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'Yes, I will try.' She had again been guilty of sloppiness. However, it did not seem to her that Iphigeneia herself was always so very focussed, not as Sisipyla understood the word. Her eyes looked often as they looked now, clear and unfaltering but somehow enthralled, as if she had been sustaining a light too strong. Our eyes are different, Sisipyla thought, they are set a little differently, mine are more on a slant, but the real difference is in the way of looking. I can only look at single things, one leaf, one shape of stars.
While she was still in the midst of this thought, Iphigeneia raised an arm and held it out, fingers extended, saluting, as it seemed, the whole shape of things, the river valley, the wide plain, the distant tawny mountains. She made a slow, sweeping gesture, as if unveiling a monument or drawing aside a curtain. 'All this is Mycenae,' she said. As far as you can see on every side, beyond what you can see. They told me that on the day we first came here, to make me understand the greatness of my father's power. We were standing just here. You were here too, do you remember?'
Sisipyla had not the smallest recollection of this. She would not have understood it in any case having no knowledge of Greek at the time, a fact that Iphigeneia was overlooking. 'Yes,' she said, 'I remember. Princess, will you let me shade your face against the sun?'
The suggestion was met by silence, a mark of consent. She took the short veil from the basket and arranged it over the head and round the face. It was white silk lace, embroidered with a pattern of saffron-coloured butterflies, fine Cretan work, a gift from Iphigeneia's mother, Clytemnestra. When she had made sure that the veil was falling properly, she put on her own cotton scarf, tying it round the head in the ma
As they turned to descend the path, she caught a last glimpse of the river in its furthest reach to the north, where it flashed in the sun as it came down through the high pass. Sometimes she forgot the names of places that Iphigeneia told her, not seeing reason to remember them so long as they were only names. A river or a mountain was as real to her without a name, perhaps more so. But she remembered stories; she knew that Nemea lay beyond the pass, because it was there that the hero Heracles had slain the lion and taken its skin.
They began to descend the narrow track, Iphigeneia in front. As Sisipyla followed, watching her own feet in their sandals going one before the other, she thought about the terrible lion, and its even more terrible mother Echidna, daughter of Ge and Tartarus, half nymph, half speckled snake, who had lived in a cave in Arcadia, from which she rushed hissing out to seize and devour passers-by. She would hear the scrape of a footfall, a faint scrunch on the loose stones of the path – a path like this one, sounds like those they were making – and she would gather herself into a coil in the darkness of her cave, and wait for the moment to come rushing out. The passer-by would draw near, thinking his thoughts, suspecting nothing... However, it was not the attack itself that was so frightening to Sisipyla, it was the thought of the ravenous creature, coiled in the dark cave, listening. And then there was the monstrous brood Echidna had produced. It wasn't only the lion. All her offspring were the stuff of nightmare, without one single exception: the fire-breathing Chimaera, the Hydra that could sprout its own heads, the monstrous hound Cerberus, watchdog of the Underworld, who licked the hands of those entering and ate those trying to leave.
Of course it was comforting to think that neither the lion nor its mother were in the world any longer, the first having been killed by Heracles, the second by Argus the All-seeing, who had crept into the cave when she was gorged with feasting and severed her head at a stroke. Argus possessed four eyes and was therefore well able to find his way about in the dark. But the comfort to be found in this was only partial, because the stories always came later than the events. Echidna had made her home in the cave and started devouring people long before these things came to be related. There might be a monster anywhere, just installed, just at the begi
The path broadened as they descended, following the curve of the hillside. Where it met the road that led up from the valley to the citadel the people were waiting in the thin shade of wild olive trees. The two girls mounted their stocky, short-legged black horses, sitting sideways in the wooden saddles. They rode ahead, followed by the mounted guards, the women making up the rear in a four-wheeled cart drawn by two mules. The road was good, cut deep and level and laid with stone cobbles squared off and fitted together. It had been built by Agamemnon's father, Atreus, a notable builder of roads – the great trade route to Mycenae from the north had been built in his day. These were things that Sisipyla had learned from her mistress.
Now, quite suddenly, as the road continued to follow the flank of the hill, they came within sight of the citadel above them, with its inward-curving, horn-shaped peaks on either side, rising above the valley. Sisipyla had seen it thus often enough before; but at the sight, even with mind prepared, she experienced always the same involuntary intake of the breath, as at some pause of life within her. She had first seen it soon after being taken from her mother, sitting in a cart like the one that was following them now, on her way to becoming a birthday gift for Iphigeneia, though she had not known at the time that this was intended. Her mother had been put to work in one of the royal textile factories at Lacinthos, three days' journey away. Sisipyla had not been able at first to make that journey, and later, when she might have had permission, she had lost the desire. She had become a new person with a new language and a new home. She belonged in the palace, where she was sheltered and fed, where she had the love and protection of her mistress. She had no idea where her mother was now, whether she was in the same place, whether she was still alive.
These things did not come so much to her mind now; but there was still this clutch of memory when she looked up at the citadel. Something of dread, too: the peaks were like the horns of a bull, so it was commonly said, the animal favoured by Zeus, signifying male strength and fertilizing power; but to Sisipyla Mycenae seen from below had always looked like a gigantic spider, with the peaks for its legs, extended on the web of the sky.
They passed below the massive bastion on the left and approached the narrow entrance to the Lion Gate under the gaze of the two rampant stone beasts above the lintel, a gaze as unfriendly as that of any lion could possibly be, Sisipyla thought. This morning the sun, by now well clear of the peaks, caught the bronze lumps of their eyes and made these glitter fiercely.
The party waited while the wooden gates were opened from within, then rode through on to the long stone ramp, passing the storehouses built against the wall, and drawing level with the ancestors' grave circle. From just beyond here the road to the palace rose steeply. Iphigeneia dismissed the guards and the women got down from the cart and began to disperse on foot.
At this moment, when Iphigeneia, with Sisipyla behind her, was about to turn her horse on to the road upward, the entrance gate was again opened and a light chariot with two men in it, followed by a small party of mounted men and panting dogs, passed on to the ramp and advanced towards them. The man driving the chariot was Macris, an officer of the garrison and a kinsman of Iphigeneia, some six years older. He jumped lightly down from the still moving vehicle when he saw them, throwing the reins to his companion and ordering the men behind to ride on to the stables below the palace. He bowed as he drew near, rather hastily, and greeted the princess with an impetuosity of tone clearly habitual to him. 'Nothing but a couple of hares,' he said. 'The ground is so well hunted round about, you have to travel half a day to get anything.' He checked at this and smiled and bowed again, very slightly. 'Excuse me, Princess,' he said, 'I blurt out news of my doings before it is asked for, one of several habits I am trying to get rid of.'