The Young Lion Read online

  Orestes

  The Young Lion

  Laura Gill

  Copyright © 2011, 2013 Laura Gill

  All rights reserved worldwide.

  Smashwords Edition

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.

  I.

  Prince of Mycenae

  Chapter One

  I was born my father’s only son, and the youngest of four children.

  My parents, the king and queen of Mycenae, had spent the first five days of my life arguing over my name. Father suggested calling me Pelops after my paternal great-grandfather, the High King of Pisatis who had given his name to the Peloponnese. Mother held out for Amyklas, after her Spartan great-great-grandfather.

  “Have you lost your wits?” Father exclaimed. “My son will have a name worthy of his royal house, not some drivel better suited to an effeminate flute boy.”

  Mother fumed. “You insult my forefathers.”

  “I let you name the girls, Clytaemnestra.” Father folded his thickly-muscled arms over his chest. “I have rights over a son.”

  “Call him Pelops, then,” she snorted. “Let everyone wonder why you named him the Dark-Faced One when he clearly has your father’s ruddy coloring.”

  Glowering, Father paced the stuccoed floor of her chamber. “Then suggest something else.”

  Mother threw out the names of men he had either killed or wanted to kill.

  “Enough!” he barked, after a quarter-hour of this. “Ah, I have it!” My nurse, who had watched unobtrusively from the corner with the queen’s other servants, later told me how his eyes had brightened. “Orestes. The Mountain Dweller.” He grinned at his own brilliance. “Orestes Agamemnonides. Hear how it rolls off the tongue.”

  *~*~*~*

  Father had not been born heir to Mycenae's throne, but after weathering hardships and upheavals that would have undone a lesser man, and seizing opportunities where they presented themselves, he had climbed to the very pinnacle of power. He was the High King of Mycenae, Argos, Achaea, and overlord of the Islands. Ambassadors from as far away as Egypt, Babylon, and the Hittite lands frequented the Lion Court with messages and gifts of goodwill.

  At forty-five, Father had surpassed his predecessors in ambition, wealth, and influence. He had taken a queen from the Spartan royal house, and sired three fine daughters, yet the one thing he now desired above all continued to elude him. He had no legitimate male heir.

  It fell to Mother as Mycenae’s high priestess to propitiate the goddess of quickening. At length, she conceived again, only to deliver a son who died within an hour of taking his first breath. As the Lion Court mourned, dissenting voices asserted that the king had neglected Eleuthia’s altar, and that he would have no heir until he honored the goddess with the correct offerings.

  Mother remained dry-eyed throughout the funeral rites, and stood still as a cult statue as the priestess of Artemis carried the jar containing the dead infant into the tomb. She ate nothing at the feast, but sat there with her women, her blood-red mouth twitching with a curious smirk, exuding silent defiance. Father noticed, and it infuriated him; he read exultation in her dark flashing eyes and curved lips, an assault on his manhood.

  After the last libation was poured, and the funeral guests departed, he turned on her. “You unnatural bitch! Does it give you such pleasure to see my seed die?”

  Mother hurled his accusation right back at him. “You should talk, mighty king of men!” Disdain dripped like acid from her tongue. “All you know of baby boys is how to dash them against walls!”

  Only she would have dared raise that specter with him. Clytaemnestra was imperious and stubborn, her head filled with odd ideas about power such as Spartan queens taught their daughters. Long ago, Father had outraged her in the worst way possible, murdering her first husband and infant son, and forcibly taking her to wife, only to realize to his everlasting regret that she never forgave or forgot an insult.

  Father brushed her caustic remark aside. “Not that tiresome old business again! If you spread your legs more often, you might already have a dozen fine sons to replace the brat.”

  “Bastard!” Livid with white-lipped fury, Mother struck him hard across the face; her heavy rings scored his cheek, drawing blood.

