by Paula Guran
Mother extended her hand. “Greetings, Achilles! May you and my daughter have the happiest of marriages.”
Achilles eyed her fingers. Beneath his helmet, his eyes were dark and chary. (Fog, a branch, a dandelion mirroring the moon.) “Woman, why do you offer your hand to a stranger? You may be beautiful, but that is no excuse.”
“Forgive me. I thought you’d recognize me from my description. I’m Agamemnon’s wife.”
“Are you? I would have thought such a powerful man would have better control of his women.”
I could not see my mother’s face, but I knew the taut smile she would wear in response to such an affront, the cat-like stretch of her lips that would not reach her eyes. (Like the taut smile Helen flashed me in the courtyard, late that night when I had nine summers: “Come walk with me, niece.”)
“We’ll be related in a few days,” said mother. “Just pretend we already are.”
“Are you insane?” Achilles’s dark eyes examined the length of my mother’s body. “No one told me Agamemnon married a madwoman.”
Mother’s voice became dangerously low. “Young man. I am not mad.”
“You must be. I’m the son of Thetis, goddess of the sea. I’ve slain a thousand men. I wear glory like other men wear scent. Why would I marry your daughter just because you tell me to?”
“My husband sent for us,” said Clytemnestra. “He said that you wanted to marry my daughter.”
“Why would I tell him that? I’ve never even seen her.”
For a long moment, mother fell silent. (My head, ringing with emptiness, the sound of forgotten memories.)
“You’ll forgive me if I sound skeptical,” she said at last, “but either you are mistaken, or my husband is lying. What should a loyal wife believe?”
Achilles’s eyes hardened like metal.
Before Achilles could speak, the slave Iamas pushed himself between the two of them. He turned toward Clytemnestra, panting, his face red with exertion.
Mother snapped, “What do you want?”
Iamas told them your plans. He revealed how the armies had delayed in the harbor, waiting for a wind. He told of how the goddess had demanded a sacrifice, and how the wedding was a ruse designed to lure us to my death.
All around us, the air was as still and expectant as a held breath. (Me, in my bed, forgetting green and figs and wool.)
“Tomorrow,” Iamas said, “They will do it tomorrow at dawn.”
My imagination caught on the moment when you forged your plan with Menelaus, Odysseus and Calchas. My mind had become a scatter of half-forgotten fragments. Tatters of old memories hung in the places of things I could not recall. I couldn’t remember Menelaus’s face, so I saw my mother’s instead, wearing the beard you had when I was younger, black through and through. A restless Achilles paced as Odysseus, sandals of gold kicking up dust as he paced the fog-filled copse. Calchas wore a thin linen robe instead of priestly raiment. He turned to you, and it was Helen’s mouth sneering around his demands, her indigo eyes filled with visions of my blood.
Will you sacrifice your daughter?
I will.
Was your voice loud and resonant? Did mother-Menelaus clap you on the back? Achilles-Odysseus would have spoken with grudging respect, a flicker of admiration in his chary eyes. “You’re a callous son of a bitch,” he’d have said, “but you do what must be done.”
Did you sink your head and whisper? Did Helen-Calchas crane her shapely neck to hear you, the red ribbons on her headband fluttering over her ear?
“Tomorrow,” Iamas said. “They will do it tomorrow at dawn.”
He knelt before Clytemnestra.
“I wasn’t sure whether I should tell you. A slave owes his loyalty to his master, but he owes his loyalty to his mistress, too. I came to Mycenae with your dowry. I was a young man then. I’ve always been yours.”
“Why didn’t you tell us before?” mother pleaded. “We could have ridden back to Mycenae. Agamemnon would never have known.”
“I tried to,” said Iamas. “I am a coward.”
If it was necessary that you kill me, did you have to use a wedding as your ruse? Do you see how cruel it was to promise me all the treasures of womanhood that I would never possess?
Perhaps you thought you were marrying me off, after all, one way or another. As I if were Persephone, spending my youth on the arm of Hades. But there will be no spring for me.
