Chapter Five

 

 

 

Clytaemnestra ordered laborers to open Agamemnon’s tholos, air out the burial chamber, and prepare a place for the slain king and his companions. Though it was a wife’s duty to prepare her husband’s corpse for the prothesis, she left the washing and anointing of the corpse to menials, and canceled the viewing.

My maid Althaia gleaned gossip from the queen’s maids and brought me additional details. “She’s even going to bury the king’s followers and the foreign concubine with him.”

Clytaemnestra hired the finest professional mourners in Argolis. She sent to Midea, the king’s own estate, for foodstuffs and wine to furnish the funeral feast, and selected the grave goods. Yet when presented with the immense, glittering Trojan treasure that had been Agamemnon’s share of the spoils, she suddenly became stingy, mixing in old, disused furniture, chipped vessels, and battered armor with the better items. In the meantime, I saw her wearing new jewels, and Aegisthus flaunted gold and silver ornaments, a silver-studded sword, and a gold drinking cup—wedding gifts they gave themselves from the Trojan spoils.

Hypocrite. While Clytaemnestra denounced my mother as a whore, she openly consorted with her lover, who would become her husband the very night of the funeral feast; she could not even wait a decent interval. A scathing reprimand from the ruling body of the Argive assembly went unheeded, even when they sent a royal envoy. Aegisthus delighted in playing the hospitable king. He heaped the envoy with the traditional guest-gifts and lent a polite ear to the assembly’s grievances as though he seriously meant to take their advice under consideration.

Plasters and painters returned to the king’s apartment to retouch work they had begun before Agamemnon’s return, only now the bright frescoes and rich furnishings belonged to a usurper.

Aegisthus’s supporters came to the wedding feast and received lavish gifts from him and the queen. Agamemnon’s gold went to the men who had helped murder him. I despised those ruffians, the way they insulted us princesses and mocked the absent Orestes. I hated how they molested the servant girls, who clearly did not like them, either. Clytaemnestra tolerated the nuisance as long as his retainers did not break anything or kill anyone, and Aegisthus himself kept his indiscretions with the servant girls private.

On the funeral morning, dozens of noblemen and their wives poured in from throughout the surrounding area, cramming the citadel to capacity. Clytaemnestra received the mourners in the megaron, where for the first time before an audience she spun the elaborate fiction she had crafted to explain the deaths.

“Faithful Talthybius told me my dear husband was in such a terrible mood that day.” Talthybius had told her nothing; he had not even been there. “We never even expected him that afternoon, but the next day. What happened was all a terrible misunderstanding!”

“Indeed,” commented Cylarabes, Argos’s Lord Ambassador to Mycenae.

Clytaemnestra blotted a theatric tear with the corner of her black-edged veil. “What a horrible scene! There has always been bad blood between Lord Aegisthus and King Atreus’s sons, but this was a terrible, tragic accident. Lord Aegisthus was merely acting as a loyal kinsman, advising us in matters where a woman’s soft hand would not suffice. He would have been gone when Agamemnon arrived, had the timing not been so bungled.”

“Yes, I can imagine just where a man’s firm hand might be useful,” Cylarabes observed drily. Behind him, a pair of ladies covered their mouths with their hands to stifle their titters.

Clytaemnestra stared him down. “It came to blows, right here where we’re standing.” Her scarlet mouth twitched at the corners, curving into a poisonous little smile. “Agamemnon’s poor concubine! That unfortunate Trojan princess miscarried from sheer fright and died right there.”

She related all these details, knowing her audience was not at all taken in by her playacting. And why should they be? By now, everyone knew how she had cursed Agamemnon after Iphigenia’s death, and how she had carried on her affair with Aegisthus.

“Where is Prince Orestes?” Cylarabes asked. “A man’s faithful son and heir should be the one to preside over his funeral rites.”

Clytaemnestra provided a ready explanation for that, too. “The commotion startled him. He has gone into hiding, as frightened little boys will do.”

Aegisthus made his entrance just in time for the first libation, amid much grumbling and muttering. He, too, wore black, along with a contrite expression. When addressed, he repeated Clytaemnestra’s story almost verbatim. No one believed him, either.

Pallbearers brought the king’s bier into the great court for the procession, which stretched from the palace to the royal tholos: a shuffling line of black-clad courtiers, ambassadors, priests, merchants, and scribes who had come to pay their respects to the dead king.

