The Children of Jocasta

It was the morning of Polyn’s coronation and, getting dressed in my room, I could hear the preparations taking place throughout the palace. The market stalls had been removed from the agora outside the palace gates, and the sand had been swept into a racetrack. Once the ceremony had taken place in the throne room, fifty youths – who were known as the aristoi, the best of Thebes’s young men – would be competing in the celebratory games. They were all Polyn’s age or thereabouts. Many of them had been his friends for years. They were the sons of Thebes’s leading families, and Polyn, Eteo and Haem would compete alongside them: Polyn and Haem in the wrestling and Eteo in the foot-race. It was a chance for my brothers and my cousin to show off, and Thebes would be disappointed if no one from the royal household won an event.

I was making my preparations alone. My sister and I would both be wearing crocus-yellow dresses: the colour worn by girls at Theban ceremonies. It was a colour which Ani said suited me, bringing out the golden tones in my usually mousy hair. My sister was far less happy about wearing it herself, saying that yellow made her look sallow and plain. She wanted to wear a beautiful blue-green dress – the colour of the lake we never visited any more – which she had recently acquired (a gift from Haem, I imagined), but she could not prevail on either my uncle or my brothers to let her disregard the traditional colour and wear what she chose.

She was so angry that – to placate her – I suggested she had the slaves help her to make herself presentable (she would allow no more than that, in such a horrible dress). My sister has never looked anything but beautiful to everyone else. The intricate hairstyle she was planning required at least two women to plait and wrap. I reassured them that I could dress myself without assistance – as I did most days – and Ani threw her arms around me with gratitude. She knew my hair would look the same no matter how many people tried to ambush it with combs and pins. But that was not why I preferred to dress myself. I could not bear to hear the slave girls gossip. The palace was buzzing with details from those who had watched the boy – my supposed assassin – die. Everyone except Eteo thought I would want to know what had happened. It was meant to reassure me: no more danger, now the man who attacked me was gone. Instead, hearing them was like joining a conspiracy. The soldiers had beaten him to death, before carrying his bludgeoned body to a wooden pole in front of the palace gates and stringing him up as a warning to other criminals. Even by staying away from the main courtyard, it had been impossible to avoid him: the smell, sweet and rancid, permeated the palace. I wondered how long they would leave him there, beckoning the crows and wild dogs to ruin him completely.

When I refused to go and look at the broken boy, Polyn laughed and said I was too squeamish. But I could not stand to see another person dead. My parents died within hours of each other, years ago. I was five years old, Ani was almost seven, Eteo nearly nine and Polyn ten. And the only thing which comforts me, when I think back to that whole terrible day, has been the certainty that my parents loved one another in a way that most couples do not. If one of them had to die, it was better that they both did, because neither of them could have survived without the other.

No woman has ever gazed at her husband with the urgency that filled my mother’s face whenever she looked at my father. When he left a room, even if it was just for a brief time, her whole body slumped, as though her soul went with him and she could do nothing but sit and wait until he returned. It might have been pitiful, had he not loved with equal fervour. If he had to go somewhere without her, you would see him almost sprinting across the courtyards on his return, just to get back to her a moment sooner. When the aristoi run in their foot-race today, each competing for the glory of victory over his peers, not one of them will have such focus in his eyes as my father, hastening across the palace to my mother. She used to wait for him like a dog, her head lifting every time she heard footsteps that might be him, coming home. This never struck me as odd, because it was all I knew. If I thought about it at all, I just believed everyone’s parents were like this: anxious when they were not together. As long as my mother could hear us playing, she was content. The sound of her children was sufficient for her to know we were safe. But with my father it was different: she needed to see him, to touch him, as though only then could she persuade herself that he truly existed.

So when she died, the idea that he might live without her was unthinkable. His heart broke on the spot, so people used to say, and he simply gave up and died himself. As a child, this seemed to me not only plausible, but necessary. But now I can no longer resist the knowledge that people rarely die of broken hearts, except in the stories poets sing.

