by Laura Gill
Mother masked her disappointment with a courteous smile. “Of course, child. Tonight, you may have anything you wish.”
The sentries had left the megaron doors open to admit a breeze, but there was no relief from the heat. Flies buzzed around the hearth, settled on dishes, and irritated the ladies. Servants plying wooden fans only stirred the warm air. People sweated in their finery, ate too much, and grew listless.
Timon admonished me to eat sparingly, but Elektra kept shoveling fruit and sweet confections onto my plate. “You can have whatever you like,” she said.
“Princess,” Timon warned. He pushed the plate beyond my reach. “Your father instructed you and your sister to look after your brother.”
Elektra slid the plate back. “I am looking after him. How is Orestes supposed to get big and strong if he doesn’t eat?” My belly was already full to bursting.
“Do you want him to get sick?” Hermione asked.
I had no appetite for any more melons or sweet cakes, and was starting to feel drowsy and a bit queasy in the close, smoky atmosphere.
An Egyptian snake charmer entered the hall, replacing the acrobats and jugglers who had entertained us through supper. He sat cross-legged on the floor before the high table and opened the tightly woven basket he had brought in with him. Anticipation settled over the megaron with a silence so profound one could hear the fans beating the air and the flies buzzing.
The snake charmer was a sinewy old man with skin as black as charcoal. His teeth were very white when he smiled, and his fingers were long and graceful. He lifted a reed pipe to his lips and started to play.
His somber tune coaxed forth a serpent unlike any other. It rose two feet or more, night-black, with a spreading hood. It elicited frightened cries from the ladies. Chrysothemis shrank back, whimpering. Hermione clapped a hand over her mouth. Elektra alone was excited, leaning forward for a better look. “It’s an Egyptian cobra!” she gasped.
She did not have to tell me what the snake was, or that it was poisonous. Fear knotted my throat at the possibility that the cobra might tumble from its basket and dart toward us. Of course, the guards would kill it before it could bite anyone, but still...
Timon grasped my hand and whispered, “The snake charmer knows what he is doing. The serpent will not harm you.”
When the performance ended, the man rose on stick legs and, to everyone’s horror and amazement, bent down to kiss the serpent’s head. I tensed, waiting for a hiss and fatal strike, but the snake charmer came away unharmed and laughing, once again flashing his white teeth. Relieved applause rippled around the megaron.
“How does he do it?” I asked.
Timon leaned toward me, keeping his voice low. “I have heard a cobra cannot strike at anything directly above its head.”
Elektra overheard him. “Can I try?”
“Absolutely not,” he told her sharply.
Aegisthus stepped down onto the floor with the rhyton to pour the third libation. I sat rigid in my chair, livid not to have been called upon. Turning, he saw me and offered a disingenuous smile. “The hour grows late, young prince,” he called out. “Surely you must be worn out from all the celebration.”
Good-natured chuckles attended his remark, mockery which burned my ears. I climbed to my feet to answer him. “No. I’m not tired at all.”
Elektra gave me an encouraging little shake. “Tell him!” she hissed.
“Orestes,” Mother said, “you have already poured the first and second libations, and that is quite an honor for a seven-year-old. Let Lord Aegisthus attend to the third libation, so you may relax and enjoy Kretheus’s singing.”
I could not argue with her subtle reprimand. Timon urged me to sit down once more, while Elektra sulked at my left hand. Watching Aegisthus raise Father’s lion-headed rhyton and splash the stones on my name day made my flesh crawl. I felt hot and cold all at once, and uncomfortably nauseous.
Timon noticed my distress. “Are you sick?”
I did not want to miss the singing. Tonight, it would be Jason and the Argonauts, my favorite song. “I don’t...”
He led me from the dais, around the tables onto the aithousa where there was a little breeze. I stumbled down the steps into the great court, heading toward the shady plane tree, but it was too late. My stomach rebelled, and all at once vomit splashed the white paving stones. Timon caught up with me, bent down, and held me through the dry heaves until the spell passed. “You ate too much,” he said.