Orestes struggled and cried in my arms. He could hear his mother. He reached for her voice. The sounds of Clytemnestra’s weeping carried on the air, tiny pitiful sobs.
As for me, I felt airy, as if I were standing on the top of the limestone cliffs that surround Aulis harbor like the broken half of a bowl. Betrayal forced all our hearts to skip a beat, but mother and Orestes could still cry.
Parts of me were already gone. I knew there was no turning back.
“Tomorrow,” Iamas said. “They will do it tomorrow at dawn.”
Mother’s grip was painful on my arm. “Come on,” she said, dragging me out of the tent. Orestes screamed as we went. It was the sound I would have made if I could have.
Achilles saw my unprotected face. He shielded his eyes (dark and chary, above a beard like adolescent scrub) with his sword arm. “Does the girl have to be here?”
“My husband has made fools of us all,” said Clytemnestra. “He tricked me and used your name to do it. People will think you find it amusing to lure young girls to their deaths.”
Achilles paced angrily. The slave, Iamas, flinched each time Achilles’s sword clanked against his armor. “He had no right to use my name.”
“You could make them stop this. They will listen to you. You’re a hero. If you tell them to stop, they’ll have to take heed.”
Achilles halted. “You want me to tell Agamemnon to stop the sacrifice?”
“For the sake of your reputation!”
“But how will we get to Troy?”
Mother approached him. At once, the stern and proper woman I had known all my life vanished (Helen arraying herself on the bench, the folds of her garment decorating her languorous body). She became a softer, reticent figure, her eyes averted, her hands gentle and hesitant as they lifted her hem to show her plump calves. Her fingers fastened on the laces of Achilles’s breastplate. Her lips moved near his neck, so close that her breath stirred the fine golden hair on his nape.
“You’ll find a way,” she murmured in his ear.
Achilles stayed silent. Mother lowered herself to her knees. She stared up at him, coy and alluring, through lowered lashes. Soft brown curls escaped from her braids to soften the angles of her face. Her breasts rose and fell with her breath.
“Do you want me to beg?” she asked. “My daughter and I are helpless. We have no choice but to implore you. Help us.”
Achilles stepped back, repelled by her need. Mother held out her hands, her wrists upturned in supplication. (“My sister was born from an egg. I was born the normal way.”)
“Do you want my daughter to beg instead? She will! She’s always been virtuous, but what good will her honor do when they send her virgin to her grave?”
There was desire in Achilles’s eyes. It was not for nothing that my mother was Helen’s sister. But Achilles’s gaze was hard and disdainful, too. For my mother was Helen’s sister, and Helen was the whore who ran from Menelaus.
“Your daughter need not debase herself on my account. I will settle the matter of my honor with Agamemnon—”
Mother clasped her hands in gratitude. Achilles held out his hand to silence her.
“I will settle the matter of my honor with Agamemnon. And then we will sail to Troy.”
For the first time, Achilles’s gaze came to rest on me. His eyes searched my face. I wondered what he saw there. I knew that I was not ugly. I thought, perhaps, in different circumstances he might have chosen to save a helpless woman with my youthful complexion and night-dark eyes. But to stir him that day, I would have had to be even more beautifu
l than Helen. Her beauty had gathered a thousand ships in the harbor. It would take something even greater to convince them to sail home without their war.
Mother took me back to the tent. She tucked me beneath a blanket as if I were a child. She pulled the wedding adornments from my hair, and stroked my tresses until they lay smooth and shining across my shoulders. Orestes laid beside me. He curled toward my warmth like a sleeping cat, and wrapped his fists around my hair.
“Stay here,” mother said. “Rest. Keep out of sight. Keep yourself pure. It will be harder for them to justify what they’re doing if they know that you are innocent and obedient.”
She ran her fingers across my cheek.
“Don’t worry. They aren’t monsters. They won’t do this terrible thing.”
My memories were tipping out of me more and more rapidly. My mind went dark with only a few memories lit up, like lamps casting small orbs of light along a corridor.
