‘You speak as though you know he’s dead,’ Peiraeus put in, dismayed that they had come so far to receive so little, ‘but no one knows that for certain yet. And there’s a lot of trouble on Ithaca right now. Telemachus stands in need of more than good advice.’
‘The whole world is in trouble these days. I wish there was more we could do to help, but I don’t see what it would be,’ Thrasymedes answered with a touch of impatience that he immediately regretted.
‘What about Menelaus?’ It was Peisistratus who had spoken, having listened carefully to the previous exchanges. ‘The word is that he’s been back in Sparta for some time now. Perhaps he’s heard something?’
Thrasymedes shrugged. ‘I suppose it’s possible. They say he’s been out east in Egypt for years. I can’t think why Odysseus would have gone that way, but you never know.’
Peisistratus directed an encouraging glance at Telemachus. ‘If I were you I wouldn’t give up either. Why don’t you go on to Sparta? It has to be worth a try. In fact, I’ll keep you company, if you like. I’m eager to see something more of the world and there’s nothing to keep me here. What do you say?’
Menelaus had been at the court of King Proteus in Memphis when he was told that Agamemnon had been assassinated. Fully apprised by his agents of the terrible events in Mycenae, Proteus chose a moment when Helen was absent among her women, for he thought it best that her husband should inform her that her sister had murdered his brother and taken his principal enemy to her bed.
Yet Menelaus himself could scarcely comprehend the shock of what he was told. There must be some mistake, he insisted. The agents must be misinformed. Agamemnon had returned in triumph from Troy. He had accomplished everything his wife desired of him. Why would Clytaemnestra dream of doing such a thing? But even as he protested, Menelaus recalled how many reasons Clytaemnestra had been given to revile her husband. And such an unthinkable act was entirely consistent with the bloody history of Mycenae. It was, quite simply, the atrocious kind of thing that happened there.
Sick at heart, Menelaus sat recalling the night when he and his brother had cowered together in the damp darkness of the water-stair at Mycenae before making their escape through the postern gate. With their lives under immediate threat from the usurper Thyestes, they had vowed always to be true to each other. Embracing his younger brother so fiercely that Menelaus found it difficult to breathe, Agamemnon had sworn that no harm would ever come to him as long as he was alive to prevent it. But Agamemnon was dead now, and the longer Menelaus contemplated that fact, the more he became aware of a great weight lifting from his chest. He felt as though all his life had been spent in the clutches of that embrace. Now that those arms had fallen lax about him, he might begin to breathe freely again.
Just as astonishing to him was Helen’s response when he found a way to tell his wife that her sister was now a murderer.
‘So she has dared to do it at last,’ she said; and he would have sworn that a wry smile passed across the shadowed beauty of her face.
He said, ‘I thought you’d be horrified by the news.’
Helen held her needlework up to the light. ‘I was horrified when I heard that Agamemnon had killed Clytaemnestra’s first husband and their child. I was horrified again when reports reached Troy that he’d sacrificed his daughter in payment for his own impiety.’ She turned her frank gaze towards Menelaus. ‘But we both know he was a monster; and now he’s met a monster’s end.’
Taking in the shock on his gentle face, she added quietly, ‘Perhaps I’ve seen too much horror. Perhaps my senses have been dulled by it.
Dry-mouthed, Menelaus said, ‘He was my brother still.’
Helen reached out a hand to cover his. ‘Do you ask me to grieve for a man who would have had me killed if you hadn’t stood in the way? Did he not threaten your own life too?’ She took in the pain on his face. ‘Nothing will cure this world of cruelty, but at least my sister has put an end to Agamemnon’s part in it.’ Sighing, she put down the little wooden frame. ‘I would rejoice at what she’s done if I could believe that anything other than more blood will come of it.’
Wondering whether he would ever understand this woman whom he loved more than his life, Menelaus made offerings alone to his brother’s shade. Yet even as he poured the libations, he wondered whether the time had now come to return to Argos and reclaim the kingdom of Sparta. And with that achieved, he might even make a bid for the Lion Throne himself.
But when he broached the matter with Helen, he was dismayed by the strength of her resistance. Agamemnon’s writ of banishment had forced them to fly east and, by the grace of some god whose mercy she scarcely deserved, Helen found herself at ease in the orient as she had never been among the rowdy princes of Argos. Here her beauty was a matter for appreciation rather than the cause of strife. Here she was respected. Here at last she was at liberty to be herself.
‘Yet there are things you must understand,’ Menelaus protested. ‘Aegisthus sits on a throne to which he has no lawful right. A long time ago, while he was still a boy, he slew my father. Now he has had a hand in my brother’s death. What must the world think of a man who stands by and does nothing while the murderer of his closest kinsmen flourishes?’
Glancing away, Helen said, ‘I no longer greatly care what the world thinks.’
‘Then what must a man think of himself in such a case? What sort of man must he be?’
