Chapter Twenty-nine

 

 

 

Summer’s heat parched the scrub clinging to the citadel mount, and in the white-hot furnace of the afternoon not even the insects stirred. Orestes limited the petitioners he received each morning, and closed the megaron early. At night, the servants slept on the rooftops to catch what cool breeze blew in from the south.

Orestes liked nothing better than to lie naked beside me in the warm evenings and contemplate my swelling belly, stroking and nuzzling my navel as though he could reach through my flesh to the baby quickening in my womb.

While the midwife assured him that I could receive him as long as I did not find lovemaking uncomfortable, Orestes would not risk injuring me. He continued to lie with Chione, though that arrangement could not last much longer. Elektra urged me to focus solely on my child, and not to concern myself with my husband’s pleasure; she would find him suitable bedmates.

Men could be so ruthless and violent among themselves yet completely dumbstruck when it came to a woman’s natural cycles. Imagine, the king of Mycenae, reduced to uncertainty, even awe, over a single baby! How his enemies would have laughed to see him behaving like an overprotective nurse, admonishing me to eat the correct foods, and giving me his arm to escort me down the stairs each evening!

“Our son will be a mighty warrior and hunter.” Orestes kissed my belly. “He’ll take his first lion at twelve and go to his first games at fourteen like his father, and all his enemies will tremble in fear when he steps on the sands.”

His stubble tickled me. “Stop it!” I cried, laughing. “You went to your first games at sixteen!”

“Don’t tell Kretheus.” Orestes moved up to my breasts. Pregnancy made my nipples even more sensitive, and he knew that. “He hates having to change his songs.”

I hissed in a breath. “What else have you been exaggerating?” Sometimes he brought my name into his boasts, which I did not like at all.

Orestes glanced at me over my breasts, his mischievous look betraying him. “Sometimes the truth doesn’t make a very good song.”

His exploits had become popular among the Mycenaeans and Argives. I sat beside him while the bard chanted the songs of the heroes, for Orestes never received important guests without introducing me to them. “Here she is, my lords,” he relished telling them. “Queen Hermione, daughter of Menelaus and fair Helen. Is she not the most beautiful woman in Hellas?”

When mortal men boasted so, it made the gods jealous, and invited disaster. “You mustn’t say such a thing!” I whispered sharply.

“It’s the truth,” he said, taking his seat again.

I sighed. “How can you know, when you haven’t even seen all the women in Hellas to judge them.”

Orestes raised his cup to his lips. “Any woman more splendid than you would have to be an immortal goddess.”

I had come to realize that Orestes needed to boast, to salt his tales with heroic exaggerations and half-truths so they became grand enough to live inside, a refuge from the ghosts dogging his quiet moments. His mother’s death troubled him enough that he fasted and sat vigil in the hot sun on the second anniversary of her death. Perhaps the gods ordered him to do so, as he claimed, or, just as likely, what he heard was the voice of his own guilt.

He found solace in his work, in poring over petitions and correspondence, and in supervising building projects that bolstered his vision of a grand new Mycenae. I woke each dawn to the echoing clink of hammers and chisels as masons shored up Atreus’s old fortifications, or labored at a new site outside the northeast circuit wall, where a gang under a Hittite master builder was tunneling into the citadel mount to construct a massive new cistern.

I knew he anticipated conflict with Nemea and Corinth, which had broken away from Mycenaean rule after Agamemnon’s death, and whose obedience and tribute Orestes meant to reclaim. He began taking his men out on grueling night marches to prepare them for the kind of stealth raids Atreus had specialized in. I had no doubt he meant to seize Nemea in just such a fashion, after its lord had refused to send tribute. Orestes would not let that insult stand.

I also knew that sooner or later he intended to consolidate his Mycenaean and Spartan territories by taking Argos. To be king of Mycenae and Sparta would not suffice. Orestes meant to become nothing less than a High King like his forefathers.