I wandered into a lamp of memory: I was trailing you as you left my room, down the steps and across the portico. I walked quietly behind so that you would not hear me. We emerged into the forest. The fog was dissipating from the copse, revealing men among the trees, their shouts and sword-clashes harsh in the cold, dim air. You were far ahead of me, already meeting with your hequetai, exchanging shouts and strategy.
Hands tightened on my shoulders. I looked up into their faces: two young men with patchy, adolescent beards. Their breath smelled of rotting fish. One stood in his nightclothes. The other wore a helmet and a breastplate but nothing else. Beneath the helmet’s shadow, his eyes were dark and chary.
They spoke. Their voices were rapid, unintelligible, drowned out by the pounding of blood in my ears. Their eyes were enormous and sinister, large and white like the dandelion before I crushed it underneath my foot.
Smells: blood, musk, new sweat. A short, blunt limb—like the branch that you gave me to use as a sword—emerged from obscuring whiteness. It pushed blindly against my leg. “Stop,” one boy commanded the other. “Here, swing at this. One strong, smooth motion.” The breastplate clattered against my flesh with a sound like thunder. My belly, rotting like the stench of rotting fish, welling with tears of fright. (Helen in the courtyard: “Come walk with me, niece.” Her daughter Hermione looking on, jealous and ignored.)
Rotting fish and sweat. The moon dwindling like a crushed dandelion. The branch swinging. The thin high wail that a girl makes when someone swings at her with a sword that is a branch that is neither thing at all.
“You’re hopeless,” said one boy to the other. “It’s too bad you weren’t born a girl.”
Then another face, a hequetai in a tufted cloak, shouting like the clash of swords. “What’s wrong with you two? Are you stupid? Don’t you know who this is?”
The reek of shit and piss. The man’s hand on my arm, tighter than the boys’ had been.
“What are you doing here? Your father would kill you if he knew. He’d kill all of us. Be grateful I’m sending you back without shoving your slatternly face in the muck in front of him. Do you have any modesty at all? Your mother and her people. Brazen the lot of you. Walking into men’s camps like common whores. You may be beautiful, but that is no excuse. Go! Get out of here! Get back where you came from! Go!”
My feet, pounding on the path back home. The copse of trees; the grass; the empty mouth of the megaron where exhausted slaves tended the coals to keep them warm until morning.
The pounding of my heart as I lay down in bed for the third time that night. Memories of moons and fog and branches. Love for my father: flat like a branch, round like a dandelion, silver like the moon, welling up and out of me into a rush like the wind, but without the power to move a thousand ships.
Indigo shaded the sky to evening. Helen smiled a taut smile that I’d seen on my mother’s face, one that did not reach her eyes.
She reached for my hand. “Come walk with me, niece.”
Hermione watched us. Jealousy darkened her features. “Mother!” she exclaimed. “I have something to show you.”
Helen did not look over at her daughter. “Later.” She bent closer to me. “Iphigenia?”
I twisted the ribbon from Helen’s headband around my fingers. I stepped toward her, but I didn’t take her hand.
Hermione upturned the bench she’d been sitting on, and began to cry.
Helen led me past the canopy that sheltered the benches, and toward the black scratchings of the olive trees that stood, lonely, in the chilly air. Helen arrayed herself beneath one, her garment spreading around her in delicate, shadowed folds.
I heard footsteps behind us and turned to see Hermione peering from the shadows, hoping to overhear what her mother had to say to another girl. She was clutching something in her hand. I wondered what delicacy she’d brought to bribe her mother with this time. A honeyed fig? A flask of sweet wine?
I looked back to Helen. Her eyes changed hue with the setting sun, taking on a lighter shade like the grey of water beneath a cloudy sky. Firelight from the lamps near the benches cast flickers across her cheekbones, highlighting an undertone in her skin like bronze. She watched my gaze as it trailed over her features, and gave a little sigh of boredom.
“You’ll be beautiful one day, too,” she said patronizingly.
“Not as beautiful as you,” I demurred.
“No one is as beautiful as I.” Her voice was flat, but full of pride.
