The Young Lion Read online

  Kilissa tried without success to silence her. “Do you want your mother to hear, young lady?”

  “Let her!” Even at ten years old, Elektra possessed an insolent, mischievous streak. “Thyestes had a horse cock, they say,” she continued. “He poked our grandmother, his own nurse—” At this, she stuck her tongue out at Kilissa. “He did Pelopia, too, once she was a woman, and some say he wasn’t drunk at all when he did that.”

  I did not understand everything she said, except the part about great-uncle Thyestes having a giant member. That was funny.

  The guardsman Augeas was right: Mother had eyes and ears throughout the citadel. Someone repeated what Elektra had said, within moments of her saying it, and the moment she heard, she marched straightaway from her apartment to the nursery to scold her wayward daughter.

  I knew we were in trouble the moment she appeared. Queen Clytaemnestra was not beautiful, but formidable and big-boned, with curling brown hair and flashing dark eyes. She always dressed splendidly, so when she suddenly appeared in the nursery doorway with both arms crossed over her ample bosom she looked like the cult statue of a wrathful goddess.

  “Hold your tongue, young lady! Zeus Xenios will strike you dead with his thunderbolt for speaking so,” she said sharply.

  Kilissa and I feared punishment, but Elektra stood up to her. “For speaking the truth? Aegisthus is a snake. Father would never—”

  Mother backhanded her across the cheek. “Be silent!”

  Angry tears streamed down Elektra’s face. She remained undaunted, however, not knowing how to be afraid or when to shut up. “You’re a slut!” She balled her hands into fists. “You let that dirty man—”

  A second backhand split her lip. As the blood welled from the cut, Mother barked over her shoulder at Kilissa. “Take this wicked child to her room and lock her in. She will have no supper tonight.”

  Elektra never did finish her story. I later learned from Hermione that the young Aegisthus had stabbed Atreus to death in his bed, or had let Thyestes into the room to do the deed. Either way, Father and Uncle Menelaus wanted him dead. Mother never should have granted him the protection of Mycenae’s hearth. Rather, she should have obeyed her husband and king, executed the villain the moment he appeared, and sent his severed head as proof to Father.

  *~*~*~*

  Aegisthus found me in the great court after my friends went home. I was probing under the exposed roots of a shady plane tree for earthworms, never imagining that he might want anything do with me; our previous interactions had been curt and perfunctory. He might, it seemed, have paid more attention to an insect buzzing around his head than to a six-year-old child.

  Infused with quiet malice, he appeared without warning under the branches. Without speaking, he retrieved the pig’s bladder my friends and I had been playing with and tossed it to me; it hit me square in the chest before dropping at my feet. “Don’t you have lessons today, young prince?” Aegisthus’s tone was as greasy as the unguent holding his ringlets in place. “I expected to find you in the schoolroom.”

  I stared at him dumbly. Aegisthus was a handsome man, about twenty-eight years old, catlike and sensual, dressed in the fashionable clothes Mother had given him. I did not understand what she saw in him, when everything about him was false. Had anyone asked my opinion, which they did not, I could not have articulated exactly how he was false or why it mattered, only that the feeling lived deep down inside me, so deep that it must be god-given and therefore true.

  “Toss me the bladder, Orestes.” Aegisthus held out both hands. “I watched you playing before.”

  Not knowing what else to do, I fumbled on the ground for the bladder and tossed it to him.

  “Ah, that’s more like it!” he exclaimed. “You’re so quiet, when your father and grandfather were so loud!” Aegisthus uttered a sharp laugh. “Has some demon caught your tongue?”

  I shook my head.

  Then he grinned, showing off perfect white teeth. His smile would have been dazzling had it been sincere. “I know you have a tongue, young man, because you and your friends had plenty to say before.”

  So he had not only been watching us, but eavesdropping, too. I neither denied nor admitted what we had said about him, but just stood there staring at the ground and wishing I were a hundred miles away.

  “Well?” Aegisthus asked impatiently.

  “Yes, sir,” I croaked.