Such ambitions required equally ambitious measures. I held my tongue like an obedient wife over his proposed military campaigns, but did not shrink from asking my husband outright how he intended to pay for his various building projects. All those stonemasons, carpenters, and plasterers expected payment, the raw materials cost, and our treasuries and storerooms were not bottomless. “I thought Aegisthus spent everything,” I said.

“Much Trojan gold remains,” Orestes told me. “Mother oversaw the stores, and you know how frugal she was.”

While he enjoyed the logistical challenges his projects presented, he also found time to encourage his nephews in their adventures. Strophius and Medon adored their uncle. I watched them together, reflecting that one day soon Orestes would be wrestling and boxing with our son, and teaching him all the things Agamemnon should have taught Orestes.

Autumn came, bringing cooler weather, but no relief for my changing body. After the grape harvest and the feast of the vines, my swelling belly strained my back and pulled at my gowns; my women loosened the latter, but could do nothing for the former. No matter how much Orestes tried to reassure me, I felt cumbersome and ugly, like a beached pentekonter or swollen pithos. Never mind that he considered pentekonters beautiful ships, or pithoi lovely vessels, I did not share his sentiments, and continuously had to remind myself that the baby moving inside me was a miraculous thing.

Elektra prepared everything for the birth. She moved the local midwife into the citadel, and even selected a competent new mother among the servant girls to act as the infant’s wet nurse until my own milk came. Moreover, my sister-in-law offered reassurance and good advice. “I know it’s hard now, and you’re swearing to yourself that you’ll never, ever do it again,” she said, “but once the baby is born, you’ll be so besotted with him that your pains will seem as nothing to you.”

I prayed that was so. It was becoming increasingly difficult to move about, and when my ankles swelled, impossible to leave the palace to attend my duties in the cult house. Orestes forbade me to set up a bed there, citing the fact that the lower citadel was noisier and the air more unwholesome. That left Elektra to act as high priestess, which not only rankled, and left me feeling like a secondary wife, but the religious implications concerned me. A queen’s conduct affected her people. Should I falter in my duties, I risked inciting divine wrath. Mother Dia might blight next year’s crops. Eleuthia and Artemis might punish me in childbirth.

Elektra considered my misgivings premature and unfounded. “You send me to the cult house every day with new offerings,” she said, “and there isn’t a woman in all Argolis with a better-tended altar than yours.”

“It isn’t the same.”

“You’re certainly not the first queen of Mycenae to have this trouble,” Elektra told me. “I remember Mother couldn’t leave the palace at all in her last three months when she was carrying Orestes, and he turned out healthy. Now stop worrying about everything and relax, or you’ll become as bad as Chrysothemis.”

A month ago, a Spartan messenger had arrived with word that Chrysothemis had borne a daughter called Thalaia. It delighted me to hear that Sparta had a new princess. Aethiolas offered further details in his letter. Chrysothemis took motherhood so seriously that she badgered the wet nurse, and was so thoroughly useless in the nursery that everyone breathed a sigh of relief when my mother took over.

“I will never become such a terror,” I vowed.

“No,” Elektra agreed, “because I won’t let you.” She thoughtfully stroked the silver and amber pendant between her breasts. A gift from Pylades, who, she told me, almost never gave her presents. Her relations with him seemed less strained now. I suspected Orestes had had a hand in that.

My nieces wanted to see and touch my belly, and feel the baby kicking. “Do you have a girl in there?” Antiklea asked.

“When can she play dolls?” Charis wanted to know.

“I think it might be a boy,” I told her.

Charis refused to accept that. She wanted another playmate. “Did it tell you it was a boy?”

I did not feel like explaining Helenus’s oracle to a precocious three-year-old, even had I known what to say to make her understand. “I don’t know what it will be, dear. That’s for Mother Dia and Eleuthia to decide.”

As autumn turned toward winter, the baby started to descend in my womb; it kicked me day and night now, and that constant back pain made it almost impossible for me to find a comfortable position. Add to that a persistent need to urinate which forced me to maneuver my bulk from the bed and hobble to the bathroom several times a night. I wept in exhausted frustration.

