Electra (4 page)

'Maiden, you are slow,' said Eumides impatiently. 'We must get in out of the night and it is still a way to the hut. Can I carry the child?'

'No!' I gasped.

'Come, boy, will you walk or ride?' he asked, smiling, and Orestes let go my hand. 'Ride, please.'

Eumides hoisted my brother without effort onto his shoulders, creating another weird shape. Hurt that the child had abandoned me so easily, I picked my way behind him trying to find a smooth path among the stones. Thorns caught my garments. At first I stopped to undo them, but I was tired and shocked and miserable and after a while I just let them tear.

Orestes was almost out of sight when someone ran lightly back and took the bundle off my shoulder. It was Diomenes and he offered me his arm.

Leaning on him, I managed to complete the journey.

'There's our stopping place just ahead, Princess, we can light a fire and you can sit down. But we must get you some strong sandals. Those will never carry you far.'

'I am not used to walking,' I gasped. 'I am a Princess of a royal house.'

'Indeed,' he replied, and did not speak again.

Around the shoulder of the hill we came upon a small house, built perhaps by goatherds. It was set back into the cliff, under the protection of a huge ledge of rock. A little light glimmered inside it and Diomenes led me to the door. I sank down onto an earth floor, exhausted. The hut stank of goats and smoke.

Orestes was sitting on the other side of a charcoal brazier, watching the roasting skewers of meat as though he had been a kitchen boy all his life. His pale, delicate face was sharp with attention. Orestes always concentrated completely on whatever he was doing. He was thin, with a ruffle of dark hair and beautiful eyes. I used to think that my golden eyes, which gave me my name - Electra, 'amber' - were unique in the House of Atreus, until I saw Orestes'. He gave me a brief smile and returned to the cooking.

I took off the ruined sandals and massaged my poor feet, bruised by stones and stuck with thorns, to distract myself from the indecent threefold embrace in the centre of the small room.

They were sitting in a group, arms around each other, mouths almost touching. Each hand caressed a throat or a back. They were continually in motion, dark hair mingling with golden; kisses laid gently on pale, scented whore's cheek, or rough unshaven fisherman's. Bracelets jingled on narrow wrists as Cassandra cupped both faces, stroking them with aching tenderness, as though she had never expected to touch them again.

'Netted like a fish,' said Diomenes softly, and kissed her bare shoulder. 'A very valuable fish.'

'Such a catch I never made in all my life, dark seas and pale, high waves and flat calm,' said Eumides, and kissed her other shoulder.

'Oh, my golden ones,' she said, kissing each mouth carefully.

Then they all clasped thigh-to-thigh in so close and convulsive an embrace that I turned away. After a moment, they separated reluctantly.

'Now, let's dig up the wine,' said Diomenes. 'Take off all that gold, Lady; we shall have enough trouble with bandits on the way.'

'To Delphi?' she asked, unfastening her earrings.

'To Delphi. We should be able to manage that journey and there we must take the lady Electra and Orestes, son of Agamemnon. I fear that the Queen of Mycenae may pursue us.'

'Why?' I asked.

Diomenes said, 'We must tend you, Lady,' and came to me with the healer's bag. I drew away from his touch, because he had come to attend me straight from the embrace of the slave. He did not appear to notice my reaction, but sat down composedly and began to extract thorns with a pair of golden tweezers.

'Why? Because we know she murdered her husband,' said Eumides, who was digging for the cellar of the little house. He knelt up, triumphantly producing an amphora of wine, on which he broke the seal.

'She will not hide it,' I said, flinching as a thorn slid out of my ankle. 'She will proclaim it.'

'She'll proclaim it?' asked Cassandra.

'Yes.' I tried not to move under the little stabbing pains, but he was hurting me. I felt my face assume its mask, and the pain ceased to matter. Cassandra was looking at me. Her eyes were brown and very deep.

'Chryse, you're too rough,' she told him. 'Gently.'

'Get me some more light, then,' he grumbled. 'And the stonecrop ointment.'

'You use stonecrop for bruises? Surely not on broken skin.' She held the small oil lamp and crouched to shed light on my foot.

'What would you use?' he asked, drawing her wrist and the light closer.

'Wound-herb, pounded with sea salt, then stonecrop once the punctures are closed.'