  Humiliated before my mother’s women, who would no doubt spread the tale throughout the citadel. Father roared at them to get out. Then, he seized Mother by the arm, hauled upstairs her to her bedchamber, and put a summary end to the argument by teaching her who was lord and master of the house.

  I was born nine months later, delivered red-faced and squalling into the world on a balmy summer evening.

  Mother turned her face from the midwife who held me up for her inspection, and refused to give me her breast. The midwives and priestesses shook their heads, but dismissed my mother’s black mood as the depression which sometimes afflicted women just after childbirth; they underestimated her deep resentment toward my father.

  But Father loved me from the moment the high priestess carried me downstairs to place in his waiting arms. He arranged a splendid feast and athletic contests in my honor. Mother did not attend. A priestess of Artemis held me on her lap during the customary tenth-day naming rite.

  In time, I came to understand that the only children my mother ever truly cherished were the ones my father took from her.

  Chapter Two

  I remembered a black bearded man dressed in scarlet wool holding me upon his knee in the nursery. The mingled odors of oiled leather, horseflesh, and musky salt skin scented with saffron pervaded my nostrils, even as the music of his hearty laugh and rumbling voice filled my ears.

  When Father donned his gleaming bronze armor, with his purple cloak billowing out behind, and his boar tusk helmet with its tall horsetail crest set upon his head, he became a god. Only his dark beard and ice-blue eyes remained familiar. I whimpered when he lifted me up to kiss me farewell, for his corselet was hard, and its edges nudged me through my tunic.

  I was three years old when Father stepped into his chariot and vanished through the Lion Gate with his companions. People cheered him from the walls. My nurse held me up to let me watch the parade of gaily painted chariots and horses with plaited manes moving through the lower town, and the followers marching behind with their bronze weapons flashing and tall ox-hide shields slung across their backs.

  The Trojan campaign kept Father away from Mycenae for the next nine years. We never set eyes on each other again except on the day he returned—the day my mother and her lover murdered him in his bath.

  Chapter Three

  Iphigenia.

  Her name became synonymous with innocence and senseless slaughter. She was the key which unlocked all the horrors to come.

  Iphigenia was nine years my senior, the firstborn daughter. She died too soon, leaving me with vague memories of a beautiful girl with curling chestnut hair and a beaming smile. I retained but a single recollection of her standing in the sunlight of the great court, wearing a crown of scarlet poppies and wheat ears. She had dipped down to kiss my cheek like a young goddess bestowing a benediction. It was the last time I ever saw her alive.

  Later, my nurse explained to me that Iphigenia had gone away that day to be married. Hence, the crown of flowers and the radiant smile. Mother bundled her into a garlanded cart bound for Aulis, and took her away for what should have been her wedding to Achilles. Iphigenia should have come back a glowing new bride, to await her husband’s homecoming from the war.

  Iphigenia returned swathed in a yellowing funeral shroud from which her rotting hair spilled out like a
rat’s nest. I would I had not seen that! That splendid memory of her beauty might have survived unspoiled but for that. Instead, I saw her as a rotten corpse, and henceforth everything associated with her, through no fault of hers, became tainted with rottenness and dread.

  They forced me to attend the funeral. Five years old was far too young to have been thrust headlong into the maelstrom of wailing women, black robes, and tombs stale with the stench of decay that was a royal Mycenaean burial, but in her grief-stricken hysteria Mother forgot about me—she forgot the entire world except for Iphigenia—and no one else had the fortitude to gainsay her.

  A dreary autumn morning hosted the burial rites. Leaden clouds swollen with the promise of more rain weighted the heavens, as if the gods themselves were weeping for my sister. The Mother I knew was not there. She had transformed into the dread goddess Persephone, a pale, savage thing standing before the doors of the high-vaulted tomb. A specter of black robes, haunted dark eyes, and unnaturally chalk-white skin streaked with blood where she rent her cheeks with broken fingernails. Her brown hair was unbound, hanging wild about her face. I shivered in my fur-lined cloak, terrified that the goddess of death had taken my mother, and burrowed closer to my cousin Hermione, who had recently arrived from Sparta to stay with us while her father fought at Troy.

