The Outcast

by Laura Gill

  A shudder moved through me, stilling the anger that had burned so hot down below. I wanted her dead, silenced, yet I wanted to hear her tell me why she had done it, why she had chosen hate and murder and vengeance for a dead child over her living children. Had Iphigenia truly meant more to her than Elektra and Chrysothemis, than me, her only son? Had it been worth it, in the end? Yet I could not move, could not find the words or voice to ask. A silent expectation hung in the air between us.

  Sudden shouts from the great court, accompanied by clashing bronze, broke the stillness. Feet tramped up onto the aithousa; struggling bodies spilled into the vestibule. Pylades hastened toward the doors to join the fight. I did not watch him go.

  Mother was staring at me, at the congealing blood on my face and hands and torso. Her lips parted, quivering. I froze. She was going to speak, to utter a curse that would outlive her, a slap from beyond the grave. No. She could not be permitted that. I moved then, the spell broken, to silence her with a clenched fist. A son should not hit his mother, but she was no longer my mother, no longer queen; she had forfeited the right to be called either. Let her fall gasping to her knees and beg for mercy. All she would have from me were the knife or noose.

  A sharp gasp escaped her lips, and her eyes went wide. “Orestes.” As she crumpled, a tug on my arm prompted me to look down. No! Gods, no! It was not my fist which had silenced her, but my sword buried to the hilt in her breast. I had not sheathed it. How could I have overlooked such a thing?

  I released the sword in horror, and Mother took it with her as she fell. What have I done? With a strangled cry, I reached for her, yet was a fraction of a second too late to catch her before she hit the floor. I went down on my knees, scrabbling for her. No! It was not supposed to happen this way! She was still warm, her eyes wide open. I felt her wrist, then at her throat, seeking a pulse, and finding none; her shade had flown.

  “Mother!” I shook her, kept shaking her, slapped her cheek, but she remained motionless. “Mother!” My breath came in short gasps, till I was hyperventilating and dizzy, outside myself with disbelief. Hot tears blurred my eyes. I groaned, then threw back my head and screamed.

  II.

  Delphi

  Chapter Six

  Mother.

  She was tall and commanding, garbed like a goddess in a bodice of scarlet leather and a tiered skirt of scarlet and blue and yellow flounces sewn with a hundred golden suns that tinkled when she moved. “Orestes,” she said sharply. “Look what you’ve done.”

  I was holding a dead animal by the legs. A hare. My first kill. “I killed it for you.” But she did not smile, did not open her arms to embrace me and celebrate this important rite-of-passage into manhood.

  “Do you expect me to praise and coddle you for killing?” Her mouth was a crimson slash against her chalk-white face paint, and with every word she spoke, blood dribbled down her chin. “Look what you’ve done.”

  It was no longer a hare, but a man’s severed head, and it was Aegisthus’s head, and Father’s head, and my arm was caked with black blood to the elbow. What had I done? I looked again at my mother. A gaping hole bled where her heart should have been. Oh, gods! I never meant to do it. I screamed. Mother! I never meant to do it at all.

  *~*~*~*

  “Make way!”

  Pylades called out ahead, as others hustled me through a throng of hostile faces and bodies that stank of sweat, urine, and garlic. I stumbled, dazed, where the men led me, neither knowing nor caring where we were headed. Had it not been for them, I would fallen down, curled into myself, and stayed that way until the Erinyes took me.

  Night and day tumbled into each other as we traveled. Sometimes I returned to my senses to find myself jouncing along in a chariot, my wrists lashed to the rail, between the driver and some other man, both of whom looked familiar yet whose names I could never quite recall. Other times, I found myself bound hand and foot, lying on the ground beside a campfire, and gazing up at the stars through the trees. Prisoner. I had been taken captive, though I could not remember when or how it had happened, and was being taken somewhere to be sold as a slave.

  Slave. No, I was a king’s son! I thrashed about, straining at my bonds, and shouted curses into the night. Men spilled from the shadows, piled atop me to restrain me. A dark-haired man shoved the others aside, pressed his face close to mine. “Orestes!” he cried. “Stop this! You’re with friends.”

