Electra (11 page)

I saw a baker dwarfed by a tower made of the flat barley loaves which Corinth consumes by the wagon-load, and a wine-maker with a whole vat of reeking raw new wine. There were oceans of honey, mountains of grain, harvests of olives and fruits, including strange preserves from distant Libya that smelt sour and exotic - long, yellow, flat, dry things and round, red, flat, dry things. There were golden apples from Libya, sharp and juicy, and enough well-woven and dyed cloth to wrap the city of Corinth in.

People let us pass, linked hand to hand, and the horses followed us. We did not slow until we were across the main square, through the stoa's colonnade of shops under cover and into a side street. There Diomenes knocked at a large wooden door with a stone lintel and an intriguing image outside it. It was the carved head of a man - rather handsome, with a hawk nose and deep eyes, but halfway down the otherwise undecorated pillar there was an erect phallus. It seemed an odd place and the wrong season to find a prop from the Dionysiac mysteries, and I said so.

'It's a herm - it signifies that a citizen lives here,' said Diomenes shortly.

'If that is all it takes to become a citizen,' began Cassandra coarsely, when the door opened and we were ushered inside. The yard door was shut and the rage of the market was subdued.

The courtyard was cool. It was paved with creamy polished stone. There was a marble bench under a vine, and the slave motioned that we should sit there while his Master was called.

The slave was very dignified but his Master was less so. He hastened into the courtyard, a tall man with bronzed skin and strong, corded forearms. He was wearing a spotless tunic, but had not even waited to put on his sandals as he rose from his noon rest.

'Chryse, my dear,' he exclaimed. 'Can you stay with me? It's been years, boy; my you've grown.'

Diomenes nodded at the invitation and Taphis ordered the horses to be tended and wine to be brought immediately. He also, to my astonishment, called for his wife Gythia.

'You must be Chryseis,' he said to Cassandra. 'He told me how beautiful you were, Lady. He spoke the truth.'

'No, Lord, Chryseis is dead,' said Cassandra quietly, as Diomenes did not speak. 'I am a priestess of Demeter, as is my companion. We are travelling to Delphi with the Lord Diomenes and Eumides the sailor, who has gone to find a ship.'

Taphis, recovering gallantly from his error, poured unmixed wine for us and we sat down. 'Delphi, Chryse? Why are you going to Delphi? Is it Troy that had burdened you with blood-guilt?'

'Too much blood, Taphis,' he replied soberly. 'Far too much blood.'

How is your Master, Glaucus?'

'He lives and is well, I believe. I have not been back to Epidavros yet. Perhaps later. Also, I need to buy some herbs.'

'My store-house is yours,' he said formally. 'What are you looking for?'

'Lethos.'

'I have some. Chryse, is it for you?' Taphis looked worried and took Diomenes' hand in his own. 'You look tired enough to sleep, Asclepid, without such strong measures.'

'No, old friend, for one who shrieks all night in unbearable dreams. The Lady here is my patient. We will mix Lethos with honey, wine, milk and valerian root.'

'An interesting compound. Ah, here is my wife Gythia. She will care for your companions.' He very carefully did not use any of the terms which would imply any close or marital relationship between us and Diomenes. Taphis the Corinthian was a tactful man.

Gythia, unveiled, was a brisk woman of perhaps forty, with long braids and bright brown eyes. She led us up the stairs to the women's quarters, talking all the way.

'Such a hot day and you have made a long journey, Taphis says.' She did not even use the honorific 'my Master' or 'my Lord' about her husband. 'I shall have them draw a bath for you at once, honoured ladies, and some food shall be brought. Would you care to unveil, Lady?' she asked me. 'There are no male eyes here, except that of my son.'

As her son was presumably the fat, dark-eyed child presently taking her basket of wools apart quite methodically, I decided that he was no threat to my propriety and put back the veil. 'You are ill,' she said. 'I am sure that Taphis and Chryse Diomenes will be able to help.'

I wondered what she had seen in my face.

The Princess Electra shrieked and struggled in her sleep every night. She could not be left or she would tear off her garments and run out into the night, ripping at her skin with her nails and crying, 'No! Don't!' Something about Eumides attracted her especial hatred. After she had attacked him, trying to claw out his eyes, Chryse and I shared the watch and sat between her and our comrade. Orestes, questioned, said that he had never seen her behave like his before. Eumides took over the care of the boy, and they grew closer together. So did Chryse and I, watching and wearying over the tormented princess.

