The Young Lion

by Laura Gill

  The sentries showed me the beacon, a stone platform heaped with brushwood and dung; they renewed the kindling at regular intervals, and kept pitch in readiness. They had even memorized a list of an entire chain of beacons that would be ignited when Troy fell. “From Mount Ida at Troy to Lemnos. Then on to Athos. Across the Aegean to Euboea. Over the channel to Attica, and here to Charvati. And from Charvati on to the Larissa.”

  Remembering Timon’s geography lessons, it seemed that those were some immense distances across which the fires would have to be seen. “How long have you waited?” I asked the sentries.

  “Been here three years,” answered the younger, who could not have been more than twenty, “and Phylas has been here since the beginning, eight years since the stones were laid down.”

  They shared their plain rations with me and my bodyguard. I offered them the wine, fresh bread, and cheese Mother had sent with me. After the meal, they bade farewell with reminders to not forget their service.

  I found Timon engaged in quiet contemplation alongside the goatherd as the goats browsed through the rocky gorse. When he saw me, he chuckled, the first such sound he had made in almost six months. Getting away from the citadel and sitting on the mountainside absorbing the warm sun had done him good. “Did the sentries catalogue their woes?” he inquired.

  “No,” I answered. “They simply asked me to tell Mother to remember their faithful service.”

  The descent was much easier, though when we reached a particularly rocky part of the trail I wondered how my pedagogue would fare getting down, as he had had to stoop and scrabble on the way up. I started to give him my hand to help him, when out of nowhere something suddenly struck the small of my back. A short, hard blow that sent me stumbling forward, tumbling down, unable to find purchase on the sandy incline. Timon called out my name.

  Earth and sky jumbled together. I instinctively flung out my arms to clutch at the vegetation, tried to skid to a halt with my feet. Dirt and loose gravel showered down with me, fueling fears that I was about to plunge right off the mountainside into the Chavos ravine far below. Low brush whipped against my face, stones slammed into my arms and legs, and the rough ground stung and sanded my skin, until slowly, gradually, the trail leveled out to let me tumble to a safe stop.

  Panting, I tried to collect my wits and assess the damage. Had I broken anything? It seemed incomprehensible that I could have skidded down the mountain without plunging hundreds of feet into the void. The Mother of the Mountains must have been watching over me. Up above, I heard my two companions calling out my name, heard their footfalls on the trail as they descended.

  “Prince Orestes!” The guard Diores reached me first, with Timon straggling several paces behind. “Are you all right?”

  I wobbled to my feet. My tunic was filthy, my legs and knees, and the palms of my hands had been sanded raw, but nothing felt broken. “Fine, I think.”

  Someone had shoved me. Timon would never, ever do such a thing, which left the bodyguard. It was him, it had to be. I didn’t imagine it. I let Diores inspect the scrapes and cuts, while trying to decide what to do. Will he try it again? Timon wetted a rag with water from the skin he carried and cleaned the wounds as best he could. The damage did not seem serious, and we had but a short distance left to travel to reach the citadel. I could manage it without assistance.

  As Timon finished, he caught my gaze, held it, and shook his head so faintly that someone else might have mistaken the gesture for a tic. He was warning me. “Go ahead, Diores,” I said. “Clear the path for us.”

  He did as instructed, without demur, which made me momentarily question my suspicions. Perhaps it had been an accident, after all. No! I knew what I had felt. Timon had flashed me a warning. The fall had been a deliberate attempt to create an accident, to send me hurtling into the void.

  At length, we returned to the road and entered the citadel through the postern gate. I dismissed Diores and went upstairs. Timon went with me, explaining, “Someone is going to have to calm Kilissa down.”

  He was absolutely right. “The boy never should have gone climbing!” Kilissa wailed. “Oh, dear Mother Dia, sweet, benevolent Mother of the Mountain, I knew he would break his neck!”

  Timon did his best to reassure her. “Do not be absurd. As you can see, he has most certainly not broken his neck.”