‘A man who has already seen too much of war?’ she answered. ‘A man who understands that the lust for vengeance is the curse that destroyed his father and his father’s house. A man who has learned to value love above everything else?’ But she grew impatient then. ‘Isn’t it enough that our passions have already burned a great city and caused the deaths of many thousands who wanted only to live their lives in peace? Are you so restless with our life that you want my approval to start another war? Or do you imagine that my sister will give up what she has won for herself without a fight? I promise you she will not.’
Helen had been pacing the room as she spoke. She turned to look back at him. ‘In all the Argive lands there is only one thing I want,’ she declared. ‘It is the one thing that you too should want more than anything else.’
‘And what might that be?’ he asked shortly, discomfited and unhappy to find himself so quickly at odds with her.
‘Our daughter,’ she answered.
And for several long seconds she let the silence stand between them.
So painful were their separate feelings of guilt over the child they had not seen for nearly twelve years that neither of them had yet dared to speak of her. Yet in all those years Hermione had never been far from Helen’s thoughts; and at each returning thought of her daughter she was seared by a remorse so profound that there were hours at a time when she could scarcely breathe for the pain of it.
‘Hermione is my child,’ she said. ‘I need to see her again. I need to hold her.’
‘I understand,’ Menelaus answered. ‘But the girl has been well cared for. I made sure of that. Hermione will be waiting for us in Sparta.’
‘There’s too much darkness there, don’t you see? Please, Menelaus,’ Helen turned her abject eyes on him, ‘let her come here to live with us in Egypt.’
Now almost sixteen years old, Hermione had seen neither of her parents since she was a child of four. She remembered them hardly at all — only that her mother had been a remote and anxious figure who had smelled like lilies and was suddenly gone; and that her father had changed from a kindly giant into a morose, short-tempered man who rarely looked at her. For a time she had been raised by her nurse in the house of her kinsman Icarius, who was boring and stiff-necked and mostly concerned that she should acquire at the earliest possible age an unshakably Spartan sense of modesty and virtue. Then, at the behest of Queen Clytaemnestra, she had been moved to Mycenae.
Once there, Hermione became utterly devoted to her cousin Orestes. Soon her admiration turned to adoration, though her feelings were coyl
y concealed when she realized, to her bitter disappointment, that he was only moderately interested in the fact that the two of them must eventually be married. Even when she shed her childhood gawkiness and revealed her share in her mother’s beauty, Orestes remained more attached to his friend Pylades than to anyone else; but Hermione endured the pain of his rebuffs, confident in the knowledge that the dynastic interests of their two families would bring him one day to her bed.
About the time of her first offering to Artemis, the feel of life in the Lion House altered for ever. Without explanation, her cousin Iphigenaia disappeared. Her foster-mother Clytaemnestra, who had never been easily approachable, became still more formidable and cold. The friendship between Orestes and Pylades turned secretive. Then suddenly, for reasons Hermione did not understand, she was returned to Sparta.
Some time passed before she learned, through the gossip of servants, about the dreadful thing that had been done in Mycenae. And then it seemed for a time that the world had forgotten about her. In her isolation the girl grew introverted and self-willed. She took pleasure in nothing but being peevish with her servants and small acts of cruelty to the pets that were meant to distract her. With the adult strangers whose duty it was to care for her welfare, she was stubborn and petulant. Her single desire was to be reunited with Orestes, but as he was now forced to live in hiding somewhere a long way away, it seemed that her wish was doomed to frustration. Not without justice, Hermione came to believe the world did not care for her; and the world, she decided, must be made to pay for that.
Then, with all the shock and glamour of divine intervention, a herald had come from Egypt. Reconciled to each other once more, her parents wanted their daughter to join them there. They loved her and missed her and wanted her back. She was to gather together all her most treasured possessions and take ship for the east as soon as possible.
Hermione arrived at her parents’ mansion in Canopus in a state of high excitement. After the tedium of Sparta, she loved the exotic feel of Egyptian life. But mostly she adored the unprecedented fact that both her parents were at her beck and call, eager to gratify her whims, to distract her at the first sign of dissatisfaction, to load her with gifts.
Yet no amount of exquisite jewellery, expensive perfumery, finely embroidered gowns, candied delicacies, attentive menials, talking parrots and ridiculous monkeys could ever quite appease the ache of abandonment inside her. Hermione’s heart was afflicted with a profound grievance against life. Because that grievance left her as ill-tempered as she was insecure, she found ample opportunities for punishment; and its principal target was Helen.
The desire to hurt her mother was as incomprehensible to Hermione as it was uncontrollable. It yielded no lasting satisfaction and left them both distressed. Yet time after time it got the better of her, for as the girl now viewed things, the only reason why her whole life had not been the subject of such extravagant attention as she was now receiving was that Helen had forsaken her when she was too young to protest. And she had done it from no larger motive than the pursuit of her own pleasure. Already it was evident to Hermione how much pain and humiliation her father must have suffered; so where to put all the blame for the family’s years of wretchedness except on her mother?
To add to the injury, Helen’s, entrance still consumed all the attention in a room, for by the simple, disastrous fact of her incomparable beauty, she relegated everyone else to dullness. This too was unforgivable.
