Electra

by Henry Treece

  I got up slowly and leaned by the wall, suddenly bitter that we were growing old, that we had lost our child, that nothing really made sense after all. No, nothing really came to a decent conclusion —all was haphazard and formless. I said to Pylades, ‘Husband, it seems to me that life is one long joke, and a poor joke at that. We, poor fools, try to make a sort of sense out of it, but there is no sense there to make. Sense is a mad dream that men have made for themselves.’

  Pylades said he would get me a cup of wine to soothe me, but I shook my head and told him to he quiet while I spoke what was in my head; I had no need of soothing, I told him. That was for children, and I was no longer a child; far from it.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘we creatures are born into a world that rages about us, and we are bewildered by it all. So, as we grow, we try to give all things a reason for being so various. We say that the god made them so. And, because we ourselves grow tired at the day’s end and fall asleep, we say that the crops and the trees fall asleep when winter comes; we say that they have life and knowledge just as we have. We say that the god has put that knowledge in them, as in us. And

  because, by reason of our hands, we may take up the wet clay and squeeze it in our palms and fingers to make a ball, with perfect form, with shape and limits, we say that there must be such form in all other things—that the god has made this form, this shape, this truth.’

  I was wearying myself and my husband by this talk. He came to me and led me to the bed, and set me there, to rest. ‘Wife,’ he said, ‘you are saying things you will regret tomorrow. Be silent now, and tempt the god no more.’

  I looked into his gentle, wearied face and answered, ‘That is it, Pylades; it has come to me in recent days that there is no god to tempt. The god is something we have all created to give some sense to what is senseless. Do you not understand? There is no god!’

  As I said this, our room suddenly became as silent as a sea-shell; yet with that faint howling round the walls such as swirls in a shell, so distantly that one wonders if the sound is in the air, or simply in one’s own head. Pylades gazed at me, his mouth open, his arm shaking as he leaned on the oaken table; an old man now, no longer able to outface life and death as the young warrior does. He was no more a warrior, but only an old peasant-man, staring in grief at his old peasant-wife.

  He was like a samphire-gatherer who has followed his quest unthinking, the wicker-basket at his waist, along the narrow ledges of the cliff—and suddenly comes out from his dream to see that a wide chasm opens before his feet, and that there is no going forward, and perhaps no turning and going back either.

  I smiled at him and said, ‘It is you who needs soothing, dear husband. In spite of your white hairs, you are still a child in your thoughts, aren’t you! You still need a mother to hold your hand and to tell you that all will be well.’

  What he would have said to this, I do not know, for I think my words had taken all the force, and faith, and trust from him—though I had not meant them so. But we were saved from the problem of this moment by a man who came to our door.

  He was a bent old fellow, with a bag on his back and a basket on each arm, a wandering merchant of small things, who walked the hills and valleys, the rivers and the towns, from year to year, bartering anything he had picked up on his journeying—amber beads, strips of copper or bronze for making into knives, glazed clay lamps from Theocracy, little blue beads from Egypt, even tiny gold seals from Salmydessus.

  He called himself Phaestus, and said he was of the old Cretan stock which had been on that island since time’s birth; but though he was dark-haired and brown-skinned, and wore a bull-seal at his throat, it is my belief that he was a Hyperborean, from the far island of mists where the stone circle was. Once, after a cup or two of our good wine, he told us how he had carved a Mycenaean dagger on one of the uprights of that stone circle when he was a youth; and it struck me even then that a wandering Cretan trader would not take such a liberty with the sacred shrine of another people. Only a Hyperborean would dare carve such a decoration, I suspected.

  There was another thing that made me think so; when we asked him to say something in the old language of Crete, to amuse the children, Medon and Strophius, Phaestus spoke the same sort of gibberish that I remembered the Hyperboreans, who had gathered with my father’s armies, speaking, before they sailed to Troy, a lifetime ago. It was my belief that this pedlar was one of them, who had been left behind and had turned to trading for his livelihood. But I never taxed him with this, in case I hurt his pride and drove him away from visiting us. Out there in the valley we welcomed visitors who could bring us news. And, again, Phaestus always carried with him a pouch of medicines for curing sunstroke, or water-sickness, or easing the birth of calves, or even of babies. When Medon was cutting his teeth, a red rash spread over all his little body, and we thought he might die of it, if the red spots met about his waist. But old Phaestus gave us a grey powder to be mingled with goat’s milk for him, and the red rash went away and left the lad whole again.