'What can have happened to her?' I asked for the seven hundredth time, as we wrestled her to the ground in another shepherd's hut in another Artemision. I lost patience and sat on her, pinning her to the earth floor. Sometimes this calmed her back into sleep.

'She must have been tortured. I feel now that your disapproval of seclusion is wise, Cassandra. Lock creatures up in close cages and they will attack each other.'

'Her mother? You think her mother did this to her? Certainly the Queen is a woman of strong passions, but why should she bother to torture this meek daughter, when she had a whole city full of slaves? Besides, she has no scars. She has not been beaten or whipped, Chryse. It is something else. She is full of self-loathing.'

'Is she re-living the death of her father, do you think?'

'No, I have not heard her say one word about her father. It is her mother she hates most bitterly.'

'You knew,' said the Princess Electra, clearly, as though she had been listening. 'Mother, you knew. You knew! And you didn't save me!'

'Didn't save you from what, Electra?' I asked softly, hoping to talk to the undermind.

'Him!' she screamed, stabbing a finger in the air. 'Him, him!'

'Him?' I asked, but she was lost again in a dream.

'Him?' repeated Chryse. 'Does this mean that she isn't a maiden?'

'Surely no one could have… not in her mother's palace,' I hesitated.

'She says that mother knew,' Chryse reminded me. 'Perhaps there was a lover. Even in a palace such things are known, sometimes.'

'Possibly, Chryse, but she would not be so wounded if she had voluntarily taken a lover, even a secret one. This sounds like rape.'

'She's over twenty, isn't she? When did you first lie with a man?'

'When I was fourteen, I made the sacrifice and joined the Mother. What about you?'

He leaned into my arms in silence. I could not see his face. I wondered if he was about to disclose the secret which he was clearly keeping about this, but all he said was, 'I was thirteen.'

'But I was in Troy where women are free, and you are a man. This stiff little princess would never have dared to take a lover. I can't believe it. She shrinks from any contact with a man. She believes in all the rules of propriety. Also, she has been watched by that hawk-eyed queen since childhood, so she hasn't a particle of initiative. She must have been given away, or waylaid in some dark place in Mycenae. It has enough dark places.'

'In the women's quarters, with all those guards outside?' objected Chryse, running a hand over his tired face. Exhausted and red-eyed, he was just as beautiful to me, the golden Asclepius-Priest, as he was when he had been alight with joy over my rescue. I remembered coupling with him in the goatherd's hut and suppressed a desire to bind Electra, and drown in his arms. His linen tunic, much stained with travel, had fallen away, revealing his throat and the pure lines of his chest. I dragged my mind away from Dionysos and concentrated on Asclepius. We had a patient and she had to be cared for, which meant we had to get to the bottom of this problem.

'Agamemnon has been away for a long time, since this princess was about eleven, I suppose. Would there be any way for her mother to find her a husband, or is that just the province of Argive fathers?' I asked.

'Her oldest male relative would arrange the marriage, and the princess would have a great dowry. There would be feasts and everyone would know. As far as the world knows, the Princess Electra is a virgin.'

'Ah, yes, the Achaean obsession with virginity. Instruct me, Chryse, I am ignorant. What would happen if the Princess had been raped? For she is behaving as violated women do.'

Chryse was too tired to notice the irony in my voice. 'Happen? She would be dishonoured and the rapist would be fined. Rape is not such a terrible crime in Achaea. A seducer makes the woman fall in love with him and is therefore punished with death. A rapist makes her hate him and therefore her affection remains with her husband, so he is fined.'

'But the victim would be dishonoured?'

'Yes. "Virginity gone, honour gone", that's what the Argives say. It would require a hefty dowry to bribe any man to marry her.'

'Have I told you how much I don't like Argive ways?' I asked, disgusted. Chryse smiled tiredly.

'Yes. Fortunately, you like at least one Argive.'

This was true. I stroked his hair. 'Why don't you sleep? I can watch her.'

'Provided that you call me if you need help.'

