The Songs of the Kings: A Novel Page 12

“Lord Agamemnon has never lacked ambition,” Chasimenos said, practicing his straight look again.

  “No, I mean what will they sing about me if I . . . accept this heavy burden?”

  “They will sing that here was a hero who was ready to shoulder his responsibilities, ready to set his private feelings aside for the sake of his country. They will call him the conqueror of Troy, they will call him the founder of Greater Mycenae. They will celebrate his return from the war, Agamemnon, Sacker of Cities, loaded with slaves and plunder, a five-star general, clasped in the welcoming arms of his queen, Clytemnestra.” He paused for a moment and there was no sound but the fretting of the wind and the distant howling of wolves. “We know what you are going through,” he said. “Our hearts are with you. But what choice has a man when the gods have singled him out for greatness?”

  It was the coup de grâce, he knew it as he spoke, the timing was perfect. Agamemnon’s eyes filled with tears. “It is true,” he said. “We who are destined for greatness must bear the burden for all. It is a heavy thing that is laid upon me. My own child, who I dandled on my knee, whose first steps I witnessed, who sang to honor me at the banquet table, among the guests, before the third cup was offered to the god. She always had a good singing voice. But I must go forward in spite of the pain, I must shoulder my responsibilities. The army depends on me. Chasimenos, I make you responsible for conveying my decision to the Singer. Make sure he understands the nature of this sacrifice. Promise him a fur-lined cloak for the winter. Singers work best on promises.”

  The intense relief at having won the King over, coming as it did after feelings of discouragement, caused Chasimenos to lose track of things for a moment. “The nature of it? No need for him to sing of that, the men will be familiar with the nature of it, they will have seen it before, not with a royal princess, I grant you, but the procedure doesn’t vary much. The victim undergoes ritual purification, the hair is cut short so as not to—”

  “No, you fool, I was speaking of the sacrifice of a father for the sake of the army, for the sake of the war, so that Zeus will lift this curse of a wind from us. You can forget about that lapis lazuli.”

  Chasimenos recovered himself and bowed low. “Pardon me, Lord King. I will go at once and give him a full account of it, making sure that your noble motives are present to his mind. He will be somewhere out there.” He made a gesture towards the night outside the tent. “He never seems to sleep,” he said.

  Odysseus hesitated a moment; but there was nothing more to say now; Agamemnon must be left for the night to the voice of Zeus, which would come to him on the wind, and to the knowledge that the Singer’s voice would soon—and irrevocably—follow. “I’ll go with you,” he said to Chasimenos. “We must make sure no detail is overlooked that could add to Agamemnon’s glory and his reputation for statesmanship.”

  At Mycenae

  1.

  The morning of the day the delegation arrived from Aulis was remembered by Sisipyla as being her last happy one at Mycenae. It was the day before the full moon and for a part of the morning she was alone with Iphigeneia, just the two of them together.

  They had gone to the foothills below the citadel, as they did every month at this time, to hang the effigies in the grove of plane trees sacred to Artemis, leaving the women attendants and the guards of the escort and the grooms below, ascending the last part of the way alone, on foot, carrying the straw figures.

  She had loved the place, though never the grove, ever since first seeing it years before. They had come here as children sometimes, in the care of Iphigeneia’s nurse, before the princess had assumed the duties of priestess. It was a fold among the hills with a narrow stream that sprang from the rocks high above and fell through a steep ravine in a series of cascades. You could see the course of it as you approached. At first the water was a mist, a soft dazzle in the morning sun, then it gleamed and shivered, half concealed among foliage, then it was sheer and smooth like silk or oiled hair when it is combed out. This last was a sort of beautiful swelling of the water, as it seemed to Sisipyla, a mood of the goddess whose place this was, who had many moods, who was present in the voice of the water and the dazzle of the mist and the shine on the rock face where the water skimmed and the seething where it met with obstacles. She was still there when you saw no water, only movement. Like a breath, like a snake.

