The Warrior, page 27
part #3 of Orestes Series
Cylarabes tut-tutted him. “Mind your tongue, lad. Orestes is a king.” But the warden’s tone was more bemused than admonishing, and insinuated prudishness on my part.
Akelos laughed, “We’re all men here!” Again, he reached across to give me a friendly shove, whilst I stifled a growing urge to break his nose. “I should visit you sometime at Mycenae,” he said. “We can box and wrestle, drink good wine, and I can see once and for all whether those rumors about your beautiful wife are true.” A lascivious laugh suggested precisely which rumors he meant. I exchanged glances with my companions, who were stationed alongside the warden’s retainers at the edge of the aithousa; my men uniformly regarded Akelos as an insect they would have been delighted to squash.
Akelos would get within leering distance of Hermione over my dead body, and his. Exhaling deeply, I ignored his comments, stood up, and, acknowledging my host, made my excuses.
*~*~*~*
Astydamia was a beautiful, bouncing baby girl. I delighted in her bright blue eyes, and the wisps of chestnut hair curling about her scalp, and covered her tiny fingers with kisses.
Hermione was bedridden, fretful with boredom, yet too still weak to rise, even though she had given birth twelve days ago. Pylades had told me how her labor had come early; it had been hard and long, and she had bled so much that Elektra and the midwives had feared for her life. She had attended the naming rituals on a litter, but Elektra had performed most of the rites. Thank the gods I had not been at home, for I could not have borne the strain of watching her suffer.
“I’m sorry to have missed Astydamia’s naming day, but I her brought gifts.” Kissing my daughter’s dainty fingers one last time, I handed her over to her nurse. “Coral beads and a little doll, and for you, my dear, I have a special gift.” I took the bedside chair, caught Hermione’s hand, and brought her knuckles to my lips. “I have ordered the lords of Minoa-in-Argolis to change the town’s name to Hermione. They will erect herms to Zeus and the Two Ladies, and when their tribute falls due, those revenues shall be yours.”
As she turned her head on the pillow, the crisp linens rustled under her hair, startlingly red in contrast with her pallid complexion. “Are you saying you called the town after me?” she asked wearily. “It’s not the custom to name places after living people. It offends the gods.”
“They observe Cretan customs,” I explained, “which means they honor their queens above their kings. They also make offerings to the powers of the underworld down in their pillar shrines, and because your name means ‘Pillar Queen,’ they interpreted it as an omen that they should fully embrace Mycenaean rule.” I spread my hands. “It was not my doing. They were most adamant, and would not accept any alternative.”
“Men will think I demanded this, and shake their heads at my hubris, nevertheless, because you have already named a ship in my honor,” she mumbled despondently. Her dark mood irritated me. She had survived the birth and was recovering, and I adored our daughter, so what did she have to brood about? “When will I see this town?”
At least she took an interest in the gift. “As soon as you are well enough to travel,” I promised. “The priestesses have asked that you come and bless the sanctuaries.”
Hermione’s mouth was drawn tight. “Hasn’t Elektra told you how the labor went?” she asked. “Did she tell you what the midwives said about the bleeding? I am not to conceive again.”
“Yes, she told me.” I did not want to discuss the matter any further. A king ought to have a dozen legitimate offspring from his queen, yet it seemed that Eleuthia was granting us but two.
“I am too old for childbearing,” Hermione sighed. Her eyes glistened with moisture. Gods, I had not come to see her so that she could weep on my shoulder. “Mother told me that women who begin their childbearing too late always have more trouble.”
Helen said entirely too much, without helping much. Women who were older than Hermione had borne healthy children and survived. What transgression had she committed that the goddess would close her womb? Somehow, the sin must be mine. “We have been blessed with a hearty son and a daughter,” I said, “and we must be thankful.”
She plucked at the wool coverlet, which covered her to the waist despite the warmth of the room. “You will have others. Chione’s baby has quickened, and that Chian woman has conceived.”
