The Children of Jocasta

The morning after the coronation, I tried to leave the palace, but there was no one available to accompany me. I asked my sister if she wanted to go down to the lake, but she made some excuse about a headache from sitting in the blistering sun the previous day. I tried to remind her of the dappled shade by the water, but she waved me away, a damp linen cloth on her forehead. It was more likely she had planned to meet Haem in some quiet corner of the palace and was waiting for me to leave so she could begin to get herself ready. There was no one else I could ask to come with me: Sophon would not welcome the suggestion that he clamber down the uneven, rock-strewn paths with his stick. And I could not ask Eteo, because I didn’t know what to say to him yet. That was one of the reasons I needed to go down to the lake: I wanted to swim away from the palace, and find my thoughts somewhere in the water. The painted dolphins which decorated the sides of the fountain in the courtyard were taunting me, swimming happily in their blue shallows.

In the end, I told one of the slave women that she would have to accompany me, and though she sighed and said she might be missed by the housekeeper, I pleaded with her until she agreed. We walked together through the courtyards: the sight of men scurrying around the second courtyard to do Polyn’s bidding would have amused me on another day – each man so intent on his own importance as he followed his route, like ants swarming around a nest – but today it made me feel more afraid. I had no way of knowing how many of these men, of the aristoi, were a danger to me. Or if the danger had ebbed, now that Polyn was ruler of Thebes once again. Sophon thought the attack had been organized to discredit Eteo. So was I safe now that Eteo was no longer king? The fear which had paralysed me at the coronation ceremony when I saw the priest’s knife had ebbed away today: I wanted escape.

The slave woman and I hurried through to the doorway which led into the main courtyard, but there we found the gates were closed and barred. Looking through them, it appeared that the front gates – from the main courtyard into the market square – were locked too, although the traders would certainly be at work by now. There were no guards standing by the gate. Only when I hammered on them did one appear on the other side.

‘Open the gates, please,’ I said.

He shook his jowls to and fro. ‘Not today.’

‘What do you mean, not today?’

‘By order of the king,’ he said. ‘The palace gates are to be kept locked.’

‘Until when?’ I asked. The sun was still low in the sky, and if they opened the gates again soon, I would still have time to walk down to the lake before it grew too hot. The guard shrugged and walked away. The maid looked at me, waiting to see what I would do now.

‘You can go back to the housekeeper and tell her our plans have changed,’ I said. She began to walk away. ‘Wait.’

She slowed and I caught her up. I preferred to walk with her across the second courtyard than go through it alone. Once on the other side of it, she disappeared into the kitchens, and I walked back along the colonnade into the family courtyard. The fountain was spluttering in the middle of the square, and I decided to go and sit beside it. I should find Sophon and ask him if he knew what was happening. Why would Polyn have closed the palace off from the city? Was he keeping the rest of Thebes out, or keeping us in?

I sat on the edge of the fountain and unlaced my sandals: I had spilled water on them yesterday and now the leather had hardened and was biting into my hot feet. I swung my feet into the pool, while I bent the leather straps to and fro in my hands, trying to soften them again. I could smell the honeysuckle and thyme from across the square: my father had planted both, hoping to attract wild bees to the garden. His plan had worked. One summer when I was small, they swarmed across the courtyard and built their hive in a dead tree just outside the palace walls. We had honeycomb that summer, dripping it onto hard brown bread and soft white sheep’s cheese. My difficulty with these memories is that I can never quite be sure that I’ve caught the right one from the mass of them flying around inside my head. I tie these two events together – my father planting the shrubs and the bees producing the honey – but I don’t know if I’m right to. I don’t always remember things in the order in which they happened, I don’t think. I remember individual moments: my father dusting the soil from his hands and picking me up so I could see the flowers on the honeysuckle and the bees nuzzling their way inside the petals. But did those two things happen on the same day? Surely he would have planted honeysuckle before it came into flower, or the blooms would have fallen when the plant was moved? As for the honey: I remember eating it – sweeter than anything I’d ever tasted before – but I don’t know who drizzled it onto my small, fat fingers. Were my parents still alive then, or was it my uncle who offered me the treat?

I sat by the fountain for a while, trying to tie the memories together in the right order, until Eteo’s door opened and he walked into the courtyard, running his hand through his ruffled hair. He had clearly woken late. I waved and he walked over to join me. He didn’t need to remove his sandals, having bare feet already.

‘What’s going on?’ he said. ‘Why aren’t you and Sophon busy composing some epic tale together, on the glory of my kingship?’

