Electra

by Henry Treece

  ‘It is no trouble. There is a prince there I would like to meet; Paris, the son of King Priam. And besides, both the Phrygians and ourselves pray to Zeus—so we must have a good excuse to offer to the god if we are to kill his other people. I am that excuse. In a way, I am almost sacred, you see. Being the chosen one has made me different from all the others.’

  I said, ‘Does Uncle Menelaus know this?’

  She smiled at me then and said, ‘I have not spoken to him about it. It lies like a wall of silence between us. But I think he knows. These things one does not talk about.’

  I said, ‘Then, if he knows, all the other kings will know, and the barons and the soldiers.’

  She nodded and said, ‘When I walk among them, all talk stops,

  They stand with their heads bowed until my shadow has passed by them on the pavements. They are proud if I notice them or smile at them. It is a great honour to be chosen.’

  ‘But what if it goes wrong, aunt? What if you do become like the shrew, with the inside showing, and smelling cold?’

  Aunt Helen rose and flung her cloak about her. She kissed me on the forehead and said, ‘I try not to think of that, Electra. That is what my dreams are about, every night. But in the sunlight, I do not think of it. I meet everything as it comes. That is the only way to live, my dear. You will discover that, as you get older.’

  At the door she turned and said, ‘If you do not, then you will go mad.’ She went then, along the dark passage-way. I think she was weeping again, but suddenly I found a little beetle trying to carry a mud ball on its back. When I had finished helping him, my aunt had gone, and I ran out into the sunshine.

  4

  I was in my mother’s room and the soldiers had stopped drilling. Some of them, the leaders, were on a small dusty mound outside the palace, lying about and laughing, waving their hands and showing their white teeth to the sun. Most of them were boys; yet they were kings and chieftains in other parts of Hellas. They sprawled carelessly, in their short kilts, their legs burnt deep brown by last year’s good summer, the summer that had scorched our crops and left us too often hungry.

  My father the king stood on the mound above them, enormous in his full growth. He balanced on one leg, leaning on his tall spear, his other leg wrapped about the ash-shaft, like a waiting herdsman.

  The young men laughed at his jokes, and made jests back at him. He threw up his head and laughed at times, and the sound of his laughter came into the room to us through the undraped window.

  All at once, my mother said, ‘Come away from the window, Electra, Those young kings are shameless, lying about there.’

  I came away, for no one disobeyed Clytemnestra; but I felt she was unfair. I thought the young men looked well in their breastplates and short kilts, with their high-plumed helmets lying beside them, and their swords piled in a heap, as though they had forgotten about war.

  Clytemnestra was weaving at a little olive-wood loom, passing the shuttle between the strands of the warp nimbly, with long white fingers. She was very different from Aunt Helen, more clever, but stricter. Yet just as pretty in a fiercer, thinner way. One of her eyes was deep blue and the other grey, and this always gave her a searching, sneering look, even when one knew about it. Her name meant ‘fierce lover’, but as she sat at the loom, her dark robe tight about her throat and her thick bronze hair covered with a black hood, there seemed to be little love about her.

  I said, ‘Are you going to weave a picture of the king in the cloth, mother?’

  She was long in answering. ‘No, this is a scarf for your sister, Iphigenia. If she is to become a priestess of the Mother, then she should have such a scarf, with all the symbols on it.’

  I said, ‘But its is Chrysothemis, the eldest, who is the priestess of Hera’s shrine, here in the palace. Iphigenia is like me—she only wants to play, and have babies of her own to nurse and dress. She does not want to shut herself up and do those things at sacrifice times.’

  My mother’s fingers halted a little in their weaving.

  ‘Iphigenia has no choice, Electra. She must do as the gods wish. So must we all. Besides, it is very convenient, and we who rule the land must always think of that.’

  ‘What does convenient mean, mother?’

  She smiled now, and looked for a moment as though she might pick me up and hug me. But that mood passed, and she went on with her work.

