The House of Atreus | ONC 2023 Shortlist

VI

I don't have many memories of my father. In my childhood, he was a fleeting presence. When I close my eyes, he is a warm hand on my head, a bearded cheek, scratchy against my own, and the scent of leather and horses. When I open them, he is barely a name chiselled into a stone, not even a ghost to haunt me. Worst of all, I can't even really construct a face in my mind to remember him by. It's all wisps and shadows, here the edge of a smile, there the crinkle of an eye. An ephemeral image that crumbles to dust like the earth beneath my feet.

My mother, on the other hand, is everpresent. The memory of her strict face is everlasting, from the frown of her brow to the upturn of her nose and the twist of her lips. Every time I look at myself in the spotty little looking glass, it feels like I am looking at her instead. The slant of my cheekbones, the sharp line of my nose, the arch of my eyebrows. They all look like they were taken straight from hers and planted onto my own face. My hair curls in the same way hers used to, even its shade is hers, before she started turning grey around the temples. Only my eyes feel like they are my own, dark and deep like ponds, whereas the Queen's are maroon; warm, though only in colour.

I lift the amphora and pour the water into the cauldrons on either side of the raised platform. The sweet scent of honey fills my nose as I uncork my small terracotta jar and let the golden nectar drip into the water. I stand waiting as it reluctantly dribbles out of the vessel. I rose before dawn to go to the spring just beyond the temple of Apollo to fetch fresh water. Now Eos is making her way across the sky, painting it in hues of pale pink and purple and soon the sun will be up.

The morning mist is loosening, bringing the edges of the grave before me into sharper focus. Pulling my cloak a little tighter around me, I try to shield myself from the crisp air. I look toward the relief sculpture painted in bright reds and blues. My gaze skirts over the epitaph placed below but I don't let it rest on the words inscribed into it this time. Instead, my eyes move on to the columns on either side of it. They are crowned by baskets full of flowers, blush roses and creamy white peonies, nestled between panicles of lilac. They look fresh, almost extravagant. They must come straight from the palace.

I pick up the jug I brought from the storeroom and pour the wine into the phiale. I straighten and, turning towards the grave again, lift my arms into the air, wine in my outstretched right hand. I shut my eyes and tip the shallow bowl sideways, pouring the wine to the ground and letting it splash onto the dirt at my feet. My prayer is short and silent. What is there to wish for for the dead anyway?

When I open my eyes again, they sting with the images that have long etched themselves into my eyeballs from all the times I have revisited them in my head. Images of the most horrible night of my life. Sometimes it's as if I can hear the screams all over again and then I wake up at night with a start, shivering and shaking. I carried Orestes out of the palace that night, out into safety. I was only sixteen and the weight of my ten-year-old brother threatened to pull me down to the ground. Especially when he fought against me, simultaneously crying and screaming as he clutched his wooden sword in his grubby hands. He begged me to let him go, let him fight, let him protect our father.

I grit my teeth and set my jaw. I refuse to let myself be dragged down again by the memories of the night King Agamemnon died. Murdered in the bath on the same night he came back home as a war hero. My thoughts wander back to Orestes instead. I have been thinking more often of him lately, wondering where he might be right now. It's his eighteenth birthday soon and then he will be a man, too old to be in need of protection from his sister anymore. He's probably tall enough to tower over me anyhow by now, he did grow fast even back then. I smile to myself at the thought and hope he has had a good life under the care of Strophius, away from Mycenae.

The walk back home is easier now that my amphora is empty and so the house comes into view soon. It's a tiny structure, made from clay bricks dried in the hot Mycenean sun. The whole house could fit inside the megaron of my old home and there would still be space left. The shutters on the tiny window slits are wide open, letting the fresh air in before it heats up in the midday sun. I'll have to close them once I get inside and I already dread the stuffiness it will bring.

My bare feet carry me along the packed dirt that snakes in a narrow path to the entrance of my home. I stop short when I notice the two horses that have been left grazing in the dry and spotty grass just outside of the door. My husband should be replacing the straw and fixing the roof that's been leaking again but I don't see him on the eaves.

"Leandros?" I call out as I duck in through the low door, leaving my things on the ground beside it.

I hear indistinct voices floating through the house. There's not much space to begin with, we barely call two rooms our own. He must be in the men's room, but there are other voices besides my husband's. I can make out the rumbling tones of two other men. There's a shuffle and then the sound of footsteps and Leandros peeks his head around the corner, and spotting me standing in the entryway, beckons me closer.

"Two strangers came by earlier looking for you," he starts. "I told them to come back later but they wouldn't leave. Something about your brother? They say it's important."

"Orestes?" I breathe, my heart giving a tight squeeze. "What is it?"

"They wouldn't tell me, they insisted on talking to you alone." Leandros steps out of the doorway and into the tiny courtyard that hosts our shrine of Hestia and opens to the sky that is lighter now that the day has dawned, but overhung and greyish more than blue. Maybe it will rain.

"How did they know where to find me?" I whisper, as if afraid the strangers will hear me. "Why didn't they go to the palace?"

My husband shrugs his shoulders. "They must've asked around town for you." He bends down to pick up the amphora and the other things I brought back with me from the graveyard.

Of course. The townspeople would've told them where to find me. Happily. Gleefully. Me, the once-princess that now lives in a tiny little hut. Cast out by her own mother and married off into poverty. I ball my hand into a tight fist, nails digging into my palm.

"Go on and see what they want so they can be on their way again. I don't like how the dark-haired one is staring at me." Leandros turns away and leaves me standing alone in the courtyard. Indecisive. Powerless.

I would like to scream but I have to let the pinprick of pain in my hand ground me instead. 

Notes:

Eos: Ancient Greek Goddess of dawn.

Phiale: Shallow ceramic or metal bowl used for performing libations, religious rituals where liquids are poured as an offering to a deity or in memory of the deceased.