Chapter 22
Mycenae
The Queen of Tiryns began to tell stories.
They were chips and pieces that she was scared to share at first, but she wanted her children to know of things, even if they were too young to understand.
The way that camomile could ease inflammation and tasted delicious in tea with honey; how to brush at their feet and hands with pumice to remove stubborn grime.
She taught them the light language of the birds, louder when they landed in rivers, and how to read ripples and currents to learn truths about the land.
She would take them walking in the forest with her women, even as their numbers and her belly swelled again and again.
They would return, her children clutching pebbles and herbs, pealing with laughter, rushing to show their father what they had found.
Perseus was away more often in those days, loosening his restless limbs in founding his new city.
He brought the Queen and their eldest two children to where the work on its foundations began and held Gorgophone high when she demanded to see.
‘It will be civilization’s centre,’ he told them, his eyes shining. Gorgophone reached high and squealed in delight as a small yellow bird landed on her wrist, its sunshine wings fluttering against the deep brown of her hand. The queen felt a pull at her skirt.
‘Mama, look.’ Perses had scampered off, eager. He tugged her after, pointing. She looked where he led. It was a mushroom.
His palms opened, still childishly dimpled, and moved to grab, and she caught them.
‘Careful. These are poison.’
They crouched low to look. The queen was not awkward with her protruding stomach; in recent years she had been full of her children more than she had been empty of them.
‘What do they mean, Mama?’
She inhaled the warning of their tang and scented something familiar beneath.
She wondered if her son, he who had grown in the warmth of her waters, could smell it too. ‘Take a sniff. What do you think?’
He did as she instructed. He turned to her, gap-toothed and grinning broadly.
‘Water!’
She kissed his forehead, his curls smelling of home. ‘Good boy. Go and tell your papa what you’ve learned.’ He trotted off obediently and Perseus declared the find ‘auspicious’ and ‘hard evidence of the city’s abundance’, and he named the place Mycenae in their honour.
The King and Queen of Tiryns and Mycenae had seven children in seven years and learned many lessons in such begetting.
The king learned to pay attention. The queen learned that change is the only certainty.
These lessons built bridges between them, bridges neither had believed were necessary.
It happened gradually, as such things do.
The queen watched her body morph and return, watched her children grow, watched her kingdoms expand into metropolises and found that such growth stirred pride and joy within her.
It was in feeling these things that she realized she was capable of such feeling again and with that came an amalgamation; her past and her present no longer waved at each other from a distance but acknowledged the chasm, reached across it, and grasped each other’s hands.
It was also in these changes that she became most aware of what was consistent, what was enduring and final and infinite – for there was still a place in her heart that had turned to stone and would not quicken or weather.
But the king had become a father and it was this change, certainly this surprising development, that made her the person that would become who she was next.
Perseus was attentive, diligent, affectionate.
He was not perfect, but he was warm. He carried his children on his shoulders.
He did not scold them when they cried over their small hurts. He bade them mind their mother.
She watched them clap and laugh as he told tales of great deeds, monsters and heroes and kin.
In a different palace, in a different skin, a different king had once done the same.
This king had been the more skilled storyteller, had been less beautiful and so more transformed by character and plot, as she’d clapped and laughed as her children did now, believing, as they did, that the man before her was a marvel, a monster temporarily but a hero always.
She almost prayed then, entreated some apathetic god that her children never feel the open wound of disabuse, the stinking pus, the weeping infection of finding instead a temporary hero and a permanent monster where their father had once been.
But they were his favourite audience and his stories were not limited to his cups and his good humour; she did not need to pray. He performed for them always.
It was in this new tenderness that the future which is written was conceived, for he began to look closer, listen more.
When he came to her at nights, he did not sing her title but called her name, a gentle whisper, like teenagers carrying out an illicit affair.
It made her laugh to hear him and that was where he met her best, in the laughter that he had caused.
When he reached her bed, he would make a great show of burrowing beneath her bed clothes and climbing towards her, so that she laughed more.
He liked the taste of laughter on her lips, liked her best curved and smiling.
And she found, in turn, that the ease of him then was the closest thing to pleasure that she had felt in a long time.
He would press against her, still clothed, between her legs, and marvel at how this and this alone could draw little sighs.
He would kiss her and kiss her, greedy and excited, and she would kiss him back, and his delight would prompt another laugh, her hands petting the fine, sensitive strands of hair at the base of his skull, before his neck.
When he pulled their clothes off, he was prone to tearing them in his eagerness, and she would scold him mockingly.
But her eyes would grow round and pleased at the sight of him because she could not deny that he was beautiful.
He was beautiful and he was kind and she was lucky.
He would move slower then. The hastiness of youth had ebbed, and he had learned the art of delayed gratification.
She was thankful for it. His hands would take more time to enjoy her, breasts full and heavy with milk, stomach rounded and soft.
