by Laura Gill
Cyrene carried me crying back through the corridor to my chamber, where, crooning a shapeless lullaby, she rocked me back and forth. “Your father will come, when he’s finished with the rituals of mourning. He made sacrifices and poured the drink offerings for your mother and brother at the tomb. Didn’t you know? He has to be purified before he can come to you.”
I had not known. “When?”
Cyrene pressed a leathery kiss to my forehead. “Soon, child. It will be soon.”
*~*~*~*
Father never came to visit me. He never summoned or sent a message. For all her attempts to soothe my hurt feelings, Cyrene could not satisfactorily explain why he stayed away. “You mustn’t go to him,” she insisted, when I suggested going downstairs to the megaron where Father heard petitions every morning. “An obedient child remains where she’s told. She doesn’t go loitering about the palace asking questions and making trouble.”
Why must I always be obedient and silent? Had I been Eurymedon, a boy, no one would have objected, I reflected sourly. Not only would Father have welcomed me to the megaron, he would have visited or sent his herald with a message as soon as he heard I was well. His silence bewildered me, then roused unfamiliar feelings of resentment and guilt. I balked at making offerings to my brother’s shade. Father had liked him better, mourned him because he was the heir, a boy. No one had to tell me this. I worked it out for myself. Father’s distance confirmed what he truly thought of his daughter, despite the laughter and games and presents of happier times.
Cyrene reproved me for holding such uncharitable notions. “Do you think because the plague’s ended and the mourning rites are over that everything’s as it was?” She shook her finger at me. “You still mourn your mother? Of course you do. Your father does the same. Do you think he has time to bother with a girl-child? You’ve no idea what his concerns are now that the household has no mistress, and he hasn’t an heir.”
Whenever Cyrene started thus, she invariably kept going. She enjoyed the sound of her own crackling voice, and, I surmised, oftentimes she half-forgot when she had already said something, or underestimated my ability to understand. Preferring to avoid a cuff on the ear, I dared not correct her on either account.
*~*~*~*
One day, in the warm days of early autumn, while the women celebrated the rites of Dionysus, I walked in the garden of the innermost court.
Fig and pomegranate trees shaded stuccoed walkways bordered with an abundance of bright flowers and herbs. Surrounded by fashionable palace ladies who gossiped over their embroidery and wool-work, Mother used to hold court there. I imagined the round reflecting pool as a hearth, the tree trunks as pillars supporting the roof of the sky, and the flowerbeds as the squares of intricately patterned and colored stucco flooring Father’s megaron. He ruled within, and she without, and everything coexisted in perfect harmony. Sometimes on sultry mornings, Father dismissed his petitioners early and came out to the garden with his followers to enjoy honey and sesame cakes and wine from amphorae cooled in large, painted tubs.
Unaccustomed to being alone in the garden, I reflected on what a desolate air the place exuded now that Mother was gone. Brownish algae clogged the pool. No one had watered the flower beds. Rotting figs littered the walkways. Impressions of bones and ashes edged my memories of happier times there. A curious thought entered my head then, that Demeter had blighted the courtyard in mourning, exactly as she had done to the earth after her daughter Koré was abducted and disappeared into the Underworld.
From her pocket, Cyrene produced my rag doll. “Go play,” she gruffly admonished. Did her weaker, aging eyes not see what mine saw? How could she expect me to amuse myself in a place where everything was ghosts? And not only Mother’s. Several ladies of the court and their children had perished, too.
Sulkily, I explored the neglected paths. Late summer herbs grew wild, their fragrance attracting honeybees and dispelling some of the miasma of the stagnant water and rotting fruits. A breeze from the ocean rustled through the boughs. Mourning mewling from a flock of seagulls echoed down from the heavens.
When my roving gaze flicked toward a portico supported by blue columns in the Cretan style, I glimpsed him. Hades, the dread Lord himself. He stood tall and menacing, swathed in swarthy garments. Gray threaded his hair. Grim lines grooved a mouth drawn tight. My breath caught fast upon seeing him, stifling an impulse to scream.
Then he shifted, his heavy dark brows drawing together, revealing to my even greater horror that he was not the spectral, dread Lord of the Underworld but flesh and bone, a mortal man. My father, transformed, aged by grief.
