The Outcast

by Laura Gill

  Father, too, came with the gathering shadows, a cold and ethereal presence lingering in the corner directly below the spider’s web. I had done exactly what he wanted, fulfilled his dying request, and he haunted me still, emanated paternal disappointment. And why not? I had killed them both, Agamemnon and Clytaemnestra. Had a son ever failed his parents so spectacularly? I sobbed by night into the pillow, leaving great wet blotches, and by day stared at the walls, silent tears rolling down my cheeks.

  The priests meant well when they gave me the juice of the poppy, but they only succeeded in making it worse; they had no idea that, far from calming me, opium wrenched open my senses, and left them even more vulnerable to attacks from the other world.

  I drifted in a stupor, until the room began to change all around me. A breath of winter entered as a bluish smoke, and everything it touched turned white, snow white, corpse white, and when the smoke wafted over me, the air in my lungs became so crisp, so pure, so heavy with the resinous scent of pine and mountain fir that it stung. I lifted a hand to study it against the whiteness; it was tinged blue with cold, except for the fingertips, which were black with frostbite. But it did not hurt at all; the flesh simply went numb and died. My entire body could slip away like that, effortlessly, painlessly, and no one would even mind. Freezing to death was not so bad. I had even heard that one became warm and drowsy toward the end.

  Frostbite claimed my hand to the wrist, then to the elbow, first mottling the skin with purple like a bruise, then black. And then, to my horror, the dead skin bloated and burst open, birthing a seething mass of white grave worms. The stench was overpowering. Now the cold was no longer the frost of the high altitudes, but the charnel mildew of the tomb, and the brilliant white of the walls turned pink, pale as a blush, then deepening into red, bright, arterial red. Blood slid down the walls like melting tallow; it drip-dropped from the ceiling onto me, spattering on my upturned face, my rotted hands, my naked breast. I screamed, shrank away, but there was nowhere to hide; the cubicle had become a slaughterhouse.

  Flies swarmed the air, great black clouds of them, and settled where the blood started to congeal; they were all over me, beating their translucent wings, laying their eggs. I swatted at them, sending them buzzing back into the air, and shouted curses, but they were relentless, persistent, returning to gorge and defecate and ovulate, and it was agony...

  Then they blew away altogether, and the priests were there to pin me down to the cot, to bid me be silent despite the maggots and blood. Someone started to chant, “In this place, I call upon the god by his sacred names: Apollo, Paian, Pythius, Epikourios, Apotropaios. Behold Orestes, son of Agamemnon, who lies under the seal of his protection. Let him set his serpent rod upon this man Orestes, and safeguard him, and drive out the demons of sickness and madness.”

  A man’s voice, low and soothing. I remembered him, tall and graying. “Go away.” An invisible weight sat upon my chest, stealing the breath behind my words. “Blood.”

  But it was another’s voice who answered, “You’re seeing things.”

  “Athos must have given him too much of the poppy,” the gray priest said.

  “Then we’ll have to restrain him, and you’ll have to stay with him until the spell passes.”

  Next thing I knew, the priests were lashing my arms, legs, and torso to the cot with rawhide thongs. I could lift my head a little, flex my hands and feet, but nothing more.

  The gray priest remained with me when the others withdrew; he dragged a chair to my bedside and sat down, a solid presence in the darkness. “Don’t struggle, Orestes. There’s nothing to fear. What you saw were hallucinations, the poppies giving substance to your guilt.”

  He had a name, the priest, though I could not now recall it. “Stay with me! They will come back and devour me.” I felt helpless, like a bull bound on the altar; images of Elektra’s king bull falling under the axe flashed through my mind. “I never meant to kill her. It was Ares in my head, and the ghosts. Father made me swear...”

  “Orestes,” the priest said quietly, “lie quiet and try to rest.” His fingers grasped mine, gave them a reassuring squeeze. “Apollo protects you. No harm will befall you unless it is ordained.”

  Oh, but it had been ordained. Nothing, not even the juice of the poppy, could steal away the memories of my encounter with the Pythia. “Madness and torment.” I exhaled the words upon a pale smoke like hoarfrost. “Death. Apollo decreed it.”