My women tucked feather pillows against my spine to relieve my backache, and spread soft fleeces over me. Lying idle when there was so much to do grated on my nerves, for at the very least I should have been working at my loom. Instead, I dozed away the afternoons with one hand clasped protectively over my womb, and listened to the wind knocking against the shutters.

I remembered my mother had lain just so in her chamber when she was pregnant with Pleisthenes. She had been sick before and after the birth, as she had been with me. My nurse had told me how my mother had labored for two days to bring me forth, and was so weak by the end that everyone had feared for her life. How I wish she had never told me! I did not want to die giving birth to my first child, after having waited so long for it.

Orestes offered to send for Helen, so she could be with me when the time came, but it was too late in the year for her to make the journey. And besides, Chrysothemis needed her far more than I did. Bearing babies was a natural thing, I told myself. The gods had made women to bear children. I was strong and healthy. I had skilled women to help me. There was nothing to fear.

That was far easier to say than to believe. As high priestess in Sparta, I had seen women die in childbirth. Sometimes they asked for me, to give them my blessings, but though I held their hands, wiped the sweat from their brows, and said the prayers, they died, anyway.

Opening my eyes, I gazed at the kourotrophos standing on the table nearest the bed. She was very old, crafted in an outmoded Cretan style, and her scarlet and black paint was fading. She had faithfully watched over the confinements of my foremothers for eleven generations. Not a single laboring woman had died under her benevolent gaze. Let that be so now!

 

*~*~*~*

An infant’s mewling cry woke me.

Winter rain sleeted against the shutters. A minty fragrance wafted past my nostrils; someone had tossed herbs into the brazier to fumigate the chamber. Kourotrophoi and amulets occupied every available space, cramming my dressing table and the little table beside my bed, silent guardians against any malevolent forces which might seek to harm me or my child. Foremost among them was the Cretan idol, which someone had anointed with a sheen of fresh oil and decorated with red ribbons.

Drowsiness suffused my entire body, tempting me back to sleep even as my tentative movements roused sore muscles. I felt a dull ache between my thighs.

Just as I closed my eyes again, I heard an infant whimpering and gurgling next door—my son with the wet nurse! A fierce mother-hunger flooded through me, a physical ache to have my child beside me, to kiss and dandle him, and clasp him to my breast. Only my exhaustion was stronger, preventing me from rising and going into the next room to claim him.

But he was safe with the nurse, I reminded myself, and my milk was not yet flowing. I lay snugly under the fleeces, listened to the hypnotic rhythm of the rain beating down, and browsed through recent memories. I remembered the midwife showing me my newborn baby, then laying him upon my breast. Orestes, jubilant at the birth of a son, had come in and seen the child before his sister and the other women shooed him out.

I strove to forget the labor: the contractions, the hours of waiting, and the agonized straining as my women supported me on the birthing stool. Delivering a child was like being turned inside out and beaten like a rug! Sweet Mother Dia, I had not realized women possessed the fortitude to endure such an obscene amount of pain and blood. The birth seemed impossible, until, strained to the limit of my mortal strength, and with a last, exhausted push and prayer to the goddess, my son left the cocoon of his mother’s aching womb and entered the world.

Soft footfalls alerted me that someone had entered the bedchamber. I cracked an eyelid. Monime carried a tray with steaming broth and tea, for which I had no appetite. “I want to see him.” My voice was weak and hoarse, and my throat sore from screaming during the birth.

Monime withdrew. I heard murmuring voices in the next room, then the curtain parted to admit Elektra, bearing a swaddled bundle which she laid down beside me. “He’s sleeping now,” she whispered.

Tisamenus. It meant Great Retribution. Orestes had chosen the name months ago, on a humid summer night when Zeus’s thunder had rolled across the hills. He claimed divine inspiration, after rejecting all the other possibilities as unsuitable. Tisamenus. I knew only that it was a terribly large and ominous name for such a small child to fill.

Our firstborn son was red and wrinkled from the birth, with a moist rosebud mouth and downy wisps of reddish-gold hair that clung to his scalp. His name notwithstanding, he was so small, and warm, and wonderful! I traced a fingertip along his butter-soft skin, drinking in his scent.

