Rachel Swirsky: A Memory of Wind

As for me, I felt airy, as if I were standing on the top of the limestone cliffs that surround Aulis harbor like the broken half of a bowl. Betrayal forced all our hearts to skip a beat, but mother and Orestes could still cry.

Parts of me were already gone. I knew there was no turning back.

“Tomorrow,” Iamas said. “They will do it tomorrow at dawn.”

Mother’s grip was painful on my arm. “Come on,” she said, dragging me out of the tent. Orestes screamed as we went. It was the sound I would have made if I could have.

Achilles saw my unprotected face. He shielded his eyes (dark and chary, above a beard like adolescent scrub) with his sword arm. “Does the girl have to be here?”

“My husband has made fools of us all,” said Clytemnestra. “He tricked me and used your name to do it. People will think you find it amusing to lure young girls to their deaths.”

Achilles paced angrily. Iamas flinched each time Achilles’s sword clanked against his armor. “He had no right to use my name.”

“You could make them stop this. They will listen to you. You’re a hero. If you tell them to stop, they’ll have to take heed.”

Achilles halted. “You want me to tell Agamemnon to stop the sacrifice?”

“For the sake of your reputation!”

“But how will we get to Troy?”

Mother approached him. At once, the stern and proper woman I had known all my life vanished (Helen arraying herself on the bench, the folds of her garment decorating her languorous body). She became a softer, reticent figure, her eyes averted, her hands gentle and hesitant as they lifted her hem to show her plump calves. Her fingers fastened on the laces of Achilles’s breastplate. Her lips moved near his neck, so close that her breath stirred the fine golden hair on his nape.

“You’ll find a way,” she murmured in his ear.

Achilles stayed silent. Mother lowered herself to her knees. She stared up at him, coy and alluring, through lowered lashes. Soft brown curls escaped from her braids to soften the angles of her face. Her breasts rose and fell with her breath.

“Do you want me to beg?” she asked. “My daughter and I are helpless. We have no choice but to implore you. Help us.”

Achilles stepped back, repelled by her need. Mother held out her hands, her wrists upturned in supplication. (“My sister was born from an egg. I was born the normal way.”)

“Do you want my daughter to beg instead? She will! She’s always been virtuous, but what good will her honor do when they send her virgin to her grave?”

There was desire in Achilles’s eyes. It was not for nothing that my mother was Helen’s sister. But Achilles’s gaze was hard and disdainful, too. For my mother was Helen’s sister, and Helen was the whore who ran from Menelaus.

“Your daughter need not debase herself on my account. I will settle the matter of my honor with Agamemnon-”

Mother clasped her hands in gratitude. Achilles held out his hand to silence her.

“I will settle the matter of my honor with Agamemnon. And then we will sail to Troy.”

For the first time, Achilles’s gaze came to rest on me. His eyes searched my face. I wondered what he saw there. I knew that I was not ugly. I thought, perhaps, in different circumstances he might have chosen to save a helpless woman with my youthful complexion and night-dark eyes. But to stir him that day, I would have had to be even more beautiful than Helen. Her beauty had gathered a thousand ships in the harbor. It would take something even greater to convince them to sail home without their war.

Mother took me back to the tent. She tucked me beneath a blanket as if I were a child. She pulled the wedding adornments from my hair, and stroked my tresses until they lay smooth and shining across my shoulders. Orestes laid beside me. He curled toward my warmth like a sleeping cat, and wrapped his fists around my hair.

“Stay here,” mother said. “Rest. Keep out of sight. Keep yourself pure. It will be harder for them to justify what they’re doing if they know that you are innocent and obedient.”

She ran her fingers across my cheek.

“Don’t worry. They aren’t monsters. They won’t do this terrible thing.”

My memories were tipping out of me more and more rapidly. My mind went dark with only a few memories lit up, like lamps casting small orbs of light along a corridor.

I wandered into a lamp of memory: I was trailing you as you left my room, down the steps and across the portico. I walked quietly behind so that you would not hear me. We emerged into the forest. The fog was dissipating from the copse, revealing men among the trees, their shouts and sword-clashes harsh in the cold, dim air. You were far ahead of me, already meeting with your hequetai, exchanging shouts and strategy.

Hands tightened on my shoulders. I looked up into their faces: two young men with patchy, adolescent beards. Their breath smelled of rotting fish. One stood in his nightclothes. The other wore a helmet and a breastplate but nothing else. Beneath the helmet’s shadow, his eyes were dark and chary.

They spoke. Their voices were rapid, unintelligible, drowned out by the pounding of blood in my ears. Their eyes were enormous and sinister, large and white like the dandelion before I crushed it underneath my foot.

Smells: blood, musk, new sweat. A short, blunt limb-like the branch that you gave me to use as a sword-emerged from obscuring whiteness. It pushed blindly against my leg. “Stop,” one boy commanded the other. “Here, swing at this. One strong, smooth motion.” The breastplate clattered against my flesh with a sound like thunder. My belly, rotting like the stench of rotting fish, welling with tears of fright. (Helen in the courtyard: “Come walk with me, niece.” Her daughter Hermione looking on, jealous and ignored.)

Rotting fish and sweat. The moon dwindling like a crushed dandelion. The branch swinging. The thin high wail that a girl makes when someone swings at her with a sword that is a branch that is neither thing at all.

“You’re hopeless,” said one boy to the other. “It’s too bad you weren’t born a girl.”

Then another face, a hequetai in a tufted cloak, shouting like the clash of swords. “What’s wrong with you two? Are you stupid? Don’t you know who this is?”

The reek of shit and piss. The man’s hand on my arm, tighter than the boys’ had been.

“What are you doing here? Your father would kill you if he knew. He’d kill all of us. Be grateful I’m sending you back without shoving your slatternly face in the muck in front of him. Do you have any modesty at all? Your mother and her people. Brazen the lot of you. Walking into men’s camps like common whores. You may be beautiful, but that is no excuse. Go! Get out of here! Get back where you came from! Go!”

My feet, pounding on the path back home. The copse of trees; the grass; the empty mouth of the megaron where exhausted slaves tended the coals to keep them warm until morning.

The pounding of my heart as I lay down in bed for the third time that night. Memories of moons and fog and branches. Love for my father: flat like a branch, round like a dandelion, silver like the moon, welling up and out of me into a rush like the wind, but without the power to move a thousand ships.

Indigo shaded the sky to evening. Helen smiled a taut smile that I’d seen on my mother’s face, one that did not reach her eyes.

She reached for my hand. “Come walk with me, niece.”

Hermione watched us. Jealousy darkened her features. “Mother!” she exclaimed. “I have something to show you.”

Helen did not look over at her daughter. “Later.” She bent closer to me. “Iphigenia?”