I shoved him. ‘I wanted to go down to the lake,’ I said. ‘But the gates are locked. On Polyn’s orders, according to the guard.’ I had been worrying that I would find it difficult to talk to him today, but it turned out to be easy.

‘Why?’ asked my brother. I shook my head. ‘You could sneak out the back way,’ he said. Eteo and I are the only ones who know about the door on the way to the ice store. Well, that isn’t entirely true. Plenty of other people must know where it is: the palace staff, for a start. But it had been locked for so long that no one else ever thought about it. A door that doesn’t open for a long enough time becomes the same thing as a wall, Sophon once said. I’m sure it was this kind of remark that provoked my siblings to stay away from his lessons. Still, I knew what he meant. Eteo had been with me when I found the key, years ago, hiding in a dark recess between a wooden chest and the bottom of the colonnade wall, outside our rooms. It was only visible because I was lying on the floor at the time, watching a bright green lizard scuttle along the ground. Lizards are usually brown or a dull, dusty green. But this one shone like a jewel. I was hypnotized by its radiant colour; Eteo by how it had avoided being eaten by a sharp-eyed bird when it was so bright.

The light glinted off something behind the emerald lizard and I reached under the chest to see what it was. The lizard scurried away in alarm, but I had this strange, ornate key to remember it by.

Eteo and I had no reason to keep the key secret, but we did anyway, because we both loved secrets. We waited until the others were occupied elsewhere, and carried the key from door to door, hidden in a pocket, testing it furtively, until we had exhausted every lock in the palace. It must have taken us a month. Only then did I remember the door that was not a door, in the ice-house corridor. We waited for days until there were no servants around, and our uncle wasn’t in his rooms, which were close to the entrance of that corridor. The key seemed to fit, but we couldn’t turn it at first, because the lock had stiffened with age. Then Eteo took a small bottle of olive oil from the kitchens that night, and we dipped the key into it, feeding oil into the lock to loosen the mechanism.

After all that, when we finally opened the door, we found it opened out onto nothing, the height of a man or more above the ground, which cut away beneath the palace because of the hill. There were no stairs or even a trace that there once had been any steps outside. We meant to make a rope ladder, so we would have our own secret exit from the courtyard, but we must have been distracted by something and we soon forgot about it. Once the mystery of the key was solved, we weren’t so concerned with using it. We just wanted to know what the key was for. Besides, we’d always been able to leave the palace before today.

‘I could sneak out that way,’ I said. ‘But doesn’t it seem odd that we should have to?’

‘You didn’t go to Polyn and ask him what was going on?’

‘I couldn’t.’

My brother turned to look at me. ‘Why not?’

And the noise of the fountain covered the sound of me telling him that it was because I was afraid of our older brother, and afraid of the friends he had chosen.

*

It was now half a month at least since Polyn’s coronation, and I was no closer to leaving the palace, not even for one day. Polyn was no longer spending the nights in the family courtyard, in the rooms he had as a child. I didn’t know where he was sleeping: perhaps one of the storerooms in the royal courtyard had been converted into the king’s quarters. I wanted to ask the servants if they knew, but I could not bear to lose face in front of them, to have them gossiping about the fact that I didn’t know where my brother was. And I didn’t. He had so often been absent that it took me a few days to notice that I hadn’t seen him at all since the coronation games. But there it was: he had not been in the family courtyard since he took the crown.

Eteo had not left his rooms since discovering that he had sentenced an innocent boy to death. Although he had always known that the boy with the knife was an unwitting victim of the same conspiracy which nearly cost me my life, there turned out to be a difference between knowing something terrible might be true, and discovering it was definitely true. He could not forget the cries of the boy’s mother as her son was marched from the palace grounds, sentenced to death by the king. By him. And until he emerged from his seclusion and returned to the fountain, I couldn’t talk to him. There was nowhere else I would feel safe discussing something so dangerous. Nowhere else where I would be certain we couldn’t be overheard.

Meanwhile my sister, who should have been talking to Polyn on our behalf, since they had always been closest – me and Eteo, her and Polyn – seemed entirely unconcerned by his absence, and wouldn’t have even noticed unless I’d asked her about it. Unless Haem mentioned something to her, or someone else talked to her about Haem, she paid no attention at all.