Elektra dashed out to see what was wrong; the appliqués sewn onto her skirt chimed as she ran. “Are you all right?” she cried.
Her voice stabbed my ears. I wished she would go away and let me be miserable in peace.
“He will be fine, Princess,” Timon answered.
“I didn’t ask you!” Elektra shouldered past him to throw her arms around me. “Orestes, are you sick?”
“I feel a little better now,” I mumbled.
Hermione met us on the aithousa, silhouetted by the mellow firelight emanating from the megaron. Kretheus was already playing, chanting the first verses of the Song of Jason. And I was missing it! “You look terrible, Orestes.” She held out her hand to me. “You should go upstairs and rest.”
I shook my head. “They’re expecting me.”
“It will be all right,” Timon assured me. “You ate too much and got sick. People will understand.”
He steered me upstairs to my room, where Kilissa exclaimed over my greenish pallor. “I warned you not to stuff yourself with too many sweets!” I already felt bad enough at having thrown up like a baby and ruined my new tunic. Kilissa bathed my face and neck with cool water, and assured me that the vomit stains could be scrubbed clean.
“Aegisthus drinks too much all the time,” Elektra started, “and ruins his clothes—hey, you let me go, you old busybody!” She smacked Timon, who firmly grasped her arm; he absorbed the slap across the face as though it was nothing more than the rustling of leaves. “Everybody knows it’s true.”
The pedagogue hustled her protesting from the room. Hermione stayed long enough to tuck me into bed. Kilissa left last, taking the lamp, soiled tunic, and basin of water with her as she went.
After the heat of the megaron, the room was a sanctuary of coolness. A breeze wafted through the open shutters. Moonlight slanted across the floor, casting silvery shadows onto the furniture and walls where the blue monkeys danced. Downstairs, I heard the bard singing, his voice too faint at this distance to make out the words and the music from his lyre. If only I could have heard a little of the Song of Jason!
Uneasiness stole over me. As wonderful as the room was by day, by night it assumed a different character. I sat up in bed, to look over at the corner altar with its congregation of gods awaiting their offerings. Then, I glanced up at the young boxers forever sparring. Castor and Polydeukes. It seemed fitting to call them thus, for my maternal uncles had been twins and famous boxers.
Perhaps my unease was just the newness of the room, a homesickness for the nursery, a natural fear of the dark. For hours, I lay awake watching the shadows move across the walls and ceiling, and listened to the night sounds of the citadel. An owl hooted far off in the distance. Soft footfalls outside the door. Muffled laughter, then a giggle. Probably a servant girl with her lover. Once, I had overheard a scrub maid with her lover in a storeroom; she giggled at his husky murmurings, then moaned. Oh, yes, yes.
This was not like that. Men never entered this part of the palace except during the daylight, on official business, and no maidservant would ever be so stupid as to bring her lover upstairs where the royal children slept.
More muffled laughter. This time, it sounded like boys in the corridor just outside my room, chasing each other, playing tag. My hackles rose. My friends were not allowed to visit except with special permission, and certainly not at night. Yet someone was there. I was not imagining it.
A faint scratch at my door. Goose pimples broke out along my arms. My heart raced. I hug
ged myself tightly. Kilissa slept in a cubicle down the corridor. I would have to shout to summon her, and then everyone would hear me, and shake their heads at my foolish night terrors, and send me straight back to the nursery.
I crept from the bed and found the wooden sword, then edged toward the door. I am a prince of Mycenae. I am not afraid of anything. Slowly, ever so slowly, holding the sword in my left hand, I turned the latch with the right. “Who’s there?” I whispered. “Alastor, is that you? Ipheus? Phausias?”
I peered out into the dark corridor.
No one was there.
I shut the door again, shaking hard now; the sword drooped in my grasp. No one. I was hearing things, imagining shades, working myself into a terror over nothing.
When I crawled back into bed, I took the sword with me.
