Free A Darker God by Barbara Cleverly Page B

cascading golden bracelets, thrust up her arms. The wide sleeves of her robe fell back to her armpits, revealing shapely limbs stained black indeed in the twilight by gobbets of blood.
    “‘… and I? I revel in it!’”
Her voice rose to an unholy shout, the white mask she wore directing the force of her triumph straight to the audience.
    Letty’s hatred deepened.
    Unrepentant, implacable. Surely some god or other would take offence and strike her down? Letty felt as one with the leader of the chorus of citizens when he bravely summoned up the spirit to chastise his queen. A worthy opponent. His baritone rang out, fearful yet determined, channelling, at the risk of his own life, the outrage of the classical audience:
    “‘Woman! Loathed abomination! Whatever possessed you to do this deed? You deserve to be banished from the city, forever cursed!’”
    Emotion had stripped away a layer of the actor’s smooth, upper-class English and Letty thought she detected something more raw, more musical, beneath. A Welshman perhaps? His heartfelt outpouring was scalding, and the perfect foil for the cold precision of the queen’s reply:
    “‘My heart is steel, you know that. You may praise me,
Or blame me as you choose. It’s all the same to me.
Here is Agamemnon, my husband, murdered
By my right hand—a perfect piece of Justice.’”
    In pursuit of her flourish of “Justice,” Clytemnestra was distracted for the moment from her unwrapping of the corpse: a bit of business designed to prolong the suspense. The ancient writer himself, father of stagecraft, would have admired the device, Letty thought. The queen launched into a tirade against her husband, enumerating his many appalling sins against her. With each accusation she tugged at the cloth and, inch by inch, the guilty man was revealed.
    Well—fairness in all things. That was the Greek way. Balance. Hear both sides. Letty could not help but agree with the queen that she had much to complain about. Foremost of the charges was that Agamemnon had offered up as a human sacrifice their young daughter Iphigenia to placate the gods and ensure a following wind to take the Greek fleet to Troy. And all with the intention of chasing after his brother’s wife, the lovely Helen, who had eloped with a Trojan prince. In pursuit of a whore, Agamemnon had sacrificed a virgin. The audience sympathised with the queen. Clytemnestra objected to his long absence from the family hearth. Ten years. That amounted, surely, to desertion? And, most recent of his offences, and most bitterly resented—he had brought back, as his concubine from Troy, his spear prize, his share of thebooty: the princess Cassandra. Agamemnon had fallen in love with the Trojan girl and had returned to Argos treating her with all honour, as his wife and the mother of his two small twin sons, rather than as his slave.
    And, here also, Clytemnestra has a devastating revelation to make to the citizens:
    “‘Here lies the man who dishonoured his wife
.
And there’”
—the queen gestured offstage
—“‘lies his slave
,
His fortune-telling concubine
.
Cassandra—this superfluous bride
,
This foul new interloper in our marriage bed
,
His lover—lies dead! And her whelps with her.’”
    She brandished her sword again.
    Cassandra and her children: three innocents dead by the queen’s hand.
    The chorus cringed and moaned at the cruelty. But the queen’s greatest sin in their eyes was the murder of Agamemnon. A king was inviolate, and a husband all-powerful. He might have concubines and bastard children by the hundred, he might have killed his own daughter: no matter. The moral law was clear. A woman guilty of the double sin of killing such a man was anathema to the good citizens of Mycaenae. Or Athens.
    The chorus went on with its breast-beating while their leader remonstrated with her on their behalf, threatening dire consequences.
    “‘For this flood of slaughter

The full price shall be paid
.
For sacrifice