The Children of Jocasta

I followed my cousin out to the main square, where Polyn’s wake was beginning. I had forgotten my five-stringed lyre, and had to run back to collect it. I hoped I would be able to play it well enough to mark the death of both of my brothers. The words I had composed were appropriately vague, but I would know – Eteo would know – they were for him as well as Polyn. I had not practised for several days; Thebans would consider it profoundly disrespectful for a sister to sit playing a phorminx while her brothers awaited burial. I knew what I wanted to sing, though: I had rehearsed it all in my mind. And the plangent tones of this instrument – which was old even when it was given to me – would be ideally suited to my song.

I wished Ani was there, hastening along beside me. Or rather, she would have been walking at her own pace, and Haem and I would have slowed down, to avoid leaving her behind.

‘Have you seen my sister?’ I asked him.

He shook his head. ‘She’s in the cells, in the caves beneath the main square,’ he said. ‘I’m sure of it. But I haven’t spoken to my father about it. He issued the sentence this morning, he will not be in any mood to issue a reprieve this afternoon.’

It took me a moment to realize that he was speaking literally. Ani had been taken to jail this morning, and then there had been Eteo, and then it was now. I felt as though Ani had been locked up a month ago. I wanted to step back from the gathering crowd and spend some time with my own thoughts, but of course I could do no such thing. The sun was dropping fast, and the servants were beginning to light the torches, even though they were not needed quite yet. Each one was placed in a bronze holder around the walls of the main square, so that it never grew fully dark. Creon was over by the altar, performing one last set of ritual offerings to the gods he believes in so devoutly. And yet, how could any priest pretend to him that his gods would tolerate the burial of one man and not another? It was nonsense. Either the dread lord of the Underworld expected his dues to be paid for the dead, or he did not. It could not be halfway between the two, and any priest who said otherwise was no more respectful of the gods than my uncle himself.

There was something not quite right in the courtyard. The servants were moving with their usual invisible efficiency, the priests were intoning, the musicians were playing, the crowd was gathering. But, something was wrong, as if the incense which burned over the altars had been tainted, or everyone in the courtyard had begun speaking a different language. I felt eyes upon me, too many of them. Of course people would stare – I have grown up as the child of a polluted union, I am used to the stares – but this was more than usual. Haem looked across at me, frowning. He felt it too.

‘What is it?’ I asked. He shook his head. But we both knew the answer, even before the watchman ran in through the main gates, and prostrated himself before my uncle, pressing his forehead against the stones as though that would be enough to save him.

‘Forgive me, Basileus,’ he said.

My uncle looked irritated at being disturbed from his piety, but not as much as I would have expected. Perhaps he had prayed enough. Or perhaps he realized the gods would not hear him today.

‘What do you want?’ he snarled.

‘Forgive me,’ the man said again. ‘I don’t know how it happened. Or when.’

Creon pressed his lips together, as though he wished he could spit the man out, like a piece of rancid pork fat. ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Be assured that I will not ask again.’

The man sat back on his heels, his grey tunic stretching taut across his belly. ‘I was not the only man on watch, king,’ he said. ‘But my comrades and I drew lots, and it fell to me to bring this news to you. Your nephew, the traitor, has been buried.’

Creon’s face was unreadable, even to me who had known him for my entire life. The anger was plain in the creases around his mouth. But I saw a trace of something else there too. Was it possible that he was relieved?

‘Continue,’ he said.

The man looked frantically around him, expecting guards to appear on all sides, their spears pointed down at his ribs. His chest was heaving with the effort of running into the palace and scraping himself down on the ground.

‘It happened sometime today, Basileus. This afternoon, perhaps. The traitor lay open to the air this morning: I saw a dog feeding off him myself.’ If he thought this would ingratiate him with my uncle, he was mistaken. Revulsion flickered across Creon’s face. I felt my own chest tighten. Even the knowledge that Eteo was finally safe did not undo the damage done before I could bury him.

‘He was buried today, on your watch?’ Creon asked.

‘There were six of us on patrol, majesty.’ The man stumbled over his words, so quick was he to explain that it was not his fault alone. ‘Whoever did it, they slipped past us.’

‘For how long,’ Creon asked, luxuriating now in the man’s evident fear, ‘would you estimate you were in dereliction of your duties?’

