by Laura Gill
Leaning back against the sun-warmed pillar, I drew my knees up to my chest. Below, Sinope continued to plug her ears. Her bare arms and the back of her neck were turning red where Helios’s rays touched them. “I thought I wasn’t supposed to know what she was doing inside the sanctuary,” I commented.
“That is not it at all. You are not supposed to listen to or sneak a glance at the sacred rites,” Chrysopeleia explained, “because during the ritual the goddess may manifest herself in the high priestess. You have not yet received the mysteries. You are too young to stand in the presence of the immortals. What, you do not believe me?” I frowned. Why was I not old enough? What did a woman’s monthly bleeding have to do with meeting the goddess?
Chrysopeleia acknowledged my irritation with a nod. “Wordeia should have Kitane explain these things to you, or at least let you come down from the women’s quarters more often, where you might observe. What you should know is this: sacred things are for those who are older and wiser. A woman’s blood brings wisdom.”
*~*~*~*
Harvest came and passed. Autumn brought the blessings of Dionysus, and terrible news. My stepmother lost her baby, a half-formed boy, and Father’s anger was again terrible to behold. He roared and cursed at the servants, and accused his weeping wife of devouring too many sweets and displeasing the gods with her coarse manners. I scurried from sight.
Sinope followed me back to my apartment, where, ignoring her ill-disguised scorn I crawled under the fleeces. Yet despite the burnt-out exhaustion generated by my frightened crying and the gloominess of the light, I could not sleep. As night fell and then deepened, I lay awake, fretful, flinching at the sound of every foot tread in the corridor outside my chamber. Sinope snored without concern. An owl hooted mournfully outside. I must have drifted, for when I stirred it was to the sound of Eurydike’s muffled, incessant sobbing.
*~*~*~*
By the time I reached my eighth summer, my stepmother had miscarried of two more babies, both sons. From the moment she lost Abas, she had grown increasingly pensive, afraid of sudden noises and shadows, and the bitterness that filled her up showed in the deep lines graven around her mouth and forehead. She sought solace in food, growing steadily larger, grotesque even, until she could no longer traverse the stairs. Not that she went anywhere nowadays; her name was almost never spoken, except in scornful whispers among the ladies.
Father finally sent half a dozen guards to help her waddle downstairs, then to bundle her into a covered mule cart with all her belongings, and that was the last Argos ever saw of Eurydike of Sparta. Months later, I heard that Father had banished her to a remote estate to the west where she had to grind her own corn and press her own oil.
*~*~*~*
“That sly bastard said what?” Father’s shout echoed through the Larissa.
I flinched, even from my hiding place upstairs in the gallery. I had been drawn by the news that Proitus’s emissary had come with important news, but now contemplated fleeing when Father bolted from his chair. “His newborn brat will never soil the throne of Argos, and you may tell him that from me!” He gesticulated angrily with his painted wine cup, sloshing and splashing dark liquid everywhere. “In fact, I will send Hipponax to make sure he and all of Tiryns hears my answer.”
“That does not change the fact that my master has a son and heir, and you have only a useless daughter.” My eyes bulged. The emissary, a snub-nosed youth named Deinias, dared such insolence that I wondered why Zeus, guardian of kings, did not strike him dead on the spot. “Prince Megapenthes is blessed with health and vigor. My master sends his condolences for your losses, but he suggests you find a wife who prefers your slobbering kisses and groping to her supper. His words, King Acrisius, not—”
The wine cup flew through the air, glancing off the young man’s temple before shattering against the stuccoed floor. “You can take those words and shove them up your arse!” Father’s face, twisted with rage, had darkened till he was purple as the grape from which the splashed wine had been pressed. Blood streamed from Deinias’s wound; droplets spattered the intricate spirals, checks, and waves drawn in the stucco. I clapped both hands over my mouth to keep from gasping aloud and betraying my presence.
Deinias pressed his sleeve to his temple to stanch the blood. “You have violated the laws of hospitality. Zeus Xenios will—”
“How dare you claim the protection of this hearth when your insolence offends!” Father roared. “You’ve not eaten my salt and meat, and are no guest of mine. Go back to Tiryns and tell that buffoon Proitus I celebrate his whore’s death and pray that his brat soon follows. Get out!” He jabbed his thick, jeweled finger toward the door.
