by Henry Treece
He held me to him and said, ‘Come, come, sister. Tell me in plain words. Do not leave me guessing any longer.’
I steeled myself and answered, ‘Then here it is, my brother. We are trapped like birds in a snare, here in this mad city, come what may, it does not matter very much. It seems to me that this is our pattern, the way our threads run. But there is Orestes still to think of. If he comes here, then he is a dead man. You remember what he said, in Oeta, that he was almost ready to come? Well, he may be on the road here even as we speak. He and my husband, Pylades, and the other men. They would be walking into the trap.’
Rarus scratched his head and said with a wry smile, ‘That is the chance they must take, sister. We have taken our chance, all the way, with only our own wits to help us. Can they not do the same?’
I began to hit at his face and to shout at him. ‘Can you not see, we have it in our power to stop him from killing himself? It is not often that we poor earthlings can change the pattern for the god, but here is our chance. I beg you, Rarus, you who have been so good to me all my days, help me to keep Orestes alive now.’
He looked at me gravely and said, ‘What would you have me do? Go back up the road to Aegira, searching for him? Would you have me cross the Straits again and dare the mountains? Is this what you are asking, sister?’
I nodded, not daring to look into his eyes.
‘Yes, Rarus,’ I said. ‘I would have you find him, whether he is far away or near, and turn him back from Mycenae. Alone, you could keep clear of the armies. A nimble fellow like you could hide in a fox-hole until Menelaus had passed by. You could walk under the legs of the Dorian horses, and they would never know you had been there. Will you do it?’
He stood a little away from me, holding my two hands in his. Then he suddenly bowed his head, once, in a sign of acceptance.
‘I will do it, if the god will sit on my back and guide me,’ he said gently.’ I will do this if it is the last thing I shall ever do for you. Farewell, my sister, and may your warp and weft be unbroken if I ever see you again.’
I turned and held on to the cypress tree as he went. If I had not done this, I should have fallen, for now all the strength had gone out of me and I felt as empty as a corn-husk after the threshing-flail has fallen on it and the harsh wind has whipped the grain away.
38
For long after the sun had lost its strength, I lay under the old laurels in the hidden garden where my sister and I had once made our house and told each other secrets. If Iphigenia had been there, she would have told me what to do now, with a mad queen and a terrified king on my hands.
But all I could hear that afternoon was the sound of refugees pleading, down at the Lion Gate, and the clattering of wagons as they made their way up the rocky slope to the citadel. That and the frantic crying of captains and sergeants trying to get the New Army into some shape, to withstand the coming shock.
Once, I thought I heard the voice of Tyndareus calling out, ‘Come, lads, just do your best and trust to me. Whenever have I not seen you through? Believe me, I can arrange everything, if you will only give me a chance. There now, that’s better. Let’s have a cheer for Tyndareus!’
The breeze which carried these words past my ears in the high garden also brought on their tail a few half-hearted shouts. I put my face into the grasses and laughed and cried at it all, coming in the end not to know the difference between the one sound and the other. For all was mad, the world itself was mad, and I was as mad as any other creature in that world—no more, and no less.
As the sun began to sink and the deep blue of the sky took on its tinge of purple, I decided what I would do to pass these awful hours; go to the tomb of Agamemnon and say a prayer for Orestes and for poor Rarus. I would beg the dead king to pardon all, and now to keep his son, and my dear friend from harm. What else was there for me to do, in a city that was crazy with its own inner terror, its men scuttering about like ants, this way and that, building barricades that would fall down at the first onslaught, practising spear-thrusts that they had not the courage to use when all came to all.
I bought a white dove from an old blind woman who sat on the steps of the Hera Shrine, beside the Lion Gate. She smiled when I took it from her, but would not tell me why she did so. I asked her, ‘Is it because you think all sacrifice is useless, old one?’
But she only turned her blind eyes away, and smiled again as though she would welcome the Dorian coming, or anyone coming, who would put an end to this city which had outlived its day.