I had not known about the second concubine’s pregnancy, but privately welcomed the news. “Don’t look so sad, Hermione. All the children will look to you as the gracious lady of the citadel, and they will love you as Tisamenus and Astydamia love you.”
Later, I visited my young sons, who were playing together in the nursery. Eighteen-month-old Tisamenus grabbed the toy triaconter that I handed him, then reached for the painted horse I gave Teukros. Irritated, I took back the wooden ship, lifted him to eye level, and delivered a stern reprimand. “You will share your toys, young man.”
Tisamenus quietly stared back at me for a second, and then shouted at the top of his lungs, “No!”
“Behave,” I growled threateningly.
“No!”
The old nurse started to intervene, to make excuses for her charge, but I would have none of it. Instead, I swung Tisamenus around to lay him across my knee, and smacked his bottom thrice. His wails triggered an outburst from Teukros, leaving me with two blubbering toddlers, one of whom had done nothing meriting tears. “You, woman,” I barked at the nurse, who just stood there wringing her hands. What did Elektra and Hermione see in the woman, anyway? “You—take Teukros outside.”
When I set him upright on my knee, Tisamenus was a red-faced, snot-nosed, hiccupping mess. “Stop crying,” I said sharply. Then the curtain parted, and a young woman, drawn by the noise, thrust her head in. I waved her away. “What do you say now, young man?” He stared blankly at me, as though he had never been disciplined before. “You say you’re sorry.”
“No!” Tisamenus screwed up his face in his diminutive fury. “Not sorry!”
When I set him on the floor and took away his triaconter, he bawled and kicked his heels, and could not be reasoned with. What had gotten into him? He had never acted so defiantly.
I encountered the old woman in the corridor outside rocking a snuffling Teukros in her wrinkled arms. Elektra, I recalled now, had found the nurse’s services indispensible in Phocis, but that had been ten years ago, and the woman had since outgrown her usefulness. “My lord,” she interjected, “the young prince is just upset that—”
“We will not have him behave thus,” I shot back. The morning’s unpleasant encounter with Cylarabes and Akelos, coupled with my wife’s postpartum exhaustion, had left me in no mood for excuses from ineffective menials. No one defied our will, least of all our own son.
*~*~*~*
With the first frost, news arrived via my Argive agents that Cyanippus was well and truly on his deathbed.
At first, I was disinclined to believe the reports, as the Argive king had taken to his bed every winter for the last eight years, with his court behaving as though that particular year was his last, but the agent assured me that the rumors were true. “King Cyanippus now sleeps sitting up, his lungs are so full of water, and even then, he can scarcely draw breath. He eats and drinks almost nothing, only the bit of broth his servants can spoon into his mouth.”
After pondering the information, digesting the possibility that the Argive king might, in fact, be dying, I called the Mycenaean assembly to discuss the course Argos would take once the old man gasped out his final breath. Cylarabes would claim the scepter, but then what?
Eurybatos rubbed his hands over the brazier. “Cylarabes will have to leave Tiryns,” he observed, “which will make his son-in-law warden.”
“We are not concerned with Lysimachus.” A biting wind rattled the eaves, pervading through the walls despite the blaze burning high on the hearth. I huddled deeper into my fur-lined mantle; the mulled wine in the cup at my elbow did little to warm my bones. “It’s Akelos who continues to vex us.” Throughout the late summer and autumn, I had not responded to the young man’s repeated attempts to secure an invitation to my court. I would not suffer him to come anywhere near my women or children.
“I’ve heard it said that he will marry Princess Myrto once she reaches marriageable age.” Eurybatos slicked a hand over his few remaining strands of hair, about which he, not yet forty, had become extremely vain and self-conscious. “The Argive assembly sees the bastards he’s fathered with the serving women at Tiryns as reassurance that he’ll sire sons with the girl.”
“Bah!” Lykeus answered with a disdainful snort. “My charioteer’s sired seven sons on five women, but I wouldn’t marry him to my daughter. Cylarabes might have something important in mind for the young man, but only a madman would soil his bloodline by breeding his granddaughter to such a loutish boy. No one believes that nonsense about Akelos being the natural son of Diomedes, except the ignorant peasants who don’t know any better, and maybe the boy himself, who’s let his hosts swell his head with their half-truths and insinuations.”