When I was sure that he was asleep, his head on Eumides' shoulder, I lay down with the Lady Electra, breast to breast, measuring my body against hers. Then I called on the Goddess that the Argives call Menmoysyne; we have a sacred name for her. Sometimes I had been able to make a link between my own mind and the mind of a patient. I was reluctant to do it without the support of another priestess, but this could not be allowed to go on. If someone wanted to capture us, we would be easy prey. We were so exhausted that only Eumides would have been able to put up a fight. And our Trojan sailor was growing fretful, urging us to leave this inconvenient, maddened princess in some village, saying we should otherwise bind her with ropes and gag her so that we could sleep. I saw his point but I could not do that. She would not survive alone, and her silent little brother would not leave her. If we abandoned her she would die.

The most difficult task was to sink into the sacred state and not to fall asleep. I quickly gained the cloudy space where the souls of humans walk when they are not awake, and there she was.

Poor princess. Secured by wrist and ankle to a bed, spreadeagled, naked.

'He's coming,' the phantom whispered.

'Who?' I asked, trying to untie the bindings. They snaked away from my touch, sliding, unravelling. I have some power over this realm. I touched each bedpost and ropes hissed at me and retreated. The princess lay as rigid as a two-day corpse. Her eyes were wide open, the pupils dilated black with horror. And her pain flooded me - corrosive, bitter. I cried aloud under the burning. I wondered how she had managed to live in this state, in agony.

'You can move,' I told her. 'Sit up, Princess. Fight. Run.'

'The door!' she screamed, and I heard the click of a bolt being drawn.

A misty form blocked the doorway. Electra's fear was so strong that I was compelled out of communion and snapped back into my own body with force enough to bruise. I lay shaking beside the Argive princess, her mystery still unsolved.

The next day, Eumides addressed Electra as 'Maiden' and she shrieked at him. 'Don't call me that!'

Thereafter he awarded her the usual word for women of all conditions: 'Lady'. The dreams went on. And so did the journey.

'Perhaps at Delphi they will be able to cure her,' Eumides said. He was sitting on the harbour wall outside the Temple of Poseidon of Corinth, eating olives and spitting the pits into the water.

It was an impressive temple. The marble pillars were painted in Poseidon's colours, green and blue, in patterns like waves. From the temple came the scent of roasting fish; the noon sacrifice.

Despite the Mycenean restrictions on women, no one had challenged me as I walked alone through the crowded streets. There was a babble of tongues from traders of all nations in sea-bordered Corinth. Unless a woman was wearing the purple chiton of a whore, consensus said that it was unsafe to meddle with her. The general view was that an unaccompanied woman might easily turn out to be either heavily armed and Amazon-trained, or the personal property of some particularly ill-tempered foreign God. I, as it happened, was both, and no one bothered me.

Eumides looked unhappy. He had endured our long, tedious journey with the half-mad girl with as much patience as he could muster. The only reason he had not run away to his beloved Ocean was the love he bore for Chryse and me, and I was grateful.

'Have you found a ship?' I took an olive and bit it appreciatively. Kalamata. The best olives. I spat the stone into the sea.

'An old friend is going to Khirra, the port we need, in three days time. Have you found a lodging? Not in one of the waterfront hovels, I hope. I've already been bitten by every flea, tick and louse in the Argolid. This is not a country I wish to see again.'

'We'll lodge in the house of an old friend of Chryse's, Taphis the Corinthian. And tonight, sailor, we three will sleep together, and the Princess Electra will be tended and quiet.'

He brightened and grinned.

'I missed you,' he said, using the collective 'you'. 'But the boy is a good boy. Solemn, sorrowful little Orestes. Apollo talks to him, he says, urging him to revenge. I told him to think about it when he's a cubit taller. I have made him laugh once or twice, though. I hope that he comes into his kingdom in time.'

'I just want to get to Delphi and leave them there. The fate of the House of Atreus is not our concern.' I was very tired, and leaned my head on his shoulder. He shifted a little to embrace me. We sat there for a while, listening to the market and the soft voice of the sea.

I looked into the temple, over his strong shoulder. I could see into the sanctuary. There was Poseidon, a resplendent new marble statue, painted in gold and blue. Round his altar were many offerings, jugs painted with octopi, cloth patterned with fish, sea-shells from the children, a blue vase of the stone the Egyptians call 'glass' and a model boat made out of driftwood.