And then there was the problem of the palace gates. It was just for one day, the day after the coronation, that the front gates were barred. After that, the main courtyard was opened again to the people of Thebes. But the inner gates – from the royal courtyard into the public one – remained locked, and only Polyn’s advisers and friends seemed able to come and go as they pleased, the guards stepping smartly aside for them. I could see slivers of this from the family courtyard, because the gates from there into the second courtyard were now shut and barred as well. There wasn’t even a guard. There was no need for one. The gates had been closed for days, so they had become, as Sophon would say, no different from a wall. I could not go to my tutor in his study either. I didn’t know if he was still sitting there waiting for me or if he had given up and left the palace. Or even if he had been told to leave.

I tried asking my uncle about the locked gates, but I achieved little. I told him I wanted to visit Sophon and borrow a manuscript. He replied that I was surely too old for lessons now, and could already read and write, sing and compose and play the phorminx – the five-stringed lyre that the older generation of Thebans prized above all other instruments – better than any other girl in the city. Flattering as this was, it did nothing to help. I asked again about something to read, and he said I could tell him what I would like and he would send someone to fetch it from Sophon’s room and bring it back with him at the end of the next day. He and Haem were still able to come and go between the courtyards, though I hadn’t yet seen the gates open for them. I wondered if I should just sit beside the gates for one whole day, and then at least I would force whoever came and went to explain why I could not. But I sat there for a while, and no one tried to enter. They could just wait me out. I thought perhaps when Eteo came out of his room, we could share the duty, and then it wouldn’t require such perseverance. When I asked my uncle why he could move around the palace but I could not, he said that the security of the royal family was of unsurpassed importance, so we needed to accept these new measures to keep us safe. He thought I would understand that, after everything that had happened. But I didn’t feel safe; only trapped.

I tried to comb out this tangled state of affairs so I could compose verses for my history, verses which Polyn would not enjoy hearing me sing. But I could not successfully unravel it all. I had to work things out in my head before I could start trying to write anything down. I didn’t have enough parchment to make mistakes, and I didn’t know when I would be able to get more. Sophon would have expected me to use reasoning to understand my predicament, and I was trying. After much thought, this was what I believed to be true.

I could not accept that my oldest brother had wanted me to die. But equally, it was inconceivable that his friend had infiltrated the palace and attacked me without Polyn being, at the very least, aware of it. Sophon had suggested Polyn was part of a conspiracy intending to disrupt Eteo’s kingship, and it was true that my brothers had become virtual strangers to one another. Or perhaps it was always thus. I couldn’t remember them being friends even when they were very young. Eteo always had more in common with Haem than with Polyn. So I had two contradictory beliefs: that my brother was involved, and that he could not have been so heartless. I could not maintain them both. But without further evidence, I would not condemn my brother.

I didn’t know what kind of evidence I was expecting to find next. Would Polyn announce that the wrong man had been condemned for the attack on me? That would have weakened Eteo’s standing with the people of Thebes, certainly, but not by very much: the boy was not from one of the elite families, and anyway, he was dead now. Besides, it might well discredit Polyn, too. Ordinary Thebans spent far less time thinking about which of my brothers was king at any one time than they imagined, at least if Sophon’s judgement on the matter was correct. Prince, king: he often observed that the distinction was far smaller from the outside than it was on the inside. Both were a world away from being a market-trader or a cobbler or a smith. So though I understood why Eteo needed time alone to contemplate what he had done, I believed he was being eaten up by a baseless fear: people would not find out that he had condemned an innocent man. Apart from everything else, if the boy was publicly exonerated, Polyn would need to find another scapegoat. He was hardly likely to lay the blame where it belonged, on his own friend.

The courtyard gates were not, I believed, kept closed to keep us safe. The only danger I had ever been in was at the hands of my brother’s friend, the aristos with the knife. If he was back inside the palace now – as he probably was – it could only be at my brother’s invitation. And it was not credible to think Polyn would invite someone dangerous into our home and then worry about the danger. He was the king: no one could come into the palace without his knowledge and approval. The only other possibility – which I had discounted – was that Polyn himself was being forced to accept things he didn’t want to accept, just as I had been forced to accept that I was locked into the smallest courtyard of the palace. But who could force their will on the king? The idea was absurd.

So my conclusion was that I was a prisoner in this part of the palace, for whatever reason and for however long Polyn decided. When Eteo emerged – if he could put aside his guilt – he would help me to work out what to do next. The guards ignored me, and I could have hammered on the gates all day without provoking one of them to come over and speak to me. But they would not ignore the man who was king until recently and who would be king again once the four seasons had passed.

The problem with my theory was that I could think of only one plausible reason why Polyn would behave as he had. There was one explanation which encompassed all the information I had considered: Polyn had no intention of sharing the kingship any longer. He had replaced Eteo for good this time, and he would not give up the throne again.

It was impossible to conclude anything else.