‘Basileus, it was not for long. I promise, not long at all. Only enough time to return to the guardhouse and find my fellow watchmen to take over from me.’

Creon nodded. ‘I should have you all executed,’ he said mildly. Perhaps he was remembering how few guards the palace now had, after he had ordered so many to be killed on the day Polyn and Eteo died. ‘You expect me to believe that a whole troop of men found their way out to the back of the palace and buried a full-grown man in the time it took you to return to the guardhouse? How long were you asleep for?’

The courtyard had grown very quiet when the watchman ran in, but you could hear the news spreading around the square. The traitor had been buried; someone had buried the boy; both of the dead kings were now beneath the ground; someone had heeded the words of the princess; Creon’s law had been broken; the gods’ law had been obeyed.

The tension was extraordinary, like the strings on a lyre that has been allowed to grow too warm near a fire. As the wood expands, the strings snap, one after another. As each one gives way, the remaining strings are pulled tauter still, trying to do the work of themselves and their brothers. Even my uncle, people were muttering, could not order that his own nephew be disinterred. It was bad enough that he had sought to disobey the gods by leaving the boy unburied. But to dig him out of the ground was unthinkable. Was Creon really about to demand that the watchman commit such a terrible crime?

‘I swear,’ said the man, stretching himself out on the ground, his belly pushed into the flagstones, spilling down into the gaps between them, ‘I was not asleep. They must have been lightning-quick.’

I felt useless nerves filling my belly. I had not even considered that Creon would have ordered guards to watch over Eteo. But I had not seen anyone when I was outside, not even a shepherd in the distance. Outside the walls, where the palace almost hangs over the hill beneath us, it is usually quiet. Goats graze on the other hills, and olives grow on the lower slopes. But no goatherds or farmers use the land around the palace. I suppose the men charged with keeping watch over Eteo had simply assumed it was unnecessary. I had been – though I could barely think the word – lucky. I corrected myself: in this one regard, I had been lucky.

‘She was right,’ I heard a man say. ‘The girl was right.’

Crowds are curious things: made up of individuals, but with a character entirely their own. As people realized what the man was saying, they remembered what my sister had demanded this morning. She had asked for Eteo to be buried, as was proper, and now he had been. Yet the girl was in prison, wasn’t she? Beneath the palace square? Was she beneath their very feet as they stood waiting for the music to begin and the wine to be poured to honour the shade of my brother, Polyn? But then how had the other king been buried?

It never occurred to any of them to wonder if I might have had anything to do with it. I was still the youngest child, the one they could overlook. I felt Haem next to me, breathing shallowly. He too had realized how close I must have come to getting caught. Or was he waiting for the watchman to admit that he had taken a bribe to look the other way, from the young prince, the heir to his father’s throne?

I would never know the truth, because I realized at that moment that it was not important, and in the chaos which followed, I did not ask him. What mattered was that the people of Thebes were beginning to appreciate that my sister had been wrongfully imprisoned. And if she could arrange, from a subterranean cell, for her brother to be buried, she was powerful in a way that the all-powerful king was not. She must be a favourite of the gods, for who else could have assisted her? This morning, the king had seemed to be a stern but patriotic leader. Now, he seemed to them to be an arrogant fool, alienating the gods by persecuting their favourite. And what could be more pathetic than a grown man afraid of a girl?

Suddenly, anger was rippling through the courtyard, like wind across the wheat crops which grew in the lowlands outside the city. They were shouting, stamping, whistling and clapping their hollowed hands together. The guards, to whom Creon looked, stood back, impassive. They were new recruits, and they had no experience in this kind of situation. My uncle sought out one he knew, but though there were a few older men who I recognized – standing with their spears by their sides, seemingly blind and deaf – he did not see them, or if he did, he realized they would not obey him.

The crowd called my sister’s name, ‘Ani, Ani’, punctuated with the stamps of their feet. My sister must have felt the very walls of her cell shuddering from the noise and the dust which rose up as they smacked their sticks and boots into the ground.

‘I’m going to fetch her,’ I whispered to Haem, though no one could have heard me over the noise they were making. ‘Before there’s a riot.’