  “Let me go!”

  Instead, the man shoved a gag into my mouth, and, as the other men continued to sit on my limbs and chest, waited for my struggles to cease. “It’s me—Pylades, your brother-in-law,” he said in his accented voice “You’re bound for your own protection. You tried to throw yourself from the chariot. You tried to fall on your sword. Don’t you remember?”

  And then the memories came, like a thousand little knives, stabbing me all at once. Aegisthus: his severed head rolling down the great ramp. Mother: a sword sprouting from her breast. I sobbed when he released the gag, and cried out in despair and self-loathing. I expected the earth to tremble, gape open, and swallow me whole. “Where are you taking me?”

  “Delphi.”

  Pylades pressed food and water on me. I did not want nourishment, only oblivion; he moistened my lips with a wet rag, the only thing he could do. Then he and another man undid my ankle bonds and helped me hobble to a tree to relieve myself. “I can’t untie you,” he said. “It’s for your own good.”

  Boukolos, the other man, washed my hands and face afterward, and replaced the ankle bonds. He did not speak, but his eyes conveyed volumes of pain.

  *~*~*~*

  “You only cared about the dead ones!” I cried. “Iphigenia and that other baby boy, the ones he killed.”

  Mother sat tall in her chair, her hair shining and red with blood. Deep lines were graven around her mouth. “At least they never turned on their mother.”

  “I never meant to do it.”

  “‘I never meant to do it!’” She mimicked me with a cruel, sing-song tone. “Well, you did. I’m sure you’ll want to write to your father, to tell him know about your glorious achievement. You’ll need your own seal.”

  My hand was shaking so hard I could barely hold the object she thrust into it. Something bluish and unborn, rotten with death, and still trailing its black umbilical cord. An expelled fetus, a fish-child. “That’s what you are,” she snarled. “A monster. An abortion.”

  She became a white worm lying upon a straw mattress. A smell of blood and tissue and shit hung in the air. A woman bearing a swaddled bundle bent down to show her what she had birthed: a little worm, fish-belly pale, a thing of the darkness. Her misshapen mouth moved, puckering like a octopus’s sucker, and she turned blind eyes to the wall.

  *~*~*~*

  “Pylades,” I croaked. “Why did you abandon me?” I remembered that much. He had gone away, leaving me alone with my mother when he had sworn a sacred and dreadful oath to remain at my side.

  Pylades covered my bound hands with his. “Aletes,” he answered. I did not recall who that was. Aletes. Aegisthus’s bastard son? “He and his father’s last few followers tried to break into the megaron to kill you. He got as far as the vestibule. I had to stop him.”

  Corpses in the vestibule, on the aithousa, in the great court, their limbs sprawled akimbo in widening pools of scarlet. I remembered the stench of blood, of voided bowels and bladders and raw meat; it was not a thing one could easily forget. I recalled tripping over the dead, stumbling through carnage and chaos, down from the palace, down the great ramp, past Aegisthus’s headless corpse and the smears of black blood and the swarms of black flies. Mycenae was a charnel house. I had done that. Killed them all.

  Mother tormented me so! I squeezed my eyes shut, but she was still there, in the darkness, in the daylight, in my dreams. She was a white worm birthing an abortion, a goddess-on-earth turning her face away from me, a specter of death mocking my remorse. There was no escaping her—not now, not tomorrow, not in ten
thousand years.

  Pylades spread out his bedding next to mine, and without a word spooned against my torso, one arm flung around my middle like a lover’s. “To keep you safe,” he said.

  Safe. What was safe? He did not even know where my enemies were. Not flesh and blood men bent on my capture, but the demons of the night, the wronged dead, the memories. Go away, Mother! I whimpered. I killed you. Go away!

  After a while, Pylades’ breathing grew faint and regular. Sleep did not find me so easily. I continued to gaze up at the stars, to listen to an owl hooting in the distance. Athena. She would not spread her tasseled aegis over a matricide. No god would come to my aid; it had been foretold. The Erinyes gathered in the shadows, waiting to devour me with their sharp teeth and razor claws.