'Trojan practice, probably good, but I have no wound-herb. Take my pestle and make some fine salt and we can clean the injuries, at least. Then the ointment shouldn't sting too much.'

I objected to them working on me without so much as a word in my direction and said, 'I can bear pain.'

'Of course, but healers are devoted to the philosophy that no one bears pain needlessly. There. A good pair of sandals - boots would be better - and you'll not be so wayworn tomorrow, Lady.'

He smiled at me but I could not smile back. What company had I fallen into? Women walking openly with men, male and female healers consulting each other as though they were equals? It was unthinkable, impossible - against all order.

Cassandra filled a bowl with hot water and washed my scratch with salt. It hurt, but I did not really feel it. I never do, in that state. I can make myself numb.

She anointed me deftly. Then she gave me a wet cloth to wipe my face and I found a comb and gave it to her.

'It's a pretty comb,' she said, looking at it and then at me.

'My hair?' I turned to give her space to work and then turned back as Eumides laughed.

'Lady, have you never combed your own hair?' he chuckled. 'Fishermen's girls can plait theirs when they are six. I think the Trojans were right about the Achaeans. Their women are so pampered, they said, that they don't even wipe their own-'

'Eumides,' said Diomenes hurriedly, 'is there anything to eat? I'm starving and we have to leave at dawn.'

'Yes, our young cook here has done good work. There's bread and meat and there's wine. What more could we ask?'

I could have asked for a lot more. My hair was not properly arranged and I was tired and sore and had no one to attend me. The meat was half-burned and half-raw, the bread several days old, and the wine cheap and sour.

But Orestes and Electra, exiled children of the House of Atreus, choked down a sufficiency and fell asleep, side by side, on the floor of the goatherd's hut. I felt the warm breath of my little brother on my shoulder as he slept, not for the first time, on my breast.

I dreamed.

I was sitting in the courtyard with my nurse Neptha, learning how to weave. We set the looms outside in the spring, when the wind ceases for a while in windy Mycenae. Neptha was a plump and comfortable woman, a slave from the far north, where the stars are cold and close, she said. Her hair was grey and she bore a scar across one breast, the legacy of the pirate who had raided her village and taken her prisoner. She had proved barren, and my mother had bought her cheap as a nurse for the youngest royal children.

Chrysothemis, my sister, had completed her lesson and was sitting on the warm marble step, shelling nuts. Her hair glowed in the cool light. She was humming her favourite song, a long ballad made by the bard, Arion, about the nymph, Salmancis, who petitioned the Gods to be united forever with her lover and who had been transformed into a hermaphrodite.

'Together in truth were Hermia and her lover,' sang my sister, cracking nuts and spitting out the shells. 'Beware, lovers what you pray for, for you may get what you want.'

'You sing better than you weave,' commented Neptha, peering at the web on the practice loom and picking at the knots with gnarled fingers.

'Electra, pull out the last ten rows and we shall begin again. Now, you lift the weft with one hand, push the shuttle through, then release the weft and return the shuttle. Try not to pull it too tight - yes, like that. It helps if you sing. Your hands must flow, gently, gently, like the tide.'

'What's the tide?' I asked, biting my lip and loosening my grip on the shuttle. I was trying too hard and the warp was puckering.

'Ah, children, that is the sea, the great water of the river Ocean which encircles the world. Every day the water rises on the shore, cleaning the beach of lost things and dead things, and every day it falls again, exposing the smooth sand. I miss the sound of it still. It used to lull me to sleep.

'There, Electra, I declare that you have learned the beginning of weaving faster than any child of mine. Look, Chrysothemis! Ten years old and a straight, smooth, even cloth. Aren't you ashamed of all those knots?'

'It's very nice,' agreed Chrysothemis grudgingly. I glowed with pride and smiled in my sleep.

I was exalted at my rescue. I had seen the death of Agamemnon so often that I was not even mildly surprised at it. I had expected to die. I had heard my own death cry and was prepared for it. I had not died. I had been freed. Hecate had come and disconnected me, possessed me, at the moment when I would have resisted rescue because of the danger that my followers were in. I might have pulled away and bidden them run before they shared my fate, but the Gods had wrapped me in trance and I had allowed them to take me from the altar.