I was standing near to one of the older guards, and I grabbed his arm. ‘Can you take me to Ani?’ I said. ‘Take me to my sister.’

The man looked around him as though he hadn’t heard, or was uncertain what I might be asking. Then he dipped his head in a brisk nod, and walked away. I ran to keep up with him.

In the furthest corner of the square, behind the throne room and the temples, was a dingy forgotten corner with a battered ancient door – blackened over the years – in front of what I had always assumed (if I had ever given it any thought) was a storeroom, built into a recess in the outside walls. The white stone had turned grey with dirt and time. The guard reached to his belt and I thought he would produce a key, but instead he drew out a dagger by the hilt. It was this which he thumped against the door five times, before stowing it back at his waist. There was the sound of wood scraping on stone and something heavy shifting in its socket. The door swung open before us, and I could see that far from hiding a small cupboard, it opened onto a dimly lit flight of stairs. The guard who had opened the door from within raised his eyebrows at his comrade when he saw me, but he said nothing, and stepped aside.

The tunnels beneath the palace were dark and I was relieved when the guard pulled a torch from a wall-sconce and carried it ahead of us to light our path. The steps were smooth and worn beneath my feet, and the air was musty. Water dripped from the roof of the caves, and had left rust-brown deposits down the damp walls.

The sound of our feet – his boots, my sandals – echoed off the walls as we followed the twisting corridor through its many turns. I had no sense of which direction we were travelling in: without the sky to guide me, I was lost. But eventually, we came to a long straight stretch, where the man half-turned his head, and said, ‘Not far, now.’

‘Whereabouts are we?’ I asked.

‘You’re going under the market square,’ he said. ‘The cells were built in the caves which open out onto the far side of the hill. Don’t worry, Potnia, your sister isn’t alone in the dark. Although the sun must be almost set by now.’

I was startled by the formal title: no one had called me ‘Princess’ in years. I was too young to warrant it until recently. But someone had used the honorific before, long ago. I couldn’t remember who. My father, I supposed. I shivered, although I hadn’t felt cold until just now.

As my companion had promised, the darkness grew slightly less complete when we reached the far end of this tunnel. Then he turned right, down a shorter corridor, and there were three small doors on the left-hand side, each one barred with a thick pine plank, and each one with a small grille in the top, through which the prisoner could be seen. But so little light was now spilling in from outside, it was virtually as dark as the tunnels we had come through.

‘She’s in the furthest one,’ he said.

Even though I was desperate to see her, I hesitated before stepping forward. I had a sudden horrible vision of Ani lying dead in the cell, her tiny frame collapsed on the ground. I felt as though the walls and ceiling were rushing in to crush me, as though all the air had been taken from my lungs. I stumbled, and the guard put out his hand to support me. ‘Steady,’ he said.

‘Forgive me.’

‘Forgive you?’ he laughed. ‘You must be the only person in Thebes who would come down here voluntarily. And as it’s getting dark, too. You’re a brave girl. Now, give me a hand with the pine log, so your sister can get back where she belongs.’

He strode ahead, and I tried to shake the image of my dead sister from my mind, concentrating on following this stranger who thought I was brave.

‘Here we go,’ he said, as we slid the wooden bar from its housing. He allowed his end to drop to the ground and propped it against the door jamb. The door swung open of its own accord.

And there before my eyes my nightmare was made flesh. Next to a small, dirty cot, my sister swung from a rope she had fashioned from her own stole. I screamed, but the guard was quicker to act: he dropped his torch and ran forward and lifted her from the waist. Reaching into his belt, he pulled out the knife and slashed through the fabric noose. My sister slumped into his arms.

I reached down and picked up the torch from my feet. Its sputtering light flickered back into brightness. The guard turned and I saw Ani’s face, reddish-purple next to the white rope around her neck. Then she coughed, and I almost dropped the torch again, in fear and relief.

‘Ani!’ I screamed. ‘Are you alive?’

She did not reply, but the guard nodded. ‘Her throat won’t let her talk for a moment or two, Potnia. Lucky you came when you did.’

My sister opened her eyes and pointed upwards.

‘I need to get her back to the main courtyard,’ I said. ‘Will you help me?’

