Читать книгу Electra (Mycenaean Greek Trilogy) - Henry Treece - Страница 12

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I am an old woman now, talking to a stranger in the hills. My head is full of half-remembered thoughts that grin like ghosts from behind curtains but vanish when I go to meet them. Days jostle days, and folk push out folk from the memory, like village-dogs fighting for a bone in the famine times. It is hard to make sense of it all. But you must take it as it comes, doctor, for it is the only way I know to tell it.

Paris came and went, without more quarrelling; and one day, before Menelaus returned, we found that Aunt Helen had gone as well. Shortly afterwards, Menelaus came back to Mycenae, riding an unblown horse, and made great show of his grief, knocking his shaggy head against the Lion Gate for all the folk to see, and raising his arms to the sky, calling on Zeus Father to give him satisfaction for his loss.

Hermione, his young daughter, clung to his kilt and wept until all her hair was wet. We other children of the palace wept, too. But afterwards, when the townsfolk had gone away, moved and swearing vengeance on Troy, I saw that the lords and ladies seemed to make little of it. Indeed, it was hardly mentioned: the only talk was of the wind that would not set right to drive our ships towards the dawn, of the harvests that must be seen to, when the army had gone, and things like that; common things.

Even Menelaus stopped pretending grief, and once, sitting at our table, he leaned across to my father and said, ‘Did she take the chestnut stallion or the litter, brother?’ My father had been drinking wine, too, and was not mindful of other ears. He smiled and said, ‘I let her have her own way, Menelaus. She went on foot by night as far as Midea. He was waiting in the hills there with his own horses. His boats lay just north of Epidaurus.’

Uncle Menelaus took another pull at his wine-cup and nodded. Then he said, quite reasonably, ‘We must not press too hard, then. With this wind holding the way it does, he’ll find it just as hard as us to make his way through the islands. Let him get to Naxos before we set forth.’

Agamemnon grinned above a partridge leg and said, ‘They will light the beacons on Naxos after he has gone from there, then on Paros, then on Siphnos, and so back to the mainland, to Argolis. So we shall know. It is all arranged.’

All the time I was looking into my milk-bowl with my hair hanging down at each side of my face, like a hood. The men did not even notice me. But my mother, the queen, did: she had sharp eyes for everything. And when the king and his brother had gone to drink in the mess-tent with the barons, she said to me gravely, ‘We in palaces hear much that is not heard by others; but we do not talk of it. Just as the priest on the hill or the priestess in the shrine hear much and do not mention it.’

I said, ‘It is understood, mother.’ Then I stroked her cheek and she smiled, and gave me a piece of honey-bread in her fingers. Now she seemed to me dearer and kinder than ever before, since the night when I had seen my father turn into a monster that I did not recognise.

After this, Clytemnestra took more interest in me. She would have me in her bed all night, while the gathering soldiers laughed and sang drunken songs outside, or set fire to the hovels on the outskirts of Mycenae.

Once, as the glow from such a fire lit up the window-holes of the chamber, she hugged me to her and said, ‘Have you ever watched fish in the river, sweet one?’

I said that I had.

She asked, ‘And what colour are they?’

I said sometimes silver, sometimes blue, sometimes black. They changed as you watched them. It all depended on the light or the shade, whether they lay in deep water or shallow, in the open or under the rushes.

My mother stroked my hair gently. ‘That is right,’ she said. ‘One thing always depends on many others. All life is like that. The man who says that there is only one truth tells a lie, and so his truth is a lie and not worth regarding.’

I remember saying, ‘But if you take a fish from the water, you see that he was silver all the time. Is that not the truth, mother?’

Clytemnestra whispered in my ear, ‘Truly he is silver when he lies on the bank: but then he is dead. That is the dead truth, the sort of thing that is told after a man’s death, and you know what manner of thing that is. You know that, when they are dead, tyrants are called good kings, and cowards brave warriors? That is the silver truth about them, not the blue truth, or the black truth.’

I was very sleepy, but I said, ‘And all life is like the fishes, mother?’

She answered, ‘Yes, my love. You will hear things said about the king, about Helen, about Paris and about me, after we are gone. But it will only be the dead silver truth. So keep your eyes open and watch, as you would watch a fish, while we are alive: then you will know the live truth about us, the changing truth that depends on whether we move in the sunlight or the shadow, in clear and shallow water, or down in the dark deeps.’

I huddled up to her, already half-asleep, and said, ‘You and my father will never die, mother. Don’t say such things.’

Then I was fast asleep.