  Time became formless. It was a daylight again, and we were in a boat upon the bright blue sea. Then we were on land once more, traveling by chariot into the high places, where the road narrowed and twisted like a serpent, and the air was heavy with the scent of pine needles and fir. Pylades held the reins. I drooped against him, gritted my teeth as the chariot jolted over a rut. Always moving, always running, yet it was never far enough or fast enough to escape.

  I must have dozed, for then Pylades was shaking me. “Orestes, wake up!” We were still in the chariot; he admonished me over the rattle of the wheels, and the creak of the wooden axle. “We’re almost there.”

  It did not occur to me to ask where; the altitude and atmosphere seemed familiar. Then we entered a place where the buildings encroached upon the wilderness, and people were everywhere. I winced. Loud voices and unwashed bodies reeking of sweat and sickness and garlic. Beggars. Pilgrims. Ten thousand eyes bored into me, read my shame. “Pylades...” A knot formed in my throat.

  He halted the chariot in a court below a complex of buildings nestled against the valley wall. No sooner had the chariot stopped moving than he drew his knife and saw through the rawhide thong binding me to the rail. Our traveling companions hauled me from the platform, hustled me along faster than my legs could work, up broad, shallow stairs crowded with the diseased and destitute.

  “Make way!” Pylades and two others beat a path through the vagrants, who muttered and cursed as we shoved ahead of them, up the stairs to a building fronted with painted columns. A man dressed as a priest tried to intercept us, to send us back into line, but an impatient Pylades blurted out his name and titles, and the priest stood aside.

  A sanctuary. Delphi. I had been here before, had been told the future, and it had been terrible. Oh, gods! I knew now why we had come. My handlers dragged me into a dim vestibule stale with incense and the late summer’s heat; the smell triggered yet more memories. I balked, like a sacrificial animal scenting blood at the altar, but they would not release me, only urge me forward, into a large central chamber illuminated by oil lamps.

  I saw the kouros first, the young god with his long black ringlets and enigmatic smile, and the sacred serpents coiled around his arms.

  Pylades seized my arm, pulled me away from the others, to the floor before the altar. “Hold onto it!” he hissed. I understood enough to grasp the rough stone before the god’s plinth, the naked earth that was the most sacred part of the altar.

  Then Pylades shouted, “Sanctuary! I claim sanctuary!”

  That brought the priests running. Agitated voices surrounded the altar, bodies crammed around me. I could not breathe amid the press and uncertainty. “Prince Pylades!” a man exclaimed, right above my head. “Why do you claim sanctuary from the god? What crime have you committed?”

  “I claim sanctuary for Orestes, son of Agamemnon, who has committed matricide.” Panting from exertion, Pylades had to force the words out. “The Erinyes torment him with madness and remorse.”

  A hiss went through the crowd. “Apollo cannot purify him,” the man answered quickly. Too quickly. “Take him away.”

  There was no refuge, no escape.

  Pylades edged closer until his thigh was flush with my shoulder. He set a reassuring hand upon my head. “Others have thrown themselves on the god’s mercy for identical crimes, and you’ve taken them in,” he pointed out obstinately. “An impossible burden was set upon him. You know this.”

  Words. Just words.

  “He brings a terrible curse with him.”

  “He’s a supplicant like any other, with the right to beg the god’s protection.” Pylades stood his ground. “If Apollo wishes to turn him away, then let him send a sign.”

  The priests were going to evict me, cast me out, leave me naked and helpless to be driven into the wilderness, where I would be dogged by gods and men alike. Madness and torment. No! I can’t bear it. I grasped the rock so tight my knuckles showed white through the skin. “Sanctuary!” I was tired of the nightmares, the twisted memories. I did not want to be that white worm, that abortion, that abomination. Let the god hear me. Let him pass his serpent rod over me to shield me from the demons.

  A dozen priests jostling me, reaching for my wrists, digging at my fingers to pry them loose, and in doing so they lost their shape. These were not Apollo’s servants, but Mother’s. “Let go,” they said, until it became a taunting, sing-song refrain. “Let go, let go.”

