The Children of Jocasta

I felt pain again under my ribs when I lifted myself out of bed: duller now than it had been. When I placed my fingers gently on the dressing Sophon had used, I could feel the heat of the injury. But not the different, more intense heat of an infection. I knew when I peeled back the bandages in a day or two that the skin would be shiny and red, not swollen into the almost bluish-pink that characterized an infected wound. He had recommended I stay in bed for another day or two, but no one had come to visit me since yesterday afternoon, and I had woken far too early this morning, when I rolled onto my side and the pain jolted me awake. But if I were to tell Sophon that, expecting sympathy, he would smile and say that if my sleeping self had forgotten I was hurt, my waking self would follow in a day or two.

I would rather have taken the risk of ripping open my stitches than spend another hour on my own. I padded over to a wooden chest, and found an old shift dress the colour of freshly churned cream. The slaves had taken advantage of my period in bed to wash and mend all my clothes: I scarcely recognized the dress as mine. It was cut wide enough for me to lift it only a little way above my head. I twisted my neck to slide myself into it without using my injured muscles more than I had to.

I splashed water on my face to convince myself it was morning: my mind was still fogged from having woken too early. I couldn’t reach down to put on my soft leather sandals, so I walked barefoot towards the door, relishing the cool stones. I could hear a faint murmuring from outside, and I was sure it was Ani. As I opened the door onto the colonnade at the side of the family courtyard, I saw her sitting by the fountain, its sides painted with leaping dolphins, holding hands with our cousin Haem.

My mother used to say that this was her favourite part of the palace. She didn’t usually enjoy telling stories, it was something she preferred to leave to our father. But occasionally you could persuade her to talk about her life before she married him, before us. When she came to tuck me into bed at night, I would ask her to tell us a story about what the palace was once like. She would resist, saying it was time for me to go to sleep, or that she was tired. But sometimes, she gave in. This courtyard – she would say – was bare and sad when she first laid eyes on it. Scarcely any living plants in the ground, no water in the fountain. The frescos on the walls were faded, and chunks of the plaster had fallen off. Some of it still lay on the ground, like half-chewed lumps of meat. She didn’t even think about how dilapidated it looked, she said. Until she met my father, who had spent so much time outside the city walls. He had grown up loving flowers and trees, she explained. Ask him to tell you the names of all the plants in the garden, she would say. He knows them all. When she saw him looking at the sad, dead courtyard one day, she realized she wanted to give him a proper garden. She found a gardener to fill the flowerbeds and repair the fountain. He brought three other men and they came at night, so it would be a surprise.

And so one morning, she and my father woke to the sound of the water, tippling down the sides of the long-parched ornamental stone. It was worth the effort, she said, just to see my father’s face when he realized the gardens were filled with herbs and shrubs and new fruit trees. When you asked my father about the same day, he offered up a detail my mother always missed out: the first morning he looked at the thyme and rosemary, freshly sprouted from the new black soil beneath them, he claimed he had spotted the first butterfly seen in the palace of Thebes in hundreds of years. I always believed him. It took years before the almond trees first produced their fruit, or the figs. My parents never lived to eat them.

My sister looked so much like our mother: the same dark hair plaited around the sides of her head and bound at the back, the same pale skin. And the same tendency for dramatic gestures: every time my sister placed her hand on her heart, I wondered if she was copying our mother deliberately. But it never felt like the sort of question I could ask. She loved to sit by the fountain because she knew it was the perfect place for private conversations. No one could approach you from any side of the courtyard without being seen. No one in the colonnades could hear what was being said in the centre because the sound of the water masked the words being spoken.

Haem noticed me before she did and he pulled his hand away from hers. Only a small distance, just so you couldn’t say they were holding hands. He knew – even if my sister pretended not to – that I wanted more than anything to be sitting where she was. His hair was a dark gold colour, lighter when he let it grow long and curl into his neck. And although it was many years since we had played together in this square – him carrying me around on his back, pretending to be a horse while I squawked with glee – I could still remember exactly how his hair smelled: clean and somehow warm, like spiced wine in winter. But of course he only cared for Ani. And now we were no longer children, he barely saw me.

I waved to them both as I walked along the colonnade. I wanted somebody to talk to, but I was too embarrassed to stop and speak to them now. My sister waved back and smiled.

‘Are you going back to lessons already?’ she called. I nodded and kept walking. I could make it to Sophon’s study, surely.