  When the servants filled the terracotta tub with steaming water, he trailed me into the bathroom and settled on a footstool beside the tub as Kilissa sponged my cuts and scrapes with hot water. After toweling me dry, she applied a stinging ointment to the wounds, while shaking her head at my perceived carelessness.

  Only when she was gone did my pedagogue venture a comment, and then he kept his voice very, very low. “Diores pushed you.”

  I donned the clean loincloth Kilissa had laid out. “You saw him do it?”

  “From the corner of my eye, yes,” he murmured. “He must have thought I was not looking.”

  A dreadful possibility occurred to me. “Mother sent him to watch over me. Do you think...?”

  Timon lifted his hand, cautioning me against rushing to judgment. “I do not think she was behind this.” I started to mouth another name, but he shook his head, indicating with his gaze that someone might be listening. “You are going to have to constantly watch your back from now on. Trust no one.”

  “Not even you?” I whispered back.

  He managed a weak smile. “You can trust me.” Then Timon reached over into the bathtub to slosh water onto his dusty face. I suddenly felt guilty for not having offered him a bath or anything to eat or drink. I handed him a clean towel, even brushed dirt flecks from his tunic.

  “The truth is,” he confessed softly, “that not everyone loves your father. Some are disgusted with the crimes he and your grandfather have committed, and sympathize with the House of Thyestes. Aegisthus and your mother have summoned some of those men here to court.”

  Traitors at court. I was surrounded by enemies. I stole a glance at the curtained doorway. Anyone could be lurking there. “What should I do?”

  “Do nothing.” Timon followed my gaze with a knowing nod. “Keep your mouth shut and never let on that you suspect anything. You are not in a position to challenge either Aegisthus or your mother.”

  I heeded his advice when going to supper. Before she even let me take my seat, Mother turned me this way and that to inspect my scrapes and bruises. “Had I known you would be this careless,” she said sharply, “I would never have let you go.”

  “Indeed,” Aegisthus added. “Did your mother not warn you to watch your step on the rough trails?” Smirking, he twitched his right eyebrow. “Perhaps I should accompany you next time.”

  “There will be no next time.” Mother did not notice his change of expression, as her back was turned from him. Did she even suspect what had really happened? Even if I could have asked her, I was not certain I wanted to know the truth. “Take your seat, young man. We will have the first libation.”

  Aegisthus enjoyed his private joke a while longer, then switched his attention to my cousin. “Why aren’t you eating tonight, little bird?” he asked with mock-solicitousness. “You look terribly pale.”

  Hermione glanced away with a little shudder. I knew how Aegisthus liked to ogle her whenever Mother was not looking. His ravenous leer said he would like to get her alone sometime and devour her whole. I wondered how it was that Mother never noticed Aegisthus’s twisted game.

  “I’m not very hungry tonight,” she answered quietly.

  Mother shot her a withering look. “Eat your meat, young lady. I won’t have it go to waste simply because you have the vapors.”

  I sought Hermione out later, upstairs in the little chamber where she and my sisters worked wool and embroidery. “I wanted to say something, to defend you, but he...” What a foolish excuse!

  She humored me with a halfhearted smile. “I understand.”

  Her understanding, such as it was, stung. I had done nothing, said
nothing, and was humiliated. “I hate it when Aegisthus teases you like that. If he does anything to hurt you, I swear, I’ll kill him.”

  “Orestes...”

  “No!” I exclaimed. “I mean it.”

  “Listen to you! A boy threatening a grown man.”

  “I’m not too young to stick a knife in him.”

  She did not take me seriously, when one day she would have to obey me as my wife. “Aegisthus is a guest, otherwise he’d be dead already.” Hermione shook her head in bewilderment. “You already know that.” Her brow furrowed. “What’s gotten into you tonight?”

  I could not confide in her about the attack, not yet, and certainly not with her maid and my sisters within earshot. “Nothing,” I grumbled.

  From then on, Timon shadowed all my excursions. In the mornings, he came out to the palaestra and practice field to watch me train, and together we explored the valley around the citadel in the afternoons.