  “Ah, so you do have a voice!” he exclaimed in mock delight. “I was beginning to worry you might be soft in the head.” He moved closer, so I saw his new red leather sandals, and crouched down so our eyes met. “Let me tell you something about goats, Orestes. They are tough animals. They thrive in the rockiest, most barren places where other animals would not survive. Remember that, young Mountain Dweller.”

  As he rose, Aegisthus considered the pig’s bladder in his hand, then nonchalantly tossed it back to me. Startled, I caught it. “Go upstairs,” he ordered sharply. “You’ve played and gossiped enough for one day.”

  Released from his spell, I fled the great court and raced up the stairs. I paused on the second landing, and, panting, gazed down the light-well to make certain he was not following. Although I saw nothing, it seemed he was still there, like a monster in one of the tales Kilissa told to frighten me.

  Chapter Five

  “Your name has three sounds, so it has three signs.”

  I studied the symbols scrawled in the wet clay. O-re-ta. “But that’s not the way it sounds.”

  “I told you before, our writing comes from the Cretans, and they do not run their consonants together.” Timon tapped the edge of his stylus against the tablet, leaving a faint indentation in the clay. “Now do it again. Make the marks more carefully this time. Others have to be able to read them.”

  The royal pedagogue was teaching me the script the palace clerks used for the tallies. Few noblemen could read or write, but my grandfather Atreus had seen the advantages in sending his children to the schoolroom. Timon explained how he had not wanted his descendants to look like barbarians in front of the foreign dignitaries who had mocked him. Father continued the trend, determined that we should learn such grammar, mathematics, geography, economics, genealogy, and rhetoric as we could be taught.

  Hermione and my sisters had finished their schooling just as I began mine. Elektra should have continued with me, but she was an intractable brat who played pranks on Timon, and stubbornly refused to attend her lessons. Chrysothemis, on the other hand, tried, but was dismally stupid and at twelve years old had learned all she was ever going to learn. Iphigenia had been the only smart one among my sisters. Of course. Iphigenia had been beautiful and perfect.

  It seemed to me that Elektra might have tried harder and been a good student, because she was as sharp and fearless as a man, but it soon became obvious that she wearied of hearing about goddess-like Iphigenia and in defiance set out to become her sister’s exact opposite: tomboyish, headstrong, and unruly. Maybe she had always been that way. I could not recall. She spun an uneven thread, was clumsy working the loom and the needle. She could not bake cakes without burning them. She liked hunting and chariots, though she was not permitted either, and had an honest vocation for the cult house because she was fascinated by the ritual double axes and enjoyed tending the sacred snakes. Once again, Mother forbade her those things.

  Like my sisters, I should have had my lessons upstairs, but I liked visiting Timon’s cubicle. Mother allowed me the privilege as long as I obeyed my pedagogue and heeded my lessons.

  Timon lived in clutter, among baskets of clay tablets, yellowing palm leaves and papyrus scrolls bound in old leather, chipped pottery, and moth-eaten weavings. An orange tomcat named Kirros dozed curled up on his cot. A single window admitted light and air when the shutters were open, and an old oil lamp always burned at the little writing table during my lessons.

  I dug into the clay to make the first sign, then the second, whereupon Timon gently touched the stylus to my knuckles t
o command my attention; he only smacked them when he absolutely had to. “Not so deep,” he chided. “Your hand will tire. Loosen your grasp on the stylus. Give the clay a light touch or you will cut right through it.”

  Writing too deep gouged lines in the clay, but not deep enough rendered the signs illegible. “It’s hard.” My fingers were already cramping from a morning spent practicing signs. Endless drills of ra, re, ri, ro, and ru. My reward for performing well was getting to write my name.

  “All things worth learning are hard,” Timon said.

  “Why do I have to know how to read and write, anyway?” I complained. “Kings have scribes to do that for them.”

  Timon chuckled. “Kings are supposed to know more than everyone else, young man. And suppose you wish to send a secret message to someone and do not trust your scribe. Or perhaps the poor man drops dead from too much work and you have no one else.” Thin eyebrows twitched in wry amusement. “This is what the High King commands, and a boy always does as his father wishes, so we will not debate the matter.” I sighed heavily. “Now, once you master your signs and perfect your handwriting, I will help you write a letter to your father.”

