The Coast of Aulis

Clytemnestra awoke early, and to much exhaustion. Lying motionless on top of the bedclothes, she calculated by the light from the high window that she had but two hours of sleep behind her. She shivered in the pale, misty air of her small room and pulled her legs underneath the sheets. Had she not been raised half-wild in Sparta, where she galloped day and night with her sisters and taught herself to survive as if she were some Amazon princess, she would not have been able to tell the time.

She knew many other things from her childhood, like how to track an eagle, or catch fish without a net, but her particular skill that she had heralded over her siblings was her ability to tell any time of night or day. Of course, there was no known formula for seeing the hour at night, and so her abilities were worshipped by the others for their incomprehensibility. Perhaps more certainly than anything in her life, Clytemnestra knew that it was five hours past midnight. And that the breeze on her bare arms was beginning to make her uncomfortable.

Breeze.

Wind.

Wind was coming in through the high open window.

The air was moving at Aulis.

Clytemnestra found herself kneeling on her bed and out of breath, and she knew not why. She could not see out that damnably high window, and so she tumbled leapt off her bed and threw a sheer wrapper over her shoulders and hurried out into the passageway.

Her bare feet slapped on the stone floor as she raced down toward the main hall.

"My lord, my lord!" she shouted, and felt the vibrating echoes hit her back in the face. She stopped immediately and waited until her breathing was back to normal, and she could hear everything around her.

But there was nothing to hear.

No one was in the palace.

There were no other frantic women racing about as she did. The sounds of troubled murmuring and deep sleep did not reach her ears from the men's bedchambers.

There were no guards at the main entrance.

Clytemnestra stood in the great receiving hall of the palace, felt the wind stir her hair from her face and the wrapper as it trailed around her bare legs, and her heart began to beat in a strange rhythm, though one not entirely foreign. She had stood and felt wind about her and listened to nothing with her heart beginning to race, and it had been the time when she was ten years old and she and her sister Helen had known a wolf den was near where they paused in the forest.

No one was in the palace, because Agamemnon was to sail and sack Troy on this day.

The doors to his palace were wide open. Clytemnestra walked through them and marveled at the lapis lazuli carvings inlaid on the beach wood, and slowly smiled. Oh, he was proud and arrogant, but unlike those Greek men in the stories of the Greek women as told to the young Spartan princess, Agamemnon was made thrice sure of everything before proclaiming his own strength. The fact that his massive and expensive doors were left swinging in the wind was proof that Agamemnon was sure he could leave Aulis behind without a thought, overtake Troy, and return to have the whole world at his feet.

Clytemnestra strolled out onto the overgrown pathway that lead away from the doors and down, several miles down to the coast, where a small stair that clung to the rockface of the cliffs by the sea opened to the port. Few cypress trees, and most of those transplanted from Agamemnon's Cypress conquest, dotted the plains that Clytemnestra walked through, but the breeze was more than welcome and cooled her enough to not want shade. The sun was just bleeding over the horizon, and the breeze in the hazy sky was enough to allow Clytemnestra to breathe.

There was a copse of older trees just out of eyesight from the palace, and as Clytemnestra approached it she saw the movement that can only be made by man underneath the far-reaching branches. She sped up her pace slightly, thinking how she was moving faster than the sun. Around her, the arid grass was beginning to tremble once again under the force of the wind, and she could see the feeble light glinting on the armor of Mycenaean soldiers as they shifted beneath the trees, and none of them watching her approach.

She was at the copse, now, and still they had not seen her. She did not recognize these soldiers; she recognized none of the men and women gathered, who all stared in the same direction, down toward the coast.

Clytemnestra looked from face to face, and still they did not see her. Fear made her heart beat even faster than it had since she had first felt the wind, and she wondered for the briefest of moments if this was all some trick of the gods, some hallucination that she suffered in the heat. But the pain in her bare feet, as they stood on the sharp stones beneath the trees, told her that she was wide awake, and that it was these strange people that were caught in a trance.

Orestes and Electra were among them, staring toward the port with a blank look in their eyes.

"What is… why, my children!" she said to them, and approached, and touched each of their shoulders, and bent to look in their faces.

Her words and her actions seemed to awaken the group. Suddenly the woman who stood behind her children put her own hands on their shoulders and pulled them a step back. Only the children remained fixated on the direction of the port.

"This wind is wondrous, is it not?" she tried, trying to bring her children to the present. It was as if they could not hear her, for their eyes glanced to her every few seconds, but they remained as yet close-lipped and motionless other than their large brown eyes.

"Yes, my lady, as you say," was the rote response of the strange woman. Clytemnestra examined her, and saw that she indeed looked like some nurse or other that lived at the palace. She looked around at the other faces, and saw not one other person she recognized or whom she might talk to.

"My husband… my lord Agamemnon. He is pleased?"

