The Young Lion

by Laura Gill

  “Mind what you say, young man.” Timon sat patiently while a servant sponged the vomit from his tunic and my bedding. “The gods have a perverse sense of humor, and may answer your prayer.”

  After a week, however, my youthful resilience won out, and my health improved. I gradually returned to a solid diet, which my sister, still suspecting poison, ordered the servants to taste first. Ainios and Strophius refused to allow me to resume my training until the weather cooled and I was fully recovered.

  Boukolos visited me upstairs, bringing his phorminx to serenade me with the most salacious love songs he knew. “A shapely woman’s breasts are the only melons a young man should nibble on, though one has to take care that he doesn’t squeeze them when they’re too green or overripe.”

  His outrageous analogy made me sputter with laughter. “Where did you hear such a thing? And when was the last time you were even with a woman?”

  “Ah, but that’s my secret.” Boukolos flashed me his most charming smile. “Now here’s a sweet song.”

  I recognized the familiar chords he plucked from the strings and groaned. “Not Apollo and Hyakinthos again!”

  Strophius took me to the sanctuary to thank Apollo for my recovery. I relished going outside again after my confinement, and looked forward to rejoining my friends down in the palaestra.

  Yet that very night, my mysterious malady returned. I doubled over in the privy, my bowels churning and my mouth rank with vomit as I waited for the servant who had answered my call to return with Ainios.

  Anaxibia came with the physician, and sat with me during the night. “Perhaps,” she suggested, “you are trying to do too much too soon.”

  No one knew what the sickness was. I might die, and no one would know why. I shivered violently, my head throbbing so hard behind my closed eyes that it hurt to think. I did not want to be lying there like an invalid, but up and visiting with friends, exercising in the palaestra and training for war with Pylades, even attending to the most boring lessons with Timon

  The next morning, Elektra relieved my aunt in order to keep vigil by my side. She worked wool, twisting fibers into thread. Young Strophius was with his wet nurse right next door where Elektra could monitor him. When I could stomach it, she spoon-fed me hot gruel, even tasted it herself.

  Aktaia brought a jug of cool spring water in the afternoon. I was thirsty, my mouth foul with the taste of vomit, but too weak to lift my head. Elektra took the cup the slave girl had filled with water, and held it out to Aktaia across my body. “Taste it first.”

  “Mistress?”

  “You heard me.” Elektra’s outstretched arm threw a substantial shadow over me. “Taste the water before I give it to Prince Orestes.”

  Aktaia made a series of noises. I turned my head slowly toward her, to find she had turned wide-eyed and ashen.

  Elektra set the cup down and rose from her footstool. She circled around the bed, and then, to my utter astonishment, lunged forward to seize Aktaia by the hair. Aktaia screamed. Ignoring her cries, Elektra dragged the girl over to the bedside table where she had left the cup. “Drink!”

  “Mistress, I—”

  “Elektra!” I groaned.

  Horrified, I watched my sister spin Aktaia around and run her into the wall, again and again, while the girl thrashed and shrieked for help. Painted plaster cracked and fell away, obliterating a flock of swallows.

  Then the nurse in the next room was shouting for the guards. Armed sentries burst into my chamber to separate the women. The infant’s wails pierced the air. Gods, oh gods, the clamor was too much! Elektra flailed between the guards, shouting at them that she was the princess of Phocis, and to release her at once. Aktaia looked barely conscious, bruised, with blood streaming from her nose.

  “Hold her arms!” Elektra ordered. Now free, she seized the cup of water from the bedside table. Liquid sloshed out onto the floor. “And you, tip her head back and pinch her nose.”

  Pain lanced through my belly. Next door, the baby continued howling. Would that stupid wet nurse shut him up, already? “What are you doing?”

  Elektra ignored me, and forced the water down Aktaia’s throat. “Let’s see how long it takes with you.”

  Drawn by the commotion, Anaxibia entered the room. She surveyed the scene with disgust. “What is going on?”

  “This slut tried to poison my brother.” Elektra showed her the now-empty cup. “I’ve forced her to drink her own medicine.”

