Elektra

by Jennifer Saint

Clytemnestra I feared the impending birth like I had feared no other. I was not afraid of the pain. I didn’t fear for my own life, or even for the baby’s. Above all else, I was terrified that I would look into my new baby’s face and see Iphigenia.

If Agamemnon, despite his fragile ego and fierce vanity, had managed Mycenae, it certainly was not beyond me to do it.

But the resolve that had been with me since I stood on that beach beside my daughter’s funeral pyre, that did not soften. It burned within me, an inextinguishable flame. I preserved his kingdom, not to present to him upon his return, but to keep as my own.

Cassandra Paris kept Helen cloistered at first.

What was the point in having the most beautiful woman in the world as your wife if no one else could see her?

Even Helen was taken aback; Helen, who visited me at the temple, returning after that first conversation to talk to me as though I were anyone else in the family, a sister of her husband, like Andromache, who had married Hector.

At intervals there were truces, and Greeks and Trojans alike would gather the corpses. The smoke from the pyres choked the sky, swelling from the sprawling Greek camps at the shore and belching from our besieged city. Only the dead could leave Troy now.

Clytemnestra He said he was a traveller when he came. I barely gave him a moment’s notice.

At first, I saw the soft curve of Iphigenia’s arm or the gleam of her hair in every young woman I encountered, no matter how little they resembled her.

Unlike his sisters, the baby Orestes would sleep contentedly enough in his crib, but I found I could not tolerate the hours I spent awake listening to his soft breathing.

A younger man, lit dimly by the beam of moonlight falling between the pillars. He was thin, taller than Agamemnon, but awkward-looking, as though he had grown too quickly and did not know what to do with his height.

‘If you plan to avenge yourself on his wife and children in his absence,’ I went on, my voice hardening, ‘you will find there is little point in doing so. He is no husband or father; you cannot wound a man by harming what he weighs so lightly as Agamemnon values us.’ At this, Aegisthus relaxed a little. ‘I had hoped you would say as much,’ he said.

‘There was no one in this world,’ he continued, ‘with more reason to hate that man than me – until he committed a more abominable murder than I would have thought him capable of worthless jackal as he is.’

Hardly anyone dared to speak of Agamemnon’s act. Women I had known my whole time in Mycenae would dart away from me, dissolve into crowds or disappear around corners rather than look into my face and see my pain.

‘When I heard that he had murdered Iphigenia . . .’ Aegisthus said. No one said her name any more. Not the slave-girls of the palace who had loved her; even her own sisters would not say it aloud. To hear it now, in this stranger’s mouth, was like the shock of cold water on burning skin.

‘The man that stormed this palace – who killed my father in front of my eyes whilst I screamed and begged for mercy – I could not believe that even such a beast as that could slaughter his own child for a fair wind,’ he said.

Perhaps it was that I could see through to the very centre of him, his beating heart exposed to me, mirroring mine. The shriek of agony in our souls, that could only be soothed by one thing. Revenge.

Aegisthus though, seemed like a man already dead. I knew it, because I was as well. What else could I be, when my soul was drifting down the dank and winding path to the Underworld, unable to break that tether between me and my lovely girl, as though the cord between us had never been split at all?

Elektra Maybe in another life, a life in which my father didn’t have to go to war and so my family paid attention to what I was doing, maybe I would never have so much as spoken to the son of a farmer.

‘Cyclopes built these walls,’ I told Georgios. His eyes widened, and he reached out to touch the stones, too. I looked at his hand, the black dirt under his nails and the grey layer of dust settled into the lines of his knuckles.

‘Can I stroke the dog?’ Georgios asked. I shrugged. ‘If he’ll let you.’ No one else in the family was interested in Methepon; he’d become my dog alone since Agamemnon had left.

Another day, Georgios asked me if I knew how long my father would be away. I shook my head. ‘How long are wars?’ Neither of us knew.

I didn’t know my aunt, but I hated the sound of her name. If Artemis had demanded her instead of my sister, then my father would never have had to go away.

And then one day, Clytemnestra appeared again. Not a shadow of her, drifting down the corridor with her head bowed as though it was she who had died in Aulis.

I bit my lip, hard. Something didn’t feel right about Aegisthus. Maybe it was the way he had been standing, just a bit too close to our mother. Or the nervousness that radiated from him, jangled in the air about him.