An urge to call out perished in my throat the second he shook his head and stepped back, disappearing amid the overhanging shadows as abruptly as he had appeared.
CHAPTER TWO
The following spring brought a new queen to Argos, for Father married again. I could not comprehend how he could forget Mother so swiftly, even when Cyrene explained that this was a political marriage, that the household needed a mistress and the kingdom an heir. My sole concern was that this female stranger was about to move into Mother’s apartment, call herself queen of Argos when she was a nobody, and expect me to address her as “Mother.”
Eurydike truly was a nobody, not even a princess. She was a lady from Pellana in Sparta, flaxen-haired and sturdy, with the sagging bosom of a peasant woman. Granted, Eurydike’s strapping frame complimented the richness of her yellow bodice and scarlet skirt that was her bridal raiment, and to the masses of heavy gold and silver jewelry, gifts from Father, that would have overpowered a much smaller woman. Sadly, however, her white paint was flaking, her tiring woman had applied it so thickly, and she had since worn away the red ocher staining her lips. Two of her pin-curls had escaped the confines of her diadem and straggled across her forehead, cheapening her appearance. Mother’s cosmetics had always been perfect, I reflected, and her coiffure never came undone except at her dressing table.
“Ah, but she’s an ox,” one matronly lady muttered to her neighbor. I was surrounded by roughly twenty of Mother’s friends and ladies-in-waiting, some of whom had only just returned to court after fleeing to their father’s or husband’s country estates when the plague struck Argos. “How swiftly do you think she’ll calve?”
A titter from the younger woman beside her. Below, on the megaron floor, was for the gentlemen of the court, the priestesses of Hera, and the bridal party; the ladies, and I among them, were relegated to an upper gallery. I wore my best raiment, a blouse of pale pink wool over a skirt of yellow, scarlet, and sky-blue with three flounces. Cyrene forbade me to wear cosmetics like the noblewomen, or jewelry beyond a single strand of coral beads. “A young princess ought to look seemly, restrained,” she declared, “and not like some tawdry slut’s brat.”
Having little notion of what a tawdry slut was, I asked, but she would not answer. Perhaps she meant someone like my new stepmother in her garish paint and jewelry. Cyrene permitted me a dab of scented oil on my wrists and throat; the fragrance of the roses of Cyprus was lost in the overpowering perfumes of narcissus, oil of lilies, lotus, sandalwood, and saffron competing for dominance in the ladies’ gallery. My nose twitched uncontrollably. Cyrene had also said that it was unbecoming for a princess to sneeze in public.
“I heard she’s already with child,” the younger lady commented to the first. “The king’s visit to Pellana was fruitful.” Father had gone last autumn to Sparta to conduct business and, the court ladies speculated, to find an eligible princess at the court at Therapne. Pellana, according to the royal bard Archelaus, lay just beyond the Argive-Spartan border, three days’ ride from Argos. Now the jest around court—though no one found it all that humorous—was that Father had not had to search very hard to discover a suitable new wife.
I had not the slightest notion why Father considered Eurydike worthy of becoming his queen, or why she should already be carrying a baby when Mother and Cyrene constantly impressed upon me that making babies w
as something that happened after the wedding, because it must happen with a woman’s husband and no one else.
Shouts of “Io! Io!” from the megaron floor spared me from having to dissemble. Laughter and applause diverted everyone’s attention. Father’s herald invited the ladies to come downstairs and pay their respects to the newlyweds, though plainly none of the women wanted to bend the knee to Eurydike.
Then Hipponax in his stentorian voice added, “And let the ladies of court bring with them the princess. Let Danaë the king’s daughter approach the dais.”
Upon hearing that, the ladies shuffled and jostled among themselves, and hastily cleared an aisle through which Cyrene hustled me on the way toward the stairs. A kindly attendant stationed beside the vestibule door handed me a posy of violets and sweet-smelling white lilies such as Mother once loved. “Present that to the queen,” the man urged kindly.
