when he is in other places.’

  I said hotly, ‘No, no, dear one, our father is not like that. He may be a mad lion but he is too noble a beast for that. Have you not seen him on the palace steps, sho
uting out the law of the land to the field-folk on the appointed days? Have you not observed his proud beard and his still hands, held out like those of the god? To such a man there is nothing small and nasty, nothing less than godhead, even though that may be terrible, as when he rose against the guests at the feast for Paris. Yet that was not small and nasty; it was grand, though fearsome. Yes, he is grandly mad, but not nasty.’

  Iphigenia smiled and shook out her long hair. ‘Dear one, dear one.’ she said. ‘What a baby you still are! Do you think that because a man is a king, and a god, and a great fighter, that there is no smallness to his mind? Can you say honestly that Zeus has never done a nasty, brutish little thing? Or Poseidon, for that matter.’

  I came close to tears and answered, ‘Our father is always great. Even at his smallest, he is greater than another king’s grandest.’

  My sister shook her hair over her face, so that it seemed to cascade down to hide her features, like a dark waterfall hiding the rock beneath it. I could not tell whether she smiled or was serious when she spoke, but she said softly, ‘How many of the slaves’ children are our brothers and sisters, dear one? Can you answer me that?’

  I was thunderstruck and said, ‘You speak in riddles, beloved.’ Iphigenia parted her thick hair and smiled at me sadly. ‘I speak what everyone knows,’ she said, ‘not riddles which no man can answer. And I tell you that half the black-eyed children who sprawl in the straw with the flies about their heads carry the Blood of the Lion in their veins. They are as well-born as ourselves, if it comes to it, sister. So what is this nobility, this godhead, if any slave may share it?’