  Aktaia hung haplessly between the guards, sputtering and sobbing. I could not bear to look at her. Was it true? Had that tiresome slut tried to kill me? A spasm wracked my gut by way of reply. I groaned into the pillow as my diaphragm heaven, then I spewed black bile all over the linens.

  “Take her down to the storeroom behind the kitchen and bind her.” Anaxibia’s voice quavered as she issued the command. “Elektra, give me that cup, and go quiet your son. I will look after Orestes.”

  Elektra returned an hour later, once the baby was quiet again. A pair of servants had swept up the fallen plaster and changed my bed linens. Anaxibia’s women had sponge-bathed me. I lay staring up at the ceiling, miserable, and sleepless. “What have you done?” I whispered. “You killed her.”

  “Yes,” she hissed in my ear. “And I would do it again.” As she leaned over me, her flame-colored hair straggling about her face, echoes of Mother blazed in her eyes. “Long ago, Father made me swear to look after you. I haven’t forgotten my vow.”

  Then the door opened. Strophius and Pylades entered the chamber together. Elektra withdrew, letting my uncle have the footstool. “The girl became quite ill very quickly,” he told me. “It took little effort to get her to confess.”

  “Poison?” That word tasted like sour vomit.

  “Aegisthus’s agent gave her gold to slip the powder into your wine, and then into the water,” he confirmed. “She didn’t know what it was, but Ainios has examined the packet we found among her things. Had you drunk from that cup before, it would have finished you.”

  Cold sweat broke through my pores. Aegisthus struck at me, even here. “Kill her,” I moaned.

  “Already done,” Pylades said.

  He stayed with me after his father left. “Elektra suspected the truth all along. Apollo must have spoken to her,” he said softly, with grudging admiration. “She saved your life.”

  Elektra never let me forget that close encounter with death. My suffering added fuel to her burning desire for vengeance, and bound her to me with unbreakable chains. Long ago, Father made me swear to look after you. I haven’t forgotten my vow. I, too, had sworn a vow, but not yet fulfilled it. Like a shackle, she would hang upon me until it was done, or until we were both dead.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  A dawn raid took the brigands completely by surprise. Our scouts overwhelmed the sentries posted at the cave’s entrance, and slit their throats. As Strophius took the lead, we advanced, stealithy creeping up the narrow mountain track. My heart raced, anticipating the coming fight. I held my sword in a death-grip, and scarcely dared to breathe lest the sound awaken the outlaws we were about to kill.

  The hearth fire burning within the cave cast more shadows and smoke than illumination. The air smelled rank, like excrement and wood smoke, and my eyes started watering. Using hand signals, Strophius directed his men to cover all areas of the cave, to account for every sleeping brigand.

  Then the slaughter began. Spears jabbed into unprotected bellies, daggers slashed throats, and unconscious men perished in gurgles and surprised grunts. I hung back near the entrance, where my uncle had directed me to wait as an observer. No one expected a fifteen-year-old boy to rampage like a champion through the enemy ranks, no matter what his training and pedigree.

  A woman’s shriek raised the alarm, awakening the remaining brigands, who went for their weapons and stumbled disheveled and sandy-eyed into a melee. Pockets of violence delineated the cave. I saw a woman seize a pot from the hearth and hurl the contents at a grizzled warri
or, who went down screaming and clutching his face. A second woman tried to claw out my brother-in-law’s eyes, before he and Machaereus hacked her to pieces. Excrement and urine and blood befouled the close air. One warrior seized a bedraggled toddler by the ankles and smashed her headfirst into the rock wall.

  A shrieking figure suddenly assailed me from the left. Instinct took over, leaving me no time to be afraid. I swung around, raising my left arm with the heavy ox-hide shield to absorb the blow, and stabbed with my right. My blade drove through cloth and flesh and muscle to grate against bone. I heard a groan, saw a woman’s maddened eyes go blank. Boukolos, who had elected to remain beside me, finished her with a quick sword thrust. He threw me an exultant smile, the look of a man flush with bloodlust.