Eurydike occupied an ivory chair beside Father on his throne. As I rounded the hearth, her triumphant smile wilted, became forced. Father said nothing, for his gaze rested not on her, but on me, patient, measuring. I became aware of the entire megaron watching along, of the scents of perfumed unguents and roasting meat and human sweat, and of the murmured comments some of the courtiers exchanged.
“How darling she looks!”
“She’s the image of her mother.”
“Will she make a speech?”
Cyrene had made me rehearse a graceful little speech with which to welcome Lady Eurydike, regardless of the fact that Father had sent no word that I should be permitted inside the megaron to be presented to her. For all other occasions—feasts, sacrifices, petitions, and the receiving of distinguished guests—I remained upstairs unless directly bidden to appear. Sometimes Mother had taken the initiative, having me dressed to accompany her, but only when the circumstances and Father, who liked to conduct business during feasts, were amenable. Yet since her death, he had not called once for me. I only ever saw him from afar.
Dropping my gaze, I dipped the knee and held the pose until Father in his rumbling voice commanded me to rise. That also gave me leave to glance up at Eurydike and gracefully extend the posy. “These are for you, Lady.” Acknowledging her as queen would have insulted Mother’s shade, as I had insisted when Cyrene chided me for not hewing exactly to her speech during the rehearsal. Eurydike’s perfume overpowered the gentle fragrance of the flowers; she needed no posy, but a good scrubbing to obliterate the scent of sandalwood and myrrh.
Her attendant took the flowers to present to her. She did not even sample their fragrance, but dropped them in her lap. She grunted acknowledgment as etiquette demanded, yet made no speech of gratitude as Mother would have done, and her gaze seemed to pass right through me as if I were nothing more than a servant’s child.
“Well done, Daughter.” Father’s voice glossed over the breach of manners. Had he not even noticed Eurydike’s rudeness? A queen ought to be gracious in everything. “I understand that you have recently celebrated a name-day.”
Recently celebrated? What a lie that was! Father knew perfectly well that my name-day fell in midwinter. All that frosty, overcast day I had waited and fretted in vain for him; he neither came nor dispatched a servant with a message or gift.
Swallowing, I nodded, then croaked, “Yes, sir.”
“And how old are you now?” Father asked this in absolute sobriety. He used to laugh while inquiring, knowing the great store I set in quarter-and-half-birthdays, and had indulged me with a conspiratorial wink. “You are four now, yes?”
He had forgotten; it was no lighthearted jest. “Five,” I answered softly, lowering my gaze to the stuccoed floor.
“Ah, yes. Five.” Father spoke slowly, forcing the words out as if he found speaking to me an onerous task. “This is for you.”
Cyrene, standing chaperone at my back, prompted me with a shoulder nudge. Raising my eyes, I obediently took the doll Father’s groomsman offered me. It was the prettiest such present I had ever received, prettier even than Nefret, with a ceramic head with elaborately painted eyes and scarlet lips and black hair, and dressed at the height of fashion in a blue bodice and pink, white, and blue flounced skirt. Nevertheless, I hesitated to take it.
And when I looked up at Father, robed in purple and scarlet and gold, seated like a god on his armless throne, the lump in my throat grew harder. The smile on his lips did not extend to his eyes; they expressed none of the convivial twinkle of earlier days. Burgeoning tears pricked my eyes, yet I knew princesses did not cry in public. So I tried my utmost to blink back the tears, no matter how hot and immediate the urge to cry was, and concentrated on making my reverences. “Thank you, Father.” I was shaking so hard by then that I could scarcely get the words out. I wished I had not been obliged to utter them.
Right away Cyrene interjected with excuses, as my struggle for self-control was as transparent as Egyptian linen. “The little princess is overcome with gratitude for the gift and happiness for your recent marriage, my lord.” Liar! I resented both—and her for presuming to speak on my behalf. “With your permission, she ought to retire. Five is too young.”
Before she even finished, Father waved her—and me—away. His desultory manner lanced through my heart. Not only did he not care enough about my name-day to remember the correct date, he did not even want me there!
I held back as far as the upstairs corridor linking the gallery with the women’s quarters. Then I halted, dropped the doll, and buried my face in Cyrene’s skirts to muffle my sobs. Mingled male and female laughter, and the striking of a lyre, reached my ears. How could everybody celebrate when Father did not care about me, when I was so miserable?