  She had said nothing to Iphigeneia about this feeling of hers, this sense of the goddess’s presence in the light and the water and the stirring of the leaves, being afraid that her mistress would not share the feeling or even approve much of it, that she might think it sloppy—a term she used often and for a variety of things. She thought it more than likely that for Iphigeneia the goddess was only to be found in definite places, before her altars, in her shrines, in this grove of plane trees. The princess knew far more than she did and was more firmminded; she knew a great many facts and could put her ideas into words without hesitating, and find answers to remarks that were made to her on difficult subjects, things beyond the range of a slave girl from Lydia, who knew only how to attend on her mistress.

  The sacred grove oppressed her and she was ashamed of this feeling but unable to overcome it. Near the foot of the falls where the water broadened into a pool among the rocks, the tall trees grew in a straggling circle round an inner group of four, marking the quarters of the moon, where the effigies of the Divine Child, Hyacinthos, nursling of Artemis, were hung at the time of the full moon. The children of past moons were never taken down and the trees were cluttered and lumpy with forms of straw. Birds had raided these to build their nests, and time and weather had taken much of the human likeness from them. Much, but not quite all; and this it was that disturbed Sisipyla and made her always glad to quit the place, the likeness still in the dangling, ruinous dolls. She struggled with the thought that she might somehow be left to hang among them. In the end they slipped through their traces and fell, leaving tassels of rope on the branches, covering the ground at the base of the trees with a whispering quilt.

  First Iphigeneia, then Sisipyla hung up the offerings by their rope loops. Then Iphigeneia raised her arms and cried out the invocation to the goddess, praying for favor, vowing the next day’s sacrifice of a goat in her honor. And it seemed to Sisipyla, standing as usual a little to the left and two paces behind, that there came an answer to this high, clear voice, a stirring in the foliage of the planes, among the leaves that had always seemed to her like the fingers of a hand held out in warning.

  The sun was hot when they emerged and she felt the usual relief at being out in the open. Released by the performance of her duty, which she took with utmost seriousness, Iphigeneia smiled for the first time since they had left the others below. “We could bathe,” she said, and Sisipyla inclined her head in a gesture that was both agreement and submission. The bathing was an established practice between them in the summer months, begun years before when they were hardly more than children; but the suggestion had always to come from Iphigeneia, had always to seem a motion of her will for the one occasion only.

  On the side nearer to them the eddies of the water had made a shore of smooth pebble. Here, as always, they laid their ceremonial dresses, garments the same in every respect, identical in size, woven in the same undyed linen. This day of the effigies was the only time they dressed in the same way. Below the dresses they wore nothing but underskirts of the same material, quickly stepped out of.

  Naked they stepped together into the water and flickering shoals of the minnows that lived in the warm edges fled at their approach. The pool was shallow and the sun had taken the chill from the water but it was cold still, they gasped and laughed as they waded deeper. Sisipyla waited till her mistress crouched and immersed herself before following suit; she was trained to attend, never to initiate. Neither of the girls could swim; they fought the cold by jumping up and down, striking at the water with flat hands, splashing their own faces, sending up bright arcs of drops across the surface all around. They laug
hed together, seeing each other’s wet faces through this glittering spray of their own making. Then came some moments of quiet, a pause for breath. The water was still and Sisipyla was aware again of the sameness of their faces and bodies; the same dark hair and eyes and the same deep brows, the same straight shoulders and sharp breasts and long, slender thighs. It was herself she was looking at, and yet a being utterly distinct from her and beyond her. With characteristic abruptness Iphigeneia turned towards the shore. At the last moment, before moving to follow, Sisipyla saw her own reflection lying on the surface of the water where it ran shallow over a bed of dark rock; and it was as though their two bodies had fused into this single perfect image, shivered at once into fragments as she moved forward.

  Afterwards they lay for a short while on the warm pebbles, waiting for the sun to dry them. Sisipyla felt the heat gather and dwell on her eyelids and breasts and abdomen. She thought in a drowsy way of her next day’s duties, the preparations for the sacrifice. She would be bearing the basket and the knife. She would have to make sure the musicians were assembled beforehand, that the goat was properly decked out . . .