  Shadows closed in. I heard the beating of leathery wings, the scrape of talons upon stone, and the sibilant rasp of demons breathing. The Erinyes, waiting to make the kill. I screamed, “Sanctuary!” The priests would have to sever my hands to get me to release the altar. “Sanctuary!”

  “Orestes!” A man’s voice shouted above the din. Pylades? “Don’t fight them.”

  “Prince Orestes, let go.” A voice softer than the others, a hand gently covering mine as the others withdrew. “Let go. Apollo has cast his rod over you. You have sanctuary. Sanctuary.”

  “No,” I groaned. “They’ve come to devour me.”

  Muttering among the priests, like a chorus of cicadas:

  “He’s gone mad.”

  “He sees demons.”

  “Cast him out.”

  “But the god has granted sanctuary.”

  “Apollo’s shadow falls over him, see? It is a sign.”

  I did not recall releasing my hold, only that my hands were chafed raw and cramping afterward, and that the priests were herding me along a passageway, into a dim, close chamber with steps leading down into an adyton, a sunken basin used for ritual purification. Then they were tugging at my clothing, stripping me naked, and their hands were everywhere, prodding, pulling, and pinching. Ice cold water shocked me, spilling over my head, running down my torso. I cried out, but they were on me again, scouring me with oil and strigils, seizing my arms to dig under my fingernails with sharp picks. Like a cornered animal, I lashed out with a fist, caught one old man on the jaw. “Pylades!”

  A dozen voices hissed at me to be quiet, to submit. A man with a graying pate and solemn face then shoved through the rest, caught my chin to force my attention. “Prince Orestes,” he said gently but firmly. I recognized his voice from before. “We must wash you clean.”

  I broke down then, doubling over with great shuddering sobs, and did not know why. Apollo had extended his serpent rod over me; I had been granted sanctuary. Now that my struggles ceased, the priests were gentler, rubbing me down, and wrapping me in soft, thick linen. A priest wafted clouds of incense over me, and there were prayers to be said, thanks to be given, oaths to be sworn. I must not do violence within the temenos. I must not blaspheme the god. I must obey the priests.

  After this, the priests led me from the adyton, and down another passage to a cubicle with whitewashed walls. I had to lie down upon the cot, then they gave me a dark, bitter-tasting liquid in a cup, and ordered me to drink. “Pylades?” I asked.

  “He has left,” the gentle priest answered. He was never very far away. “Apollo will look after you now.”

  I did not remember closing my eyes.

  Chapter Seven

  I hibernated, cocooned in a world of white walls, drugs, and spells. Sometimes
I woke, and tried to take some food, but what little I could choke down tasted like dust. The Erinyes haunted every recess of the cubicle. Apollo’s protection meant they could not physically rend me with their talons and sharp teeth, yet there was no shutting them out completely. Those fiendish goddesses were as primordial as Parnassus itself, with other means to attack their victims.

  At night, for my own safety, I had no lamp. So when twilight fell, the shadows gathered inexorably around me, coalesced into familiar forms that were menacing, reproachful. I tried at first to reason them away, to focus on the amulets hanging from the windowsill. Shadows were simply a trick of the light mingling with the dark, nothing more—but no, the hours between sunset and sunrise were magical, when the membrane between the living and the dead thinned, and the darkness became thick and alive, and pulsated with malicious intent.

  Mother appeared before me, old and gray, with parted lips as though she would speak—exactly as she had been the moment when, thinking she was about to curse me, I had made my fatal mistake. But there had been no curse; her last words were nothing but my name, only my name.

  Oh, but that could not have been her! Clytaemnestra was tall and dark and imperious. It must have been a faithful old servant, a decoy; the real Clytaemnestra was still tucked away like a spider in her royal apartment, weaving and plotting, as women did best.

  My imaginings conjured a large gray spider high up near the ceiling. I saw her by day, repairing her web, hanging upon it, and remembered the woman Arachne, transformed by Athena for her arrogant presumption. Although she was no bigger than my thumbnail, she disturbed me, leaving me too afraid to shake down her web and crush her, or ask the priests to do it. For I knew what had occurred. Mother had become a spider, that spider. I had killed her, but Athena had revived and changed her, and set her to spin her web here to torment me.