The Children of Jocasta
: Chapter 19

Everything happened so fast, but also too slowly. Someone – one of the guards, I suppose – reached around me from behind. His hands were covered in wiry hair, and the knuckles were swollen and calloused. He held me in a strange, clumsy embrace, and lifted me away from Eteo. I could hear Ani sobbing on the other side of the square, and Haem murmuring words of comfort. I looked up to see she had turned into his chest, her back heaving, one small hand clenched on his tunic. I stood alone as people walked around me: the guards carrying Polyn on a litter, reverently, because he was the king; the ones who walked past Eteo without noticing his precious body, as though he were a pile of refuse; my uncle, walking out from the shaded colonnade in front of the treasury and into the morning sun, which illuminated what would have been better left in darkness. I saw Creon’s mouth move as he spoke to one of the guards, but too quietly for me to hear. There was a rushing sound in my ears, as though I had dived underwater. Everything else was muffled and distant.

Slaves rushed into the square from all sides, and stood waiting to be given orders: my uncle directed them calmly to remove Eteo from the courtyard stones. He didn’t use my brother’s name. He said ‘this’ and gestured. I stepped forward to help them, because it was my duty – mine and Ani’s, as their sisters and closest kin – to prepare both my brothers for burial. But the slaves bustled past me, as if I were no more than one of the statues which stand in the four corners of the square. Both brothers would need to be washed and wrapped in white cloths. And we would need to place some small piece of gold – a ring or a thin chain – into each one’s hands or around his neck. Thebans believe the ferryman will not take someone across the river of the dead without some payment for his trouble.

But even as I was thinking about all this, a part of my mind wanted to shout out that it was all ridiculous. How could my brother be buried, when it was impossible that he was dead? He was alive a moment ago; he could not now be something else. I was looking around the square, expecting Sophon to arrive and explain that he could revive Eteo, stitch him back together as he had done me, shaking his head and tutting about how we got ourselves into such scrapes. But he didn’t come.

The slaves carried Eteo away before I could touch him. It was only later I realized they were taking him the wrong way: out towards the main courtyard, when he needed to be carried to the family square, so we could lay him out and wash him. I knew something was wrong at the time, but it seemed so minor, after everything else.

My uncle finally noticed me and my sister, and directed a slave girl over to each of us. She told me that I must go to the family courtyard, and wash my brother’s blood from my feet, from where I had blundered into the square, too late to save him. Only then did I look down and see she was right: my feet were covered in Eteo’s sticky black-red blood. I wanted to clean myself of such a terrible pollution, but simultaneously, I wanted to kneel down and rub my hands in the blood: to run my fingers through it and paint it over my face.

But as I felt my knees collapse beneath me, the guard who had lifted me back from Eteo a moment and a lifetime ago stepped forward and caught me. He glanced over at my uncle, and swung me up into his arms, as though I were a child. He carried me away from the scene of my brother’s death towards the family square.

Not just the scene of one brother’s death, the scene of my both my brothers’ deaths. The loss of Eteo was so enormous, I could barely see around it to Polyn. I could not take in what had happened: my whole family gone except Ani. I heard the words of the slave girl, as the guard put me down carefully on a bench by the water pump in the corner of our courtyard, but I couldn’t think how to do what she was saying. Soon, more slaves approached me, all carrying water and cloths. One undid my sandals and slipped them off, before wiping my ankles and feet with her cloth. She rinsed it out into a small wooden bucket, and I watched the water darken with Eteo’s blood.

‘Where’s Ani?’ I said to her, as she finished, folding her cloth in half and placing it on the edge of the bucket. My sister was still with Haem, I supposed, and I needed her. When she finally came through the gates, I stood and ran to her, forgetting I was barefoot until I was standing on the sharp stones beneath the colonnade. She held out her arms and, clinging to one another, we stumbled away from the courtyard to be alone together with our grief. We sat on one of the couches in her room – a puffy, cushioned thing which our mother used to lie on when she was tired. Ani’s face was streaked with tears: her hair was sticking to the salt left on her cheeks. She reached over and squeezed my hand.

‘Did you know what he was planning to do?’ she asked.

‘Of course not,’ I told her. Though at that time, I did not know precisely what Eteo had done, only what my uncle said he had done, and I knew better than to believe everything people said in the palace. ‘I knew he was angry with Polyn. I knew he wanted to get out of the courtyard. You’d know this too, if you hadn’t disappeared.’