When I reached the great stone tomb of Agamemnon, set in its eternal silence beneath the dark cypresses, it was so much night that I mistook a stray sheep for a man lying in the grass. I jumped with fear, then laughed at my mistake, and went into the columned porch where the blurred white of the tomb just showed through the dusk.
Here I stood, as is proper to the Greeks in praying, and addressed my dead father, begging his aid, admitting my foolishness in the past. The white dove gave up its life easily, without causing me any anguish, and I laid it carefully in the centre of the tomb stone, where the High King’s bronze helmet still stood, for this would be the nearest place to his heart in death.
It was only when I was taking my hand away again that I felt the touch of something that was not dove or helmet. My finger-tips rested on it a while, before the nature of the thing revealed itself to me. It was a fabric of some sort, some piece of braiding, of linen, yet small. I wondered if it was a ribbon that the wind had whisked from some girl’s hair and sent spinning over the wall on to the flat tomb stone.
Yet as I touched it, a strange tremor seemed to come out of it and into my arm, striking to the inner parts of me, I took it in my hand, as fearfully as if it had been a little black snake, and almost ran with it to where a tripod glowed beyond the tomb.
And there I saw that it was a ribbon indeed; the ribbon I had once woven for my little brother, and which I had last seen about his hair in Oeta, when in wine he had promised to come again to Mycenae.
I almost fell to the ground with the shock of this message. It meant only one thing—that Orestes was already in the city, somewhere, perhaps among the refugees. That Pylades my husband would be with him, and even their Band of Brothers, their trusted soldiers. Now as I stood, my legs quivering with weakness, behind the tomb, perhaps they were at their work, up in High Town.
And I had sent poor Rarus towards the enemy to save them from this! ‘Oh, father,’ I said aloud, ‘so my dove was wasted, just as the blind old woman knew, down at Hera’s Shrine.’
Now I did not know what to do. I thought of Rarus running along the dark road, listening for the approaching tramp of feet; or hiding behind the rocks as a troop of Menelaus’ cavalry rode under him. I began to wonder if there was any chance of my getting through the Lion Gate, and of finding him, and going away with him for ever, away from Mycenae. This I would most dearly have done.
And it was then that my ears first caught the sound of a low moaning, like the cry of a starved and deserted lamb, dropped in the wicked winter weather by a careless ewe.
It came to me that beyond the columns, in the long grasses, a child might be lying, lost and afraid, the child of some refugee, perhaps, left by terrified parents. There had been little tenderness in my heart towards these people, but now, myself lonely and fearful in the darkness by the tomb, and remembering my own lost baby, I went towards the moaning sound, hoping that the god who looked over all might deal with me the more generously for this pity I was showing.
‘Where are you, child?’ I called, softly, so that no one might hear me lower down the slope. ‘Where are you? I am a friend.’
The moaning was now nearer, almost beneath my feet, in the dark and trampled grass. Afraid lest I might tread on the crying child, I kneeled and groped about me, until my hand touched something that was not a child. I drew back then, for what I had felt was hair, long hair, damp with something other than dew. As I knelt, rubbing thumb against fingers and knowing that I had touched blood,
the moon rode from behind the high summer night-cloud, down upon the upturned face of Rarus. But a Rarus I had not known before.
This was such a face as might be cut from alabaster, yet so ravaged and stained, as though a troop of horse had trampled over it to ruin what the sculptor had created. In the silver moonlight, his eyes were round hollows of purple darkness; his clotted hair hung matted, beside his cheeks, like the flaps of a helmet. His lips were drawn back from his teeth like the voice-hole of an ivory mask, leaving only a dark shadow where the tongue should be.
As I looked down on him, at this ghastly comedy that had been Rarus, he cried out again, yet so mindlessly, so distantly, that I knew there was no knowledge in his cry. He was asking no pity, accusing no enemy; he was crying because this was all now left for him to do.
I kissed his gaunt face but its blind features gave no sign that he had ever known me. I held him to me, staining my shift with his dark blood; but his body was already stiffening and he got no comfort from my rocking. Then, as he fell away from me and rolled helpless over, I felt something drag at my skirt, and, reaching out my hand, found that a long javelin-head, such as become detached from their shaft once they have reached their mark, was fixed deep into his side below the ribs.