  I looked away, toward yet another woman whose white limbs flailed under the man raping her. Two more men joined him. I could not watch. Somehow, there seemed to be far more women and children than men among the brigands. Strophius had not warned me about that.

  Boukolos seized my arm, hustling me outside into the fresh air. Dawn’s first colors lightened the sky. Strophius’s men shoved past to dump their booty on the ground. Gold and silver jewelry crammed a crude vessel. Fleeces and furs. An embossed bronze helmet, its decorative front horns snapped away. A silver-studded sword smeared with blood. All were spoils taken from pilgrims waylaid on the mountain road to Delphi. Removing my helmet, I sucked in a lungful of crisp autumn air redolent with the scent of pine, and tried to collect myself. Those people are murderers and thieves. It is right to kill them. This is the king’s justice.

  There were no prisoners, no women and children to sell into slavery; the brigand den must be utterly eradicated. I sank down upon a rock. On my first raid, my very first kill had been a woman. In the chaos, and with the shield between us, I had not glimpsed enough of her face to know whether she had been young or old, or even pretty. Her name was a secret she carried with her into the hereafter. Somehow, her death seemed ill-omened, prophetic. All I recalled were her bulging eyes, and the blankness of shock and impending death. Taking the tracker’s life in Corinthia had felt like nothing compared with this.

  Strophius emerged from the cave and removed his boar tusk helmet with its great horsetail crest. Streaks of sweat and grime stained his face; he wiped them away with the back of his hand. Seeing me, he nodded. “That went well.”

  My gorge suddenly rose. Groaning, I dropped my head between my knees. Vomit splashed the ground around my feet. When the heaving stopped, Boukolos offered me some water from his skin. “It’s all right,” he said. “Nausea awaits every warrior the first time he meets Ares.”

  Strophius took a sterner approach. “Come with me, Orestes.”

  Taking a torch, he led me back into the cave, back into the den of slaughter. Warriors were prowling among the bodies to dispatch the wounded and search out any loot. I could not count the corpses. Men, women, and children sprawled in their own gore, mutilated and dismembered. Blood drenched and spattered and smeared every surface. I had not seen such carnage since...

  I focused on suppressing the thought. Thieves and murderers. Even the women were cutthroats, and so I had witnessed. What Strophius carried out there on the mountain was the king’s justice. Long ago, Philaretos had warned me that battle was vicious and ugly, and so it was.

  “Take a good look,” my uncle said. “If you mean to succeed your father as king, then you must learn about war, and about death.”

  I bit back a rebellious impulse to retort that I knew all about death. Nevertheless, it turned out that Strophius was absolutely right. Not about corpses or carnage, but about the lessons one learned about oneself in war. War was not a mechanical thing at all, although sometimes, in the very thick of the fighting, it might seem so. The influence of Ares brought out the best and worst qualities in mortal men, all the nuances of ruthlessness, bravery, and cowardice. Thus I began to view war as a harsh but effective gauge for determining who and what a man was.

  On my next raid, I tried to seize a woman and rape her, because the other warriors seemed to expect me to; they even offered advice and assistance. The adventure did not, needless to say, go as anticipated. The woman looked young and frail, but she fought and clawed at me with unexpected strength. It took me forever to loosen my loincloth, only to discover that the struggle did not heighten my arousal.

  Had she not continued to struggle, the foolish bitch, I might have let her go, but her insistence on gouging out my eyes and tearing my throat with her teeth, coupled with the fact that it was her fault that my erection had failed, earned her my fist. She slumped to one side, half-naked, either unconscious or dead. It struck me then that I could have done anything I wanted with her, violated her in every way known to mortal man, but she was fortunate, I suppose, to have been seized by a young warrior who had just discovered that he did not like raping women. I preferred my bedmates pliable and eager, and far cleaner than the slovenly wretch she was. So I rearranged my clothing and left her for someone else.