My uncle’s wife had died giving birth to his heir, explaining why Proitus had called the newborn “Great Sorrow,” or Megapenthes. Father could have said something nicer about her, I thought, or had Proitus’s dead wife been like my stepmother: fat, crude, and unpleasant? Because my uncle was a taboo subject, no one ever spoke of his family.
Once the emissary collected himself enough to stalk from the megaron, I judged it prudent to withdraw from the gallery before Sinope, whom I had sent on a superfluous errand, returned to find me missing from my chamber, and tattled on me.
Later, Aunt Wordeia brought me news of the debacle—though, because she herself had not been present—without the sordid details of Deinias’s insolent remarks or Father’s heated response. “Proitus celebrates his son’s birth with uncalled-for insults as well as revels.” She kept her mouth pursed long after she moistened her thread between her lips, relaxing her jaw only to speak. “Needless to say, your father is not in a pleasant mood.”
After my last name-day, my aunt’s stance toward me changed. She shared more information of Father and the world. That was how I came to learn about Father’s concubines—what my aunt called the special slave women who comforted him and attended his needs—and the children he had with them. “Sadly, they are all girls,” Wordeia said, shaking her head.
“Why won’t Zeus grant Father a son?” I knew Father made regular and lavish offerings in the sanctuary of Zeus, and drove the best animals from his flocks and herds to the open-air altar so the god might take pleasure in the greasy smoke from the burning fat and thigh meats. Why would the gods grant wicked Proitus a son while denying my just, upright father? Had he offended some deity? Then I remembered. “Has he displeased Queen Hera or Lady Eleuthia? You said he made offerings.” For it was the goddesses of marriage and childbirth who decided whether to grant or deny mortals the blessing of children.
“He forgets nothing.” Wordeia drew her turquoise-colored thread through the bleached linen stretched across her wooden frame. “Now, come, and choose a green for the leaves.”
*~*~*~*
Wordeia engaged a tutor to teach me the rudiments of the tallies, how to make signs and calculate figures. She also took it upon herself to correct my everyday speech. “A proper noblewoman does not contract her words, but enunciates.” I hated practicing this around the Larissa, for to my ears a lady’s polished conversation sounded affected, and felt odd on the tongue. “Are you sure I have to do this?” I complained.
“Do you want your future husband and mother-in-law to think Argive ladies lowborn and bred?” Wordeia replied sharply. “Do you want to bring shame to your father’s house and to me, your poor kinswoman, who has been charged with your upbringing?” Her tone left no room for argument. “Your grandmother made me talk with river pebbles in my mouth to force me to consider each word. And she pinned thorns to my gown to teach me to keep my head held high.” She made an approving noise in her throat. “Yes. I should have done this with you earlier, and now that things have changed it is more important than ever.”
I did not follow everything my aunt said, except that she meant to prick me with thorns. Sinope, combing wool off in the corner with my aunt’s attendant, wore a smugly satisfied expression even after I glared at her. “What has changed, Aunt Wordeia?”
“F
or whatever reason, the goddess has denied your father a son.” Wordeia sorted through the tablets in the basket beside her; she preferred to review the household tallies in the light and space of her chamber, rather than in the dark closeness of the storerooms. “Unless he means to leave the throne to Proitus’s son, which will never happen, your father must either discover how to appease Lady Eleuthia to persuade her to relent and grant her blessing, or he must find a worthy man to marry you and inherit his kingdom. You, child, must be prepared to do your duty and carry on the royal bloodline of Danaus of Argos.”
So she engaged Archelaus to teach me my lineage. I could already recite the names of my grandparents and great-grandparents, but this was different, an education given only to male children, to noblemen and princes, who were frequently expected to recite their genealogies as a matter of prestige. “You will have this knowledge,” Wordeia said, “because your husband will be an outsider, more interested in teaching his son his own bloodline. A descendant of Danaus and a future king of Argos must know the source of his birthright. So listen to the stories the bard tells you. Commit them to memory.”