It was more than I could bring myself to do, to drag this frightful weapon out. Not knowing where my strength came from, I raised the heavy body of my friend and staggered with him past the moonlit tomb, and up the gentle slope behind the palace, where apple-orchards were. There, where the white and rose-pink blossom starred the grass, I laid him down, beneath a tree whose branches were a canopy, of red, and white, and moonlit green.
And there I kissed his chilly lips, called him my love, told him I would return; and ran away.
Huge and squat, most monstrous now, the palace rose upon its granite base; the House of Atreus, the den of death. I did not dare go up its stark and splendid stairs; and so, I entered through a little cavern, at the back, a door prohibited to all but members of the House. I raced on blindly up the winding steps, that led in secret to the great hall. And as I went, my cold mouth formed the message I would shout: ‘Beware, mother, beware, your son is back! Orestes is in Mycenae!’
39
And yet these words were never said. As I drew back the heavy curtains and looked into the room, I saw that my message would come too late.
My mother was trying to rise from a straw-pallet laid on the floor for her, with the aid of two sticks. Her back was towards me, so she did not see the terror in my face.
Three paces from her stood two tall men, so cloaked that their faces were hardly visible in the flickering lamp-lit room. But I knew who they were, for, from beneath the hood of the smaller, a torn length of red ribbon had escaped and was hanging on his shoulder. It was ribbon I had woven myself so long ago, to keep Orestes’ hair in order, when his mother wanted him tidy.
Between the two men stood a tall bronze urn, and each of them had a hand upon its lip, as though they had carried it up the stairway.
My mother’s reedy voice asked, ‘What did you say again, young gentlemen?’
They saw me as she asked this, but made no movement across the tiled floor. The taller of them, my husband Pylades, answered her and said, ‘Lady, as you see, we are two Aeolians from Aulis. A man who calls himself Strophius, a stranger to us, I must admit, whom we met on the road to Aulis, flying from the Dorian, begged us, if we ever got to Mycenae, to bring this urn to you. He said it held the ashes of your son, Orestes. We know no more than that, great lady. But we felt that a mother would wish to have the ashes of her flesh and blood at the last. And so we came. Have we done right?’
By now my mother had struggled to her knees, always leaning on the sticks, and was shuffling her way towards the urn. They made no move to help her, but still stood there, the great cloaks and hoods about them.
She was saying, again and again, ‘Oh, little Orestes, my poor Orestes.’ Then, ‘Good gentlemen, how did he die?’
I was like a cold stone at the doorway, unable to move for horror and weariness. It did not startle me at all when hooded Orestes shouted out, like a man bewitched, ‘He died like this, mother!’
And as he said these words, he and tall Pylades bent swiftly, so that their cloaks fell over my kneeling mother, shrouding her. I saw a white hand rise and fall, but in the dim light of the clay lamps, could not say whose hand it was. I only knew that they drew away and let Clytemnestra fall on the painted tiles, her hands clasped to her stomach and a dark gout of blood spurting up like a fountain from between her fingers.
She was saying, ‘My son, my son, remember your duty to your mother.’ And they were laughing, as though she had been some clever poet making a jest.
Suddenly, Orestes shouted hack to her, ‘And you remember your duty to your husband, witch!’
Then I unfroze and ran across the room to her, as she rolled on the pavement. Pylades waved his hand at me and said, ‘Go back, Electra, this is not your business now.’
But I ignored him and fell down beside the queen. She was smiling, not weeping, and now the fountain had stopped its dreadful flow. It was as though she had always waited for this; and, now that it had come, was content once more. As I stooped to kiss her lips, she looked as young as I ever remember her. Her bright eyes flickered over my face and she whispered, ‘Daughter, now we are all together. It is good for the family to gather once again, is it not?’
As Pylades tried to drag me off her, she looked up once more and said, ‘The nurse, Geilissa, told me that great Agamemnon would be back from Troy in time for this feast. Is it so, daughter? I thought I saw him a moment ago, standing by the wall and nodding down at me. Oh, the god is good to bring us all together at the last, after these hundred years of waiting.’