“There, there, now.” Cyrene’s work-roughened hands snagged my curls in the attempt to smooth them. “Why are you crying?” Her skirts smelled of wormwood; country women used that herb and sometimes leeks to repel clothes moths, whereas Mother had used lavender and expensive cedar shavings from Byblos in her chests. “You did as well as you could, and that was well enough. There’s no need for tears.”
“What’s this?” Still holding me, Cyrene bent to retrieve the doll. I heard her tendons groan in protest. “Ah, but look here at this lovely thing!” I kept my face hidden. “Your father spared no expense.”
A small but persistent, growing inner voice challenged that Father had had nothing to do with choosing the gift, that someone else, a palace official, had selected the doll. He had said something once to Mother, about his having no talent for determining what young girls liked. Mother would have selected or even commissioned a ceramic doll herself, dressing it in miniature raiment that she sewed in secret so as not to spoil the surprise. She had fashioned my rag doll, cleverly patterned and sewn my brother’s favorite stuffed lion, and on my name-day always baked me a special little cake of almond paste and sesame seeds according to the recipe her mother and grandmother taught her.
“Ungrateful child!” Cyrene shook me vigorously. “Someone will see or overhear, and tell your father.”
Let them, I thought savagely. At that moment I hated Father, who could not even remember a simple name-day, and who had married so uncouth a commoner. Lady Eurydike did not strike me as a woman who sewed doll clothes or baked special cakes for little girls. She was not, and never would be, a substitute for my mother.
*~*~*~*
At midsummer, Eurydike bore a son to replace my dead brother as heir. I sulked through the fortnight of feasting and contests Father staged in celebration. Had I felt so resentful when Mother bore Eurymedon? I remembered her showing me my baby brother lying in the cradle that had been mine and reassuring me that she loved me no less. Father had taken no such pains, perhaps because it simply never occurred to him that I might feel jealous and pushed aside because I was a daughter and not the heir he wanted.
Also, I remembered being frightened by Mother’s long labor, the screams, and the confusion of women rushing back and forth. Cyrene, keeping me out of the way in the nursery, had explained how Mother was
pushing out the thing growing in her belly, and that it hurt. No wonder. Mother had been so small, and her womb so large, that I remembered being amazed she could carry herself around without tipping over.
Yet Eurydike’s labor struck me as a nuisance, interrupting my sleep at night, and my efforts to concentrate on spinning during the cool morning hours. I could not escape the sound of her screams, not even in the garden where Cyrene took me to spend time with the ladies of the court. As they drank cool barley water flavored with mint and honey, and did their needlework and spinning, they gossiped that Eurydike’s shrieks could be heard even in the lower citadel. “The king stays in the megaron with his companions,” the stunning Lady Chrysopeleia informed me. She had been one of Mother’s favorite ladies-in-waiting.
Once it was over, on the morning of the second day, the sounds of the queen’s women bustling around the women’s quarters was replaced by the masculine sounds of drunken laughter from downstairs where Father celebrated. Could Eurydike not have borne a girl? During the labor, when I was in the courtyard among them, the court ladies who shunned the birth sat around speculating about baby names.
After the herald Hipponax announced the birth from the citadel heights, everyone closed their mouths and went to do reverence to the child and its proud mother. Even the court ladies ceased their gossiping, donned false smiles, and scrounged around for trinkets and sweetmeats to take to the queen’s chamber.
When Cyrene hustled me into the bedchamber to see the newborn, I glimpsed Eurydike’s bulk dominating the great feather bed; she looked weary and disheveled.
Eurydike had changed everything about the queen’s apartment. Mother’s delicate taste in frescoes depicting flowers and leaping dolphins and fronds of papyrus had given way to the Spartan woman’s masculine preference for hunting scenes, lions taking down prey, rows of worshippers adoring Artemis as Mistress of the Beasts. A waisted shield hung on the right-hand wall, with a spear leaning beside it. I saw several ladies attending my dour great-aunt, High Priestess Kitane, who held court under the shield. All the women shifted to one side to give me right of precedence, though not with the same fond remarks of encouragement as when Eurymedon was born.