She blushed, knowing the accusation was fair. ‘I’m sorry, Isy. I didn’t think about him.’

‘Or me.’ I wasn’t in the mood to make her feel better about how she had behaved.

‘No,’ she agreed, fresh tears springing from her eyes. ‘I just wanted to be with Haem. He was planning to announce our betrothal today.’

I stared at her. ‘He might have to wait until our brothers are in the ground.’

‘I know. I’m sure he will. I didn’t mean to suggest that . . .’ She paused. ‘I’m sorry, Isy. I know you’ve always admired him.’

Now it was my turn to redden. I had tried so hard to avoid letting them see that I cared for our cousin at least as much as she did. I had always known he would choose her. It would have been unthinkable for him to do anything else: quite aside from her beauty, she was the elder sister. I could not be married before she was.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I told her.

‘It does,’ she said, gulping. ‘Who will want to marry you now, Isy? After what our brothers have done? I know I’ve told you before that you would be hard to marry off, but I thought there was at least a chance. You know how people have gossiped about our family since . . .’ She refused to say the words. She always had, ever since she and I had watched our mother be carried through this courtyard on a litter. ‘This will just confirm that what people say about us is true,’ she said. ‘That our family is cursed, has always been cursed. For two brothers to kill one another . . .’

‘Cursed? What does that even mean?’ I asked. ‘Polyn and Eteo have never been close. Sharing the kingship was the only way to keep their dislike of one another in check. And then Polyn changed his mind about sharing Thebes with Eteo, as he has done with everything else since I can remember. The only curse is that Polyn should have been born an only child.’

She looked startled. ‘Are you saying this is all Polyn’s fault?’

‘Ani – open your eyes. Or at the very least, use them to look at something other than your intended. Polyn is the one who tried to throw everything into chaos. Polyn is the one who tried to turn the people against Eteo. Polyn is the one whose friend attacked me.’

‘You can’t mean what you’re saying.’

‘I saw the man again, Ani. I saw him at the coronation games. I recognized him straightaway.’

‘But you said the man who stabbed you had his face covered.’

‘His eyes weren’t covered.’ Ani opened her mouth but she did not argue. She knew that I would not have made a mistake about something like this.

‘And that’s why Eteo . . .?’

‘Of course. What did you think?’

‘I thought he was seizing the throne, Isy.’

‘But he’s your brother. You know what sort of a man he is. Eteo isn’t at all ambitious.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘But you must see what it looked like. Eteo attacked Polyn.’

‘I don’t believe that.’

Ani looked at me for a moment, and pushed her hair back, shifting the strand which had stuck itself to her face. ‘It doesn’t matter what you believe, Isy. It matters what everyone else believes, and they will all think Eteo was the aggressor.’

I knew she was right. ‘We need to tell people that they’re wrong,’ I said.

She patted my arm. ‘We will. We can do all this once I am crowned queen.’

I was so startled by her words that I could replace nothing to say. How long after she saw our brothers dead did she decide she should succeed them?

*

I was in my own room now. There was a basket of raw, greasy wool which had been in the corner for so long it had acquired a thin coating of dust. I hated spinning, and always had. It was the appropriate task for women in the royal household, my uncle once said, when I asked him why I should work wool badly when we had a palace full of slaves who were skilled at spinning and weaving some of the finest cloth in Hellas. Creon knew I was happier in lessons, or playing the lyre, and he did not press the point.

But today, I needed to do something with my hands, or I would lie on the ground and scream my brothers’ names until my throat was raw. I could not play the phorminx: there were not yet words or music for what had happened. There would be elegies to come. But not yet.

I sat on the floor next to the basket, pressing my back against the wall. I took a handful of wool and began to turn it over, picking out the burrs and seeds which had caught in it. I piled them up on the wooden stool, and began twisting the wool to make a thick, lumpy thread. It unravelled itself so quickly: how did the slave women keep theirs from returning to a puffy cloud of fibres? I pulled on the thread with my other hand, tightening it to keep it straight. Ani was right, of course: she would be queen now. No one would expect us to share the throne, as our brothers had. She would be queen, Haem would be king, and Thebes would be unchanged for most of its citizens. But the palace would be changed, and I would be changed.