  I forgot my frustration and aching fingers all at once. “Do you really mean it?”

  “Of course, but not yet.” Timon lifted a finger, cautioning me not to get too carried away. “You still have to master two dozen more signs, plus all the ideograms and figures, and you need more practice using the stylus. You do not want your first letter to look childish, do you?”

  Visions filled my head of a black-bearded man wearing a purple cloak smiling over a letter and passing it around. Orestes is a splendid boy. A gift from the gods. He will make a great king someday. “Can I write it on papyrus?”

  “Absolutely not!” Timon exclaimed. “Papyrus is very expensive, and you would have to write with ink, where here you can barely scratch in clay. No, you will write your letter on a wax tablet.”

  “I see.”

  “Sit up, young man. Princes do not slouch.” Timon nudged me under the chin with the stylus. “Your father wrote his first letters in clay and wax, too.” He indicated the tablet and half-formed re sign. “You are going to write your name ten more times before you leave today, so stop dawdling.”

  I picked up my stylus and tried again. Re was supposed to be among the easiest signs to draw, but my effort looked like a lopsided trident. “Timon, are the stories about Aegisthus true?”

  Timon made a disapproving sound under his breath. “Are you referring to the stories about the she-goat?”

  “No, I mean the one about his mother being his sister and his father being his grandfather.”

  “That is not a subject fit for discussion, young man.” Timon answered in the same warning tone he used with Elektra. I wondered whether he would rap my knuckles for my presumption.

  I was about to apologize and return to my lesson when, sighing, he continued, “Those who would know for certain are dead now. But Thyestes did claim once that an oracle commanded him to lie with his own daughter to beget a son who would avenge all the wrongs that Atreus did to him.”

  From Elektra, I knew that Atreus had killed his brother’s young sons to repay him for seducing his wife and attempting to usurp his throne. After that, the story was filled with mysterious gaps. The abrupt silence with which everyone greeted my queries spoke of a lingering fear, a taboo something never to be revealed. I hated it when adults refused to tell me things. “Do you believe that?”

  Timon shrugged. “Thyestes lied about a great many things. For all anyone knows, Aegisthus might be a trueborn son of Atreus, and your uncle. I have found that the more sensational and terrible a story, the more people are willing to believe in it. Even Aegisthus seems to believe the tale, though one can never quite tell with him.”

  I thought of the perverse way Aegisthus compelled me and my sisters to address him as Uncle. Maybe he did that because he really was my uncle. Gods forbid! It was bad enough that he was a second cousin, but for him to be my father’s half-brother? The very notion filled me with revulsion. “I wish Mother would send him away.”

  Timon dipped a finger into the little bowl of water he kept on the table for moistening the clay, lest it dry out before I finish my lesson. “The laws of hospitality are absolute, young man. She cannot evict him now. Zeus Xenios protects all guests, no matter who they are or what crime they may have committed,” he said sternly. “Do not make trouble like your sister does. Your father will deal with the matter when he returns home.”

  *~*~*~*

  Upstairs, I scrawled out my name once more, in charcoal on a potsherd to show my cousin. “You see? I know my signs.”

  Hermione was the daughter of Menelaus and Helen. She was thirteen, seven years older than me, with long, autumn-colored hair and blue eyes like mine. Kilissa said that we were betrothed, but the word meant nothing to me until she further explained that my cousin and I would one day be married. “But she’s a girl!” I protested. “Girls are gross. I don’t want to marry one!”

  Kilissa laughed. “Then who do you expect to marry, young man?” When I did not answer, she went on, “Not that it matters. Your father and hers decided it all when you were born. And you’ve already sworn the oaths and joined hands before Mother Dia. I saw it myself.”

  I could not recall the betrothal ceremony. Hermione had to describe it for me. “It happened the day I arrived from Sparta,” she said. “You were fidgeting and picked your nose, and your mother was angry because you wouldn’t repeat the words.”