I have only the most fractured memories of the day they died: the rest I know from my siblings. My parents were buried over by the city walls, a little way down the hill from the palace. I remember the funeral because so many people were crying and tearing their clothes. I didn’t understand why my uncle was weeping and holding Haem so tightly in his arms. My brothers had tried to explain to me that our parents were gone and would never come back, but I still thought they would walk into our rooms at any moment, holding each other and laughing. Once it became clear that no one thought this except me, not even Ani, I indulged in this belief only when I was alone in bed. I cried when my uncle snapped at me that they were dead forever, and then Ani would cry too, because she hated to see me cry and we both hated to hear what he said. So on my own, in my head, in the darkness, I would imagine their return: how we would hear two sets of sandals clipping the stones in the courtyard, how the splashing water would be interrupted when my father ran his hands through it and splashed it into his face to cool off. How they would block the light for an instant when they stood in my doorway and smiled at me. I knew exactly how it would be, but it never happened.

I still remember the smell from the temple grounds where offerings were made after the funeral: the pungent incense – pricking my eyes with its sweet, suffocating smoke – which the priests burned in their honour. There were gleaming white calves with fillets tied around their heads which were sacrificed to the shades. Their small clean hooves clattered against the cobbled ground as the blade cut through their undefended throats. I remember that too.

But so much is lost to me. I have always felt that if I had been even a little bit older, I would have known more. No one ever spoke about my mother after she died. Perhaps they believed that we would forget about her if no one mentioned her. In fact, the opposite has happened. She seems more real to me now than ever, as though I could walk through the door into her bedroom and see her sitting up with pillows all around her, patting them for me to spring up and kiss her, even though I would now be taller than her. I still wake up sometimes, thinking I can hear her shutting the door as quietly as she can, having checked I am safely asleep.

There is one more memory I have from that day, one I am certain of. One I cannot forget. My mother was carried across the palace on a stretcher by two men, one much taller than the other. They had placed a sheet over her, as a sign of respect. But as they hurried through the square, the disparity in their heights meant that my mother was tilting downwards. The cloth shifted as they shuffled along, and the one at the front could not see: he was facing the wrong way. So he didn’t notice when the sheet uncovered part of her face.

Ani and I were standing in the colonnade, trying to understand what was happening: so many people – slaves, guards, our uncle, Sophon – had been rushing in and out of our mother’s room. We knew something was wrong, but could not imagine something so terrible. And even when we saw the stretcher, we didn’t think it could be her, because why would our mother be lying on a litter with her face covered? That wasn’t how she behaved at all. Even when I saw what I now know must have been her face, I didn’t realize it was our mother because it was not her: the person I saw was purple and puffy and broken, barely a person at all. Then our father walked out into the courtyard and caught sight of her. The sound he made – a wordless howl of anguish – is one I could still hear now, if I allowed myself to do so. He ran over and flung himself onto the stretcher, crashing with her down to the ground. Within moments, my uncle had intervened and my father was lifted away from her.

I have tried and tried to remember what happened next, but I cannot. Nonetheless, I am as certain as I can be that this moment was the last time I saw my father. And how am I supposed to compose my own history without including this part of my story? I am the daughter of a king and queen, the sister of two kings, but I will remain unmarried and will grow old alone. What Theban family would ally themselves with one as cursed as mine, unless real power and wealth was at stake?

Perhaps I should leave here one day, and settle in another city, where the curse is not common knowledge. But I doubt if even Eteo would agree to his sister wandering Hellas like a vagabond. My parents were disgraced and died in so short a time. I was the same child from one year to the next (or the changes I underwent were minor: a little taller, my hair a little longer), yet I metamorphosed from princess to burden in the cessation of a heartbeat. No wonder the philosophers say that a river is always in flux, never staying the same. So a person cannot step into the same water twice.