  Then there was the news he brought, which was always worth buying. I think he dreamed much of it as he trudged about the hills, telling us what he thought we would like to hear—for that is always an agreeable thing in a messenger.

  On this morning, when I had told Pylades that there was no god, Phaestus was especially welcome, to take the heavy load from our minds.

  Pylades said to him, ‘What news of the world, old friend?’

  Phaestus sipped at his wine and munched the barley bread and the goat-cheese I had put for him, then answered, ‘It goes from bad to worse, sir. As I make my rounds with the seasons, I see change everywhere, and all the time. Nothing stands still; everything rolls on towards darkness.’

  Pylades began to tease him, saying, ‘That is always your tale, Phaestus! Come, tell us what is happening, in plain terms.’

  Phaestus drained his cup, and let it hang on his finger so that I should notice it and fill it for him again. When I had taken it to do this, he said, ‘These Dorian will bring the world to an end, mark my words, lady. They destroy wherever they go—shrines, palaces, all. If there is a crop in the fields, they eat what they can, and fire the rest before they go on. And they are going on, to all places. They have learned boat-building now, and make the run to Crete three times a year. In my town there is scarcely one stone standing upon another, lady. As for Cnossos, they have made a sad ruin of that! If my grandfather could see the place now, he would die once more, of shame. Why, nothing can stop them, it seems. They are into Egypt itself, like sand-flies settling; they blow up out of the desert and put all to the sword. In the great days, the men of Egypt would have blown them away; now even kings go in fear of their lives from these Dorian. They have no sense of the rightness of things, my lady. They say that all men are equal; their kings are shepherds, and their shepherds kings. They have no great families, no great houses…. It makes no sense, you see. Since time began, there have been great families, we all know that; but the Dorian point to the cattle they have stolen and say, “That is my family! ” And they point to their tents and say, “That is my palace. ” Who can make anything of that,

  I said, ‘You have come through Mycenae recently. What of the palace there, where my fathers have always lived, Phaestus?’

  The old man clucked and wagged his head. ‘Lady,’ he answered, ‘if you went back there today, you would be lost. You would not find your way from one street to another. All that your fathers had ever done has gone. It is as though your fathers had never lived, my dear.’

  He pretended to weep a little, wiping the back of his brown hand over his eyes, and then went on, ‘They have robbed all the graves in the tholoi, men say, and have beaten the gold masks into trinkets for their wives. Their pigs have rooted up the pretty doors in the palace, and their herdsmen have lighted fires in the fountains and have cracked them. Fast-growing alder has pulled the pillars down; ivy nourishes itself on the stones; the tumbled roofs are deep in cow-dung. There is no
palace now. Only a stinking rubbish heap, lady. Vultures have their nest in High Town, and no man goes there any more.’

  I turned to Pylades and laughed, for this news was pleasing to me, not saddening. Old Phaestus glanced across uneasily, as though he thought I suffered from heat-stroke. Then, deciding that I didn’t, and that I was perhaps taunting him, he did his best to bring me to my senses.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I have told you only the little things, lady. There is worse to come. Your sister, Chrysothemis, who calls herself Queen Thoasa now, has forsaken her priestly duties and no longer speaks her own tongue. She leads the Dorian women in praying to the stones and the streams, and has forgotten all the correct usages. She paints herself like a warrior-man, and rides at the head of the women’s company into whatever forays there are. It is as though she has lost all her senses.’

  He glanced at me as though he had gone too far, but I only laughed at him and filled his cup again. ‘She was always a fool,’ I said. ‘What of my other kinsfolk, Phaestus?’