  ‘When the men have gone away.’ she said later, ‘we shall need all the priestesses we can get to keep Hellas in order. The slaves will only obey priestesses—you know that. They worship the Mother, secretly in the straw, whatever the king commands. There must be a hundred clay images scattered here and there among our own stables.’

  ‘But there are other folk besides slaves in Hellas, mother. Hellenes who pray to Zeus, as we do.’

  Clytemnestra gave another of her smiles, but a wrinkled one this time, and said, ‘When the men are gone to the war, there will be no one left between Mycenae and Olympus worth bothering about. And when the men come back, your two sisters will be too old to make a good marriage.’

  I said, ‘What do you mean? I asked you what convenient meant, mother.’

  ‘And I am trying to tell you, child. While this war is on, I cannot have Chrysothemis and Iphigenia running off and marrying the first brisk young peasant who touches their legs. So, they shall be kept safe in their shrines. And when your father comes back, if he ever does, there shall be no peasant bastards haggling at him for his throne.’

  My mother never explained things to me simply, as Agamemnon did. She lacked the patience to find words I would understand. She was impatient in all things—which is why her name was what it was.

  After a time she said, ‘Why are you standing sulking, child? Be off and feed the hens, or see if little Orestes is crying.’

  I stared at her then began to cry. She left her loom and came over to me, putting her arm round me and drawing me to her.

  ‘There.’ she said, ‘I see now; it is because I said your father might not come back…. Is that it?’

  I nodded, and she smiled. ‘You think he is a god, don’t you, Electra? One who could walk through a raging fire unmarked?’

  I nodded again. ‘He will come back,’ I said. ‘He could come out of the jaws of Poseidon unhurt, or kill a bear with his teeth.’

  Clytemnestra was not warm, like Aunt Helen. Under her shift, her body was as cool as a stone in a stream. She said, ‘It is right that little girls should make their fathers into gods. But you are eleven now, and you must be starting to grow up, Electra. Agamemnon is not a god, whatever you think. He is only a man; a strong man, certainly, but a man. Do you know, he weeps if he hears a sad song?’ I said, ‘Of course I know that! Do not the gods weep? Is that not rain?’

  Clytemnestra shook her head. ‘I can see that you will be hard to convince,’ she whispered. ‘Then hear this; your father the king has the name, through all Hellas, of being the bravest man, the most resolute warrior. Yet, I can tell you, he never sleeps before a battle. He prowls the room all night, weeping, and being as sick as a dog. What do you think of that?’

  I hated her for telling me, and said, ‘It is a lie! I have seen him sitting in the saddle as they started out, laughing and throwing his sword up into the air with the others. And I have seen him when they come back, shouting and yelling out for drink to wash the dust from his throat. And the heads of the defeated kings hanging from his horse’s neck. Is that not brave, then?’

  My mother left me and sat down at her loom again. She said, ‘He puts on a good show, as a High King should. But his warriors do not see him in his bedroom at night. They think that they are the only ones who are sick with terror, so they respect him. Yet, one day, perhaps, he will be a head hanging from a horse’s neck. Then men will know that he is not a god after all.’

  I could stand this no longer. Suddenly, hardly knowing what I was doing, I ran at my mother and struck at her. She was startled, but the smile never left her face. Her a
nnoyance showed only in her strange eyes. She tried to hold my hands, but my fingers caught in her fine shift and tore it open. Then I drew back, afraid, for I had never seen her body before, and it was not what I had thought.

  From ribs to knees, she was marked with a tracery of blue and red, the flesh slightly raised where the marks were. I saw that there were snakes and palm trees and even bull’s horns on her. At first she was about to cover these things up again; but then she thought a little longer and just sat there, showing herself to me, and smiling.

  ‘I have worn these since I was your age, Electra,’ she said. ‘It was the fashion in Laconica, before I married your father. All the princesses were pricked with bone needles and dyes rubbed in.’

  I said, ‘Aunt Helen is not like this. I have seen her, and she is all clean and the colour of honey.’

  Clytemnestra shrugged and answered, ‘She may be the colour of honey, but she is not clean. I should know that, she is my sister, and I know most of her secrets.’