Agamemnon’s tholos tomb gleamed in the sunshine, its whitewashed apex thrusting up against a clear blue sky. At the end of the dromos, a monolithic façade of red porphyry and mottled green Laconian marble inset polished double doors standing fifteen feet high hinted at the splendor within.

No amount of alabaster and marble and bronze could disguise the fact that this was a tomb; not even a High King’s riches could defeat death. Dozens of flickering lamps allowed a macabre play of light and shadow upon the walls. I could barely make out the vaulted ceiling worked with interlocking spirals, rosettes, and acanthus leaves. Myrrh and crocus oil perfumed the space, and the doors had been left open since yesterday to banish all rankness, but death had a very distinct odor and nothing could mask the putrescence of a grave sealed for seven years.

Chrysothemis reached for my hand, clutching it tightly as we entered the tomb together.

Elektra was not with us. Yesterday morning, Aegisthus’s men had dragged her from the palace and taken her away. They had pulled her hair and struck her like a common slave as she dug in her heels to resist them. The entire citadel had heard her shouting obscenities against her mother and Aegisthus, accusing them of sacrilege, regicide, and denouncing them as usurpers. Chrysothemis and I were too afraid to intervene, to ask questions. Better to remain inconspicuous lest we find ourselves dragged away, too.

A short time later, Clytaemnestra had called us to her sitting room to explain, although not before she reprimanded Chrysothemis for her hysterical weeping. “Calm down, you foolish child. You should be rejoicing. This is Elektra’s wedding day!” Clytaemnestra exclaimed. “She has married the prince of goatherds and moved into a thatch and mud palace.” In the ensuing silence, the queen allowed herself a venomous smile. “I understand he’s quite handy with the rod.”

In the tomb, Chrysothemis leaned against me and sobbed. I drew my veil over my nose; it did little to shut out the horrible stench, but concealed my disgust with Aegisthus. Already playing the king, assuming the role of chief mourner and using Agamemnon’s own golden rhyton to pour the customary drink offering.

“Hades, dread lord, and Persephone, dark queen,” he intoned, “receive this libation for the shade of Agamemnon Atreides, High King of Mycenae, Argos, and Achaea, overlord of the Islands, and conqueror of Troy.” Dark red liquid splashed like blood onto the floor beside the king’s shrouded bier.

Aegisthus next drew Agamemnon’s sword from its red leather sheath, slid the blade under his right foot, and bent it double.

Orestes should have been the one to pour the libation and dispatch his father’s sword. Aegisthus’s trackers had not found him or we would have heard. Let swift Hermes continue to watch over him, I prayed, so he might return one day and deal with his father’s murderers!

It was so cramped in the burial chamber that we in front were pressed against each other and in danger of falling across the bier. Agamemnon’s corpse was shrouded in white linen so gossamer-fine that one could just start to recognize the dead man’s features underneath. I heard a woman nearby remark about the lack of smell, and a man explain to her that when a corpse bled out first the stink was much less. When he next started to relate an anecdote about a prince’s burial where the corpse had been so ripe that it was nothing but a mass of seething grave worms, she and several other women swiftly hushed him.

I tried to breathe while averting my gaze from the corpse. Agamemnon’s shroud revealed more shadow than detail; my aunt would have made certain that no one could see his many wounds. Yet in her miserliness and spite, she had not provided the traditional royal death mask. I overheard people commenting on the lack thereof, complaining about the flouting of custom.

We started to disperse, making way for the kinsmen of the slain companions. Those men had been cremated to conceal the true manner of their deaths, and their funerary urns arranged in places of honor around the king’s bier. Chrysothemis, still crushing my hand in hers, directed my attention toward the tomb’s other occupant. Iphigenia’s burial had been moved to one side. Fresh garlands lent color to her moldering shroud. “It’s so sad,” my last remaining cousin whispered in my ear. “Iphigenia should have been here with us.”

“If she had been,” I whispered back, “then there would have been no funeral today.”

Just before we exited the funereal gloom, I noticed the Trojan concubine’s plain urn standing alone in a corner. Cassandra had no grave goods and no mourners to provide food or drink offerings. It saddened me to think that my aunt nursed such spite against my uncle’s unfortunate captive that she could not have spared even a strand of cheap beads or a plain wooden spindle to help speed Cassandra’s shade to the hereafter.