The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com

by Various

  “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 beautiful 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 Orestes’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.

  “I’ve lost so much already. I don’t want to lose any more.

  “Should I be glad that I’ll never see the sun again so that Helen can be led like an errant child back to the marriage bed she desecrated? Should I rejoice that my death will enable my father to slaughter Trojans over a vixen that ran into the hills when she went into heat? Should my life dower the frigid air that passes between my uncle and his whore?

  “I used to learn things, but now I forget them. I think I liked learning things. I need you to learn things for me now. Learn how to love someone, and how to survive a tragedy. Learn how to swing a sword, and how to convince an opponent when you have no argument but justice. Learn how to polish your armor until you become a glowing golden man, and then learn to be a flame that fuels itself. Learn to be your own wind. Will you? Will you please?”

  I felt my tears falling into Orestes’s hair. He hugged me tighter. I breathed in his smell.

  “When warm air rises, seeking the sun, cool air rushes in to replace it. That’s the way of the world. Joy and youth and love flow ever upward. What they leave behind is the cold consolation of the wind.”

  Orestes pulled away from me. I studied his solemn face. His mouth opened. For a long second I thought he would speak, but no words came. For once, I found him inscrutable.

  * * *

  I feel the sea beneath me. I inhale and it waits. I exhale and it tumbles. Can you feel the pressure of my anger as it blows fiercely across your skin? I am the sand in your eyes, and the reek of the camp’s midden heap blowing toward the sea. I am the force that rocks you back on your heels so that you flail and stagger. My hatred whistles through the cliffs. It screeches across the rough timber of your boats.

  I grow stronger with every moment. I will be wild. I will be brutal. I will encircle you and conquer you. I will be more powerful than your boats and your swords and your blood lust. I will be inevitable.

  * * *

  I brought Orestes back to the tent, and we laid down beside Clytemnestra. I stared, sleeplessly, into the dark.

  Possible paths stretched before me. I could go to Achilles’s tent and plead my case as a whore instead of a virgin. I imagined what Helen would have done in my place, how she would color her cheeks and set her hair. She would arrange herself to look like a dandelion, easily crushed, and easily conquered. Unlike my mother, she would not have halted her fingers at the laces of Achilles’s breastplate. Unlike my mother, she would have let her lips do more than hover hotly by his ear. Unlike my mother, she would have convinced him.

  I could plead my case to Menelaus as his niece and an innocent. Or if he did not care for virtue, I could venture a suit to replace his lost Helen. Such methods might work on Odysseus, too. Only I was not a practiced seductress. My clumsy attempts might only succeed in doing as my mother said they would, and make the monsters feel justified when they gave me to Calchas’s knife.

  I could have sought you out, in the hope that the eye of night would grant you mercy. But I already knew what you would do if you found me wandering alone through a camp of soldiers.

  One path seemed best: I would run out into the cold and wake the first soldier I found. “Take me to Calchas,” I would tell him, and march resolutely to my fate. It would give me a fast, honorable end. And there might be a chance, just a small one, that I could be killed without seeing your face and knowing how it changed after you betrayed me.

  But Orestes whimpered and tossed beneath his little blanket. Sweat damped his brow. I’d kept him up too late, overwhelmed him with disturbing confidences. I stayed to soothe him until dawn neared and I was too tired to chase my death.

  I was not brave. I was only a girl.

  * * *

  You came to fetch me. You didn’t know we knew. You pretended to be overjoyed at the prospect of the wedding that would never happen. You took my hand and whirled me in a circle. “Oh, Iphigenia! You look so beautiful!”

  I looked up into your eyes and saw that you were crying. Your smile felt as false as mother’s. Your tears washed over the place where I’d once kept the day when Orestes was born.

  “Stop this,” said mother. She pulled me away from you and pushed me toward the other end of the tent. Orestes sat on the cushions beside me, a wooden toy in his hand, watching.

  Mother turned to confront you. “I have heard a terrible thing. Tell me if it’s true. Are you planning to kill our daughter?”

  Your eyes went blank. “How can you acc
use me of such a thing?”

  “I’ll ask again. Answer me plainly this time. Are you planning to kill our daughter?”

  You had no answer. You gripped the hilt of your branch, and set your jaw. Tears remained immobile on your cheeks.

  “Don’t do this.” Mother grasped at your shoulder. You wrenched away. “I’ve been a model wife. I’ve done everything you’ve asked of me. I ran your home and raised your children. I’ve been chaste and loyal and honorable. How can you repay me by killing my daughter?”

  She snatched Orestes from the cushions and held him toward you. He began to cry and kick.

  “Look at your son. How do you think he’ll react when you murder Iphigenia? He’ll shy away from you. He’ll fear you.” She turned the baby toward her. “Orestes, do you hear me? Do you want your father to take your sister away?”

  You tried to grab my brother. Mother held him tight. Orestes screamed in pain and fear.

  “He’ll hate you or he’ll imitate you,” mother shouted over his wails. “You’ll teach your son to be a murderer! Is that what you want?”

  You pushed Orestes into his mother’s arms and stormed away from her. You stopped a short distance from me and reached for my arm. I flinched away.

  “Are you happy, Clytemnestra?” you asked. “You’ve scared the girl. She could have gone thinking that she was going to be married. Now she’s going to be terrified.”

  You leaned close to touch my hair. (Tugging my ponytail: “It’s a good thing you were born a girl.”) You dropped a kiss on my brow. (“I know this is hard to hear,” said Helen, “but your father is the kind of man who would kill a baby.”) I wrenched backward.

  “What do you want?” I asked. “Do you want me to take your hand, blithe and trusting as any goat that follows its master back to the camp to see men fighting in the fog? I’m not a little girl anymore.”

  I looked into your angry, sneering face.

  “Or do I have it wrong?” I asked. “Do you want me to kick and scream? Do you want me to have a tantrum like Orestes so that later you can think back on my wailing and berate yourself about the terrible things you’ve done?”