  Mother descended into the darkness with my sister, to lay her in the tomb Father had prepared for his final repose. We did not have to accompany her, thank the gods. I could not have borne the imagined horrors waiting within, even though Hermione and Kilissa both reassured me that the tomb was empty, that there were no ghosts within. Iphigenia was its very first occupant.

  When Mother emerged from the tomb, a curse accompanied her back into the realm of the living. It walked arm-in-arm with her, taking the form of a man, a rival kinsman named Aegisthus. Of all the impressions from that dreadful day, I recalled him most vividly of all, because although Iphigenia was the catalyst for what was to come, the son of Thyestes was the key.

  Although Aegisthus had not been invited to the funeral and had a price on his head, he took his chances returning to Mycenae while Father was away. He presented himself like a suitor, for he had come to woo my mother’s anguish and burning hatred for my father, and brought gifts for the tomb. I remembered how he grasped Mother’s white hand with its blood-crusted fingernails, brought it to his lips, and spoke condolences to her. He alone escorted her into the tomb, then led her to the altar where the priests had bound the heifer for the blood offering. His full, sensual mouth curved in an approving smile as she raised the holy labrys to strike the death blow.

  Blood spattered vivid scarlet against Mother’s hands and face. A feral satisfaction gleamed in her eyes. Ever after, in my nightmares, her tongue darted out to swipe the gore which had landed on her lips. Surely she had not really done that; my memories twisted the image so.

  Aegisthus took her hand again, kissed the fingers—I was certain he had kissed her somehow—and licked them clean with a snake’s forked tongue. His black serpentine lovelocks, of the kind which Cretan youths affected, writhed about him like the hair of a Gorgon. Perhaps I imagined that, too, in the way the wind moved through his hair, but the cruel and predatory smile he flashed us afterward was real enough.

  *~*~*~*

  Had the seer read the omens differently and instructed Father to sacrifice me instead, would the outcome have been different? Would Father have sent for me, his only son, and cut my throat so the wind would blow? Or would he have disbanded the fleet, sent the warriors home, and abandoned the Trojan expedition, for my sake? Those questions tormented me for weeks after the funeral, and even though they eventually subsided from my consciousness, allowing me to concentrate on other matters, my perpetual uncertainty followed me into manhood.

  Kilissa urged me not to think about such awful things. “Artemis protects you, little prince.”

  “Artemis protected Iphigenia, too, didn’t she?” Among my swiftly vanishing memories of my sister was an image of her carrying offerings to the cult house. Hermione had said she tended the altar of Artemis as a virgin priestess under Mother’s tutelage. “Then why did the goddess let Father sacrifice her?”

  Timon, the royal pedagogue who had initially brought the disturbing news, assured me that my father had not undertaken the sacrifice because he had wanted to. “He loved your sister,” he said. “They say he covered his face and wept in agony when the time came to make the offering.”

  “Then why?” I asked.

  “Because he unwittingly offended the goddess, and she turned the wind against him.” Timon was a thin, elderly man with a square, clean-shaven jaw and dainty hands stained with cuttlefish ink. As a member of the scribal class, he spoke with a very correct, formal diction. “She would not allow the fleet to sail for Troy until he appeased her wrath with a daughter’s blood.”

  That was the simple answer, though, the one the bards gave whenever they recited the story. It did not satisfy me, because it did not answer the deeper question of how, as in how Artemis could so capriciously snatch away her own priestess, or how Father could bring himself to cut the throat of a child everyone said he had loved.

  Mother had her own answer, of course. Father was a blasphemer, a born murderer, a child-killer by nature. I flinched when she cursed his name. I hid in the nursery when she smashed him in effigy, broke and burned his possessions, and wrecked the king’s apartment. I covered my ears against the terrified shrieks when she had his concubines hurled from the citadel walls.