  She quickly wrapped her shift about her and fastened it with a strand of red wool.

  ‘Then all at once she said, ‘Electra, you know well enough that I love you. Yet you know that I cannot always find the words to tell you so. It is as though there is a coldness in me, a shyness, that ties my tongue down. Your father is different. He can come out with it and make his heart known. Helen is the same. She can sing as freely as a bird, all that is in her. Yet she forgets just as freely. I am not like that. What I feel, I feel for ever. Yet I am dumb to tell what I feel, at times, even when I feel it the most strongly.’

  I was still staring at her, thinking of the marks on her body that I had never seen before. I said softly, ‘Mother, it comes to me now— you are a witch. Those marks mean you are a witch.’

  She did not even hear me, and perhaps it is just as well. Instead, she said, ‘I was not always like that, my dear. Once, I was as brisk and warm as Helen. That was years ago, when I was a young girl. You do not know this, but I may as well tell you, for no doubt if I do not, someone else will, before long.’

  Her voice flowed on, harsh, like water over sharp stones in the dry season, when the shrivelled reeds crackle in the sun. I was thinking of the marks, not of her words, until she said, ‘And in those days I had a husband, a boy as young as I was, Tantalus.’

  Now I began to prick up my ears, for this was new to me. I said,’ But Agamemnon, mother…?’

  She waved me aside and said, ‘Tantalus and I lived as though each day was a lifetime, and every wood and field a whole world. The sun shone for us alone; the streams flowed only for us; the early aconite came up out of the cold earth only to cheer us. All the folk adored us in those bright spring days, and ran to the doors of their cottages to watch us pass, our arms about each other, singing. And then we had our baby, and Tantalus stood by me while it was born and wiped my forehead. We loved that child, perhaps too much. One day warriors raided us and burned down our house. Their king put his sword into Tantalus, and then struck off the child’s head as I held it in my arms, at the breast. I could show you the mark now, where the sharp bronze bit into me, too.’

  She began to wipe her eyes on her shift, though I saw no tears. Then she said, ‘They were hard times. When all the kings fought together like dogs, each tearing at the bone in the other’s jaws.’

  I said, ‘And did my father, Agamemnon, save you from the raiders, mother? Is that it?’

  She began to laugh and to rip at the strands of wool on her loom, spoiling the cloth.

  ‘Your father was the raider. He was the man who put the sword into Tantalus and killed my first-born.’

  Somehow, I knew that she was going to say this. The scent of it had passed across the room to me even before the words were spoken, just as a farm-dog knows a wolf is about, even before he has seen him. And at the same time, though I had come from her body, I knew that there was something of me my mother hated, some part of Agamemnon.

  I ran out of the room, crying, ‘A witch! A witch!’

  She did not try to follow me, and I was soon ashamed of myself. In the courtyard, near the well, my sister Iphigenia sat, combing her hair and whistling to the doves on the red roof of the great hall. She was two years, perhaps three, older than I was, and her body had begun to show under her shift, making me envious. She stopped whistling and said with a smile, ‘Hey, what’s the matter? Or have you broken your doll?’

  I fell at her feet and said, ‘Sister, our mother is a witch, and our father is a murderer. And mother’s body is all marked with blue lines and red lines, right down to her knees, like the warp and weft on a loom.’

  Iphigenia began to comb my hair then, and patted me so hard on the back that I choked. ‘Child, child,’ she said, ‘surely you have been deaf and blind all your life.’

  I looked up and said, ‘Did you know, then?’

  Iphigenia laughed in the sunlight and said, ‘All the women of the Laconian royal house are like that, except Aunt Helen. She wouldn’t let the old men do it when she came of marriage age. She fought and bit them when they got the little needles to her, and said they shouldn’t spoil her body. Being tattooed doesn’t make mother a witch, dear. As for the king being a murderer, it is true that he killed Tantalus. But then, all kings have killed other kings. It is the law, just as it is the law for the king stallion to kill other king stallions and to take over the mares. Bears and wolves and foxes do it, too. It is the law of the god. So there is nothing wrong in it.’

