HECUBA YOU curse your father?
IPHIGENIA I curse him who killed me. And him who tricked my mother into letting him.
ANDROMACHE Give me my child. (She reaches for him but cannot hold him)
IPHIGENIA He is beyond your grasp, unhappy queen. But see, he smiles again. Be glad he’s come to me. He has kinfolk who walk among us ghosts. Polyxena will rock him in her arms and give him buds of asphodel to suck.
HECUBA Polyxena dead! But Talthybius said she served Achilles’ tomb.
IPHIGENIA She was slain on Achilles’ tomb, if that is service.
HECUBA Oh, false Talthybius, to riddle me these serpent’s words. My daughter dead.
IPHIGENIA Her throat was slit above Achilles’ corpse as mine was cut above Artemis’s. They like the smell of virgin blood, these men.
HECUBA They tell us that the Gods are pleased with blood.
IPHIGENIA Oh shhh, shhh, don’t curse the Gods, old woman. It’s man who puts the blood-stink in their noses and clotted gore upon their divine lips. Would you drink human blood instead of meat? Do not the Gods have cows? Don’t they have cooks?
(Enter, upon the battlement, the ghost of Achilles)
ACHILLES I seek my servant, Polyxena!
Starid’s eyes were closed as though she might be asleep.
Corrig watched her for a moment, then asked gently, “Who’s going to play Achilles?”
“Joshua, I think. He has several times before.” She blinked.
“Good old Joshua.”
“Good indeed,” said Stavia. “You know, Corrig, I remember once when I was about eleven, Myra was reading the play for me, cuing me, just the way you were….” Her voice trailed off as she thought of Myra.
Corrig didn’t speak for a time. Then he asked, “Have you seen Myra lately?”
Stavia came to herself with a start. “Not for months. I only see her if I happen to run into her at the market or somewhere. I guess she’s never really forgiven Morgot for asking her to move out.”
Corrig shook his head slowly. “No, she’s never forgiven you, Stavia. Because you stayed.”
MYRA’S LEAVING MORGOT’S HOUSE HAD BEEN INevitable from the moment Myra met Barten. Not that Barten had intended it or Myra foreseen it or Morgot known it would happen. No one knew, but it was inevitable just the same.
On the day the rift between Myra and Morgot began, Stavia had just turned eleven. She and Myra were in Stavia’s room, going over the opening lines of the play, both of them already more than a little bored with it.
“You know, Stavia,” Myra said in her dramatically fed up older-sister voice. “You’ve got most of the lines all right, but you seem to keep forgetting this is a comedy!”
“I don’t forget,” Stavia objected, rolling over on her bed to stare at the low ceiling. Last winter the rain had come in through the roof tiles and left a long, swirling stain that sometimes looked like a man with a long beard and sometimes looked like something else. “I do fine until they get to that bit about throwing the baby over the wall, then I think of Jerby and it doesn’t seem funny.”
“Well you’ve seen it every year, for heaven’s sake. You go with the rest of us, just before summer carnival. They use that crazy clown-faced doll for the baby. It doesn’t even look like a real child. It isn’t supposed to be a real baby. The old women aren’t real old women. The virgins aren’t really virgins. It’s supposed to be a satire, you know?” She frowned, trying to remember something an instructor had said. “A commentary on particular attitudes of preconvulsion society.”
“I know.” Stavia knew it was a commentary, but knowing and feeling were two separate things. She felt the play in ways she didn’t know it.
Myra went on, “Hecuba and Andromache are all tarted up, like a pair of river Gypsies, with red on their cheeks and their lips as bloody as Talthybius’s are supposed to be. And where he says Andromache’s young yet, he puts his hand on her, you know? Then Achilles comes down the stairs with that great dong on him, sticking way out and bobbing around like anything, looking for Polyxena….”
“I know, Myra! I just keep thinking of Jerby, that’s all.”
“He’ll be all right,” Myra had said, not sounding as though she believed it. She no longer talked very much about Jerby. His being down at the garrison confused her. She did want him to come home, and yet men who did come home were cowards and tit-suckers, according to Barten, the young warrior she’d been spending a lot of time talking to from the top of the wall. Cowards and tit-suckers and impotent, too. Or else gelded when they came back. All the warriors said so. Until recently she had not thought of Joshua as a coward and a tit-sucker, and she wasn’t sure what gelding really did to a man, but she supposed he must be if Barten said so. “Jerby’ll be coming for a visit soon.”
“It’s only two months to midsummer carnival.”
“I know.” Myra got up off the floor where she had been sitting to cue Stavia in her part. “Oh, I know.” She looked at herself in the mirror, turning her head from side to side, striking a dance pose with her arms.
“You’re going to have an assignation, aren’t you?”
“Maybe.” She tossed her light red hair. “One of the warriors has been courting me.”
“Is he good-looking?”
“Mmmm.” Myra rolled her eyes and made fainting motions. “Shoulders out to here, with the cutest bottom, and blue, blue eyes and his hair and eyebrows are black, and he has these lips that curve down in the middle….”
“What’s his name?”
“Barten. He’s in Michael’s command. Tally’s fit to be quarantined, she’s so mad at me. He was courting her until he met me.” She preened, throwing her head back, looking for an instant as beautiful and mysterious as Morgot sometimes did.
“How old is he?”
“He belongs