“Cylarabes may not like the prospect of an uncouth commoner wedding his granddaughter, but he will go ahead with the marriage if he believes that it gives him some advantage.” Atymnios coughed into a sopping square of linen. He did not look well, but had insisted on attending the council. “Currently, his heir is his sickly grandson. If Akelos can sire vigorous sons on Myrto, and if the Argives accept those boys as the bloodline of Diomedes, then Cylarabes sits more comfortably on his throne, secure in the knowledge that even though he might be a stay-at-home schemer, and no battle-leader—”
“That’s nonsense,” Lykeus grumbled. “Give the Argive assembly credit for not being gullible.”
“Atymnios has a point,” Eurybatos countered. “Without the bloodline of Diomedes, what do the Argives have once Cylarabes dies? That sickly child Polylaos won’t survive to manhood. His mother hasn’t conceived since his birth. Cylarabes is impotent, and even if he were at the height of his vigor, his wife is past childbearing. And he needs her relatives to support his claim. If the Argives want to preserve their royal family, then Myrto—”
“Bah!” Lykeus made a derisive gesture. “A vigorous bloodline should never hinge on the fruitfulness of a single girl’s womb.”
Kleitos, who had listened silently, took the opportunity to interject, “We’re speaking as though Akelos and Myrto have been betrothed, when this is all mere speculation.”
“Speculation, yes,” Atymnios agreed, “but not without merit. It’s simply a question of what’s most—” His voice rasped, then broke, and he hacked into the cloth.
“Take the seat nearest the fire, good Atymnios,” I said. “No one here will begrudge you the honor.”
The assembly courteously waited on Atymnios to shuffle to the chair a servant brought, and take some mulled wine for his throat. He ought to be in bed, heaped with furs and fleeces, with a hot brick snug against his feet. Each morning and evening, Hermione brought him savory broth such as had helped her regain her strength after Astydamia’s birth; she also visited with his daughters and grandchildren, while she privately expressed her worries that this winter might well be his last. As much as I did not want to lose Atymnios as a councilor or as a friend, he was past seventy, and I resigned myself to the eventuality.
When Cyanippus drew his last breath on a rainy night three weeks after the solstice, Argos dispatched no royal messenger to invite me to the funeral or the investiture of the new king. I sent gifts, anyway, to maintain the pretense of amicable relations between Mycenae and Argos, but was not surprised when I received no acknowledgment.
Cylarabes spent the remainder of winter as most kings did: hearing petitions, propitiating various deities, and seeing to small matters about court. According to my agents, his wife and daughter put on airs and made themselves insufferable, but Cylarabes himself behaved in a completely ordinary, even dullard fashion, as Lykeus phrased it, a pig sunning himself after wallowing in a mud hole. With that image in mind, his moniker for the new Argive king—Piggy Wanax—quickly took hold in the Mycenaean assembly.
Although I laughed at my councilor’s caustic humor, I had no illusions about Cylarabes settling into mediocrity. He was going to attack Mycenae. Perhaps not through conventional means, with armed men, because the Argives knew well enough that I could have repelled a physical assault and pushed back. No, when a man like Cylarabes could not demonstrate prowess in battle, he turned to alternative, equally effective methods. He had already displayed his penchant for deception by his double dealing over the matter of Mycenaean berthing tolls. His current passiveness was a nothing more than a ruse, a shield designed to obscure whatever scheme he had in mind to discredit and overthrow me.
At a loss, I consulted my father-in-law the moment the festival of Plowistos reopened the sea lanes. Menelaus duly wrote back, praising my restraint during the incident at Tiryns, and urging extreme caution. “Regarding this man called Akelos,” he said, “we can tell you one thing with absolute certainty: he cannot be a bastard son of Diomedes. Queen Aegialia took great pains to make sure that her husband’s women never conceived.