  I said, ‘Then, one day, another king will kill our father?’ I began to cry again at this; I was too young to learn all the truth of the world in one day.

  Iphigenia lifted me up and said, ‘If Agamemnon is a god, then that puts him out of reach of swords, doesn’t it?’

  I pushed my damp hair back and said, ‘But how do we know he is a god, now? Mother says he is sick before a battle, and surely the gods are not as weak as that? Surely his sickness means that he is mortal, and will fall under the sword of another?’

  My sister straightened my dress and wiped the dust off my legs with her hand. Then she said, ‘That about being sick is nothing. I’ll tell you what it is; father sups milk, as we all do. But on the evening before a battle, he goes into the tents with the other men and also drinks wine. Now, you know what our Mycenaean wine is—sharp and sour as a crab-apple. Put it to yourself, sour wine on top of milk. The milk curdles, you see, and becomes too heavy for the stomach to tolerate. So the stomach throws it up, and the man is sick. Try it some time, when Mother is not about You will be sick, just as anyone would be. But that will not mean you are afraid.’

  I laughed then and kissed her. She had almost made my father into a god again, with a few kind words. I said, ‘It is right that you should be a priestess, sister, for you have truth in your heart and can tell it to others.’

  Her face became very serious then, and she took me by the arm, pinching me a little. ‘Come,’ she said, let us go out and watch the men throwing javelins.’

  5

  Another thing comes back to me again and again, doctor. There are many nights, even now, when its memory pushes through my dreams as a man pushes through a door curtain and comes suddenly into a room, when everyone thought he was miles away.

  I was playing on my own at evening, away from High Town, up the grey hillside in one of the shallow quarries where once the masons had dug out the stone that made the tholoi and our palace. I did not mind being alone, among the wild thyme and brown grasses that now covered the dusty basin.

  I called this my secret bower and not even Iphigenia knew that I used to go there. In this quarry there were little brown flickering lizards that stuck on the sheer rocks like images, until I coughed. Then they would be away, zig-zagging like the god’s lightning, into crevices too small even for my little finger.

  And there were wise little old snakes, dusty green snakes, that lay on the tumbled rocks, baking themselves in the sun, not seeming to mind although the stone was often so hot that I could not bear
to hold my hand against it.

  I used to believe that, with patience, I could find words to talk to them in: I tried Greek and Cretan, and the few bits of Egyptian I had picked up from merchants. And when these failed, I tried various sorts of hissing. But they still went away. Then the notion came to me that such little beasts might only understand the language of the god, since they were always outside and did not live among men in market-places and palaces. So I tried to remember what the god sounded like, in thunder, rain, wind and earthquake, and did my best to make his voice. But a young girl cannot make that awful splitting crash that conies when the floor quivers under the feet and the tall columns sway and then slash downwards, even though she shouts herself raw-throated and puts such a buzzing into her ears that it lasts for days—as I did. My small companions still left me, for their holes and crevices, try as I might.

  So I approached them at last in the final way that occurred to me. When I thought it out at last, I was amazed I had been so stupid before. All my life I had watched the priestesses at the altar, supplicating Mother Via, laying first a row of sea-shells on the marble stone, then a row of pebbles, then one of laurel leaves.

  In this way, it came to me: I ran quickly to the secret bower in the quarry with a skirt-full of amber beads, blue clay beads, scallop shells and agate stones. There were even a few old glass seals from Crete among my offerings.

  And I went silently and with respect down into the bower, making no sound in the thick grey dust. The lizards and snakes did not move yet, so I sat before a low flat-topped stone and arranged my beads and shells on it, glancing round through my thick hair from time to time, in hope. Yes, they were still there, pretending not to be concerned with me, but watching all the while. I knew they were watching!

  Oh, my heart said, if only your clumsy hot fingers can get the pattern right! If only Mother Via will guide them, as she does those of the priestess, so that the beads and shells and seals will spell out some message of friendship to these shy creatures of the earth!