Even on that first day, I looked at Queen Maire and knew I had a fight on my hands. Only it was not just one fight, it was a whole bloody war. By the time I was eighteen I was the veteran of many long and bitter campaigns. Mynes seemed entirely unaware of the tension, but then in my experience men are curiously blind to aggression in women. They’re the warriors, with their helmets and armour, their swords and spears, and they don’t seem to see our battles—or they prefer not to. Perhaps if they realized we’re not the gentle creatures they take us for their own peace of mind would be disturbed?
If I’d had a baby—a son—everything would have changed, but at the end of a year I was still wearing my girdle defiantly tight until at last Maire, made desperate by her longing for a grandchild, pointed at my slim waist and openly jeered. I don’t know what would have happened if she hadn’t become ill. She’d already selected a concubine from one of the ruling families; a girl who, although not lawfully married, would have become queen in all but name. But then, Maire’s own belly began to grow. She was still just young enough for there to be ripples of scandal. Whose is it? everybody was asking. She never left the palace except to pray at her husband’s tomb! But then she began to turn yellow and lose weight and kept to her own rooms most of the time. Without her to drive them, the negotiations over the sixteen-year-old concubine faltered and died. This was my opportunity, the first I’d had, and I seized it. Soon, all the palace officials who’d been loyal to her were answering to me. And the palace was no worse run than it had been when she was in power. More efficiently, if anything.
I stood in the centre of the hall, remembering these things and the palace that was normally so full of noise—voices, clattering pans, running feet—stretched out all around me as quiet as a tomb. Oh, I could still hear the clash of battle from outside the city walls but, rather like the intermittent humming of a bee on a summer’s evening, the sound seemed merely to intensify the silence.
I’d have liked to stay there in the hall or, even better, go out into the inner courtyard and sit under my favourite tree, but I knew Ritsa would be worrying about me and so I went slowly up the stairs and along the main corridor to my mother-in-law’s room. The door creaked as I opened it. The room was in semi-darkness; Maire kept the blinds closed, whether because the light hurt her eyes or because she wished to hide her changed appearance from the world, I didn’t know. She had been a very beautiful woman—and I’d noticed a few weeks before that the precious bronze mirror that had formed part of her dowry was nowhere to be seen.
A movement on the bed. A pale face turned towards me in the gloom.
“Who is it?”
“Briseis.”
Immediately, the face turned away. That wasn’t the name she’d been hoping for. She’d become rather fond of Ismene, who was supposed to be carrying Mynes’s baby—and probably was, though given the lives slaves lead it’s not always possible to know who a child’s father is. But in these last few desperate weeks and months that child had become Maire’s hope. Yes, Ismene was a slave, but slaves can be freed, and if the child were to be a boy…
I went further into the room. “Do you have everything you need?”
“Yes.” Not thinking about it, just wanting me to go.
“Enough water?”
She glanced at her bedside table. I went round the bed and picked up the jug, which was almost full. I poured her a large cup then went to refill the jug from a bowl of water in the corner furthest from the door. Warm, stale water with a film of dust on the top. I plunged the jug deep and took it across to the bed. Four sharp slits of light lay across the red-and-purple rug beneath my feet, bright enough to hurt my eyes, though the bed was in near-darkness.
She was struggling to sit up. I held the cup to her lips and she drank greedily, her wasted throat jerking with every gulp. After a while, she raised her head and I thought she’d had enough, but she made a little mew of protest when I tried to take the cup away. When at last she’d finished, she wiped her mouth delicately on a corner of her veil. I could feel her resenting me because I’d witnessed her thirst, her helplessness.
I straightened the pillows behind her head. As she bent forward her spine was shockingly visible under the pallid skin. You lift spines like that out of cooked fish. I lowered her gently onto the pillows and she let out a sigh of contentment. I smoothed the sheets, every fold of linen releasing smells of old age, illness…Urine too. I was angry. I’d hated this woman so fiercely for so long—and not without cause. I’d come into her house as a fourteen-year-old girl, a girl with no mother to guide her. She could’ve been kind to me and she wasn’t; she could’ve helped me find my feet and she didn’t. I had no reason to love her, but what made me angry at that moment was that in allowing herself to dwindle until she was nothing more than a heap of creased flesh and jutting bone, she’d left me with so very little to hate. Yes, I’d won, but it was a hollow victory—and not just because Achilles was hammering on the gate.
“There is something you could do for me.” Her voice was high, clear and cold. “You see that chest?”
I could, though only just. An oblong of heavy, carved oak, squatting on its own shadow at the foot of the bed.
“I need you to get something.”
Raising the heavy lid, I released a fusty smell of feathers and stale herbs. “What am I looking for?”
“There’s a knife. No, not on the top—underneath…Can you see it?”
I turned to look at her. She stared straight back at me, not blinking, not lowering her gaze.
The knife was tucked in between the third and fourth layer of bedclothes. I drew it from its sheath and the sharp blade winked wickedly up at me. This was far from being the small, ornamental knife I’d been expecting to find, the kind rich women use to cut their meat. It was the length of a man’s ceremonial dagger and must surely have belonged to her husband. I carried it across to her and placed it in her hands. She looked down at it, fingering the encrusted jewels on the hilt. I wondered for a moment if she was going to ask me to kill her and how I would feel if she did, but no, she sighed and set the knife to one side.
Easing herself a little higher in the bed, she said, “Have you heard anything? Do you know what’s happening?”
“No. I know they’re close to the gates.” I could pity her then, an old woman—because illness had made her old—dreading to be told her son was dead. “If I do hear anything, of course I’ll let you know…”
She nodded, dismissing me. When I got to the door I paused with my hand on the latch and looked back, but she’d already turned away.
2
Ritsa was bathing a sick child when I got back. I had to step over several sleeping bodies to get to her.