Mother took me back to the tent. She tucked me beneath a blanket as if I were a child. She pulled the wedding adornments from my hair, and stroked my tresses until they lay smooth and shining across my shoulders. Orestes laid beside me. He curled toward my warmth like a sleeping cat, and wrapped his fists around my hair.
“Stay here,” mother said. “Rest. Keep out of sight. Keep yourself pure. It will be harder for them to justify what they’re doing if they know that you are innocent and obedient.”
She ran her fingers across my cheek.
“Don’t worry. They aren’t monsters. They won’t do this terrible thing.”
My memories were tipping out of me more and more rapidly. My mind went dark with only a few memories lit up, like lamps casting small orbs of light along a corridor.
I wandered into a lamp of memory: I was trailing you as you left my room, down the steps and across the portico. I walked quietly behind so that you would not hear me. We emerged into the forest. The fog was dissipating from the copse, revealing men among the trees, their shouts and sword-clashes harsh in the cold, dim air. You were far ahead of me, already meeting with your hequetai, exchanging shouts and strategy.
Hands tightened on my shoulders. I looked up into their faces: two young men with patchy, adolescent beards. Their breath smelled of rotting fish. One stood in his nightclothes. The other wore a helmet and a breastplate but nothing else. Beneath the helmet’s shadow, his eyes were dark and chary.
They spoke. Their voices were rapid, unintelligible, drowned out by the pounding of blood in my ears. Their eyes were enormous and sinister, large and white like the dandelion before I crushed it underneath my foot.
Smells: blood, musk, new sweat. A short, blunt limb-like the branch that you gave me to use as a sword-emerged from obscuring whiteness. It pushed blindly against my leg. “Stop,” one boy commanded the other. “Here, swing at this. One strong, smooth motion.” The breastplate clattered against my flesh with a sound like thunder. My belly, rotting like the stench of rotting fish, welling with tears of fright. (Helen in the courtyard: “Come walk with me, niece.” Her daughter Hermione looking on, jealous and ignored.)
Rotting fish and sweat. The moon dwindling like a crushed dandelion. The branch swinging. The thin high wail that a girl makes when someone swings at her with a sword that is a branch that is neither thing at all.
“You’re hopeless,” said one boy to the other. “It’s too bad you weren’t born a girl.”
Then another face, a hequetai in a tufted cloak, shouting like the clash of swords. “What’s wrong with you two? Are you stupid? Don’t you know who this is?”
The reek of shit and piss. The man’s hand on my arm, tighter than the boys’ had been.
“What are you doing here? Your father would kill you if he knew. He’d kill all of us. Be grateful I’m sending you back without shoving your slatternly face in the muck in front of him. Do you have any modesty at all? Your mother and her people. Brazen the lot of you. Walking into men’s camps like common whores. You may be beautiful, but that is no excuse. Go! Get out of here! Get back where you came from! Go!”
My feet, pounding on the path back home. The copse of trees; the grass; the empty mouth of the megaron where exhausted slaves tended the coals to keep them warm until morning.
The pounding of my heart as I lay down in bed for the third time that night. Memories of moons and fog and branches. Love for my father: flat like a branch, round like a dandelion, silver like the moon, welling up and out of me into a rush like the wind, but without the power to move a thousand ships.
Indigo shaded the sky to evening. Helen smiled a taut smile that I’d seen on my mother’s face, one that did not reach her eyes.
She reached for my hand. “Come walk with me, niece.”
Hermione watched us. Jealousy darkened her features. “Mother!” she exclaimed. “I have something to show you.”
Helen did not look over at her daughter. “Later.” She bent closer to me. “Iphigenia?”
I twisted the ribbon from Helen’s headband around my fingers. I stepped toward her, but I didn’t take her hand.
Hermione upturned the bench she’d been sitting on, and began to cry.
Helen led me past the canopy that sheltered the benches, and toward the black scratchings of the olive trees that stood, lonely, in the chilly air. Helen arrayed herself beneath one, her garment spreading around her in delicate, shadowed folds.
I heard footsteps behind us and turned to see Hermione peering from the shadows, hoping to overhear what her mother had to say to another girl. She was clutching something in her hand. I wondered what delicacy she’d brought to bribe her mother with this time. A honeyed fig? A flask of sweet wine?
I looked back to Helen. Her eyes changed hue with the setting sun, taking on a lighter shade like the grey of water beneath a cloudy sky. Firelight from the lamps near the benches cast flickers across her cheekbones, highlighting an undertone in her skin like bronze. She watched my gaze as it trailed over her features, and gave a little sigh of boredom.
“You’ll be beautiful one day, too,” she said patronizingly.
“Not as beautiful as you,” I demurred.
“No one is as beautiful as I.” Her voice was flat, but full of pride.
The night smelled of burning oil and women’s bodies. A dandelion hung high in the sky, casting its light down on us. Helen’s motives were obscured behind blankness, like soldiers’ bodies disappearing into fog.
Helen distorts the world around her. Never look at her too closely. You’ll go blind.
“I saw you holding your father’s hand today,” said Helen. “Do you feel safe with your father?”
I made a moue. I couldn’t speak to my beautiful aunt without my mother beside me.
“What was that?”
“Yes,” I mumbled.
Helen shifted. The folds of her garment rearranged themselves into new shimmers and shadows.
“There’s something I think I should tell you, Iphigenia. About your father. Did your mother ever tell you that she was married before?”
I shook my head. Around and around, the ribbon wove through my fingers.
“She had a husband named Tantalus who was the king of Mycenae before your father came. They had a child together. A son.”
Helen paused, scrutinizing my reaction. I didn’t know what to do. I looked to the right and the left. There was no one nearby.
“I know this is hard to hear, Iphigenia,” said Helen, “but your father came to Mycenae and murdered Tantalus and then he-” She raised her sleeve over her mouth, and looked away. “He took the baby from your mother’s arms and he dashed it to the stones and smashed it to pieces. My nephew.”
With a quick glance over my shoulder, I saw that the servants were clearing out the benches and the canopy. Iamas helped a young girl douse the lamps. Behind me, there was safety, there was familiarity. I stepped back. Helen caught my hand.