Where would I go, when Ani and Haem had this courtyard for their own family? Would I stay in my rooms, as her unmarried sister? Ani was right about my chances of marriage now, but she always had been. I had spoken about it with Eteo many times, and he had always promised that I could live in his court, no matter how many children he produced. They’ll need their wise aunt, he used to say, and I felt a wrench through my gut at the loss of my brother and his future. I tried to concentrate on protocol, so I could staunch my tears and catch my breath. The appropriate match for me was a prince from another city. But to be the sister of two murdered brothers was a curse in itself. People would believe the cruel tales about the gods persecuting the children of my parents: and who would want to ally themselves with someone who came from such a wretched house, of which stories could never be told without sadness?

I felt the grease spreading across my hands as I carried on twisting the wool, and saw the dirt was discolouring my nails. Eteo couldn’t have known that Polyn would fight. He could not. He must have believed that our oldest brother would stand aside when presented with the truth: that his siblings knew what he had done. But had Eteo been foolish? If Polyn was so shameless that he could enlist a friend to attack me, he was hardly likely to be shamed when he was found out. Eteo should have foreseen this, and then he would still be here with me now, watching me and marvelling at how I could ruin a whole sheep’s worth of wool in a matter of moments. My brother had made a simple error: he had assumed that Polyn would behave as he himself would have behaved. But Eteo was never like Polyn, could never have been so devious. So how could he think Polyn would behave like him?

I dropped the thread and watched it unfurl back to its unwound state. Why was the courtyard so quiet? The slaves should have brought Polyn and Eteo in to their rooms by now, so we could wash them and wrap them with the other women of the household. Where were they?

We should have known what was coming. Especially me; trying so hard to replace the story that made sense of our home and our family, imagining myself a historian, an astute chronicler of events. I fell so far short of what I imagined myself to be. I was no historian, no poet; merely a fool, failing to understand every single thing that happened until it was too late. The humiliation of realizing this was terrible. Who was I, if I wasn’t the clever, observant creature I had always imagined myself? I was no one. I was the stupidest of us all. Because I was watching so closely, and still I was tricked, like a gullible fool trying to spot which cup the ball is under: so confident in his prediction, so risible in his confidence.

In the time that I had been sitting with my spindle and my worthless woollen yarn, thinking only of my future, the palace had changed irrevocably. The neat destiny my sister had spied for herself was not to be hers after all. She was the heir in line to the throne, but the throne was no longer vacant. At the precise moment that I was wondering why the slave women had not summoned me to wash my brothers’ corpses, I heard a distant, tinny peal.

I knew immediately what it was: a herald’s horn, sounded for an official pronouncement in the main square. I stood up and ran to my door. They were announcing the death of the king. Ani’s door swung open too, and her eyes met mine. She frowned, and reached out her hand. We scurried along the side of the family square, and then through the second courtyard, both of us trying not to look at the bloodstains which still covered the ground. The guards should probably have prevented us from crossing to the gates into the main square, but they were nowhere in sight. It was much later when I discovered they had all been marched out of the palace and executed, the standard punishment for failing to prevent the death of a king.

The final squawk of the horn had barely died down before my uncle stepped forward on a podium and reached out his hands to quieten the small but excited crowd which had gathered. Rumours about my brothers must have been racing across the city from the moment Eteo walked into the treasury this morning, and the murmuring was growing louder. My uncle stood waiting for them to realize that he would not speak until they were quiet. Eventually, their curiosity overwhelmed their desire to deliver gossip dressed as fact.

‘Men of Thebes,’ Creon said. ‘The king is dead. Slain by his brother, cut down by bitter rivalry.’

The murmuring began again, more intensely than before.

‘I stand before you a bereaved uncle,’ Creon continued. ‘Not one but both my nephews died today, each by the sword of the other.’ I felt Ani’s hand squeeze mine. She wanted me to keep silent, even as we heard him lie. ‘It is a dark day for Thebes,’ my uncle said. ‘And it must also be a new beginning. It was never my desire to inherit the mantle of power from my sister; you all know me and you know this to be true. I was content to be the adviser of kings, I have never sought kingship for myself.’

The crowd of strangers nodded, flattered by the suggestion that they were party to decisions made in the royal household, when they simply happened to be in the market square as the news erupted.

‘But I can shirk my responsibility no longer,’ he said. ‘Today I accept the role I now acknowledge I was destined to perform.’ A priest in a hastily tied robe stepped up behind him with the bright gold crown which had last been placed on Polyn’s head. My uncle bowed slightly, and accepted it over his own balding pate. The crowd cheered: one king was much the same as another to them.

So my sister did not become queen. And I realized at last – too late – that Polyn had been the victim of a conspiracy, just as much as Eteo.