I was the only one who still visited our tutor. Polyn had finished lessons when he turned fifteen, Eteo and Haem the year after when they reached the same age, both boys resenting that final year, when Polyn was spending his days with men as they were left to feel like children. Ani had never been interested in the classroom, unless my cousin was in it. She called Sophon a dry old man and said he had nothing to teach her. But once it was just him and me, Sophon began talking about more interesting ideas – history, philosophy – almost as if he had been waiting for the others to leave. I had never dared to ask him if he had deliberately bored them into removing themselves from his lessons, one after another. He was almost the only person who spoke about my parents at all (everyone else preferred to pretend they had never existed, even my uncle), and I wondered if he wanted someone to remember them to, as much as I wanted to hear them remembered. He was nearly seventy years old, and had lived through the Reckoning, when he was a boy, then through my mother’s reign, and so far – he would say – he had survived my brothers. He liked to say that he planned to hold on till I became queen, and then he’d die happy. I would laugh, knowing this was a promise to live forever: as the poets would sing of me, I am the youngest of four siblings, cursed daughter of cursed parents. My brothers will marry because they are kings. My sister will surely marry Haem. But I cannot expect such a future for myself, and Thebes will never want me as her queen.

I knocked on Sophon’s door and found him sitting in the thin early morning light on a battered old chair by the fire. It was cold in the courtyards at the beginning of the day. The sun took its time to clear the mountains behind the palace, and until it filled the open squares, it was never really warm, even during the summer. The hairs on my arms were standing up: I should have asked Ani if I could borrow a cloak or a shawl. My own cloak had disappeared. I asked one of the servants about it, and she told me that they had scrubbed and scrubbed but couldn’t get the blood out of it. I was relieved to see that Sophon was also feeling the cold. He used to say the heat went out of him when he was thirty, so he had spent the last forty years lighting the fire.

His room was my favourite part of the palace. Its walls were lined with shelves, which were filled with carefully rolled papyri. There was nothing you couldn’t find here, if you had the time and the inclination. Sophon didn’t play favourites with the manuscripts he had acquired over the years: astrology and astronomy were next to each other, history and biography, agriculture and household-economy, and – most numerous and my favourite – stories about great heroes of the past.

The fireplace was on the far wall, surrounded by the shelves. Sophon’s desk was under the high windows, but he preferred to sit closer to the heat. He was white-haired, balding on the top. He had a neatly trimmed white beard, and I never saw him wear anything which wasn’t brown. I had asked him once why he liked brown so much, and he said it was easier. Long ago, before the Reckoning, he was a doctor, and lived at the temple of Asclepius, son of Apollo, down in the belly of the town. People would travel from all over Thebes and the lands outside to be treated by him. But he moved up to a house near the palace when he met my mother and she asked him to be Polyn’s tutor. She couldn’t think of anyone better, she said.

‘Isy – you look cold. Come and sit here.’ Sophon waved at the chair opposite his, and I hurried over and sat down, trying not to wince. ‘I’m not sure you should be up yet, should you?’ he asked. He pointed to the back of the chair, where there was a woollen blanket. I pulled it down and wrapped it around myself.

‘I woke up so early,’ I told him. ‘I was bored.’

‘You wanted something to read, I imagine,’ he said. ‘This might be what you’re looking for.’ He stood up with a suppressed groan and walked over to his shelves. He was a cacophony of bones: a joint creaked or snapped with every step. He reached up without a moment’s hesitation and picked out a new papyrus from the crammed stacks. He gave it to me, and I saw it was a replacement copy of the one I had been reading before. The one I had covered in my blood.

‘I’m so sorry I ruined it,’ I said.

‘Isy, it doesn’t matter,’ he replied, though his eyes were filmy, as though it mattered very much. ‘And the scribe was pleased to have the work.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Is there any news on your attacker?’ Sophon asked, as he sat back down. I looked across at him. His chair was in front of the window, so it was too bright behind him for me to see his face in more than silhouette.

‘I don’t know. Eteo is searching for him. What have you heard?’

‘I’ve heard your brother will find him,’ he said quietly.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I believe your attacker will be found shortly. It has taken several days now, long enough to make it appear that it has been a difficult job to track him down.’

‘You’re not saying that Eteo . . .’

‘I don’t think so, Isy, but I can’t be completely sure. I think someone else is responsible, but – as far as I can tell – Eteo is as much their target as you.’ The fear must have leapt across my face because he corrected himself. ‘Not a target of an assassin. The target of a plot. Someone is trying to destabilize his kingship. Killing you would have been an extremely effective way of doing that. The king can’t be responsible for keeping his city safe when he can’t even keep his own household safe. Do you see?’

‘But Eteo will only be king for one more month,’ I said. ‘Then it is Polyn’s year.’ My brothers alternate the kingship. In other cities, Polyn would have become king, because he is the eldest. But the age gap between my brothers is very small: barely more than one year. And my uncle decided that sharing the kingship would be a better solution for our city. He believes in prophecies, and he was persuaded by a fortune-teller that our city could easily descend into civil war otherwise. The king of Thebes, whoever he is, is cursed, Creon believes. Lots of Thebans believe it. So by splitting the power, he hoped to divide the curse. And half a curse can’t possibly be as bad as a whole one. One day, I would like to ask him if he really believes this or if he just believes he should pay heed to it in public. My uncle is not an easy man to read.