Acrisius my father was the elder son of Abas, who was the son of Lynceus, who was the last surviving son of Aegyptos, the younger brother and rival of Danaus, the founder of our dynasty of Argive kings. At least, that was what I had been brought up believing. Archelaus, stroking his stubbly, snow-white beard, gently shook his head.
“The story was not told that way when I was a youth, when Lynceus was king by virtue of his marriage to your great-grandmother Hypermnestra,” he said quietly, perhaps not wanting the ears of the palace to overhear. “Eumelos, the bard who instructed me, who remembered the days of wise old King Gelanor, who ruled before King Danaus, told me that your great-great-grandsire was an only son, that Aegyptos was a Cretan nobleman banished from Knossos by Minos Alektyron for his overweening ambitions. He sought refuge with his fifteen sons in Argos, and when the oracle at Delphi commanded Gelanor, who had neither sons nor daughters, to surrender the throne, Aegyptos challenged the old king’s and Argive assembly’s choice of Danaus.” Archelaus smiled at me. He had a truly wonderful voice. Maybe he would sing something just for me, if I was obedient and attentive. “Danaus, as you almost certainly know, did not want Aegyptos’s warmongering sons and followers rampaging through Argolis, so he sued for peace in the cleverest way he could devise, by offering his daughters as brides to Aegyptos’s sons.”
A pause in the bard’s account allowed me to comment, “I thought there were fifty. Fifty sons for fifty daughters.”
Archelaus’s watery blue eyes twinkled. “Sometimes, Princess, a tale gets confused or exaggerated after so many tellings. Fifty sounds more dramatic than fifteen, no? But, yes, there were fifteen daughters, brides for fifteen sons. Aegyptos had more than one wife to bear him those sons, you see, because his forefathers came originally from Egypt. They were priests of the cow-headed goddess Io, who they call Hathor, and the priests there are fat and rich, and may take more than one wife. As for Danaus, he had concubines as well as a wife, your great-great-grandmother Piera, so, yes, in the end they were equally matched.”
“How did they decide who married who?” I asked, glad that the old bard seemed to welcome questions.
“With athletic contests held at Lerna,” he replied. “The brothers competed for the women.” Archelaus paused again, smiled, and winked at me. “Now, I cannot say for certain, but your father may choose your husband in the same manner. Whoever marries you will have to bring lavish bride gifts of livestock and gold and silver, and he will have to prove that he is the strongest and most cunning of the numerous suitors who will come seeking your hand.”
“How many suitors?” Wordeia had mentioned only one suitor, one husband. I had not realized that many men might seek me in marriage. I hoped that that wretched prince from Seriphos, whatever his name had been, would not be among the suitors. “Will they be brave and handsome?”
“Ah!” Archelaus exclaimed, laughing. “Well, they will have to brave, to face your father, but, yes, there will be many. Argos is a rich land. As for handsome, I will tell you something to remember about handsome men. A man who thinks too much of his looks and willingly draws the attention of too many women does not make a good husband. Better to have a man who is in the prime of his strength and experienced in his years.”
Did he mean a man like himself? I did not want to marry a grandfather, but a courageous, comely hero who loved me. I hung my head. Surely Father would not marry me to a man with graying hair, or would he? “If you say so.”
His long fingers, callused from many evenings plucking the lyre, chucked me under the chin. “Women can be foolish in their desires. Accept the thread the Fates weave, young lady, and you may be surprised. Now smile and think no more on it. Only the Fates know what the future holds. When your bridegroom comes, you will of course welcome him better than your many-times great-aunts did their bridegrooms.”
I strove to do as he bade and banish the gloom attached to the thoughts of a slobbery old bridegroom, but the subject of Danaus’s daughters did not help. “Then I will be like Hypermnestra with Lynceus,” I said, “and not kill him on the wedding night.”