  “Orestes! I know what the Pythia told you,” the priest said. “I also know she didn’t say you would die.” Listen to him! He was bandying semantics, playing games, but what else could he do? To give me a straight answer would have meant condemning me, and then there would have been no point.

  All this must have been inscribed upon my face for the priest to read, as he did his utmost to change the subject. “It will be some time before you are well enough to face judgment. Autumn is coming. Soon the trees down on the plain will turn their leaves, and the snow will start to fall. I understand you’ve gone up to the summit before, that you love the mountains.”

  Parnassus was beautiful in all seasons, but when I tried to resurrect memories of the windswept summit, the profusion of wildflowers clinging to the rocks in spring and summer, and the evergreens with their fragrant resin, all that came to mind were the dank caves Pylades so loved to the explore, and the alpine meadows where men were advised not to wander at midsummer, or when the grapes were pruned from the vines.

  Apollo departed holy Parnassus for faraway lands during the late autumn and winter months, leaving Dionysus to reign in his stead. Dionysus, the wine drinker and reveler, the divine madman, the savage lover of women and violence. “The maenads in the hills. They rip men apart.”

  “They do,” the priest conceded, “in their season, but neither Dionysus nor his wild women ever come to Delphi. Apollo’s aura remains to safeguard the sanctuary and all within it.”

  I did not believe him, not then, and not afterward. Each autumn, the maenads found some unfortunate man to make their year-king and sacrifice at their bonfires in the high meadows. And here I was, trussed up and consecrated with the blood of the king bull, a ready-made offering.

  At sunset, the priest brought bread dipped in hot onion soup, and a jar into which I could relieve myself. “Your eyes are still unfocused from the opium,” he said, “so I can’t undo your bonds.”

  Darkness slowly swallowed the cubicle, which was a very small room, roughly eight paces long and five across. By lamplight, the priest washed me with a damp rag and covered me with another blanket, for though the nights would still be warm down on the plain, at Delphi the cold came early in the season. “I will stay with you tonight, Orestes, and leave the lamp burning.” He and a servant set up a cot beside mine; we were crammed so close together he could reach out his arm and place his hand upon my breast.

  I welcomed his presence, and the light, for all the good it did. A wind rattled the shutters, which had been shut against the night. A dozen maenads must be out there: tattered, wild-eyed creatures clawing at the sill. Gooseflesh rose over my arms. It would not take long for them to break through; the scent of my blood drove them on. I turned my head to look at the priest, who slept like the dead. He should not have stayed; the madwomen would kill him, too.

  I must have fallen asleep, or fainted from sheer terror, because consciousness found me with the taste of blood in my mouth, and straining, panicked, at the rawhide thongs. The priest was gone, as was his cot. An odor of spent lamp oil hung in the air. A thin bar of daylight traced a crack in the shutters.

  At least someone heard my call; the priest entered, his entrance heralded by his treads in the outside passage. “You’re awake,” he said. “Did you rest well?”

  I recalled his name now. Didymus. “Why am I bound?”

  He came closer, dragging the chair with him. “Athos gave you too much juice of the poppy. You were seeing things, and flailing about.” He sat down. “Do you remember that?”

>   A fearful confusion, a haze of red, a glimpse of rotting flesh. “Only a little.”

  Didymus touched his fingertips to the side of my mouth. I smelled olive oil on his skin; he must have bathed. “You cut your lip during the night.”

  I tried to concentrate, to recall how that had happened, though it was hard with my thoughts so scattered. He undid the thongs, and guided me into an upright position to let me flex stiff muscles. A servant brought food. I choked down the gruel more to please the priest than to sate any hunger, and followed him meekly down the passage to a small bathroom to wash and change my clothing. I had no desire to go out, even for fresh air and exercise, and no wish to be seen. I was polluted. Anathema. Whenever temple servants or other priests crossed my path, they uniformly averted their eyes.

  Didymus alone did not refuse to look at or touch me; only he did not make the sign against evil. “Aren’t you afraid?” I asked.