Then she patted my arm with her red hand and slipped sideways out of my knowing to the floor.
Pylades took me by the hair and yelled in my ear, ‘For the god’s sake, go! I love you, Electra; do not stay here to die. Their guards may come at any moment. Go, I beg of you, go!’
I shook him away, and as I did so, the curtains at the far end of the hall were suddenly drawn, and Aegisthus ran in, wet and naked, save for the white woollen towel he held about him. There was a gold mask in his other hand. His face was puffed and angry.
In the dimness of the lamps, he could not see what was happening at our end of the great room, and he was calling out, ‘What is all this row? Can’t a man bath in peace? Can’t a queen lie sleeping? What are you servants doing in the chamber at this time of night? Whose urn is that?’
He was hobbling towards us all the time, leaving wet footmarks on the floor-tiles, like a snail.
Then Orestes flung back his hood and faced him.
‘It is your urn, swine from Thyestes’ sty!’ he yelled.
Aegisthus stopped at this voice and stood like a man struck by lightning. Then he gave a low cry, from deep in the belly, and swung round to run away. But his leg was lame from the black bull and his feet wet from the bath. He slipped and fell headlong on the shiny floor, and the two men were on him like hounds on a fallen stag.
I heard the thudding of their dirk-hilts on his body, and heard his sharp sucking-in of breath each time a blow landed. Then, in a great noble voice, Aegisthus called, ‘Let me cover my face! Let me go into the shadows like a king.’
He tried to get the gold mask over his features as he lay. I saw then how it was; he must have had this thing in readiness against the day when he should be placed in the tomb. It was his own face in gold, the cheeks fat, the eyes small slits, the loose mouth smiling in a sneer. The goldsmith had made a craftsman’s job of that mask.
But Orestes kicked it out of his hand, sending it slithering over the floor. ‘Your face shall be covered, with a vengeance!’ he shouted. And he and Pylades took up the bronze urn and pushed it down hard over his head and shoulders, as far as it would go.
The sound of Aegisthus’ last cries, from inside that urn, were horrible to hear;
it was the sound of a bull bellowing under the butcher’s pole-axe.
I turned away, for the towel had fallen from him, and there was something I could not bear to see in his fat body and his legs kicking in the air.
When little Helen ran through the door, squealing, in her flounced skirt and her bracelets jangling, it was nothing to me that the two men handled her as they did. No, it was no more than the dove, whose neck I had just wrung, down at Agamemnon’s tomb.
Then the two were beside me, their arms about me, pulling, ‘Come, you fool!’ Pylades shouted hoarsely in my ear. ‘If we do not go now, we are dead men!’
Though I struggled to stay in that flickering death-room, they dragged me through the far door and down the little stairway I had come up, towards the orchards. No guard was there to stop our way. The New Army was saving itself.
Outside, in the cold night air, I was sick, and vomited. Pylades stood beside me, leaning on the lower wall of the palace, doing the same. Orestes struck out at both of us, with the ivory haft of his copper knife, and grunted like a wild boar in anger at our delay. In the moonlight, his eyes were no more human than pieces of agate, or thin slivers of flint, such as the men of Thessaly used to set in their death-masks. He seemed to have lost his power of speech now. He was like nothing more than a Fury that has done its work and is lost in the dark, not knowing how to get back to its master, back into its dark shelter in the ground.
40
When we were among the first trees, Pylades stopped again and whispered, in fear, among the overhanging boughs, ‘Steady now, we must not miss the way. Our company waits for us beyond the tomb, keeping guard on the little gap in the wall. In which direction does it lie, Electra?’
I tried to point, but my hand was so shaking that I was not much use to him. Orestes was still hitting out, and pulling at our cloaks, trying to make us move on. He was now less like a Fury than a boy frightened by a nightmare. His mouth-ends were jigging up and down as though in a spasm of silent laughter. And all his flesh was shuddering when I put my hand upon his shoulder. At first, he jumped with fright when I touched him, and then swung round on me, his dirk upraised.