The night smelled of burning oil and women’s bodies. A dandelion hung high in the sky, casting its light down on us. Helen’s motives were obscured behind blankness, like soldiers’ bodies disappearing into fog.
Helen distorts the world around her. Never look at her too closely. You’ll go blind.
“I saw you holding your father’s hand today,” said Helen. “Do you feel safe with your father?”
I made a moue. I couldn’t speak to my beautiful aunt without my mother beside me.
“What was that?”
“Yes,” I mumbled.
Helen shifted. The folds of her garment rearranged themselves into new shimmers and shadows.
“There’s something I think I should tell you, Iphigenia. About your father. Did your mother ever tell you that she was married before?”
I shook my head. Around and around, the ribbon wove through my fingers.
“She had a husband named Tantalus who was the king of Mycenae before your father came. They had a child together. A son.”
Helen paused, scrutinizing my reaction. I didn’t know what to do. I looked to the right and the left. There was no one nearby.
“I know this is hard to hear, Iphigenia,” said Helen, “but your father came to Mycenae and murdered Tantalus and then he—” She raised her sleeve over her mouth, and looked away. “He took the baby from your mother’s arms and he dashed it to the stones and smashed it to pieces. My nephew.”
With a quick glance over my shoulder, I saw that the servants were clearing out the benches and the canopy. Iamas helped a young girl douse the lamps. Behind me, there was safety, there was familiarity. I stepped back. Helen caught my hand.
“He was a round, happy baby. I only saw him once before—” She broke off. “After your father killed Tantalus, he forced Clytemnestra to marry him, and became king of Mycenae. I see him holding your hand and I worry. My sister doesn’t want you to know, but you need to be warned. Your father isn’t what he seems. He’s the kind of man who would kill a baby.”
I broke away and fled toward the bustling servants. My feet pounded past Hermione who glared at me, and then turned toward Helen, her expression aching with desire for her mother’s attention.
Jealous woman. Vain woman. Boastful woman. I never believed her. I never believed you would kill a child.
After mother fell asleep, I took Orestes in my arms and crept out of the tent. We made our way to the shore where the night sea looked like obsidian, reflecting the glow of the dandelion overhead.
I broke off a piece of branch the length of Ores
tes’s arm and gave it to him, but I couldn’t remember why. He stared at me with puzzled eyes until I took it away again and threw it toward the boats.
“Why don’t you speak?” I asked him. “You’re old enough.”
Orestes stretched out his chubby hands. He snuggled his face against my chin and throat, warm as a cat. He liked to snuggle when I was distressed. It made him feel powerful that he, too, could give comfort.
“I am dissolving into pieces,” I told him. “I need you to remember me for me. Will you do that? Please?”
He stared up at me with sincere, sober eyes.
“I am your sister,” I said. “My name is Iphigenia. I love our father very much. I am going to be murdered by our father, but you must not be angry with him for that. To be angry with our father is to be angry with everything. It’s to be angry with wind and war and gods. Don’t be angry with him.
“I was born on an autumn day when the rain fell, scented with the crisp aroma of falling leaves. I was born with the sound of thunder, but I was terrified of it anyway. When the palace rattled with strike and clash, I would run to hide behind mother’s loom. She would glare at me and tell me to find something useful to do, but when I lay down beside her and stuck my thumb in my mouth, she would lean down to stroke my hair.
“I love music, but I can’t sing. Our mother forever tells me to hush. I sang to you often anyway. When I sang, you laughed and clapped your hands. I taught you songs, but I don’t remember them anymore. I want you to remember the things I taught you, whatever they were.
“Our grandmother was raped by Zeus when he turned into a swan, and our mother’s sister was born out of an egg. Gods are our aunts and cousins, but we are only mortal. I am particularly mortal. I am weak and not very brave and I will die quickly, like those things they put in my hair for my wedding that never happened.
“I am afraid to die. I am afraid of losing simple things. Things like . . .” My memory cast a net through dark waters, coming up empty. I drew from what I saw. “Things like the smell of salt near a dark sea, and how warm your hand is, and how much you make me feel without ever speaking.