Читать книгу Electra - Kerry Greenwood - Страница 13

I knew she was going to kill him when she laid out the sacred tapestries.

I stood at the head of the marble stairs and watched them unroll across the floor, blurred by the feet of the children of Atreus. Intricately embroidered, many-figured with holy beasts, bulls and lambs and horses dancing to the altar to die in the worship of the Gods. Black, like the splashed blood of the sacrifice.

Before dawn the watchers had cried that the signal fires were burning to announce the return of Agamemnon, son of Atreus, from the sack of Troy. I went out, wrapped only in a thin chiton, and sighted the points of greedy light on the surrounding hills. He had been long away, my father, the King of Mycenae, and many things had happened in his absence.

She had taken a lover. Queen Clytemnestra, my mother, had welcomed into her bed the revenge child Aegisthus, my uncle. He was the son of incest between his father Thyestes, brother to my father, and his own daughter, a priestess of the river. He existed to enact his father's vengeance on the House of Atreus, for Atreus' murder of Thyestes' children. Before he came, I had not known how well I could hate.

I hate very well.

Part of me did not really believe that she could kill him. My tall father, dazzling in his bronze armour, tall as a giant, strong as a bull. When he had gone with the army to harry Troy, ten years before, I had been twelve and a child, believing that the world was a safe place for Laodice, called Electra, Princess of Golden Mycenae. I had given him my bunch of windflowers and he had fastened them on the shoulder of his harness. He had picked me up and hugged me, smelling of leather and wine, and I had snuggled closer to him, begging to be allowed to come, at least as far as Navplio and the beaches where the black ships lay, keel to keel, waiting for the wind.

Later I was glad that he had denied me that sight. We sent my sister Iphigenia, my gentle, beautiful sister, out of the gate of the lions, with rejoicing and the music of bells, for her marriage with the hero Achilles. Instead she had been espoused by Thanatos who is Death, the Dark Angel. She was sacrificed on the altar of Boreas, the north wind, so that my father's ships could sail to Troy; so that the revenge of the sons of Atreus for the kidnapping of the faithless Elene should fall on that stone city.

The nightmare began the night we heard of her death.

My mother Clytemnestra did not scream or cry. No tears fell from eyes that became more and more stony as the days went by. She did not speak or eat for three days, then she arose and stalked the walls. She stared out, towards the sea, towards Tiryns where Dikaios the Just ruled. I did not know what she was looking for.

Now, ten years later, I know. The beacons were blazing for the return of the king. My mother's order, my mother's fire, whipped on by her will. From Lemnos to Athos, Makistos to Messapion across Euripos, Kithairon to the Gorgon's Eye, burning Ida to the Black Widow's mountain, Spider Peak above Mycenae, which always threatens to topple but never falls.

The cloth was laid for the sacrifice; the double axe was in my mother's hands. I shivered in the chill light of dawn, looking out over the silvery olive groves, my hands on the balustrade thawing the ice-rimmed stone, and listened to the morning noises.

A cock crowed 'Kou kou ra kou!' I could hear Orestes, my dearest brother, singing the morning song to Eos who is the dawn. Somewhere a man was whistling on the cold hills; a goatherd was piping calling-tunes to his herd. Running feet, well shod, sounded in the chill courts of Mycenae and I smelled hearth smoke and the scent of baking bread. But there was a misplaced sound among the morning noises, a regular, gritty sliding sound just behind me.

With mountain stone and virgin oil, Clytemnestra was whetting the axe.