  “That’s not true!” The picture she painted made me indignant because it was so outrageous. Only babies and peasant children picked their noses.

  Hermione did not argue the point, but changed the subject by admiring my awkward signs. “Can you write my name?”

  Rubbing out my earlier marks, I tried but found myself unable to scrawl the signs, because I had not practiced them beforehand. Hermione regarded me patiently, then took the charcoal stick and wrote her name as the scribes would have: E-re-mo-ni. “Now you can practice,” she said cheerfully.

  Because it was her, I felt no shame over my shortcomings. Hermione never laughed at me or condescended to my youth. Although she was unfortunate in being born a girl, she was neither stupid or gross. I simply did not want to marry her because she was like a sister, and because she was so much older than me that she would be an old woman by the time I was a man.

  I diligently applied myself to copying out the first sign of her name. “Timon told me today about Aegisthus.”

  Hermione drew a sharp breath. “Let’s talk about something else.”

  Again, the avoidance. “I don’t understand why Mother likes him.” I shaped the second sign, re, more easily because it also appeared in my own name. “I think he’s...” Elektra could have offered up a hundred apt descriptions, laced with the profanity she had picked up from the sentries, but in the end one could measure Aegisthus with a simple word. “He’s evil.”

  My cousin answered with the briefest nod, in case anyone was observing. “I think so, too,” she mouthed back.

  Chapter Six

  Mother rarely showered me with gifts, but for my seventh name day she gave me sweet cakes, a blue cloak and scarlet leather shoes, a wooden sword, and a painted wooden warrior with a boar tusk helmet. Then she led me by the hand from the nursery and down a corridor to a room she said was mine.

  Brand-new frescoes decorated the walls. Blue monkeys cavorted among palms and reeds. Two brown-skinned boxing youths sparred right above the bed. “Your Spartan uncles Castor and Polydeukes used to share just such a room when they were boys,” Mother told me. “Do you like it?”

  “Oh, yes!” Even more than the room, I liked the way Mother was smiling. Not the malicious little half-smile she used with people she disliked, but a broad grin that suffused her cheeks with color and lit up her dark eyes, revealing a strange sort of beauty. “Thank you, Mother.”

  Timon gave me an ivory stylus and w
ooden folding tablet. Kilissa loaded me with socks and clean loincloths, a typical nurse’s gifts. Chrysothemis wove and embroidered a blue tunic for me. Hermione gave me a little offering table painted along the sides with scarlet flames, like the great hearth in the megaron. Elektra let me hold the snake she had caught near the spring; she kept it in a jar, fed it mice, and tormented poor Chrysothemis with it until Mother sharply ordered her to surrender it to the priestesses in the cult house.

  Kilissa made me lie down in the afternoon, in the sultry midsummer air. I lay on my back atop the fleeces, studying the ceiling with its blue and yellow stars, and wondered what Father would have given me. Maybe a real sword and shield, an ash spear, a chariot with horses. Every boy’s dream. My lack of experience with those things made no difference. He would have indulged me, shown the world that I was his son, his heir, his favorite thing in the whole world. Or, better yet, he would have let me ride with him in his chariot, taken me on the hunt, and shown me how to sail a ship.

  Father would not come home until the war ended. Kings never left the field, not even to visit their families; they had to stay with their men to keep them loyal and focused. If only the Trojans would just give Aunt Helen back! Fighting a whole war just for her, for all these years, was stupid.

  That night, we feasted in the megaron, upon trestle tables set up around the great hearth. Mother let me have my favorite dishes, and allowed me to pour the first libation from Father’s gold rhyton. Afterward, she silenced Aegisthus’s backhanded praise and complimented me. “That was well done, Orestes.”

  She invited me to sit beside her in the seat of honor, the most coveted place in the megaron next to the throne, but accepting meant sitting within arm’s length of Aegisthus, whose condescending demeanor always spoiled my appetite. Could she not have sent him away for just one evening? It was my name day feast and I did not want him there. “Thank you,” I said regretfully. “But I would rather sit with Timon, and Hermione, and my sisters.”