  Kilissa used to take me to visit the king’s apartment. Father owned so many wonderful objects: cups and bowls painted with running spirals, octopi, and birds; an ivory footstool whose legs were bound papyrus stalks; inlaid chests; an entire lion skin from Megara. And the frescoes! Blue and scarlet rosettes framed the doorways, warriors in boar tusk helmets fought by a river in the sitting room, and an entire hunting scene with hounds chasing a boar covered the wall above the great bed. I loved to lie among the rich scarlet and purple cushions, inhale Father’s masculine scent, and imagine that he was close by.

  I did not want those things to be gone. Refusing to believe the tales, I begged Kilissa to take me back to the apartment, but now she refused. “Your mother’s set a guard on the door, little prince. No one can go in.”

  Neither my sisters nor the other servants would risk defying Mother’s orders and incurring her wrath. Not even Hermione would take me.

  At last, Timon took pity. First, he drew me aside to explain matters. “I know the guard on duty this afternoon,” he said. “Augeas might let us in, but—ah, not so quickly, young prince!” He raised a cautionary finger, showing me his ink-stained nails. “Or he might not. Do not set your hopes too high.”

  Timon took my hand as we walked the short distance from the nursery to the royal apartments; his skin felt cool and dry. Mother and her women were downstairs in the megaron, where as my father’s regent she spent the midmorning hours hearing petitions and rendering judgments.

  A burly sentry wearing an embossed bronze helmet and linen greaves stood at attention outside Father’s door, where no guard had been stationed before. As we approached, he grounded his spear and halted us with an upraised hand.

  “No one enters,” he barked. “Queen’s orders.”

  “But...”

  Timon squeezed my hand to reassure me. “Be reasonable, Augeas,” he told the guard. “There is no one else here but you, me, and the young prince. Close the door behind us and pretend all is as it should be. We will not be long.”

  “Ah, I would be risking my neck for that. The queen knows everything,” the guard answered, his tone softer now. “Got eyes and ears everywhere.” Augeas crouched down to address me directly. “You don’t want to go in there, little prince.” When he offered a friendly smile, I saw his broken and yellowing teeth; his breath reeked of garlic. “It’s not like it was before.”

  Chapter Four

  “I heard he was suckled by a she-goat,” Alastor sai
d.

  Ipheus shook his head. “No, the goat just led the searchers to him.”

  We tossed a pig’s bladder in the great court, which was a pleasant place to play in the late spring afternoon after the petitioners had gone home, and exchanged gossip about Aegisthus. Mother liked his company far too much. She let him sleep with her in her bedchamber, and sometimes very late at night they made strange noises together like the grunting of animals. Kilissa would not explain what those sounds were except to say it was something men and women did together, and that I would understand when I was older.

  Aegisthus was my second cousin. He had been born in the palace to my grandfather’s second wife, a lunatic who had abandoned the child in the Chavos ravine, where a herdsman searching for a lost goat had found the mewling infant wrapped in fine swaddling clothes and brought him back to Atreus. The king had dismissed his young wife’s actions as postpartum foolishness, and named his new son Aegisthus, Goat-Strength.

  What a stupid story! Unwanted babies were abandoned all the time in the ravine; sometimes one could hear their thin wails piercing the air, but no one ever rescued them. And when the winter rains came, the torrent washed their tiny bones into the plain of Argos.

  I tossed the bladder to Alastor. Aegisthus often told the tale of his birth and naming, adding new embellishments all the time, so we were never certain what the bare bones of the truth were.

  There were other, more salacious stories about him that one could never mention, because Aegisthus was a guest, protected by Zeus Xenios, and guests could never be insulted, even with the truth.

  That did not deter Elektra, my youngest sister, who despised the interloper so much that she was willing to violate his guest-right and slander him. Once, she started to tell me that Aegisthus’s mother was really his half-sister, and that his real father Thyestes was also his grandfather. “He was a lecherous drunkard who drank so much one night, they say, that he thought she was—”