The Plains of Aulis
Clytemnestra awoke in pain, and knew that it was midday as sure as she knew she was alive.
Much of her physical discomfort had been eased. Her throat was moist, and doubtless a liquid had been poured down it for some time until the pain had been eased. A cold, numbing compress covered one eye, and she raised a hand to feel the bandage that went around her head to hold it in place.
"She is awake, my lord," spoke a voice, a medicinal voice, as sure as Clytemnestra thought she knew people, and she took not a moment to wonder where she lay.
She sat up and waited for the dizziness to pass her, and the dots to fade from her good eye, and she gazed about her. Soldiers, a sort of healing woman, and people she did not know. The faces were blurred, and the high brown walls around her indicated only that she was in some room in the palace.
She was hurt, and confused, but she could still fight. She reached out and clawed the air until the few people surrounding her leapt back, and she tumbled from the bed. Her sleeping tunic, and the dizziness from her injuries at the hands of Agamemnon, coupled to bring her to her knees when she tried to stand. The healing woman reached out to help her, and Clytemnestra struck out again and again, and every few seconds screamed and tried to stand. She could keep doing this; she could squat here and fight like a dying animal until her throat closed up again. He was here; she could feel Agamemnon was here, behind this or that nameless face in the small crowd, and she would get to him, she would scream until he was forced to come to her—
Her efforts and dizzy fury were checked by a short blow to the back of her head. It was not enough to hurt her, but enough to send her senses spinning until she was sprawled on the dustless floor, and the stone accepted her tears.
He was bending over her, and through her own blood and dirty hair and healing herbs she could not smell his breath, and for some reason she wanted to. She wanted to know he was human and mortal and breakable as she was, and then she cried harder because she knew that he was not, that there was something in this man that neither she nor anyone would ever understand, and that was why he was going to get whatever he asked.
"That's enough. You must be quiet now." Then he was away from the back of her, and she especially noticed his position though she did not look at him because a hunted animal always instinctively knows the position of its attacker.
"You have all done enough. I shall see to it the lady gets to port. She must be there within the hour to see off the ships."
One strong hand under each of her arms set Clytemnestra upright on her feet, and then they moved to her waist as she was steered out of the old room. The crowd stepped back and murmured among themselves, and she knew they would not remember the queen's embarrassment by the end of the hour.
They were walking down the empty corridor (everyone was at the port or at their duties) when she tried another escape. She reached down to the arm at her waist and dug in her nails and raked back, and then twisted to free herself from the vice-like grip. The tanned arm pulled moved under her nails and released her for a moment, and she scrambled to get away when the back of her tunic was snatched and she was dragged to the ground.
She looked up into the pitying face of Achilles.
"My lord!" she cried, her voice broken and winded from the injury and her own screaming, and it was the first thing she was conscious of saying. Until that moment, when she had deliberately tried to hurt the man in her whirlwind drive at avenging her daughter, she had not been aware of what she spoke. She thought now that she had doubtlessly screamed obscenities and curses and all sorts of pain-filled blasphemy in that airless room, and before the face of the most-feared warlord in the known world she was brought to her knees in instinctive acquiescence.
"You've done enough of that, now," he said, and she heard the quiet soothing in his voice and saw the strengthening pity in his face, and she wondered how she could have thought it was her husband merely because of his ruthless touch.
He held out his hand, and she sat for a split-second at his feet before she placed her own hand in it and was hauled to her feet. He kept the grip, not harshly, but bracingly, and hurried her down the corridor until they passed out through the doors of lapis lazuli blue. "Agamemnon and dozens of ships and myself are leaving within the hour," he said, and she noted the repetition for the third time, as though he were trying to reassure her of something. "You are to be at the port."
"Did my lord Agamemnon request this?"
"Request what, my lady?" He did not look at her as much as he had once before.
She wanted to fall to her knees at that subtle hint, but she kept walking. His hold on her hand would let her do no less.
He had ordered it all. He had calculated it all.