  He brooded over his cup before saying, ‘Old Menelaus and bis wife, the one they went to fetch back from Troy, are dead. The news is that they went into Caria to find themselves a new kingdom and were murdered by some Egyptians there. It is a sad end for such great ones, lady.’

  He expected tears from me, I could tell; but I was not concerned with such ghosts of the past. I said, ‘They had lived their lives. How they ended is no matter. If they burned on the altar, then they must have sent up a good flame, for they were dry old sticks, with no sap left in them, Phaestus.’

  ‘Lady! Lady!’ he said, throwing up his wrinkled hands.

  But I waved him to silence without any trouble. ‘Tell me, and this is more to the point, has any news come to you of my brother, Orestes?’

  Old Phaestus gazed down at his shoes, and watched his toes wriggle in them. Looking up at last, he said, ‘He has gone to the goddess, I think, lady. It is like asking where last year’s wine has gone—or this year’s, for that matter.’ He half-held out his wine-cup, hinting, but this time I did not rise to fill it. I thought that if I gave the old man any more, he would lose the use of his tongue; so I made him wait, and asked, ‘When was Orestes last seen, Phaestus?’

  He mumbled a while, and pretended to catch a fly that was bothering him, though there was no fly to be seen. Then he put his cup down on the table with a clack, and said. ‘He was seen in Crete three seasons ago, trying to persuade the folk there that he was old Minos come again. He was in Troy last summer, telling all who would listen that he was Priam’s shadow. And this year, when the buds first sprang, he was in Phantasm, having come off a boat from the far-islands, dressed as Agamemnon and calling for the folk to march again and take Hellas from the Dorian.’

  I said, ‘How can a man be in so many places, Phaestus? And, if he can, why do you say that Orestes has gone to the Mother?’

  The sly trader nodded in the afternoon sun. He shook his head and gazed at me with dim eyes. ‘If an old dog like myself can go foraging through the world, lady, then surely Orestes, who is a younger dog, can do likewise. As for going to the Mother, I used that phrase because no one is sure that this dark wanderer is Orestes. These tales blow up and down among the islands, as though the simple folk like to think that Agamemnon will come again—or any hero come again, who will drive the Dorian out and set Hellas free once more. I do not know whether it is Orestes, so it is easier for me to tell you that he has gone to the Mother.’

  Pylades smiled and waved to me not to give the old fellow any more wine. ‘Lie down and rest, grandad,’ he said. ‘You have come far and are weary. We will not press you for more news. Now rest,’ But Phaestus shook his head and said slyly, ‘You think your wine is too strong for me, sir. But that is not true; all my days I have drunk the good heavy wine of Crete, and my head has not grown so weak that I cannot stand this hillside brew! Look, to prove I have my senses about me still, I will tell you another bit of news. Hermione, the daughter of Menelaus and Helen, is with Orestes, wherever he is. She followed and found him, and swears he is her destiny. Together, they hope to found another royal line that shall be greater than all who have gone before. Now, what of that news?’ I said bitterly, remembering our old love that had faded, ‘Hermione is of my own age, Phaestus. If she has waited till now to start a family, then she has left it a little late. She is beyond childbearing, friend.’

  Old Phaestus wrinkled his brows, as though calculating the years, then said, ‘Lady, if the Mother blesses Hermione, then she will still he able to raise a family. Have no doubt of that.’

  I did not press him further, because his words were already stupid enough and no more good could be got from them. Instead, I asked him what he had to sell us this time. He answered, ‘Nothing, lady. All I carry is rubbish which such as you would not wish to buy from me. I called only to greet you and to see how your fine sons were faring.’

  Pylades said, ‘They are faring well enough, Phaestus. Indeed, they have gone from home now and have farms of their own, over the valley. They have got themselves wives and are busy breeding their own families. You must call on them and give them our greetings, when you leave this house.’

  Phaestus nodded, ‘It seems no time at all since they were little lads, running behind me and taunting me for my age,’ he said. ‘Now they are married, you say? Did they choose Dorian women?’

  I answered him and said, ‘They did, old man. Good clean girls, apt for childbirth, and able to churn butter with the best.’