I was a slave of the Palace of Mycenae no longer. I was out on the road with a destination and some chance of peace and delight. Now, beside me, wine cups in hand, replete with goat meat and bread, were my dear ones, my unutterably faithful Chryse and Eumides, smiling, touching me; real, not visions.

And the haughty Princess Electra and her silent brother had finally fallen asleep.

I had put the gold aside; now my movements were silent. Eumides unfastened one brooch and Diomenes the other. The chiton fell to my waist, and I lay back on my thick sheepskin mantle and held out my arms.

One face dark, on pale; golden silk and curly fleece, smooth, smooth skin, as they shed tunics and lay down beside me. I stroked them. Palm down, my hands moved along slender thigh and muscular thigh, along flat muscles which grew rigid under my touch.

It had been so long since someone had loved me that I took a moment to identify the thrill running along my nerves as a mouth closed around a nipple.

I clutched a handful of curly hair and tried not to cry out.

Then it was all firelight pictures, scenes from a Dionysiad, the Three Days when Troy was mad and lived for nothing but mating. I tasted grease and honey on someone's mouth; hands touched, slid, skin grew hot then wet as we rolled, curled, curved, pressed close. I held one phallus, hard as metal, and the other pierced me, there were thighs between mine, a strong body, a gasping breath, an urgent mouth. A heart beat wildly under my cheek, and another pulsed inside my flesh.

Then the charcoal glow blurred, and I would have screamed, but a mouth sealed mine. Oh, honey and fire, I melted into the light. Diomenes lay beside me, cradling my body against his, and Eumides on the other side shuddered and was still.

I lay in the goat-scented hut in this dual embrace and wept with pleasure and release, and they kissed my tears away.

'Lady,' said Eumides, 'we are yours now.'

'My loves,' I said, touching their flanks. 'I am yours.'

We could not bear to be apart, and fell asleep where we lay, in the warm darkness, wrapped in the mantle which was once the gift of King Agamemnon to his captive.

I woke in cool grey light. Diomenes had rolled over in his sleep and lay with his head on my thigh. My cheek rested on Eumides' chest. I was warm and sated and unable to account for what had woken me.

Eyes, for there were eyes on us, inimical, horrified. Golden eyes of the small woman clutching the boy on the other side of the room. I felt for the source of her disgust, trying to find what had shocked her, and recoiled from a burning rage, deep as a pit. I had not felt such a thing before.

I was suddenly very awake. I sat up, dislodging my lovers, and said, 'Lady, we must take the road again.'

She did not reply. The boy wriggled out of her too-tight embrace and said calmly, 'Electra, you are hurting me.'

Chryse woke, kissed the thigh he was lying on, then hauled himself and Eumides to the crouch which was all the hut allowed a tall man.

'Morning,' he stated.

'Again?' groaned Eumides, ran a hand through his hair, and smiled at me so that my heart glowed.

'Perhaps the Princess can make a fire, we'd better cook the rest of the meat, while I go out and find a leather worker. If you will give me your sandal, Lady, I'll get you some boots.'

'I can't walk further,' she said angrily.

'Perhaps, horses? Mycenae won't need them now that the treasure's in the city,' suggested Diomenes.

'I'll try. Give me four gold bracelets. And the sandals. Stay quiet, Cassandra,' Eumides said to me. 'We won't be long. The traders know us.'

It was the first time he had used my name.

The whore and the two strangers had mated in my plain sight - I had heard their breathing, their gasps, their laughter; I was revolted. Into such company my mother's actions had thrown me, and I had to rely on them, for I was so still that I could hardly move and I did not know the way to Delphi.

Therefore I said no word to the slave Cassandra as she blew into the brazier and made the coals glow. The hut, which stank of humans and goats and mating fluids, began to smell of roasting. Orestes took a skewer of meat from the fire and sat down to eat it. He was dirty and dishevelled but he seemed composed, licking his fingers as the grease dripped down.

I was not used to sitting on the ground and my legs cramped as I tried to move. I crawled to a crouch and snagged my feet on a trailing edge of my chiton. Cassandra reached out a hand and hauled me to my feet - she is very strong - saying, 'We will have to shorten these garments, Princess. Court robes are not suitable for the road. Have you a needle amongst your things?'