ACHILLES What’s it like, this Hades?
IPHIGENIA Like shadow with no sun, like dark with no day. Like the mating of ghosts.
ACHILLES Riddles! Only riddles!
POLYXENA I think she means, Achilles, that in hell we need not damn ourselves by trying to defend ourselves.
IPHIGENIA That’s what I meant, yes.
ACHILLES It makes no sense! What has defending yourself to do with it?
POLYXENA I pled for my life, Achilles. When they said they would kill me, I wet myself. My bowels opened and the shit ran down my legs. I screamed and groveled. I hated what I was doing, but I did it. Achilles, I wanted to live! I wanted to live, but they killed me, stinking like a dung-covered animal. I was slender and still young, Achilles. I loved to dance, Achilles. But they killed me there in the mess with my skirts hiked up and blood and shit mixed like a stinking stew, damned to forever remember myself like that—like that….
In Hades, perhaps I’ll dance. I won’t have to beg for my life, Achilles. I’ll have no life to lose.
ANDROMACHE I saw my father slain. The spear went into his chest where he’d cuddled me, sometimes, calling me his sweetheart. The blood came out and he grunted like a slaughtered pig, a kind of squeal. He was surprised, I think. My brothers came running, but you and your men slaughtered them. Now, here at Troy, you’ve done it again, hacked my husband to bits. I keep seeing it in my sleep, arms, legs, fingers, thighs, all mixed in this terrible clutter. I keep trying to sort them out, calling, “Daddy, Hector, where are the parts of you I loved…?”
And Hector’s baby? My baby, his baby, our son. Thrown from the walls like rubbish. I heard him cry as he fell. He made a sound like a hunting bird, falling into the sea…. I can’t think of anything else.
When the ship that takes me gets far enough from shore, I’ll leap out into that sea. I’ll be damned for taking my own life, but that’s all that’s left to do. I can’t risk loving anything else to see it slain. In Hades there’s no life and there’s no pain. The dead are dead. They can’t be killed again.
HECUBA I had a knife in my skirt, Achilles. When Talthybius bent over me, I could have killed him. I wanted to. I had the knife just for that reason. Yet, at the last minute I thought, he’s some mother’s son just as Hector was, and aren’t we women all sisters? If I killed him, I thought, wouldn’t it be like killing family? Wouldn’t it be making some other mother grieve? So I didn’t kill him, but if I had, I might have saved the baby. I’m damned to think of that, that I might have saved Hector’s child. Dead or damned, that’s the choice we make. Either you men kill us and are honored for it, or we women kill you and are damned for it. Dead or damned. Women don’t have to make choices like that in Hades. There’s no love there, nothing to betray.
ACHILLES (Shaking his head, still weeping) I ask you yet again, Agamemnon’s daugher. What’s it like, this Hades?
IPHIGENIA What’s Hades like?
Like dream without waking. Like carrying water in a sieve. Like coming into harbor after storm. Barren harbor where the empty river runs through an endless desert into the sea. Where all the burdens have been taken away.
You’ll understand when you come there at last, Achilles….
Hades is Women’s Country.
Stavia leaned over Joshua, putting her cheek against his own, her eyes fixed on the half-empty garrison ground, seeing in her mind the thousands who had marched away. Gone away, oh, gone away. Wetness ran between her face and his as he—servitor, warrior, citizen of Women’s Country, father—as he wept.
Wept for them all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sheri S. Tepper was born in 1929 in Denver, Colorado, and has lived in Colorado all her life. She worked in the administration of a multi-state non-profit organization until her retirement in 1986. Currently, she divides her time between writing and—in association with the American Minor Breed Conservancy—raising various minor and rare breeds of domestic livestock and poultry on a ranch in the foothills of the Rockies. She is married, has two adult children and one grandchild.
In the few short years Ms. Tepper has been publishing, she has written over a dozen novels which have garnered the respect and admiration of both readers and critics. In addition to After Long Silence, her works include The Gate to Women’s Country, Grass, The Awakeners (published in two volumes as Northshore and Southshore), Beauty, (winner of the Locus award for best fantasy novel), Sideshow, A Plague of Angels, and Shadow’s End. Her most recent novel is Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, available now.
Fall 1959
The campus sprawled rosy brick over a hundred acres and buzzed with a thousand new students making their way through room assignments and registration. Extracurricular activities were posted on the bulletin boards in front of Old Main. Drama-club meeting on Saturday morning. Orchestra tryouts for non-music majors, also on Saturday morning. Women’s-chorus tryouts, Tuesday and Wednesday evenings.
Carolyn had an unencumbered hour on Tuesday, so she decided to sit in on the chorus tryouts. She sang some, and if the standard wasn’t too high, it might be fun to try out. She sat down next to a plainly dressed young woman with a strong, rather horsey face and offered her hand.
“Carolyn Crespin, from New York.”
“I’m Agnes McGann. I’m from Louisiana.”
An improbably perfect blond on the other side of Agnes leaned foward. “Hi, I’m Bettiann Bromlet, from Fort Worth.”
She smiled, rather shyly. Carolyn, looking at the careful grooming and wealth of tumbled curls, wondered what she had to be shy about.
“Sopranos,” called a woman in gray from the front of the room. “Please pick up a copy of the audition music