  We visited Atreus’s tomb, where each autumn after the grape harvest the people sacrificed a brown bull in my grandfather’s honor, and frequented the agora, where Timon steered me firmly away from the garish women flaunting their breasts outside the sanctuary of Mother Dia. “There’ll be plenty of time for that foolishness when you’re older,” he promised me.

  Spending time outdoors in the sunshine and fresh air greatly improved Timon’s spirits. By midsummer, he relaxed enough to let one of the laundresses clean his cubicle and do his laundry after she swore a solemn oath not to touch his tablets or writing materials. I think he liked her a little, from the way he flushed and became tongue-tied whenever he saw her.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The end of the war began with a plague.

  At Troy, Apollo loosed his poisonous arrows among the mules and dogs of the Hellene camp, then turned his divine wrath upon the men, who sickened and died in their hundreds. Father sent his heralds home to fetch food and medicine. Mother, however, shut the gates, and would not admit the delegation until the priests assured her that they were not carrying any disease.

  I observed from the megaron’s great gallery when she relented and received the delegation to hear the news they brought; she would not allow me to join her by the hearth for fear that the visitors might yet be carrying some lingering pollution.

  “The dead lie packed together like amphorae,” Talthybius said. His voice and Mother’s created soft yet somber echoes in that empty space. “The High King has ordered sixty ships dismantled. The funeral pyres burn day and night, casting their black pall over the camp, and still the dead keep coming.”

  Mother showed no reaction to this grim news. “And what sin has Agamemnon committed now, to bring this evil upon his men?” Either she had some secret knowledge to be able to assign the cause to Father so swiftly, or, far more likely, she blamed him purely from spite.

  I held my breath, waiting to hear the herald’s answer. Talthybius had his back turned toward me, so it was impossible to read his face, but the herald’s tone was contrite. “Some months ago, the High King claimed as his concubine the daughter of a high priest of Apollo. The seer Calchas read the omens and has decreed that the High King’s refusal to return the woman to her father has angered Apollo. Now that your lord husband has realized his error, Chryseis will be returned to her father with sacrificial offerings and rich presents to placate the god.”

  Mother uttered a contemptuous laugh. “Gods, does that man ever know how to sin!” There was a substantial pause. “What makes him think that we possess food enough to nourish his men, or enough herbs to heal them? Surely he realizes that our storehouses are not bottomless.”

  She had no right to refuse. I chewed my bottom lip. Those were Father’s stores, not hers. He was entitled to take what he wished. Had I only been old enough, I could have stood up, countermanded her right there, and, as the High King’s son and heir, granted the herald whatever he needed.

  “Men are dying, my lady,” Talthybius persisted. “A thousand more may already have been laid upon the pyre.”

  “Then they will not need food or medicine, will they?” Mother smiled a malevolent, frigid little smile that told me exactly why she refused. She wanted Apollo’s plague-darts to continue ravaging the hosts, to leave them desolate and crippled. She wanted the god to strike down Father.

  Mother sent the herald away with but a third of the grain, livestock, and medicinal herbs he had been ordered to bring back. To no one’s surprise, other messengers arrived bearing fresh demands for supplies, reprimands for the queen’s stinginess, and the additional news everyone craved.

  After six weeks, the plague ran its course and abated, but the debacle over the priest’s daughter escalated. Returning her to her father’s house had left Father without a suitable war prize, which diminished his standing among the other kings and captains. So to remedy his situation, he seized the next most beautiful and valuable woman, stealing her from the one ally he could least afford to offend.

  Achilles refused to bear the insult to his honor, and withdrew his Myrmidons from the fighting. Father had to return that woman, too, with many gifts and apologies, after swearing that he had never touched her.

  Mother laughed darkly when she heard that. “Hah! He fucked that slut fifty different ways.”

  Aegisthus’s presence always brought out the obscene in her. She drank more with him, and used coarse language, as though he were Dionysus and she his maenad. I cringed at her drunkenness and vulgarity, because those things were beneath her dignity as a queen and my mother.

