Free A Darker God by Barbara Cleverly Page A

demented fireflies, holding off the moment of revelation and screwing tight the tension. Finally, beside himself with anxiety, the leader rushed to the central doors of the palace, the closed doors behind which the murder had just been perpetrated. He flung them open. The audience of two gasped in astonishment, carried away by the theatricality of the moment.
    “Oh, bravo!” breathed Maud.
    “That’s the stuff!” said Letty.
    The torches had settled into a line on either side of the doors, a last guard of honour forming up for the king. A silver bath, an old-fashioned Victorian hip bath painted to resemble a decorated metal cauldron, swept forward on silent runners into the circular orchestra space.
    Maud leaned close and whispered so as not to spoil the effect: “The
ekkyklema!
It’s worked! But so it ought—they’ve been tinkering with it for a week! I never can quite bring myself to trust in these mechanical devices and—truth be told—they’ve no idea how the ancients worked it, though they’ll never admit it! But some clever cove—come to think of it, it might have been that William Gunning of yours—borrowed a hospital trolley and stripped it down to its wheels. He got a chappie up from the street of coppersmiths and had him weld the bath onto it and hey presto! What a tableau!”
    Letty wished she could have been left, just for once, to absorb the scene without asides from Maud. It was certainly dramatic. Following on the shattering effect of the sounds of murder still ringing in their ears, it was enthralling. The bath, gleaming fitfully in the torchlight, contained a body. Slumped sideways, one bare brown arm trailing over the side, Agamemnon lay, shrouded in white fabric. The net wrapped around his head and torso was stained hideously with blood. Letty was proud of her contribution to the scene of slaughter, but this very minor rush of feeling was swept aside by other emotions. Her lips parted and her eyes flared, in astonishment and admiration for the stagecraft but also in pity for the character. Just as the playwright intended, she was contrasting the picture still in her mind’s eye, of the kingly figure of Agamemnon arriving, a warrior in the prime of his manhood, towering over his men and eagerly awaited by his subjects, with the presentation of this huddled creature before her. Within minutes the golden monarch of Mycaenae had been reduced to a side of dead flesh, netted and speared, a temple offering, bleeding into a bathtub.
    “Ox blood,” explained Maud. “They brought it here in a flask.”
    Clytemnestra entered, reddened sword in her right hand. She strode towards the distraught old men of the chorus ready to defy them, eager to challenge their judgement of her. The role of the queen was being played by a tall girl instead of the traditional male actor and was all the more terrifying for that, Letty thought. Men were never convincing squeaking away in an attempt at a woman’s voice. And this actress had a powerful contralto that Lady Macbeth would have been proud of, along with a stage presence that fitted the part. Though clad in heavily embroidered silk robes and wearing a tragic mask like the others, her every gesture spoke directly to the audience.She conveyed pride in her royal status but with a suggestion of her femininity. The audience didn’t doubt that under her rich robes she had breasts and a body that had given birth. But she was about to reveal also a heart of steel.
    “‘At last my hour came …’”
Letty heard her gloat.
“‘Here I stood firm. Here I struck the blow.
There was no way he could escape or flee his fate.’”
    Letty hated and feared her.
    The queen flourished her sword and tugged at the knots restraining the limbs. She began to peel back the folds of cloth.
    “‘… So down he fell, and the lifeblood spurted out of him—
In showers. And this deadly rain has dyed me black…’”
    Clytemnestra turned to the audience and, with a clatter of