Agamemnon had outflanked everybody once again, and now he was about to embark on the greatest triumph of this, the greatest kingdom ever known.
The night before (there had to have been a night before, even if she felt like it had been a thousand years since she had not felt pain) he had been preparing to sacrifice his own daughter to Artemis. He had planned it all so that he did not have to lay one finger on his own wife or even look at her.
And he wanted her now to give him a royal and respectable sendoff.
"Did he even feel…" Clytemnestra searched for the word in her injured psyche and struggled against the rising flood of tears, and gave up. "Did he even know?"
"No. He was as always," Achilles answered, and he slowed almost imperceptibly.
"Oh…" The little involuntary syllable was all she could muster. "Oh…"
They walked in silence then, and Clytemnestra began to feel nothing. Her mangled face, which she knew must now be hideous, was motionless and her breathing became more regular with each passing minute. She became blind to the beautiful, sunlit plains they crossed in the same path that she had taken to the port several hours before.
But when they reached the copse of trees, Achilles pulled her to a stop.
She was beyond being surprised at the will of men, and so she did not even look at him. She waited for him to get on with whatever it was he wanted to do.
"Look at me, Clytemnestra."
She turned. She was expressionless. The hair in front of her battered face did not move with her breath.
"We will all be gone within the hour."
She saw that violet smoke and tasted it deep in her throat and smelled, and remembered how she had thought it was her daughter, and then realized she did not even have those sensory stimulants of her left. Iphigenia was as gone as if she had never existed.
"No war is fated to a victory. Many will never return. No matter what happens in the end, Clytemnestra, we are still gone at the end of this day, and as long as we are gone you are free and yourself."
She had not known Iphigenia all that well. Her daughter had been raised by singers and nurses and cooks, like her other children. She was the wife of a king, not a mother. Iphigenia's death was both a loss and a personal insult. Either way, Clytemnestra was cut through the heart.
"Do not forget to feel, Clytemnestra. I have spent all my life under the control of my own mind, and it is a half-life. Do not let this end Clytemnestra. At the end of this hour, begin again, and find how to win the day."
She stared into his lapis lazuli blue eyes as she removed the bandage from her head, and he stared into hers, one weeping and the other closed. She let the white wrap and the crumbling compress fall to the ground, and Achilles took the hand that dropped it and bowed before her. Her tears dropped to the arid ground in front of him as he slowly stood.
"He has killed himself," she whispered. "Do not do the same."
"I act only for myself, not on behalf of others, as Agamemnon does," Achilles said, and there was a faint, confident expression playing about his lips. "And so I won't bid you be happy. I hope only that you do what you will. It will be a change… but then, the winds have come, and everything is about to change."
Clytemnestra said nothing more as they moved on to the cliffs. The mile to the walls passed fleetingly, and they did not stop to look out over the many ships filling the expansive port until they spilled out into the sea, a mess of war machines. The two descended the stairs without worrying over the sway and creak of the whitened wood. Then they were at the base of the cliffs, and they in front of the ceremonial fire built into a shallow cave.
There, before the High King Agamemnon and Odysseus and Menelaus and all the many Greek lords boarding their ships for this, the greatest adventure that had yet to begin, Achilles, son of the goddess Thetis, stooped slightly and gently, like an evening zephyr, and brushed his lips against Clytemnestra's forehead. Then he turned and walked down the whitened planks, disappearing among the vessels. The queen was here, and the fleet could begin to set off and find the rest of the ships with which it was to demolish Troy.
When the last ship was untied and rowed out of the port, Clytemnestra raised one hand, a lone figure on the beach, and a faint, confident expression played about her lips.
"This is my home now," Clytemnestra spoke, without the tremor of injury or fear or sadness. "It is where I last beheld Iphigenia, daughter of Clytemnestra. It is where I was betrayed by Artemis, goddess of the forest. These hateful walls shall see only vengeance."
The hour was passed.
"Aulis is mine."
