Electra (10 page)

For Demeter's child.
 

I rolled up the completed cloth, re-hung the loom, and tied off my ends. Clea was gazing at me as though I had done something miraculous. Her cruel mistress would get a surprise in the morning.

And it was morning. Birds were singing outside and a cool light was bleaching my little oil lamp's flame. I had stood and woven all night. As I stretched, taking the stiffness out of my back, I saw that all the people in the room, even sleepy Eumides, were smiling at me, and I blushed.

Then I said to the Healer, 'How can we save Clea?' and Cassandra smiled and said, 'I think we shall have another miracle.'

I was woken by an imperious voice saying, 'Get up, Healer!' and had extracted myself grumpily from between two warm bodies. Eumides, who sleeps as though he and the Achaean God Morpheus have a close understanding, did not stir, but Chryse woke and asked, 'Cassandra? What is happening?'

'Sleep again,' I said. 'The Princess requires my attendance.'

He muttered something abrupt about making her comb her own hair this time and subsided again into the sailor's embrace.

But it wasn't a trivial matter. A sobbing girl held out a wounded hand for me to treat. The bones were not broken but it was a very bad bruise, and I found the stonecrop and the pestle and mortar and the remains of Eumides' third best tunic, which was frankly only fit for bandages, although he insisted that it had a few seasons' wear in it yet. The little light wavered in the cold air - it was very late. The girl seemed faintly astonished at being tended so carefully, and I thought better of Electra for having noticed that the maiden was injured. I hadn't. Slave women seek anonymity and after a few villages I had ceased to really look at them. I sat on the floor pounding rendered lard and the herbs together, deeply ashamed.

Then Electra, standing at the loom, began to sing. She had a high, clear voice, very precise and true, and she sang a weaving song. She was not thinking about her performance or she would not have dared, but the song went with the work. Her hands sped almost without her volition, automatically, and she moved with the grace of a dancer, shifting her balance as the shuttle moved across the warp and the cloth grew as inexorably and effortlessly, it seemed, as a wave. Cream-coloured wool moved up the web like magic.

I bandaged the girl's hand, told her that she would not be permanently crippled, and then fell silent under the influence of Electra's song. In the dark and the cold, in the warmth and the sun, Pallas wove, endless cloth for endless purposes. A vision came to me as I sat on the earth floor with the sobbing girl's maimed hand in my own. The vast tapestry of the world, tree and star, flower and human and stone, all woven by women such as these. Clotho who spins, Lachesis who measures, and Atropos who cuts the thread of life; the moon-spinners, the Fates.

By dawn Electra had woven a cloth as long as her outstretched arms; one ell.

In the morning we spoke to the master of the house and his wife. We expected that Clea would have no further trouble as few weavers have ever had the favour of Arachne, who came in the night to miraculously relieve the distress of an injured slave.

We passed through seven small villages before we came into the outskirts of Corinth polis, and never a whisper of pursuit from Mycenae. I could not believe that my mother would let us escape so easily. When I was a child fleeing punishment for some misdeed, I had never managed to hide from her. She had found me, even in the mazes of the under-city, dragged me forth whimpering and spanked me. I almost expected her to do that now. I was still amazed that she had let us escape at all. We were easy to find; the passage of the Goddess Artemis through her people was whispered from one goatherd to the next all the way, I expect, to Argos.

I was confused. All the rules I had learned didn't seem to apply to the world outside the Palace of Mycenae. I had been told that a woman could never be happy outside her own house; for that was her place. But Cassandra rode laughing in the sunlight, between her two lovers. And I saw women working in the fields, riding donkeys, sitting under the trees in the spring sun.

We stopped on the road to ask directions of one group of maidens. They wore scarcely enough between them to make one respectable tunic, were burned brown by the sun and they were happy. They offered us berries. Their mouths were stained purple with juice and they exchanged teasing words with two goatherds higher up the hill. They were easy with travellers, friendly and easy and fluent. Offering to show us the turn, one maiden climbed on Eumides' horse and rode the little way to the crossroads.