The nurse would not look at her. She looked at the port, or she looked at the children, or she looked at the ground, but she did not look at Clytemnestra. "He… is not here, ma'am."

"Well, that I can see!" Clytemnestra responded petulantly. She looked around again and again, and saw these strange, nameless Mycenaean faces coming closer and closer to her, and she began to feel… frightened.

"Where is he?"

The nurse would not speak.

Clytemnestra looked down at her stricken children (they were certainly stricken, they were behaving so strangely about something) and demanded, "Where is your father?"

The children could not speak.

She walked up to one soldier until she was so close she could see individual hairs on his unshaven face. "Where is my lord Agamemnon? Your king?"

"The port. Above it. My lady." He spoke softly, but he did not look at her.

She did not care. She went back to the nurse and grabbed the woman's wrists, wrenching her hands from the shoulders of her children. "I shall take them to bid goodbye to their father. You would do well not to subvert me at this moment."

She looked down at her two children beneath her hands, who shifted only a foot in her tirade. She would take them, shake them from this odd behavior, and deal with this nurse later.

Two.

There were three.

There should be three.

Iphigenia was not in this group beneath the copse.

She looked at the nurse again and there was now genuine anger within her. "And Iphigenia, where is she? I demand that one of any of you inform me where my daughter is."

None spoke, and none looked at her, save the first soldier. "Above the port, my lady. King Agamemnon bid that she be the new bride of Lord Achilles before leaving for Troy."

Clytemnestra's hands fell from the shoulders of Electra and Orestes, and she did not see their gazes upon her face and the tears streaming from their big brown eyes. She did not see the nurse grabbing them back, because the children were moving to cling to their mother. She did not see the soldiers starting forward to restrain her, because she had already broken away and was racing toward the cliffs above the port, her wrapper flying behind her.

Her knowledge of the outdoors fled from her faster than she had fled from the strangers, and soon her feet were cut and bleeding from the rocks in the path. All sense of time and place left her, too, until she could not say how long it took her or how far she ran until she reached the edge of the cliff that stopped before the vast expanse of lapis lazuli ocean and oxblood sky.

There, winded and torn and senseless she found herself before a ceremonial fire, the priests of Aulis at the head, and her husband beside them. The warlords were gathered in a semicircle around the fire, of which only ashes remained. Violet smoke rose towards the crimson sky.

She knew nothing else, but she knew that this was no wedding ceremony; this was a sacrifice. She knew then nothing more, other than that her daughter, Iphigenia, who had asked for nothing but a lapis blue tunic on her last birthday, was dead.

She saw nothing else, but she saw the evil behind Agamemnon's tears, crocodile tears like the ones she had seen on their campaign down the Nile.

She heard nothing else, but she heard the shouts of the warlords as she flew at her husband and reached up her hands to scratch at his face, to tear open those eyes that looked at her in disgust and condescension and hatred.

She wanted nothing more, not even her daughter returned to life, than to hate Agamemnon, and she knew also that it was not in her to hate, but to love to her own destruction.

She did feel him strike a blow, not on her face, but her neck, and she was on the ground in the cold coals, choking on her crushed windpipe and the smoke that she inhaled. Still, she knew him and wanted to hate him and destroy him, and she crawled onto her knees because she could not stand on her bleeding feet and spat on his cloak.

She knew she was on the ground, but that was all she knew now.

One of her eyes was filled with blood, and she could feel one of the delicate bones was snapped and it hurt her every time she blinked. She knew that someone had done this to her, and that still she wanted vengeance, some sort of mortal vengeance, but she could not remember who or why, only that her broken heart was choking her.

She knew that something had happened to her, that someone was missing and she wanted to weep for them, but each time she tried to cry out her throat closed further and shooting pains sent her into temporary blindness, and she could do nothing but close her eyes and think it all through.

Something that felt warm against the chill of the wind was wrapping around her, and she knew it was a mortal touch, and she wanted to cry again, but felt an unknown darkness coming over her.

"The most beautiful thing I have ever seen!"

"How beautiful, oh, gods, how beautiful!"

"Praise to Artemis in her mercy!"

"It is a tribute to you, Agamemnon, that your daughter should so please the virgin goddess. This will not be forgotten."

In her failing, Clytemnestra heard the astonished voices of the lords around exclaiming at what they had seen. She did not need their narration; she could imagine the death of her daughter all on her own, and see the treachery of Artemis all on her own, and she tried one last time to cry out, You fools, you are all fools, and I am a fool! We should be in that fire, but let Agamemnon go first! My daughter should be shedding but one tear for all of us as she should live, and we should all go to Hades! How could it come to this!

The arms held her and did not touch her hurt throat or pain her eye, and so she let the blackness overcome her.

"An immaculate trade! Praise be to Artemis! May the maiden Iphigenia eternally please her, Lady of the Forest!"