The Children of Jocasta

The heat of the summer was fading but the memory of the dead burned ever brighter. Once people had stopped fearing for their own lives, they started to ask questions. No one doubted that the Reckoning had come back to claim another generation. But why? And why now? No one wanted to articulate their darkest fear: if the disease had been gone for fifty years, and returned, perhaps it could never be outrun. Thebans wondered if they had made a mistake all those years ago, when they unlocked their gates after closing the city against the first plague to ravage their world.

Whose idea had it been to open the city gates again? People argued for days about it. Some said it was the fault of Laius, the late king. But where was the satisfaction in blaming a man long dead? Others thought the order to unbar the gates had come from the queen. But the most popular view was that it must have been Oedipus’s idea. The queen’s husband came from the Outlying, didn’t he? So of course he would want to open up the city to others like him. But it couldn’t have been his idea, someone argued. The gates must have been open before he arrived in the city, or how did he himself get in? This was dismissed as sophistry by most. Besides, even if the gates had been open for the odd foreigner to enter the city, Oedipus had encouraged Thebes to look beyond her walls. He had championed trade with his own city, Corinth, and the opening of further routes both north and south. He had changed Thebes from fortress to market. And now look where they were: placing offerings on the graves of their dead children.

Jocasta was partially aware that the mood of the city had turned against her. She had never thought very much about her popularity because she had never needed to. Laius hadn’t been a popular king, and he had lived and died exactly as he would have wished. Well, perhaps he had not died exactly as he had wished. But close enough. Still, as the days grew shorter, Jocasta felt the city turning cold.

She indulged in brief self-pity: she had done everything right, and followed the advice of her friends and experts. But because they had used subterfuge to persuade the citizens that the water supply was safe, she could not now claim credit for having lied to them. And she had closed the palace gates, which had perhaps contributed to her citizens’ sense that she had cut herself off from them in their moment of crisis. But she had four children, and Sophon had warned her that the young were especially at risk. Surely people would understand that? Thebans would know – the women would know – that she had to keep her children safe. But a tiny voice in her ear told her that a woman who had buried her own infant in baked-dry ground sprinkled with lye would have little sympathy left over for a woman with four healthy children running about the palace grounds. She had locked down the city to prevent further contamination coming in from outside. But how could people measure what hadn’t happened? If the gates had remained open, many more cases of plague would have devastated her city, she was sure. But there was no way to prove it. People only counted the deaths there were against how many fewer they wished there had been.

Jocasta wished, more than anything, that she could talk things over with her brother. But the distance between them could not be traversed. Creon had come back to the palace a few days after the gates were reopened, and begun working on the tasks he had been forced to abandon during the plague. He had never reproached his sister for allowing the gates to be barred against him, never asked her how she could have abandoned him and his family, never shouted at the unfairness, never wept over the loss of his wife. He continued to offer advice when she sought it. But he never discussed anything personal, and he left promptly each afternoon. He no longer brought Haem to play with his cousins, but kept the boy at home. Jocasta had tried to apologize for their enforced separation, tried to express her sorrow for what had happened to Eurydice (though Oedipus was quick to remind her that her sister-in-law had already been carrying the sickness when he had closed the palace, and that she – and the whole family – were lucky the plague-riddled woman had remained outside). Jocasta could not find the words to bring Creon back to her. She wanted to touch his arm and beg his forgiveness, but after the contagion, the city had lost the habit of touch and so, she found, had she.

One morning, when the leaves were beginning to drop onto the ground and scratch her feet as she walked through the courtyards, Sophon arrived, asking to speak to her. She could see he was upset. He looked to have aged ten years since the start of the summer. Purplish-brown shadows were painted beneath his eyes, and his expression was oddly sympathetic. She stood up and wrapped her hands around his.

‘Thank you for coming,’ she said. ‘What a terrible summer.’

‘You did everything you could,’ he told her, the words she had been longing to hear from someone. ‘You are alive, your children are alive. You did well.’

Tears sprang from her eyes, and she wiped them away with her fingers. ‘Do you honestly believe that?’ she asked. ‘I feel as though everyone hates me, and I don’t know why. I thought I’d done everything right.’

She took him across the square to the padded chairs by the fountain, which were piled high with cushions. Jocasta waved away a servant who sprang up to arrange them comfortably for the old man. She picked up a pillow in each hand, and propped them behind Sophon’s back as he settled himself onto the seat.