“And not later, either,” Archelaus added with a wry smile. I nodded. “Now, there is a tale that Lynceus killed his father-in-law in revenge for his brothers. Have you heard that one?” Again, I indicated yes. “It happened before my birth, so I do not know whether that is true, but Eumelos said that after Lynceus and Danaus were reconciled, and Danaus’s health began to fail, Lynceus was restless and snappish, eager to become king. They quarreled in the megaron, right there on the aithousa where High Priestess Kitane waves her torch to welcome Helios’s return on the longest night of the year. Can you picture it, Princess?” His hands conjured the scene as he described it. “Two men, one young, one old, each surrounded by his followers. Voices raised in anger. A young woman heavy with child, carrying the esteemed Lady Kitane herself, weeping in the background, pleading with her father and husband to stop quarreling, her cries growing fainter as her women take her away. One aging man, coughing as he spoke, accusing the younger of hastening his end; the other, the young wolf, denying the charge, accusing the old king, his own father-in-law, of impiety, of murder. Was it true, that the young prince, the son of Aegyptos, sought to poison Danaus?” Was it? I wondered, echoing his query. “Eumelos could not tell me, my grandparents could not tell me. Perhaps. That was the last time King Danaus appeared in public. He coughed himself to death a fortnight later, and when the servant of Apollo the Healer pressed upon the corpse’s chest, a torrent of blood escaped its mouth.”
Trying not to let my revulsion show, I said only, “That is a dark story.”
Archelaus nodded. “Lady Wordeia said you should not be spared any details, no matter how gruesome or otherwise unpleasant. One must take the bad with the good. The tale reminds me of those somber days when your grandfather Abas was dying. Your father and his brother quarreled as Lynceus and Danaus had fifty years before, they and their followers brawling in the megaron, in the lower citadel and Argos town. Acrisius succeeded your grandfather, of course, as the elders of the Argive assembly and damos agreed that he was the elder son, his birthright protected by Zeus and the Two Ladies. Proitus tried to impersonate your father, to receive the blessing of the high priestess in Acrisius’s place, but your grandmother, she was cleverer than he. She switched the amphora of drugged wine Proitus meant for Acrisius, and served it to her wayward son instead.” Archelaus chuckled at the recollection of a fond memory. “When he woke, Proitus was lying in his own vomit, in a mule cart headed for Tiryns and banishment.”
Even though Wordeia said that Father and Proitus were identical twins, I had trouble picturing Proitus, because he was not the same man as my father. “Is that when he became king of Tiryns?” I asked Archelaus.
“No, that was later, after he and your father made peace and divided the kingdom,” the bard answered, leaning h
is bent back against the sun-warmed pillar of the portico overlooking the garden court. Ten yards away, I saw the ladies gossiping as they plied their needles and spindles and carding combs. Philinna’s daughter, Althea, waved when she spied me, but a hushed word from my aunt, who sat among them, prevented her from approaching.
“Proitus went to his father-in-law Iobates, the king of Lydia, and he came back with armed men, warriors in gleaming bronze, in helmets of boar tusk with plumed crests, who ousted your father from his rightful throne. Acrisius escaped to Crete, to seek help from Minos Lakhuros, the king at Knossos. He married your mother then. You were conceived there in the painted and airy courts of Knossos, where beautiful maidens dance and brave youths leap the backs of fearsome bulls. Your lovely-tressed mother carried you low and heavy in her womb aboard the ship as your father returned to reclaim his throne. I remember her arrival well. She had barely stepped into the megaron to see your father enthroned and wielding the scepter with the blessings of Zeus and the Two Ladies when her waters broke. Perhaps Lady Wordeia has already told you these things, but it was for your sweet mother’s sake, and yours, that Acrisius did not hunt down and execute his traitorous brother. That would have set Argive against Argive, and offended the gods. So he divided his inheritance, and pardoned Proitus, and gave him Tiryns and its tributaries to rule over.”
Yet Wordeia had given a slightly different account of how the kingdom was split, and I wondered which one was right. “But Father and his brother are not really at peace.”
Archelaus was silent a moment, and pensive, while basking in the warmth of the spring sunshine. “No,” he agreed. “They are not.”
*~*~*~*
A few days later, Father summoned me to his chambers. He sat alone but for his manservant Theophantes, and nursed a cup of wine. I pictured him as he was when he hurled his cup at Proitus’s insolent emissary, roaring and purple-faced, and for all Wordeia’s assurances that he merely wanted to measure my progress, I could not help but dread a similar outburst when he realized how imperfect my figures and signs were, how pretentious and fake my speech sounded, and how childish and rough my embroidery was.