Chapter 2 Klytemnestra
I rise from rusty waters, hair dripping with my husband’s blood.
The vapours from our bath snake upward to the vaulted ceiling, like supplications made in sacrifice, scented with copper and steel. Sticky, hot droplets coating everything, even the chamber walls’ floral patterns, the mighty lions painted on them blurred, weeping.
Not so mighty, after all.
I take a deep breath, letting the enormity of this moment settle on my skin – this meting out of justice, so well deserved and overdue – but my skin is pruning and I still have work to do.
I push Agamemnon’s supine form with my foot, and the soapy waters slosh and spill, lifting him momentarily.
For a suspended second, he’s upright again.
Then my husband’s corpse tumbles backward, head bumping on the bath’s gold-gilded edge.
A sound, like hollow stone snapping, sends shivers down my naked arms.
Something awakens in me then, a hunger to inflict more pain on him, to drag him back from Acheron’s shores so that I can see the light leave his eyes anew.
Ten years I’ve waited, dreamed and planned for this; how is it fair I get to hurt him only once, when the wounds he left in me will fester on forever?
But this will have to do. My knife has run its circle round Agamemnon’s neck, bringing forth blood like rain to sate the thirsty wheatfields of my heart.
There’s no life-warmth in him – his kingly robes are drenched in it, bathwaters claiming the excess.
The contents of his now cold head, spilled like pomegranates, are further proof my work won’t be undone.
Good. Maybe our daughter’s spirit can now know peace.
I step out of the bath, carrying the bloodstains like a cloak, knife still firm in hand.
‘You murdered him,’ a voice whispers to my right. ‘And now you’re going to murder me.’
I turn my gaze to the crouching figure on the floor, this foreign princess he had the audacity to bring to our home.
Her auburn hair is limp, her gown bloodstained.
Cassandra is nothing more than spoils of war; a pretty toy Agamemnon meant to play with under my roof, proof of his perceived omnipotence.
But I’m the victor of this final battlefield. Her life is mine to take, as was his.
I take a step and then another, my naked feet charting a crimson path of ill intention.
Yet her conviction gives me pause. Her words are calm, as if she has made friends with Fate.
No pleading; no abject terror in those cerulean eyes of hers.
Only a sour kind of sadness, the kind that knows how lives like hers must end in blood, has known for quite some time now, and is exhausted to be proven right.
A bitterness not unlike bravery. I can relate to that. Perhaps …
But no. I shake away the summer flies of sudden kindness before they get into my eyes, darken my purpose.
Knee-deep in treason as I am, I have no room for kindness.
For mercy. The trip from Troy was long – and Agamemnon’s patience never was.
For all I know, under that slender frame of hers, this princess may be carrying his seed.
Sparing her now might mean my future doom.
There can be only one Anassa of Mycenae.
My blade flickers in the candlelight, cracking Cassandra’s brave facade.
She flinches, whimpers, but does not run.
Better this way. If she tried to leave these halls without my say-so, my guards posted outside would gut her.
They have their orders; and enough coin to ensure that no aid is coming to their late king’s rescue.
There is no way out for her that does not result in steel.
Had I been given such a choice, I would also rather die by a queen’s own hand.
‘Hush now,’ I tell her. I’d like to think my tone is motherly, not harsh. ‘It will all be over soon.’ I raise my knife.
The world explodes in pinpricks of gold.
I blink, my eyes adjusting to the eerie light, my bloodied hair whipping in a wind that wasn’t there before. Yet, what has changed? I am not unmade. No god’s wrath has struck me down for slaughtering a king. My feet are still planted on the tile floor, my arm still poised to strike. But Cassandra …
Cassandra stares at something other than the spectre of her looming death. Her gaze is right above my left shoulder, pupils wide in bewilderment. ‘Goddess,’ she whispers.
Trying not to let a sudden terror grab me, I turn around.
The light subsides just barely, enough for me to see. There is a door carved on the wall behind Agamemnon’s bath; a door that wasn’t there before. And through that door, like a curious crow crashing my coronation, an intruder on my triumph, steps a pale woman clad in black.
‘Claret,’ she rasps.