‘You’re going to tell me something horrible. I can tell.’ She took the seat next to his, leaning forward, her hands gripping a cushion so hard her knuckles were white.

‘How?’ he asked.

‘I’ve known you for over half my life,’ she said. ‘Longer than I’ve known anyone but my brother, and he . . .’ She couldn’t finish the sentence. Sophon took a moment to phrase his reply.

‘I don’t agree with your diagnosis that everyone hates you,’ he said. ‘But I must tell you the truth: the Thebans I speak to every day are not happy. They think you should have done more to help them. I always ask: what should the queen have done? Most of these people don’t know I am your friend. So they are not trying to spare my feelings. I ask them because I want to know what they say, what they believe. And none of them has an answer. They all say the same thing: they just feel that you didn’t do enough to help your people in their darkest hour.’

‘Should I have been by your side?’ she asked. ‘The queen, mopping brows and checking fevers? Would that have saved lives? Even one life?’

‘Of course not,’ he replied. ‘Your place was here. But the rumours that are swirling around the city . . . You would hate them.’

‘What rumours?’ she snapped. ‘I suppose they all think we spent the summer eating and drinking and laughing in the palace, while they faced death alone.’ She coloured, as she realized that this description was not entirely inaccurate. Oedipus and the children had spent a blissful summer, much of it in this garden. If her brother and his family had been with them, Jocasta might have enjoyed it too. But she could not weep for every Theban lost to disease or anything else. She was the queen: she could not allow herself to be consumed by pity or sorrow.

Perhaps people thought she should have sealed the city years ago, when Laius died. But the Reckoning had been gone for decades by then: how could she have known that it would one day return? Besides, Thebes had more pressing needs, for food and trade. The city was self-sufficient for some months of the year, but it would never be able to feed its population without importing some foodstuffs. Besides, Jocasta had always thought her city had a tendency towards self-importance. It needed the Outlying, however much its citizens preferred to imagine it did not.

‘I don’t want to upset you,’ Sophon said. ‘But you should know. You need to combat the gossip-mongers, and you can’t do that if you don’t know what they’re saying. Has no one said anything to you? Your brother?’

She shook her head. ‘Creon has not spoken much since the gates reopened,’ she said. ‘His wife died. He grieves for her. You must tell me. What are people saying?’

The old man looked at the ground for a moment.

‘They say that the plague is your doing,’ he said, the words spilling quickly from his mouth.

‘My doing? How on earth could that be?’ She laughed at the ludicrousness of it all. ‘Have I poisoned the water supply? Who could possibly believe such nonsense?’

His rheumy eyes met hers for a moment, before she looked away. ‘They don’t think you are causing it on purpose,’ he replied. ‘But they nonetheless think you are the cause of it. They believe the city is being punished by the gods.’

She let out a snort of annoyance. ‘I sometimes believe the city is being punished by the gods,’ she said. ‘Or why would stupid, small-minded people survive, when so many innocent children have died? You can’t be serious.’

‘I wish it was a joke,’ he said. He reached out and touched her hand. There was worse to come. ‘People believe you are committing a terrible crime against what is right and decent. You and Oedipus. They think that you have both affronted the gods, and that the plague is the consequence of your behaviour.’

‘How have we affronted the gods?’ she asked. ‘Because Oedipus knocked down that ugly shrine and replaced it with a garden? Because I no longer prostrate myself before an unseeing oracular god, day after day, for no purpose? Since when did Thebes become a hive of religious devotion? I didn’t see many of them going into the temples when I was a child.’

‘You would now,’ Sophon told her. ‘People have become increasingly,’ he paused, to think of the appropriate word, ‘superstitious over the past few years.’

‘Because they’re afraid,’ she said. ‘I understand that.’

‘You won’t understand everything they’re saying,’ he said. ‘Maybe you should send for Oedipus.’ She was about to refuse, then realized the old man was trying to protect her. So she stood up and walked over to her quarters, returning a few moments later with her husband.

‘What’s this about?’ Oedipus asked, as he perched on the edge of the fountain, facing them both. ‘Jocasta said there’s something you think we need to know.’

‘Please believe that I would very much rather not be telling you any of this,’ Sophon said. ‘But in my experience, rumours don’t disappear merely because their object doesn’t know about them. Gossip is spreading and it can’t be stopped by me. People say you have angered the gods with your marriage. With your children.’ He exhaled, and his shoulders slumped forward.

‘How?’ Oedipus scoffed. ‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘They’re saying you can’t be married,’ Sophon said, looking up to meet two appalled faces. ‘They’re saying you’re mother and son.’