He would hold her legs open, wishing to see all of her, as he did when standing high on hills, delighting in all that was his.
Then he would rub his slick tip over where she parted, ready before him, and her mouth would fall wide part in pleasure.
He had learned this trick by accident, and it was one of the happiest of his life because it was a rare sight, to see his queen so uncomposed.
But her hands would coil around the braided length of her hair and her back would arch.
He had never known her to need anything and he was delighted by it.
When he had first felt the luscious squeeze of her thighs as he flexed his hips, inside her, he had been driven almost wild.
She smiled at him, not placid and agreeable, but broad and edged with something wicked.
Then she had urged him with a quiet yes, my lord and he had obliged her encouraging.
She would grow breathless with him now, and if hers was not the frenzy that he had experienced elsewhere, he did not mind.
She allowed him his slave girls for that, though she kept only servants herself, and did not trouble herself with the many children that bore his dark golden curls.
Occasionally she would say, ‘You are kind to them, aren’t you?
’ And he would assure her, honestly, that he was, and she would send treats for the little ones and say no more about it.
Such behaviour was strange in a wife; even Hera, indomitable, preternatural Hera, hated him still for her own husband’s infidelity.
But the Queen of Tiryns and Mycenae seemed to understand that the heart was huge and the soul was deep and contained room enough for more than one person, more than one type of pleasure.
It was through this realization, watching her hand date cakes, a dish from her homeland, to his bastards, and share herbs and salves with his courtesans, that he came to watch her more closely.
He noticed her aversion to pomegranates and figs.
He noticed her nervousness of horses and the way her gaze flicked, occasional but consistent, to where the sea shone, a thin silver sliver of flickering scale, a line just above the horizon of their walls.
And he noticed her hands, often busy but, when at rest, drifting to the pouch that was always at her waist.
It was late spring, almost summer. She would be thirty soon. He sat upright in her bed as she pottered around her apartments, seeing to this and that, instructing her attendants to bring this child a cup of warm milk and that child dittany for his cold, bidding her women goodnight.
As she climbed into bed beside him, Perseus said suddenly, ‘You are sad today.’
The queen was surprised. ‘No, I am not.’
‘Yes, you are,’ and then, ‘You are always sad in the spring.’
‘That is not so. Three of our children have been born in the spring and so I love it well.’ But her heart was hammering and she was surprised that he could not hear it.
‘They were born early in the spring, almost in the winter,’ Perseus insisted. ‘When spring is near to summer you are different.’
She did not say anything. He had never seen her so clearly before and she was afraid.
He did not know what to say next, but tried anyway. ‘I am away a lot and I leave you with the children.’
‘You are the king.’
‘Yes,’ he looked suddenly wounded, ‘but surely I am not so tyrannical that you cannot say if my absence is … is hard on you.’
‘No, my lord. I simply meant you have your duties and I have mine.’ She tried to smile reassuringly. ‘The children amuse me. And I have your mother, and my women. And there is much to see to here.’
‘Yes, and you see to it well.’ He paused, tried a different approach. ‘The ambassador for Aethiopia will arrive soon. To discuss when we intend to send Perses to your father.’
The queen thought of her sweet, sensitive boy.
He was so desperate to be like his father but his rivers ran as deep as hers and he was wounded easily.
Her other children were more like their father; it would have been kinder if Gorgophone had been born the eldest boy, but then it was better that she had not.
She reminded the queen of her own mother and thrilled at the thought of the world in her daughter’s hands.
‘We will not send him yet. He is a boy still.’
‘Very well.’ Perseus felt as though he was prising open an oyster, but the shell was made of sturdier stuff than even his most determined knife. ‘You have not visited Athena’s temple since it was built at Mycenae. My mother says wisdom is melancholy’s salve.’
‘Your mother is ever the optimist,’ said his wife with a wry smile.
‘You are not one for prayers.’
‘I give Zeus thanks for you often, my lord,’ she said hastily. This was true. He had spared her. ‘And I have thanked Hera for our family.’
‘But is Athena not some kin of yours? Your grandmother’s cousin?’
‘Yes.’
‘It might bring about ill fortune if you do not pay your respects.’ The thought occurred. ‘Come with me next time I go to Mycenae. I will be busy in the city but you might visit the temple and the markets and hear the musicians play.’
‘The children—’
‘Will be fine with my mother. And your women. It will only be a few days!’ He took her hand.
‘If you seek the goddess’s counsel, should she show you the path to your happiness …
I would have you know that … that I wish for you to seek it.
’ He scrunched his brow deep in thought.
And then added, ‘I have seen you, with your body, feed seven of my children. I would … I would know that you feed yourself, also.’ She wondered when he had come to be so wise.
She wondered when she had come to love him.
She smiled at him. ‘Thank you, Perseus.’
And he smiled back.