‘Yes, that’s the most confusing aspect of things,’ Sophon said. ‘Only a month . . .’

‘What do you expect to happen next?’ I asked.

‘I think they will find someone who appears to be guilty. But if he is the perpetrator – which I doubt he will be – he will only be the most visible element. The real plot is still hidden from view. You must be careful.’

‘I was careful before,’ I said, although I knew this wasn’t true. I hadn’t been expecting a masked man to infiltrate my home. We have guards everywhere. I thought I was safe and I had behaved accordingly.

‘I’m not blaming you, Isy. I’m trying to protect you.’

I nodded. I had come to Sophon to try and feel better, and if anything I now felt worse. I wanted to go back to my room, but my side was throbbing too much for me to stand.

‘Do you have any old parchment?’ I asked him. ‘That you aren’t using?’

‘Yes, I think so,’ he replied. ‘Are you too old for wax tablets now? Your words need some permanence?’ He smiled. ‘How old are you today?’

‘Fifteen,’ I reminded him. He knew perfectly well when I was born.

‘It feels like a year or two at most since you were a baby,’ he said. ‘It’s only because you’ve grown so tall that I believe you when you say that.’

He opened a cupboard door beside the desk and pulled out two small rolls of parchment. ‘Here you are,’ he said. ‘Will this be enough for now?’

‘Yes. Do you have any ink?’

‘There’s ink and everything else you need in the cupboard over by the door,’ he said. ‘You can pick it up when you go back to your room. Save me walking over there.’ He crunched his way back to his chair and sat down again.

I thought of something Eteo had said, about Sophon running to help me, when I was stabbed. The man who supported his way round the room leaning on the furniture could not really have run, surely? Not even if there was a fire behind him. But my brother has never been prone to exaggeration: like me, he prefers to leave that to Ani.

‘What do you intend to use it for?’ Sophon asked.

‘I want to keep a record,’ I told him. ‘Of what’s happening. When we talked before, about history, you said I must always bear in mind who composes it. And I thought about that a lot when I was in bed. I thought about how my story would never be told if I didn’t tell it.’

Sophon said nothing.

‘An official history of Thebes would mention my brothers and my uncle. It might even mention Ani, because she will end up marrying Haem.

Sophon nodded. ‘Yes, I think she will.’

‘But no one will remember me, the youngest daughter. I don’t matter, do I?’

Anyone else would have told me I mattered very much to them. Sophon sighed. ‘No, Isy, I’m afraid you don’t.’

‘So I should compose my own history, shouldn’t I? Or it will be lost forever.’

‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘You should.’

‘Is it better to start at the beginning?’ I asked him. ‘Or to start now and work backwards?’

He thought for a long moment. ‘You should try to compose it in your head first,’ he said. ‘And then you will know how to begin when you write it down. I think, perhaps, you should start now, and then try to understand what will happen in the light of what has happened so far. Do you see?’

‘Everything that is to come has been decided by what has already occurred? You sound like Creon: the gods decide everything, and we are their playthings.’

‘Not the gods, Isy. The gods do what they will. I doubt they have much time for us: why would they? Don’t they have more important things on their minds than the fates of a few mortals?’

‘Of course they do. You know I think the same. That’s why I don’t understand what you’re saying.’

‘Because events are decided by other events. Aren’t they? If someone ran in through the door now, and shouted that a pack of wild dogs was tearing through the main courtyard, what would happen?’

‘We would shut the door and lock it. We might push some of the furniture against it, too. Then if the lock doesn’t hold, the chairs might keep them at bay.’

‘And if no such messenger arrives, what happens to the furniture?’

‘We leave it where it is.’

‘So the fate of the chair today is decided by the decision of a pack of dogs that have – at this moment – never set eyes on it. Who could not begin to understand that it even exists. Do you understand?’

‘Yes. I think so.’

‘No one would believe the gods had nothing to do with what happens to us, Isy, but we surely can’t believe they would intervene in the existence of a simple chair, or even a dog.’

‘And a human life is more complicated than the life of a chair,’ I said, wishing I had thought this through for myself.

‘Of course. Can you even begin to count the myriad ways in which your life might be affected by the choices other people – people you have never met, whose existence is utterly hidden from you – are making every day?’

‘So how can I write my history, when there is so much I don’t know, which might cause a profound change to things I think I do know?’

‘Well, that is the difficulty of writing it,’ he said. ‘The ink is by the door. I told you, didn’t I?’

He closed his eyes. This is typical of our conversations. I end them knowing more than I did when they began. But I am somehow less sure of things.