I began to understand about Europa. She had been a girl like these. When the great bull from the sea had come, she had clambered, laughing, onto its back and been borne away. I had been taught that all women who speak to unrelated men are whores, but these were not whores. Neither was Cassandra.

Perhaps they had lied to me about whores as well. I had never met one. They had lied to me about a lot of things in my mother's house.

My confusion grew, but so did my pleasure in being outside.

At first I had been intensely uncomfortable in the open, but now I began to feel constrained in a house. I did not know if I was being set free or going mad. I talked to Cassandra in one drowsy noon rest about where we would be happy. She was leaning against an olive trunk, combing her hair, and I was sitting down with Orestes asleep in my lap. The air smelt of honey and the bees of the Mother buzzed in the early flowers.

'I need a place where we can all live,' she said. 'Where we can all be accepted. I don't mind where it is. What would you like, Electra?'

'I would like a white house, like those, but bigger,' I said, surprised, for it was not something I had ever thought about before. 'With an olive grove and three good fields for corn and a vegetable garden. I would like a stable for Banthos, and a clean wall for my loom. And a bench to sit in the sun and embroider. I would like a window with shutters and a stout door between me and the night.'

'And who would live in the white house?' she asked.

'There would be the master,' I answered. 'A kind man, a good trader. And perhaps he would be away a lot. But it won't happen,' I said.

She asked me, 'Why not?' and I could not answer. I could not tell this foreign woman why no one would ever marry me. Then Banthos snatched at someone's linen, laid on a hedge to bleach, and we had to stop to retrieve it and apologise to the outraged owner. We didn't speak about it again, though I remembered my white farm house every time I came into a village.

Banthos and I were now close friends. I had never met a horse before - horses in Mycenae are the province of men. I had assumed them to be fierce and dangerous, needing to be overborne by a mastering will. But I found that they were tractable beasts, not very clever, perhaps, but willing and helpful, within their limits. He knew me, turned when he heard my voice, and loved my touch.

In the next village I saw an elder chastising his daughter. This would usually be done behind closed doors, but the girl had run into the square and he had followed her, beating her with a stick. The girl screamed and cried. Cassandra took a step forward and both Eumides and Chryse laid hold of her.

'Princess,' said the sailor, 'this is not our argument.'

The girl fell to her knees, her chiton torn away from her shoulders. She cried to the old man, 'Yes, yes! I will do as you order!' and he threw the stick away and gathered the girl into an embrace, pressing his white-whiskered lips to a weal on her breast.

That night the dreams began. A feeling of dread had been on me all evening. I don't remember dreaming, but I woke horrified, sore, to the exhausted faces of my companions. I forgot my joy in being free, because I was no longer at liberty. My dreams bound me like a chain, and even Orestes could not comfort me.

Banthos was nervous as we came into Corinth, shying at every line of washing and chewing his bit. I was dreadfully tired and only pride stopped me from asking Cassandra to take the rein, as she had on that day when we had escaped from my mother's crime. Homicide. Regicide.

I dreamt every night. It seemed that the things I could not bear to think about were surfacing in my sleep. I had dreadful visions, which I could not remember. They said that I screamed in my sleep, struggled and cried for mercy, for vengeance. Eumides still bore vivid scratches where, apparently, I had clawed for his eyes. He was in favour of binding me, but Cassandra and Diomenes would not allow this. They sat up with me, one after another, as I wept and writhed. Or so they said. I only know that I awoke every morning exhausted and bruised, and that my escort was getting more short-tempered as the days wore on and village succeeded village.

They didn't seem to like me any more, but that did not surprise me. Only Eumides was sleeping at all, and he remained obstinately cheerful, which was irritating the others. Banthos tossed his head, almost hauling the rein out of my grasp, and Cassandra flicked him with a luggage strap and growled 'Behave!' in such a dangerous voice that he lowered his neck meekly and behaved. And he is my horse. I was about to remonstrate with the Trojan woman about her handling of Banthos when we heard a shout from ahead on the mountain road.

'Thalassa, thalassa,' Eumides cried, reining the horse. 'The sea!'

Orestes, who had greatly taken to the sailor, pointed and I looked.