Elektra forced me to drink the nourishing broth and tea. Thank Eleuthia and blessed Artemis for her presence! She had been with me since my labor began, and had taken charge of the birth.

After I finished, she called my women in to help me relieve myself. I found I could hobble to the privy on my own, despite my exhaustion and soreness, but needed their assistance to change my padding.

Sleeping through the night, I woke with the dawn, and ate and washed again. This time, I felt strong enough to don a dressing gown and venture into the sitting room, where the young wet nurse had just laid Tisamenus down for a nap in the lavishly decorated cradle Elektra had given me, and was now suckling her own infant. Elektra and the midwives had promised that my milk would start flowing soon, but for now, I envied the wet nurse the simple intimacy she enjoyed with her child.

At my altar, I honored Eleuthia and Artemis with libations of wine and honey, and promises of greater offerings in the cult house. It had all been arranged before the birth: lengths of purple and scarlet cloth, perfumed unguents, gold bangles, rings, and necklaces.

Thebe plucked a soft melody on her four-stringed phorminx while Tisamenus contentedly dozed in his cradle. Monime fetched my spindle and wool basket, that I could sit beside the brazier and work.

Outside, it had stopped raining. I scented wood smoke in the air, and heard the distant lowing of cattle and the monotonous chanting of the high priest carrying across the citadel mount. Orestes must be making the thanksgiving sacrifices, driving the animals through the Lion Gate to the altar. Anticipating the birth, he had sent to his estates for the best animals in his herd more than a week ago, and had instructed the priests to keep the sacrificial labrys and knife in readiness.

I spun wool and listened to Thebe’s playing, while frequently pausing to watch my son sleep; he was the most beautiful thing in the whole world. For this magical moment, we were removed from the life of the citadel, quiet and secure in the snug cocoon that was the queen’s apartment. Aside from the naming day ritual and the mother’s usual thanksgiving offerings, there were no pressing matters requiring my attention. Elektra leapt at the chance to take charge, and had already reassured me that she would manage the household until I had recovered from the birth.

Just before noon, Orestes arrived smelling of the precious unguents his bath servants had rubbed into his skin, and wearing a richly embroidered tunic and a broad grin. Seeing him again made my heart race. I set down my spindle and raised my face to receive his kiss. At a brusque gesture from him, my women and the wet nurse respectfully took their leave.

Orestes bent over the cradle, and lifted his swaddled son onto his shoulder. Tisamenus mewled, whimpered at the strange man holding him, and then subsided as his father began rubbing his back with practiced ease. “Are you well?” he asked.

“I’m still a bit tired,” I admitted, “but much better than before.”

“I want you to rest, Hermione,” he said earnestly. “Elektra made all the offerings last night and this morning, and she’s already agreed to oversee the preparations for the naming day feast. You don’t have to do anything.” An avid gleam of pleasure lit Orestes’ eyes. I knew that look; he was planning something. “We’re going to have a splendid celebration. There must be at least seven days of games, feasting, and sacrifices.”

Did he have no head for figures? “It’ll ruin us.”

“Our son is worth it.” Claiming the vacant chair beside me, Orestes kissed the fuzz on Tisamenus’s head. It was hard to believe that one day Tisamenus would grow into a big man like his father, or that Orestes himself had ever been so small. “He’s a blessing from the gods, after all our troubles.”

Never had Orestes been more endearing, sitting there with his newborn son in his arms. Never had I loved him so much.

Then I heard Thebe softly plucking the lyre in the next room. One day, there would be a song about us, a king and queen who had endured many sorrows and long separation, but whose love had banished a curse and set the old ghosts of Mycenae to rest. A bard would choose this singular moment, a man and wife together with their newborn son, to close his composition.

But we were more than just a song, more than the son of Agamemnon and the daughter of Helen. We were Orestes and Hermione. Creatures of flesh and blood. We were the sum of our memories, convictions, and longings, and where the bard made his ending, we made our beginning.