  Her eyes were still closed, but she heard Iphigeneia shift on the pebbles nearby and then get to her feet. She waited a moment or two longer, allowing time for her mistress to take the first steps. Then she rose and followed. They dressed quickly, not speaking. But when they were ready, when Sisipyla had brushed out the princess’s damp hair and clasped it at the nape with an ivory comb, when she had restored some sort of order to her own hair, they still lingered a while longer at the edge of the pool; and once again Sisipyla’s mind became crowded with the signs of the goddess’s presence, signs hidden and revealed, in the water when it was still and when it was flowing, in the loitering flight of dragonflies over the surface. Her eyes felt pressed upon, besieged by detail. It was like trying to see the pattern in the wall hangings and the woven rugs that covered the floors of the royal rooms in the palace, the flowers and the leaves and the birds, trying to take it all in at the same time, at one single moment . . .

  “What a long way you can see today.” Iphigeneia’s voice came from above. Unnoticed by Sisipyla, she had moved onto the track above the pool. Sisipyla went up to join her and they stood together looking across the broad valley towards the flatlands of the south and the distant girdle of mountains. In this pellucid light perspectives were canceled, the mountains seemed depthless, as if they stood on a single plane.

  “That’s the river Cephinthos we are looking at,” Iphigeneia said. “It flows into the Gulf of Argos. I’ve told you that before, haven’t I? Do you remember?”

  “Yes.”

  Iphigeneia shook her head. “You never remember the things I tell you. It goes in at one ear and out at the other. You should repeat things to yourself, over and over until you have got them fixed in your mind, that’s what I do.”

  “You said it is where the sea begins.”

  “Good, so you do remember. It flows into the sea just below Tiryns. If you set out from there in a ship you would get to Asia.” Her face wore its teacher’s look. From their childhood days she had enjoyed instructing her slave-companion, passing on stories, snippets of information, sometimes in garbled form, things she had had from her own teachers. It was she who had taught Sisipyla her first songs, her first words of Greek. “It is good that you remembered,” she said gravely.

  Sisipyla felt happy to be commended, but she knew that the sea did not begin at any one definite place, though it might seem so to Iphigeneia because she had never seen the sea. But Sisipyla had seen it, at the age of seven she had been brought with her mother and a shipload of other slaves from Miletus to the port of Tiryns, which she knew that her mistress had not seen either. She remembered the exposure, the terrible openness of the sea, after the narrow wooded valleys of home. They had passed through scattered islands and she had seen how these were nothing compared to the sea, which stretched all around them and was still there when they had vanished from sight. It was as if the sea had swallowed them up.

  The memory had remained vivid, kept fresh by the misery of her condition then, and the fear on the face of her mother. It was not possible to speak of it to Iphigeneia, to seem to know more than her mistress about the sea or anything else; but she had guarded it as something of her own. That fear, that lack of shelter, was a kind of possession, and she had very few. Not that much guarding had been needed: Iphigeneia had never shown any curiosity about her previous life. A barbarian child, chosen for her prettiness, she had been a gift for the princess’s sixth birthday. A gift has no history, its life begins with the first glance, the first touch of the one to whom it is given.

  This talk of the sea, in conjunction with the immense sweep of land that stretched before them, brought back, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, the lonely anguish of those days. She wanted to retreat from this great gulf of space, to go back to the play of water and light, the loitering dragonflies, the shape of pebbles, the shelter of detail. But she could not move until Iphigeneia moved. “It’s like the sea,” she said, gesturing before her, the words coming almost before she was aware of uttering them. “You could fall into it and drown.”

  “Like the sea? What in the world do you mean by that? You say the strangest things, Sisipyla. It doesn’t look in the least like the sea, there is nothing watery about it. People are living and working down there, they have huts, they have families. I mean, it’s not even the right color, is it? You really should try to be more focused.”

  “Yes, I will try.” She had again been guilty of sloppiness. However, it did not seem to her that Iphigeneia herself was always so very focused, not as Sisipyla understood the word. Her eyes looked often as they looked now, clear and unfaltering but somehow enthralled, as if she had been sustaining a light too strong. Our eyes are different, Sisipyla thought, they are set a little differently, mine are more on a slant, but the real difference is in the way of looking. I can only look at single things, one leaf, one shape of stars.

