Читать книгу Electra (Mycenaean Greek Trilogy) - Henry Treece - Страница 4

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I was eleven when my father the king went away in the ships; and my brother Orestes had only just begun to walk a step or two. He was perhaps only a year old. He was always a forward boy, but a very quiet baby.

I can only just remember what Agamemnon looked like then—a huge man, a giant in his bronze armour and with the high horse-tail plume on his helmet. All the lords were afraid of him, though in his presence they did a lot of laughing and even touched his arm. But I could tell.

I do not think that I was afraid. I am not sure now. When he was at home, in High Town, by our hearth-fire, he played with me on his hands and knees, growling like a hill-bear or roaring like a desert lion, and tickling me with his bristly hair and sharp beard. He made all the lords wear their hair long, so that the world should see they were Hellenes who prayed openly and upright to the god with the beard, and not the conquered folk who muttered in the dark at the Mother shrine.

If my mother the queen ever came into the hall while father was playing with me, he would stop and stare at her till she went out again, sniffing and shaking her long bronze-coloured hair. He would stare after her even though she had gone, as though his eyes would follow her down the dark corridors, and push her along to her own chamber. He used to do the same with my two elder sisters, who said they wanted to be priestesses at the Mother shrine when they grew up.

But it was all right when the nurse, smiling Geilissa, brought baby Orestes in. Father would play with him too and call him ‘baron’. And though the king was so big, Orestes was never afraid of him, and never used to cry when the stiff beard brushed him. I used to scream out when the king whiskered me, but I was only pretending, as girls do, to see what else would happen.

But when the king was dressed in his war-gear, with the side-flaps of his helmet down, so that you could only see his bright eyes staring, this did frighten me, because he was no longer my father. He was like Zeus then, with his voice booming out of the closed bronze, and echoing till the words lost all their meaning, like the bees in the tholoi.

Then he would swing me up onto his shoulder and the sharp edges of his corselet used to pinch me. I tried not to say that I was hurt, but I did cry out once, I recall. This made the king very angry with me, and he turned up my tunic and smacked me with the flat of his sword. I can remember what he said while he was doing it. He said, ‘You, an Achaean, and howling because you are hurt! What an example to the world!’

The sword hurt me, too, but I didn’t mind that kind of hurting. I cannot explain, but in a way it made me love the king all the more for doing it.

And when the king had gone after this beating, I told my corn doll that I would marry him one day. He was the man for me, the biggest man in the world. I was only about nine then, but for the first years he was away over the sea in Troy I longed for the day he would come back, so that I could marry him. It got very bad at times and even turned me against the boys of my own age in Mycenae.

In fact, it was so bad that I used to dream I would take the king away from Clytemnestra, my mother. Such thoughts made me ashamed at first, but Geilissa told me that all dreams were sent by Zeus, so after that I told myself that it was the god speaking in the night, not I.

All the same, in those days, there was nothing wrong about loving your father. Most of the girls I knew, of good family, said they were in love with their fathers and would marry them when they came back from the fighting. Some of them did, I know for a fact, if their mothers had died in the meantime. It was something to do with land-tenure, I think. Only a few, slave girls mostly, liked boys of their own age; but we of the House of Atreus had our own ideas of what was right, and we did not do as the slaves did in those days. Though, the god knows, before we were finished, we lost our pride and were willing to do anything that would put bread into us.

But in those days, it was not so. The only other man I loved was my baby brother Orestes. He was like a little doll to me. I loved washing him and nuzzling his body, which always smelled so warm and sweet. Many times, when the fit was on me, I would put him to my chest and implore Zeus to let milk come out of me. And when it didn’t, I wept to hand him back to Geilissa, to be wet-nursed.

Once she said to me, with her crooked smile, ‘If you want milk for the prince, then one day there’s an easier way of getting it than praying to the Man God, Electra.’

I asked her how, and she told me something that sounded silly and impossible. It concerned her young brother, a cowman in the sheds behind the great hall. She said he was a great hand at it, and her winking and gestures were so confusing that I didn’t know whether to run out to him straightaway, or to call the soldier at the door and tell him to beat her.

I ended by putting my hands over my ears, as though I was not listening, but I left a little space between my fingers so that I could hear.

I remember, she laughed and said, ‘Oh, ’tis a small thing, lady. Especially for a fine boy like the prince. Someone is doing it all the time—why, even your own mother—and once they are used to it, it gets better and better. You will find out.’

My mother the queen came in while this was being said. She was tall, with bronze hair and a deathly white face. She always painted her mouth very red. I liked her in one way, but feared her in another. This day she smiled at us in her stiff, mask-like way, and said through her sharp teeth, ‘If I catch her at it, I will see that she loses all taste for it afterwards. And I’ll see that your brother does, too.’

When she went out, Geilissa made a very rude sign behind her back. I did not want the nurse to see that I agreed with her, because we of the kingly folk were not supposed to speak of one another to the slaves, or even to the better class of Cretans. So I went away, too, and ran up to my room above the armoury, where my little loom stood. There I worked at making shawls and ribbons for Orestes, thinking that if I could not suckle him, at least I could help to clothe him.