Blue as the sky, blue as borage flowers or eye-bright, shadowed with islands, it was the salt river Ocean. I had never seen it before. It was vast. I heard the cries of strange white birds, raucous and sad. I strained my eyes to see the other side, and couldn't.

'Up there is the Corinthian acropolis,' Eumides told us. 'And down there, at last, is the port and that is where we are going.'

'You go and find us a ship, and we'll look for a lodging,' offered Cassandra, red-eyed and haggard. I had reduced her to this state, but I could not feel that it was my fault. I hoped I could die in one of those nightmares, and relieve them of my company. They had been kind to me beyond my worth, kind to Orestes. They would look after my little brother. I sagged in the saddle, rubbing my eyes.

'Don't pay more than four obols, and look for me in the temple of Poseidon,' he advised, and kneed his horse into a gallop, taking my brother with him. I watched the dust cloud on the white road. My heart sank. I was so tired of the wideness of the world, the unsafety outside walls, that I was almost longing to be back in my mother's house.

'Come along,' said Cassandra briskly. 'We need a place to stay and stabling for these tired beasts. Tonight we will all get some rest, if there is a herbalist in Corinth who sells the herb I am looking for.'

'Which?' asked Diomenes dully. 'I might know the Argive name.'

'It's a black sticky substance made of the sap of the Asian poppy. We call it earth of poppies.'

'Here we call it Lethos, and it's dangerous.'

'I know that,' she snapped. 'But with milk and wine, honey and vervain it's the strongest sleeping drug I know. Electra must sleep in peace, and so must we.'

'Vervain should abolish the visions,' he said, without animation. 'Milk and wine will be nourishing to the spirit, and honey will render it palatable. We'll try it. Taphis the Corinthian should have some, and we can lie in his house. He supplies many rare herbs to Epidavros. I came here with Master Glaucus before I went to Troy - he should remember me.'

I had never been in a city before. Corinth sprawled down from the white pillars of the acropolis to the edge of the sea, a maze of little houses and taller temples, built to no plan. The street began to be paved as we went on.

The walls of Corinth are high and well made but the town has grown outside it. If attackers ever come from the shore to sea-bordered Corinth, there will be a massacre.

This did not appear to concern the citizens. The streets were full of people, all selling something or carrying something home. Women shoved past us bearing amphorae of wine and oil, heavy water jugs and armloads of bread. Slaves dragged new pithoi, taller even than me sitting on Banthos, newly fired from a smoking kiln. The air rang with hammering from a carpenter's workshop, asses complaining that their loads were far too heavy, and talking; talking, endless voices, in a cacophony of known and unknown tongues.

A man with a wheeled cart shoved against Nefos and shouted at Cassandra in some language, and she astonished him by shouting back in the same speech. He then blocked the street by bowing in a strange foreign fashion, allowing us to pass.

'What did you call him?' asked Diomenes. 'I mean, I know the words, but-'

'The son of a pine tree. It's a very nasty insult in Phrygian. It means illegitimate. It's the standard reply to what he called me, which was daughter of the cavern, where the Phrygians throw their deformed children.'

'And the comment that caused him to bow?'

'I reminded him that Phrygians were known for their execrable manners.'

'And for their perversity?'

'Just so,' she said.

'You are a woman of many talents,' said Diomenes, admiringly.

We had to dismount a little further along and lead the horses through a market. I had never seen so many people together in one place, and I was shaken and frightened. Cassandra reached back without looking and took my hand, Diomenes took hers, and we moved slowly through the agora of Corinth like a chain of sacred dancers in the circle-mazes of Mycenae.

Faces, so many faces! Women sold woven cloth, leather boots and sandals, bronze ornaments and potions. An old man and three huge grinning sons sold every possible type of pot, from
lekythoi
to hold tears or perfumes, to
amphorae
and jugs and
rhytons
, flat
kylix
wine cups, goblets, cauldrons, earth ovens, pots with ears and pots with feet, and
pithoi
big enough to take a whole cargo of wine. A man with a tray sold honeycomb in squares - 'Only one obol, Kyria!' - and another was tied all over with ribbons, precious and paltry, of all shades from pale to startling red, fluttering in the breeze.