At dawn, Kilissa nudged me awake from a fitful slumber. “You were running about last night.”
So she had heard, too! “No, I wasn’t.”
“Don’t tell tales, young man.” She poured water into the washbasin. “I heard you.”
Kilissa did not believe me, and yet, she had heard something, too; it was not simply my imagination. I washed, donned the clothing she set out for me, then we tended the gods on the altar. After breakfast, she gave me my stylus, and sent me downstairs to my morning lessons.
Timon’s cat lolled in the sunlight slanting white-hot through the open shutters. I bent to scritch his belly before taking my seat.
“I am writing out some addition and subtraction problems for you.” Timon showed me the tablet. “We will work on your figures for a bit.”
Mathematics came more easily to me than reading or writing, because the number signs and concepts were simple, and the answers absolute. Timon never had to rap my knuckles when we worked on mathematics.
I copied out the exercises Timon gave me. A tax man collects three bushels, redistributes one. How many mouths will that bushel feed? How many does the king keep? How much grain does a standard pithos hold? How many pithoi do the king’s clerks need to store eight bushels?
“Can I ask you something?” I ventured.
“Is it about the exercise?”
“No, but I don’t think I can ask anybody else.” I paused. “Last night, I heard something outside my room.”
“And what did you hear?” Timon touched his stylus to the tablet, warning me not to stop. “Keep calculating. You are not yet finished.”
I chewed my lip, trying to find my place again. “I heard boys laughing, running back forth in the corridor, except when I looked nobody was there. Kilissa thinks it was me, but it wasn’t.”
Silence. I tried to concentrate on my problem. How much grain for one standard pithos? Three hundred liters. No. Liters is olive oil. Grain is bushels. “Timon?”
“Yes.” His voice was grave, even somewhat agitated. What had I said to bother him so? “You must have heard the ghost children.”
I stopped working. “What ghost children?”
Timon anxiously cleared his throat. “Thyestes’ three young sons. As I recall, they lodged in your room, just before they...” Another self-conscious cough. “They are quite harmless.”
I looked away from my exercise, at Kirros lolling in the sunshine, at the corner clutter. My heart raced. I wanted to be outside, to run far, far away from the citadel, as fast and far as my legs would carry me. “But Mother gave me that room. Why would she do that if it was haunted?”
“She might not know about the ghosts.” Timon did not seem to believe his own words. Mother knew everything there was to know; she was like the Great Goddess in that respect. “Those things happened a long time ago.”
I set down my stylus so he would not see how hard my hand shook. “Did Atreus truly...did he really...?” The clandestine whisperings of my sister and servants hit me with a wave of nausea as intense as anything I had experienced last night. Only the fact that I had eaten little that morning kept me from vomiting all over Timon’s feet. “Did Atreus really cut those little boys in pieces and cook them in a stew?”
Timon’s ashen face communicated more than ten thousand words would have. “I was there in the megaron that night with my father.” His voice trembled as violently as my nerves. “Do not ask me to describe it for you, Orestes. Thyestes was—yes, he was a churlish man, a villain, he deserved to pay for his crimes—but what Atreus did was an outrage.” The words tumbled breathlessly from his lips. “I never saw anything so utterly vile, never thought anyone could be so ruthless, so completely vicious.”
A heedless old servant had once muttered something to me about severed heads and hands on a covered platter, and three sets of little entrails swimming in grease. Now I realized she must have seen it thus, as Timon and his father had seen it, and not exaggerated. What demon could have driven my grandfather to do something so horrible? Seeing Timon’s stricken face, hearing his shaky voice, drove home the fact that some stories were not just stories.
And then, the dam broke. I covered my face for shame and sobbed. A moment later, Timon’s thin arms encircled me. He drew me to his chest and stroked my hair while I bawled into his threadbare tunic. “It will be all right, Orestes. They will not hurt you. Make an offering, some wine and cakes, and the dark goddess will look after them.”
“Will they leave me alone?”