Agamemnon was a big, broad man. His shoulders filled the doorway. His voice rumbled when he spoke. Those things I could remember, those things I would hold on to.

I wished so desperately that my father was here. I took a great, juddering breath, about to cry – and then I heard it. A sound I hadn’t heard since before she went to Aulis, a sound rising up from what felt like the ancient past. The sound of Clytemnestra laughing.

Both of them were smiling. I felt cold, despite the warm sunshine. She hadn’t laughed with me for so long. I’d forgotten what it sounded like.

Clytemnestra How would Helen have done it? That was what I wondered the first time I woke beside Aegisthus. My sister, who had boarded Paris’ ship in the dead of night, who now took her place as a princess of Troy.

‘Aegisthus lives?’ she asked, and when I told her yes, it was true and he was here, her eyes shone with delight. There was love for the boy who had been chased from the palace, pity for his grief and anger at his exile.

We were not alone in Mycenae, Aegisthus and I. She helped to send our messages, discreet and protective, and when we had quietly gathered enough men, the time came to act.

‘You saw my daughter grow up here; you waved her away to her new life and husband, and you know what happened instead – the cruel trick Agamemnon played so that he could take our men, your sons and your nephews, to fight his war. I can tell you that he did not flinch, did not waver for one moment when he murdered Iphigenia. Sweet Iphigenia, loved by all of you.

My girls had a different experience here, but what frustrated me the most was that they never seemed to miss the liberty they were denied. They seemed content to stay within the palace walls, to learn to weave and to sing. They didn’t even seem to wonder what was outside.

What was the loss of a parent compared to that of a daughter? I didn’t want him here, comparing his grief to mine.

The darkness belonged to me, the most comforting place I could find. The closest I could be to Iphigenia as she drifted through the subterranean night.

Elektra Clytemnestra didn’t spend all day in her chamber after Aegisthus came.

It was something I would become well practised in later, slipping stealthily through the palace, hanging back in the shadows, pretending that I didn’t exist at all.

I was powerless. He was there, always, and so no matter how much more I saw my mother, I never seemed to see her without him.

But every day passed without event, seasons bled into one another, Methepon’s legs grew shakier and less steady as Orestes grew taller, walking confidently on his own, and still the war raged on in Troy – and Aegisthus remained in Mycenae, as impossible as it seemed.

I could understand that my mother had come back from Aulis swamped in grief. She hadn’t been able to see it then the way that I could now: that the gods had a purpose for the House of Atreus.

Artemis had made a terrible demand of my father, and of course Clytemnestra had been distraught. I could forgive her that. Looking back, I could see that what had felt like a cold abandonment to me as a child was the pain that shrouded her, a suffering she couldn’t break through.

I had prayed for my father to come home, for the war to end and the victors to return, so that he could put things right. The uncertainty gnawed away at me. What would he do when he came back and found out? Her crime became graver with each passing day.

One afternoon, whilst my dog lay sleeping in a patch of sunlight, I saw Aegisthus dart his foot out and kick him in the greying fur over his ribs.

‘How dare you?’ The words flew from me before I could even think to be circumspect. In an instant, my mother was there. ‘What’s this, Elektra?’ ‘He kicked Methepon!’ My chest was heaving. ‘The dog shouldn’t sleep there, right in everyone’s way,’ she said, her hand on Aegisthus’ elbow, guiding him away.

I knew that, like me, Methepon was holding on for his master’s return, but he had grown old over the course of this war, and his good, loyal heart couldn’t hold out much longer. When the life slipped away from him, I wept long and painful sobs, soaking his fur until they took his body away from me.

So that was how I would lose Chrysothemis. She’d marry an ally of Aegisthus, too obedient to make any protest.

Something broke between my sister and me that day. I had no hope any more that the three of us could be allies: Chrysothemis, Orestes and me.

‘He didn’t have the face of a monster. When I married him, I didn’t know; I never imagined . . . And now he takes a woman as though she were a thing, he risks his whole war, the war for which he slaughtered his own child like an animal, for the sake of saying this Briseis is his and not Achilles’.’

My mother felt a kinship with this faraway woman, my father’s slave. She imagined her – Briseis – despising the king who had claimed her as his own.

I felt all at once a great and terrible restlessness, a frustrated energy in my limbs that made me wish again that the sea did not lie between here and Troy. If it were the harshest, driest desert that separated us instead, I would walk across it to see my father again.