Oedipus gave a hard bark of laughter. ‘That’s the stupidest, most unpleasant thing I’ve ever heard. You can’t be telling me that anyone is taking this seriously?’

Sophon nodded. ‘I’m afraid so.’

‘They know I came to the city ten years ago, for the first time?’ Oedipus asked. ‘And that Jocasta had her first child nine years ago?’

The glance between Sophon and Jocasta took less time than a beat of her heart, but it gave her away, just the same.

Oedipus didn’t speak to her for three days. He left any room she entered, using the constant presence of their sons and daughters to keep conversation trivial. Even at night, he stood by her as they put the children to bed, but as soon as they were outside, he ignored her. He slept in another room, and locked the door. She placed her hand on his arm, and he flung it away, as though she were unclean. On the third night, she gave in and, even though her pride loathed doing it where the servants could see her, she fell to her knees before him and begged his forgiveness.

‘How could you keep something like that a secret?’ he asked. ‘How?’

She reached out and took his hands in hers. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘It was all so long ago.’

‘It wasn’t always long ago,’ he replied.

‘It was,’ she protested. ‘When I met you, it had been sixteen, no, seventeen years earlier. I had already spent half my life trying to forget what had happened. I wasn’t trying to keep a secret. Everyone knew. Everyone here, I mean, and I so much wished they didn’t. I think one of the things I liked most about you, when we met, was that I didn’t have to live with you knowing something awful had happened to me. You weren’t sorry for me, like everyone else had been.’

His face softened slightly, though it could just have been the twilight playing on his skin. He gripped her by the wrists and pulled her up onto her feet. There was something undignified about a middle-aged woman on her knees.

‘You could have told me,’ he chided her. ‘Not then, but later.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I wanted to, often. But then I fell pregnant so quickly, and we were having our first child. We were embarking on a family together. I didn’t want you to think I’d been there before.’

‘But you had,’ he said, and turned away from her.

‘I swear to you I had not. Nothing was the same as before. I was on my own then. I had no one to take care of me. Except Sophon, and I only met him because I nearly fainted in front of him. It was all so awful. Everything was awful.’ She began to weep as the long-hidden memories flooded through her. ‘And then the baby was dead anyway. So I went through it all for nothing. I never even saw him.’

‘What?’ He turned back to face her, and wiped her tears away with his thumbs, though they were instantly replaced. ‘What do you mean?’

‘She took him away,’ Jocasta sobbed. ‘The cord was wrapped around his neck. She said it would be worse if I held him, so she took him away. And,’ she gulped the words, ‘I’ve spent the rest of my life thinking about him. I imagined him growing up, getting bigger, learning to say my name, walking, running. I used to sit in here, on my own, so I could think about him in peace. Do you know what I mean? I just sat here, imagining him.’

‘Do you still think about him now?’

She nodded, guilty. ‘Sometimes. But when I try to find him in my mind, now I see Polyn instead. Or sometimes Eteo.’

‘Do they look like you imagined he would?’ Oedipus asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she whispered.

‘I wish you had told me,’ he said. ‘You’ve been hiding part of yourself from me.’

‘I never wanted to spoil things,’ she said. ‘I was always frightened you’d guess. That you’d see the stretch marks on my skin and work it out.’

He shook his head. ‘I didn’t have anyone to compare you to. You know that.’ He sat down beside her. ‘What are we going to do now?’

‘About these horrible rumours? I don’t know. I can’t prove the baby died.’

‘Wasn’t Sophon here? He is a witness, he can confirm you’re telling the truth.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘He wasn’t here on that day. He wanted to be, but something happened. He was dragged off to the other side of the city for some reason, I think. I can’t remember why. There was just me and Teresa.’

‘Who?’

‘She was the housekeeper. When you first arrived here.’

‘Oh, her. She’s probably dead by now, isn’t she?’

‘I don’t know,’ Jocasta admitted. ‘Yes, she must be. She would be ancient.’

Oedipus nodded, and squeezed her hand. ‘It will all be alright,’ he said. ‘Even if we can’t find her, I will send a message home. My father will explain to everyone that I was born in Corinth. He’ll swear to it, and so will dozens of people who knew me when I was a boy. I promise.’

‘Will you send a message to him today?’ she asked.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’m not entirely sure how to begin such a letter, but I’m sure I’ll think of something.’ He smiled at her, and she tried to smile back, but another sob broke through instead.