“We would expound more on the subject, but it is a delicate matter, and one cannot trust couriers with such sensitive information these days. Come visit us this summer! Nestor has expressed interest in your exploits, and you would profit much from his counsel. It’s a shame Tisamenus and Astydamia are too young to make the voyage! We should have liked to bounce them on our knee, and seen your other sons.”
Had Menelaus known how difficult his firstborn grandson was, he would have scratched his head. Tisamenus had reached that age when young children were at their most unruly. Having learned the power of the word no, he started to shout, throw immense tantrums, and tyrannize the nursery. Hermione lost her patience with him, and his cousins fought back whenever he attacked them. Even Elektra had little success disciplining him, for, as she later confessed, “A stern voice and the back of one’s hand only accomplishes so much, and as you can see, it’s done nothing to improve Tisamenus’s attitude. I would sooner drop him from the wall than smack him again, except I’m not certain that would do any good, either.”
I brooked no defiance from my heir, and took away his toys and playmates. Tisamenus tested my authority by hollering, stomping the floor, and kicking my shins, which earned him seven stinging reasons to reconsider his lack of respect. “What’s gotten into you, young man?” I asked sharply. Snuffling, he hunkered down in a corner and refused to answer.
It took the new nurse, a kind-hearted Arcadian woman, to realize that Tisamenus’s outbursts had started with Astydamia’s birth, and continued because he resented the attention she received; he could not understand why some other baby claimed the mother’s breast that previously had been his alone. When introduced to Astydamia, he called her ugly, and wanted to toss her away, and he refused to meet Ismenos, his new half-brother. Tisamenus tolerated Teukros because he could not recall a time when his half-brother had not been there, even though it was still a battle to get him to share his playthings. Foolish child, he was too young to grasp that he had outgrown his mother’s teat, and that, as heir to Mycenae and Sparta, he outranked his sister and half-brothers.
Helen also wrote, smothering Hermione with motherly advice on every conceivable topic from colic to teething, and heaping her with spells and remedies for regaining her vigor and preventing conception. She wasted no courtesies with me, but held me to blame for wearing my wife out with childbearing, as though Hermione had borne twelve children rather than just two. Gods help me, she actually threatened to come to Mycenae and make certain that I did not, as she phrased it, molest my wife again.
After reading the offending letter aloud to Hermione, I stated my objections. “That woman will not lecture us in our own house.”
“Ignore her, Orestes.” Hermione laid out a fresh linen smock for the nurse to dress Astydamia in. Her color had improved as the season turned, and the weather warmed. She had resumed all but the most strenuous of her duties, and often spent her evenings embroidering with her women and Chione, whom she had come to like. “It’s her way, that’s all.”
“Are you certain you don’t want to come to Sparta with me?” I asked. “Find a wet nurse to look after the baby, while you rest and get some wholesome sea air and sunshine. And you could tell your mother once and for all that I do not keep you as a broodmare.”
Hermione looked aghast. “Are you asking me to leave the baby behind? I couldn’t possibly do such a thing. And besides, I would be miserable and seasick the entire voyage, and would never get any rest, especially once when we got to Sparta. Mother would wear me out.” She smoothed the hem of the little smock, looking thoughtful. “Since we’re speaking of wholesome sea air and sunshine, though, I wouldn’t mind visiting the town you renamed in my honor. It would be nice to have a change.”
I had not intended for her to travel to the former Minoa-in-Argolis alone, or remain without me, especially when the loyalty of the local nobility remained questionable, and when the town lacked adequate fortifications. Yet Hermione’s health would benefit from time away from the constraints of the citadel. With the proper arrangements, she would be safe.
On a day just after the summer solstice, she traveled by mule cart with our daughter, whom she had insisted on bringing alone, and our niece Antiklea, who had been allowed along as a special treat. I escorted them with a vanguard of thirty-three men who would join the garrison of fifty already stationed in the town, and assigned Phemios and Iobates to serve as a personal bodyguard. “Guard her and the girls as you would us,” I said, even though there was no question in my mind that the pair would fulfill their charge to the utmost, as Hermione’s quiet calm and grace inspired much admiration among my servants.