  It took a few more raids for me to notice that, despite the lewd banter, not every man bothered with rape. Boukolos showed tact in not asking me about it—he himself preferred to bugger any comely youths we came across—though he observed, “Gods only know what diseases these mountain women have. Best not to meddle with them when they’re young or clean, either. They observe the rites of Dionysus, and know curses to shrivel one’s manhood, I hear.”

  I did not hate the brigands I killed, perhaps on account of what many of them were: veterans of the Trojan war, broken and dispossessed men who could not go home again. After some time among the warriors of Strophius’s company, I began to realize that some of the toughest, fiercest fighters were not necessarily the most vicious men; they fought out of necessity, to serve their king and to protect their homes and families from predation. They slaughtered children and raped women in the heat of battle because Ares drove them to such carnage. Most did not celebrate the murder of women and babes afterward, but were sober and reflective, regretting the circumstances, because they themselves had wives and children at home. As much as they might celebrate a successful raid, most drank to excess to forget the atrocities of the slaughter.

  Killing was a serious business. A warrior could never take for granted the divine favor he enjoyed, or dismiss the lives he took.

  Aegisthus was the only man alive whom I hated enough to savor the prospect of killing, and in that, I think, I began to understand something of the incandescent hatred Atreus and Thyestes had borne each other.

  My ruminations of war and killing eventually reminded me of something Mother had said. Before you know it you will be a man, and then you will turn into your father. You will start to have a man’s longings, and men become violent with their wants. I did not think she understood men as well as she thought. The violence she deplored did not always depend on wanting, so much as on necessity.

  Chapter Thirty

  Pylades approached me a week after the spring equinox. “It’s time.” A rakish smile enhanced his ebullient air, which alone made me sit up and take notice. I could count on one hand the number of times my brother-in-law had smiled that fortnight.

  “Time for what?” I asked.

  “Parnassus.”

  For the last three years, we had gone out to my estate to train, work the land, and go hunting in the foothills and forests near the farm, while Parnassus spread her broad shoulders across the horizon and awaited me with the patience of the immortal goddess she was. At sixteen, a few months from my seventeenth name day, having been blessed with a man’s deepening voice and strong limbs, and the first fuzz of an adult beard downing my chin, I was ready to meet her.

  Elektra expressed her doubts about the venture, cataloguing a litany of mishaps that might befall me—a fall, a snakebite, sunstroke, brigands, and so forth until she sounded like Anaxibia. Such fussiness had become a habit during her pregnancies. “Listen to you!” I exclaimed. “You’re constantly urging me to be a man,
yet whenever the occasion arises you want me to sit at home like an invalid.” She complained about my going on raids, too, until Pylades and I decided to withhold the information from her, and arm ourselves in the lower citadel.

  “But how many brothers do I have?” Elektra would not refuse, though. Anything that might bring renown to my name, and thus to the House of Atreus, she encouraged. “Pylades, make sure to look after him. And don’t stint the Mother of the Mountains her offerings when asking her protection.”

  It took two days to prepare for the expedition. We needed additional men and supplies, and the appropriate offerings in order to make propitiatory sacrifices to Gaia. Pylades kept an eye on the weather. Although the mountain snows were melting, a sudden thunderstorm could drive us back from the summit.

  Timon expressed optimism over the excursion. “You have wanted this for a long time, young man.” Feebly, he patted my arm. His arthritis forced him to shuffle along using the walking stick I had made him, and his eyesight was now so poor it rendered him unable to read or write. My uncle had appointed me a new pedagogue for such lessons as I still required, but Timon remained first and foremost in my sentiments. I visited him every day that I was in residence, and last winter had sat with him and spoon-fed him gruel and custard after Ainios pulled a rotted tooth. “You must tell me about Delphi when you return.”

  “I should take you there,” I said. His failing health worried me.

  He waved aside the offer, though I had made it in earnest. “Apollo has no cure for old age.”

  Elektra balked again the night before our departure, finding yet another reason why I should stay home. “You should be training for war, Orestes, not traipsing around on these interminable excursions.”

  She begrudged me this one thing, though she knew how I wanted it, and worse, her gestational mood-swings made her contrary. “I train hard enough for two men.”