The guard glanced at the ground. ‘I’ll carry her out of the caves for you. But I can’t take her into the palace. I have three daughters. Your uncle—’

‘I understand,’ I said. There was no point arguing with him when we both knew the words he wasn’t saying: my uncle didn’t hesitate to punish guards with death. The man could not afford to take the risk.

I walked beside him, carrying the torch, while he carried my sister. When we finally found ourselves out on the hillside, he dipped Ani’s feet to the ground and set her down. ‘Can you stand?’ he asked. She nodded uncertainly. But as he let go of her, she did not fall.

‘Thank you,’ I said to him. ‘If it is ever within my power, you will receive a rich reward for the service you have done my family today.’

The guard smiled. ‘Thank you, Potnia.’ He took the torch from me, for it was still just light enough to see in the fading twilight. He retreated back into the caves, and I took my sister’s arm, so she could lean on me. We began the darkening trudge up the hillside to the city walls.

‘What were you thinking, sister?’ I asked.

‘I should have known it would be you who came,’ she whispered. ‘I was hoping it would be Haem.’

It took me a moment to understand her meaning.

‘You wanted him to find you and cut you down?’ My sister had always had a weakness for dramatic gestures, but this was excessive even for her. Her eyes glittered.

‘I will be queen of Thebes, Isy. I am the rightful heir. The throne is mine. I knew Haem would have supported me if he’d rescued me from death by my own hand.’

I stopped dead. ‘Are you serious?’

She pulled my arm, hurrying me along. ‘Of course I am serious. Never more so. Our brothers are dead, I will be queen or I will be dead. I will not live like a child for the rest of my life.’

‘But you nearly died. What if it had been Haem, and he hadn’t been able to open the door in time? Or what if he hadn’t had a knife to cut you down?’

‘He’s not an idiot,’ she snapped. ‘He would have done something when he saw me hanging there.’ I shook my head. ‘I have to separate him from his father,’ she said. ‘Or he is no use to me at all.’

‘I thought you loved him,’ I said, and she squeezed my arm.

‘I do,’ she replied. ‘In a way.’

‘Well, I’m sorry he didn’t come,’ I said. ‘But he covered for me. I buried Eteo this afternoon.’

Ani nodded, though it made her wince. ‘I knew you’d think of something,’ she said.

We had reached the edge of the city and climbed a few steps into the deserted market square. I thought she would ask about Eteo, but she seemed happy to know no more than that he was properly interred.

‘I thought our brothers were important to you,’ I said.

‘They were, Isy. But they’re in the past and I am here now. They’re both buried, you said?’ I nodded. ‘Then there’s no more to discuss,’ she continued, as we scurried across to the palace gates. She paused, then said, ‘Isy, I overheard the oddest thing this afternoon, as I was waiting for you to come and get me.’

‘What did you hear?’

‘The guards walked past my cell to check on me several times,’ she said. ‘Two of them, making sure I was safely locked up. I don’t know how they imagined I could escape.’ Her thoughts had already returned to herself.

‘And one of them said something . . .?’ I prompted her.

‘They had both helped to carry Polyn to the tomb, to our family tomb,’ she said. I nodded, as we continued to walk across the slippery cobbled stones. ‘And they said when the tomb was opened for him to be placed inside . . .’ She paused and looked up, to check I was hanging on her words.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘They said the tomb was empty. Don’t you think that’s strange?’

‘I’m not sure strange is quite the right word for what I think,’ I said. ‘Empty?’

‘Mother and Father must be buried somewhere else,’ she said. ‘But I can’t think why, and I have been trying, all day.’ I felt a sudden rush of love for her, the last of my family.

‘I’ll think about it, too,’ I said. ‘We’ll make sense of it.’

‘Well, that will have to be your responsibility now,’ she said. ‘I won’t have time.’ Annoyance rose up in my chest where the love had just been.

‘Why not?’ Sometimes, you cannot avoid giving Ani the pleasure of making you ask.

‘Because when we walk into the palace,’ my sister said, ‘the people of Thebes will make me ruler of the city. I know they will. So that will be my life now.’

And as she spoke, we had arrived at the palace gates. We walked into the main courtyard and the crowd fell silent. But only for a moment, before they began shouting her name, and calling her Basileia, Anassa, queen.