“I think they only appeared to you because they wanted a playmate.” Timon sounded calmer now, and that helped me not be so afraid. My eyes were bloodshot and my face sticky from crying. I needed to blow my nose. He searched the room, found a threadbare but clean square of linen, and handed it to me. On the rug, Kirros stopped grooming himself to offer a plaintive meow.
To my surprise, Timon set aside the day’s lesson. He rummaged about some more, before producing a folding wooden tablet overlaid inside with a thin layer of wax. “Do you know what we use a diptych for?”
I knuckled my bloodshot eyes, and looked at the diptych with disinterest. “Messages, letters.”
“That is correct,” he said. “Now, I had not planned to let you do this for several more months, but I think you have learned sufficient vocabulary and improved your writing enough to try composing a letter to your father.”
For a moment, I simply stared at the tablet. “A letter?”
“It may take a day or two, as this is your first attempt, but I think it would be a good exercise.” Timon pushed the tablet toward me, while urging me to take my seat. “First, we begin with the salutation. Do you know how to write your father’s name?”
Just writing ‘Agamemnon’ meant puzzling it out with signs, because the system our scribes had learned from the Cretans did not cover all Hellene sounds. Timon, of course, knew how to write Father’s name, but made me do the work. A-ka-me-no. Then there was the patronymic, ‘Atreides.’ I had to figure that out, too. Composing a single sentence took more than an hour. “To Agamemnon Atreides, High King of Mycenae, Argos, and Achaea: greetings.”
Now I was ready for the actual letter. But what to say to my father? I had so many things to tell him, and so many more things I wanted to ask, that it was impossible to focus on any one topic.
Timon stepped in with prurient advice. “You are not to complain or waste his time with meaningless chatter. Remember, he is a very busy, important man, and his spies already tell him what goes on here. He knows how old you are, what your mother says about him, what she does with Aegisthus. Tell him you are well, and doing well with your lessons, and that you hope he is well.”
How formal and boring that all sounded! “Then it’ll sound like you wrote the letter.”
“My father helped him and Menelaus to write their first letters to Atreus,” Timon pointed out, “so he certainly knows that I am standing over your shoulder.”
By midday, we had composed the first two sentences: “I hope you are well and winning many victories.” I insisted on the winning victories part, because I wanted to hear all Father’s stories. “I am working very hard to learn my letters and figures to write
to you more often.”
Timon directed me to put down my stylus, then placed the tablet on a shelf where Kirros could not get his fur all over it.
We went out to eat lunch and stretch our legs, keeping to the portico where it was cool. Only then, after we had exercised and enjoyed the fresh air, did we return to the ominous matter between us. Timon helped me inveigle a honey cake from the head cook, and held it for me on the way upstairs.
Facing south, my room was hot during the day, a far cry from last night’s chill. Flies buzzed through the open shutters, and around the leavings on the little painted altar Hermione had given me; Kilissa had forgotten to remove the morning offering. Timon threw out the figs, now that the gods had consumed their essence, and showed me how to dedicate the cake. “Unwrap it and place it carefully upon the altar.”
I did as he instructed.
“Now,” he continued, “you must be very cautious when invoking the dark goddess. Avert your eyes from the offering and state your business in a low voice. One never shouts when dealing with her or with the powers of the world below.”
Although I had never before dealt with the dark goddess Hekate or the shades of the Underworld, I knew from observing others that in order to appease the restless dead one had to know their names. The ghost boys were nothing more than a nameless triad until Timon surrendered the information. “Orchomenos, Aglaos, and Callileon,” he murmured. It struck me then that perhaps this, what we were doing now, was the very first time in years that anyone had spoken their names. And for the first time I felt very sad, not for myself for being afraid, but for those murdered little boys.
Aegisthus, having somehow found out about the letter, interrogated me about it over supper. “I had no idea you could read and write so fluently,” he drawled. “And here you are, still so young, only just turned seven! Now what could a boy so young possibly have to say to the High King of Mycenae?”