  While she was still in the midst of this thought, Iphigeneia raised an arm and held it out, fingers extended, saluting, as it seemed, the whole shape of things, the river valley, the wide plain, the distant tawny mountains. She made a slow, sweeping gesture, as if unveiling a monument or drawing aside a curtain. “All this is Mycenae,” she said. “As far as you can see on every side, beyond what you can see. They told me that on the day we first came here, to make me understand the greatness of my father’s power. We were standing just here. You were here too, do you remember?”

  Sisipyla had no smallest recollection of this. She would not have understood it in any case, having no knowledge of Greek at the time, a fact that Iphigeneia was overlooking. “Yes,” she said, “I remember. Princess, will you let me shade your face against the sun?”

  The suggestion was met by silence, a mark of consent. She took the short veil from the basket and arranged it over the head and around the face. It was white silk lace, embroidered with a pattern of saffron-colored butterflies, fine Cretan work, a gift from her mother, Clytemnestra. When she had made sure that the veil was falling properly, she put on her own cotton scarf, tying it round the head in the manner prescribed for palace domestics, so that the ends hung down at the sides of her face.

  As they turned to descend the path, she caught a last glimpse of the river in its furthest reach to the north, where it flashed in the sun as it came down through the high pass. Sometimes she forgot the names of places that Iphigeneia told her, not seeing reason to remember them so long as they were only names. A river or a mountain was as real to her without a name, perhaps more so. But she remembered stories; she knew that Nemea lay beyond the pass, because it was there that the hero Heracles had slain the lion and taken its skin.

  They began to descend the narrow track, Iphigeneia in front. As Sisipyla followed, watching her own feet in their sandals going one before the other, she thought about the terrible lion, and its even more terrible mother Echidna, daughter of Ge and Tar
tarus, half nymph, half speckled snake, who had lived in a cave in Arcadia, from which she rushed hissing out to seize and devour passersby. She would hear the scrape of a footfall, a faint scrunch on the loose stones of the path—a path like this one, sounds like those they were making—and she would gather herself into a coil in the darkness of her cave and wait for the moment to come rushing out. The passerby would draw near, thinking his thoughts, suspecting nothing . . . However, it was not the attack itself that was so frightening to Sisipyla, it was the thought of the ravenous creature, coiled in the dark cave, listening. And then there was the monstrous brood Echidna had produced. It wasn’t only the lion. All her offspring were the stuff of nightmare, without one single exception, the fire-breathing Chimaera, the Hydra that could sprout its own heads, the monstrous hound Cerberus, watchdog of the Underworld, who licked the hands of those entering and ate those trying to leave.

  Of course it was comforting to think that neither the lion nor his mother were in the world any longer, the first having been killed by Heracles, the second by Argus the All-seeing, who had crept into the cave when she was gorged with feasting and severed her head at a stroke. Argus possessed four eyes and was therefore well able to find his way about in the dark. But the comfort to be found in this was only partial, because the stories always came later than the events. Echidna had made her home in the cave and started devouring people long before these things came to be related. There might be a monster anywhere, just installed, just at the beginning of its career, before any stories were going about. There might be one somewhere nearby. Sisipyla raised her face to the hot sky. That would be worse than ever, if it was too soon for a story or if you hadn’t heard the story yet. If you knew the story, at least you could avoid the place . . .

  The path broadened as they descended, following the curve of the hillside. Where it met the road that led up from the valley to the citadel, the people were waiting in the thin shade of wild olive trees. The two girls mounted their stocky, short-legged black horses, sitting sideways in the wooden saddles. They rode ahead, followed by the mounted guards, the women making up the rear in a four-wheeled cart drawn by two mules. The road was good, cut deep and level and laid with stone cobbles squared off and fitted together. It had been built by Agamemnon’s father, Atreus, a notable builder of roads—the great trade route to Mycenae from the north had been built in his day. These were things that Sisipyla had learned from her mistress.