  “Apollo appointed me your caretaker,” he answered. “I was the first to see the sign.”

  “The sign?”

  “The kouros casting the shadow of his serpent rod over you.” He handed me the linen towel he kept for me. “That day when you clung to the altar and cried out for sanctuary—you don’t recall?”

  I did not, except for the terror associated with the priests closing around me, trying to break my hold on the altar, and the ice cold water in the adyton. “It’s all muddled.” I rubbed the towel over my damp hair. “Do you resent having to look after me?”

  “It’s the god’s will.”

  A typical priest, equivocating when the truth was uncomfortable. “That’s not an answer.”

  He reclaimed the damp towel. “What would you have me say, Orestes? You’ve committed a grievous crime, and you’re ritually impure. I despise your sin, not you, though you must understand that the gods make no distinctions between a man and his crime.”

  “I know that only too well.” I took the rough-spun tunic he handed across to me; it was one of two tunics the priests had allotted me after my own bloodstained clothes were taken away and burned. “Is there any chance of purification?”

  “It’s too soon to think about that.”

  Again, he was equivocating, deferring the subject. Was the truth so painful, then? “How can it be too soon?” A knot rose in my throat; my fragile calm suddenly threatened to dissolve over this thing. “Am I to spend the rest of my days shut away in this sanctuary?”

  Sighing, he said, “I don’t know, except that you’re clearly not ready to undergo any ordeal. Look at you, Orestes. See how your hands are shaking, hear how your voice trembles. If I didn’t force you, you’d never eat or wash yourself. You need a draught to help you sleep at night, you can’t be left alone with a lamp or brazier, and during the day all you wish to do is hide in your cubicle and stare at the wall.”

  I did not want to hear all this; it was too close, too raw. “You’re too familiar with me. I am a prince of Mycenae.” Petulant. Childish. I was abashed.

  Didymus squared his shoulders, stared straight at me. “Orestes,” he said deliberately, quietly, “you are nothing before the god and his servants, and will be nothing until you are absolved.”

  “Then absolve me!” In the throes of a full-blown tantrum, my face grew hot, my voice became shrill. I did everything but stomp my foot and pound my fist into the wall. If only the Argive lords could see me now! “How can the gods condemn me when I had no choice? I never meant to kill her, but I was trapped—trapped!—and I had no choice.”

  “Orestes!” he shouted. Echoes doubled and trebled in that confined space. His jaw had tightened, and his eyes blazed. I fell silent, but for the maelstrom raging inside my skin. “You will be judged when the gods decide you are fit to be judged, and you will be absolved or condemned according to their will, but it will not happen until you humble yourself before them.”

  I felt cornered by my circumstances, and ashamed by my unbecoming behavior. “All my life, there has been the curse. Two curses. I was born rotten.” Gazing down at the floor, away from him, I knuckled the tears from my eyes. “Can I ever be free of it, or will the gods cast me down into Tartarus?”

  “When the season is right, the gods will show the way.” Didymus’s voice was gentler now, more forgiving, when I had not earned such compassion. “But Apollo speaks through the Pythia, and she will not sit down to give another oracle until spring.” I saw his sandaled feet peeping from under the hem of his white woolen robe. “I know it isn’t what you wish to hear, but you must bear this burden a while longer.”

  Chapter Eight

  Like a child with an overactive imagination, I heard voices in the wind rattling the shutters at night, which drove me to huddle under the fleeces and weep. When the air in the cubicle turned cold, the spectral cold reminded me of the haunted spots in Mycenae. I tried my utmost to be an adult, to reason it through. Of course it was cold—autumn had come with icy winds, and the priest had not lit the brazier—but no, no, the chill had substance. I knew the difference. Whatever walked in the night was akin to the three little ghost boys who, years earlier, had roamed the corridor outside my room at Mycenae.