  Phaestus shook his head; ‘The world is coming to something,’ he mumbled, ‘when the kin of Agamemnon marries Dorian…. Aye, aye, it is a sad fall.’

  He rose from the stool and rummaged among his packages. ‘I have thought of something,’ he said. ‘I had forgotten that there was something you might like to buy from me. Here it is.’

  In his hands he held a small box of horn, a cylinder stopped at either end with wax, through which the sun shone dimly, showing a twisted dark thing that moved in the light as though it hated sunshine and sought darkness. He put the box into my hands.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, as the thing inside it moved, and the movement brought a prickling to my flesh, like a deed twice-done, done in the forgotten past, and then done again in the waking present and still half-remembered, though long-neglected.

  Old Phaestus said, ‘You may well ask, for it is my most priceless article of trade. It is one of the last of the brood of ancient black Cretan serpents that the old woman at Delphi nourished on her own milk. It is a creature of the most ancient lineage, from the depths of the grotto itself. This I would not offer to anyone but you. I would not….’

  I flung the horn box down and moved away from it.’ I do not want it !’ I cried. Suddenly I remembered how, when I was only a little child, Aegisthus had married me to Rams with such a snake, and had wormed his way into our House itself from this marriage. From such a snake all our doom had unfolded, I thought. ‘Take it away!’ I cried. ‘I do not want it!’

  Pylades came forward and put his arm about me. ‘There,’ he said, ‘there, old woman, but you take on too much, and in this heat. It is not good for you—and all because of a little black snake that I could crush with one stamp of my foot! Is it decent that the kin of great Agamemnon should behave so, before a common trader, because of a little black worm that lives under a stone?’

  I began to weep then, so overwrought, that Pylades led me to my chamber to rest. And later he came to me and told me that he had bought the little black snake, to put in a hole under the rocks, near our water-trough. ‘For,’ he said, ‘though you may not know it, I have a great fondness for these little worms. They are said to bring luck to a house. Moreover, they give warning of enemies, of fire and flood and drought. You shall see, Electra, this little creature will drink his fill at the trough, and then go into his own home and never trouble us. He will catch worms and flies and beetles, and we shall not need to concern ourselves about his keep. Perhaps, once in a while,
on a sacred day, we may leave a shrew for him, or any small thing we care to offer.’

  As he turned from me, he said, ‘Since you deny us a god to pray to, let us at least have a little black snake! Though he was once the Mother’s creature, we can think of him simply as a garden-pet, and delight in him, not fear him. Now our children have gone away and left us, we need a small one to watch and to talk about, when we sit by the hearth at dusk. You will see, come next year, you will be telling me all manner of things about his strange tricks. You will be waiting at the gate at night, when I come in from the fields, to tell me where he has cast his skin.’

  All I said was, ‘Curse that old Cretan, for bringing the doom on this house, too!’

  But Pylades had gone through the door and did not hear me, I think. If he did, he made no mention of it again.

  45

  The years pass, and the oak-trees fall in the wind, their roots rotten, their bark scarred. The fires in the mountains are slaked. The proud-antlered stag lies aheap of dust at the bottom of a gully. Ten thousand of his children have wandered to the northern grazing-grounds, and their herds are but a memory, for they died a lifetime ago. All passes, the pain and the pleasure, the agony and the glory.

  Medon died of a plague and his three sons with him. Strophius took his brother’s widow into his own house, and into his own bed for comfort. Then the drought struck his farmstead and he went north, in a wagon, with all his oxen, to find green grass, like the herds of deer.

  And we were left alone in our bitter valley, Pylades and myself. Two folk who should have died when the Dorian came to Mycenae, if there had been any meaning in life.

  I find it hard, doctor, to remember this part of my tale. After the drought, there came rainy season after rainy season, as though nature had gone mad. All rotted now, just as it had shrivelled before. The very roof-thatch sprang green again, as though it were a cornfield. Damp-mould stood on the bread, and the floors were never dry. The beds stank of wetness, and Pylades woke up one day to find the use of his hands gone.