If Hermione intuited that that her mother had long ago passed the same verdict on herself, it made no difference. Nothing Helen could do was ever quite right for her daughter. Her advice and opinions were dismissed, her jokes disdained, her gifts derided, her concern misconstrued. And so, over the next two years, by a slow insidious process of erosion, Hermione achieved what all the tribulations of her mother’s life had so far failed to accomplish: she broke Helen’s spirit.
Having believed that all the happiness he had originally conceived for his family in Sparta might soon be recovered here in Egypt, Menelaus found himself stretched between his wife and his daughter. When he discovered that Helen had begun to drown her pain in the poppy prepared for her by the serving-woman Polydamna, he felt angry at first; then, increasingly, he was inclined to join her.
Hermione had been in Egypt for three years and was almost nineteen years old when she at last heard word of Orestes.
Canopus is a great trading city standing on the Delta of the Nile, and not much stirs in the world without news of it reaching the waterfront there. That the son of Agamemnon had avenged his father’s death by murdering his mother caused a buzz of horror to run throughout the taverns and bazaars within a week of its happening. Less than an hour later it had reached Menelaus. Instantly he felt all the old ghosts rising round his head.
Where other families loved and cherished one another, the House of Pelops feasted on each other’s blood. Helen was right: they were monsters spawned by monsters. Of all of them, he alone was not guilty of slaughtering his own kin, though he had come within an inch of killing the wife he loved. So there was, Menelaus saw, a terrible inevitability about it all. And he had always been fond of Orestes. The boy’s imaginative spirit had lightened the dour air of the Lion House, which was all the more reason why Menelaus had long entertained hopes that a marriage between Orestes and Hermione might initiate a new age across all Argos. One free from all the old curses. A golden age of prosperity and peace.
Well, so much, he thought now, for the dreams of an unworldly man!
And somehow, he must tell Helen that her sister, the murderess, had in turn been murdered, and by the hand of her child.
Yet this time it was his daughter’s response that astounded him.
‘I must go to him at once!’ Hermione cried. ‘He must be in terrible distress. I’m sure he needs me now.’
Half drowsy with poppy, Helen said, ‘You would offer comfort to a man who has murdered his own mother?’
‘I would do more than that,’ Hermione answered.
Menelaus tried to intervene. ‘This matter is not your concern, Hermione.’
But his daughter turned on him with outraged eyes. ‘How can you say that? Orestes belongs to me. He has always belonged to me. You promised him to me a long time ago. We have always been meant for each other.’
Menelaus glanced away. ‘As you say, that was all a long time ago. After what Orestes has done, things can never be the same.’
But the girl was not to be deterred. ‘I understand well enough why he was driven to do what he has done,’ she said. ‘His suffering is my suffering. He needs our love not our judgement now. I will go to him and marry him.’
‘You will do no such thing,’ Helen gasped. ‘The youth has passed beyond the protection of both men and gods. He belongs to the Daughters of Night now. Put him from your thoughts.’
‘Your loyalty does you credit,’ Menelaus said more gently, ‘but no sane man can bear to contemplate what he has done. Orestes is not for you, Hermione. Let that be an end of it.’
But that was the beginning not the end of the harrowing encounter. It ended with Hermione smashing a delicately painted two-handled jar that she knew was dear to her mother’s heart as she ran in a blizzard of rage and grief to her room.
Thereafter, life in Egypt became intolerable to all three of them. Hermione was beyond all reason, contemptuous of both her parents, trapped in her own fury.
Menelaus and Helen could see no way through the misery except to find a suitable husband for her as soon as possible. He would need to be a man strong enough to rule Sparta, but also, which might prove more difficult, to cope with their daughter’s powerful will. So despite Helen’s reservations, Menelaus wrote a long letter to Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, who had recently won a significant victory in his war with the Dorians.
The letter suggested that in uncertain times, with Mycenae in a state of confusion, it made sense for Thessaly and Sparta to enter into an alliance for their mutual protection and suppo
rt. The future of Sparta would be secured that way, with Neoptolemus as the country’s strong king. The combined forces of the two kingdoms might withstand any renewed incursion by the Dorians; and one day, if the gods looked with favour on their endeavours, the High Kingship might be restored with Neoptolemus on the Lion Throne. The treaty would be sealed by his marriage to Hermione; and if this proposal proved acceptable to his young friend and comrade, Menelaus would return to Sparta with his family in the near future so that all the arrangements could be put in place.
On the afternoon after he had broken the news of her fate to his daughter, Menelaus sought to distract himself by putting in hand the commissioning of his ship. He was walking along the waterfront when he met a Phoenician trader called Hylax who had kept him supplied with luxuries from the east and news from the west in the early days of his arrival in Egypt. Throughout the war, Hylax had made a fat living by profiteering from the sale of necessary goods both to the beleaguered Trojans and the besieging Argives; but he was an engaging rogue and Menelaus had found him useful.
The two men had not met for some years, however, and there was much inconsequential chatter to be got through before Hylax bared his big teeth in a grin, and said, ‘So what are we to make of your old friend Odysseus of Ithaca? Such a stir he has caused! May the gods spare him for his iniquities!’
The Return From Troy Page 41