  Only two deaths weighed on my conscience. I did not have to peer above the fleeces to know Mother was coming; I recognized her treads in the passageway. Another was with her—a man, to judge from his heavier footfalls. Not Aegisthus. I had not feared him in life, and certainly would not cower from him in death; and even after all these years, I still recalled how quiet and catlike his movements had been. Rather, these treads were ponderous, forbidding, like a distant thunderstorm rumbling on the horizon. Father, then. Agamemnon. It must be. King and queen, their shades came to reproach me. I knew why, for had I not slain them both through my carelessness and cowardice?

  Dawn found me huddled on the icy floor beside the door. I could not remember how I had gotten there, though the blood smearing the doorjamb was easier to puzzle out. My head ached abominably; when I rubbed it, I winced at the tenderness of a fresh bruise and felt dried blood crusting my right eyebrow.

  Didymus knelt beside me. “What have you done, Orestes?”

  “I must have struck my head.” And more than once, I realized, to break the skin; the bright red smear stood out against the white plaster like an accusation. “They wouldn’t rest, they wanted blood.”

  He did not ask who ‘they’ were, or why they demanded my blood, merely got me to stand and wobble back to the cot. “You mustn’t do this again. Your blood is tainted. If anything, it will bring demons upon you, not appease them.”

  As he probed my wound, I watched how the amulet around his neck swayed back and forth; it was a silver rod as long as my index finger, twisted around with a crude a serpent. “I don’t have a talisman like yours,” I remarked.

  “There’s no amulet to keep away the Erinyes,” he answered. I winced as he pressed down upon the bruise. “And you might harm yourself with such a thing. Some years ago, a supplicant afflicted with a similar madness shoved the amulet we gave him down his throat and choked to death. We can’t have you do the same.” He removed his hands, and stepped back. “Wait. I will bring water and ointment, and something for you to eat.”

  Left alone, I dragged the sleep-rumpled fleece around my shoulders and stared at the spider guarding her web. “Go away!” I hissed.

  An old servant sidled into the room bearing a basin of water. When our eyes met, he immediately averted his gaze, cursed under his breath, and spat upon the floor. “Alcmaeon,” he muttered.

  The encounter left me both puzzled and uncomfortable. Alcmaeon. I could not quite place the name.

  Didymus noticed my distraction when he returned with the ointment to dress my wound. “Is something amiss?”

  I told him about the incident.

  “The servants have been forbidden to speak to or otherwise interact with you,” he said. “I will see to this.”

  He need not have bothered; it was not the first time one of the temple servants had insulted me, and i
t most certainly would not be the last. “He called me Alcmaeon.”

  “For the Argive prince who killed his mother and was hounded by the Erinyes.” Taking a seat beside me, Didymus started sponging away the dried blood. “Haven’t you ever heard the story? Alcmaeon’s father was Amphiaraos, a king of Argos who lived in your grandfather’s time.”

  “I know who Amphiaraos is.” Although the water was ice cold, the priest had a very gentle touch. Amphiaraos had been one of the Seven Against Thebes, the last one to die as he tried to escape the battlefield. So Alcmaeon must have been one of the Epigoni, the heroes who returned to Thebes a generation later to avenge their fallen fathers. “But I don’t know the rest of the story,” I admitted.

  “Strange that neither your uncle nor anyone else ever told you.” Pinkish stains discolored the linen washcloth as Didymus wrung it out in the basin. “Amphiaraos was granted a divine gift of prophecy. Therefore, he knew he would die in the fight against Thebes, and that the entire expedition would fail, so when Prince Polyneikes and the other five great leaders called upon him, he refused.

  “An oracle had told the men that the war couldn’t be won without Amphiaraos, so the son of Oedipus went in secret to Amphiaraos’s wife Eriphyle, and bribed her with the sacred robe and necklace of Harmonia that the priestess-queens of the House of Cadmos wore in their rites, and in return she would persuade her husband to join the expedition.”

  Although he lacked a bard’s elaborate flourishes and musical gift, the priest was nonetheless an excellent storyteller, plain-spoken and confident. I did not tell him I already knew the story of the Seven Against Thebes, and how the old king’s wife had betrayed him for gold and gems and a scrap of embroidered linen; in my newfound isolation, this was the only storytelling I was ever likely to hear.