  A seductive leer crossed his face. He raised his cup to her, and with a husky murmur said, “I know a hundred different ways.”

  Not surprisingly, Father never discussed those matters with me in his letters; it was neither my concern nor my right to question his actions. I continued to write him as a dutiful son, swallowing my frustration over my inability to speak to him face to face. I wanted to ask him whether he had gotten sick, why he had antagonized Achilles, why all the trouble over women. I wanted to ask him whether he knew there were now traitors at court, or whether he realized that someone had tried to murder me, but I dared not commit any of those things to writing.

  When winter’s storms closed the sea lanes, the messengers stopped coming. Tension charged the air. Philaretos became shorter and more choleric with us boys. Timon’s spirits sagged again. Mother grew snappish with her maids, the scribes and petitioners, and everyone else. Elektra argued with her almost daily. Hermione stared pensively into space for long intervals when she ought to have been weaving. I understood the reason for her distraction, though. She heard her father had been wounded. A Trojan archer had fired an arrow into Menelaus’s thigh during a duel with Paris, violating a temporary truce. Then, just like the coward he was, Paris had taken advantage of the distraction to throw dust into my uncle’s face and flee behind the Trojan lines.

  Unfortunately, Mother’s spy had set out with the news before the physician had even pulled the arrow from Menelaus’s thigh. She boxed the man’s ear for not waiting longer and bringing her a full report. “Menelaus could be dead and the Trojans victorious, but thanks to your incompetence we now have to wait until spring!”

  I later sat down beside Hermione’s small loom and tried to reassure her. “There’s nothing to worry about. Your father will be all right.” I did not actually know that, but it was the appropriate thing to say.

  Hermione contemplated the pattern of red and blue checks stretched across the weft. “I wish he had killed Paris,” she murmured. “Maybe it would have brought an end to all this fighting.”

  *~*~*~*

  Achilles was dead.

  Spring brought fresh news, which reverberated like thunder around the Lion Court. Magnificent Achilles, sacker of cities, slayer of Hector, had been killed in an ambush arranged by that coward Paris, who, they said, had shot him dead with a poisoned arrow. I reeled. Everyone said that Achilles had been the greatest warrior alive. If that was true, then what would Father do without h
is champion fighter? Not only was Achilles dead, but the great warriors Patroklos and Telamonian Ajax had been killed, too. The Trojans would surely take heart and rally.

  For the first time, it dawned upon me that Father might actually be defeated, that he might be slain in some sudden and ugly skirmish, and never return home to Mycenae to set things right.

  The news got worse as the months wore on. The son of Achilles, fifteen-year-old Neoptolemus, had been brought into the war by Odysseus. For others, of course, it was good news, because the youth took after his father and was winning victories and renown. But I seethed with envy. I was a hero’s son, too. It was not fair! I might have been twelve, three years younger than Neoptolemus, but was nevertheless big and strong for my age, and I knew how to fight.

  Hermione brightened for a time when she heard her father was alive and well, and had rejoined the fighting, but her spirits sank again after a messenger reported that Paris was dead and that her mother had at once cast off her widow’s veil to marry his brother. Hermione suffered the fresh onslaught of slanders about Helen’s promiscuity with downcast eyes.

  I wanted to comfort her, to put my arm around her and tell her that it was all right, that she was not a hussy like her mother. But I did nothing. I held back because my body was starting to betray me. Pretty girls made my pulse race. I began to understand lewd jokes and songs whose meaning had eluded me only months earlier. Some mornings, I woke fully engorged and thinking about sex, or to the embarrassing evidence that I had dreamt about it during the night.

  Hermione made me burn hottest of all. When we were together, all I could think about was sliding an arm around her shoulders and touching my lips to hers, or removing her clothes and touching her breasts. The fragrance of her skin traveled straight to my groin. The mere sound of her voice set me afire, making it necessary to devise ways to conceal my embarrassment. I focused on keeping my composure around her, lest she perceive something was wrong and assume my newfound nervousness was me blaming her for her mother’s indiscretions.