The Children of Jocasta

I didn’t notice the pain at first, because I was too distracted by the thirst. My mouth felt like a piece of old dried-out parchment. My lips cracked as I separated them, tiny fissures of pain. I half-opened my eyes, though they were gravelly and itched so much I wanted to shut them again. But I didn’t know where I was, and I needed to find water from somewhere. Everything was so bright. I lay on my back, trying to persuade my eyes to focus.

I turned my head to see Ani, my sister, sitting on a small wooden chair beside me. I was in my own bedroom, a large, high-windowed room on the west side of the palace, away from the city, overlooking the hills behind Thebes. She was working a small tapestry of some sort – I could see the light glinting off her needle as she took it up and down through the fabric. I wanted to ask her for water, but my throat was too dry and no sound would come. I tugged on the sheets to try and get her attention, though it fired pain through my left side. Eventually, I pulled hard enough to move the thin top sheet, and the rustling sound forced her to look up.

‘Oh!’ She put her hand to her chest. ‘You’re awake!’ She leapt to her feet, and shouted, ‘Isy’s awake! She’s awake!’ She ran to the door to announce her news further afield. This was not what I had been hoping would happen. I heard quick feet padding towards me. My brother Eteo – king, for now – tall, dark-haired, always with a slight frown. He looked down at me and smiled. He looked at me for a moment, then stepped back. When he returned, he was holding a battered bronze kylix of water in his hand.

‘You must be thirsty,’ he said. ‘Let me help you up so you can drink something.’ If I had not been so desiccated, I would have wept.

He held my arms, and pulled me up and forward, stuffing an extra pillow in behind me. I felt another jolt of pain, but I didn’t care. I reached out my hands and took the cup. I peeled my lips apart and took a sip, forcing it into every corner of my mouth before I swallowed. My throat hurt, and my tongue was swollen. I tried to drink it all, but Eteo reached over and took my hand.

‘Easy,’ he said. ‘Don’t drink it too fast. I’ll get you some more in a moment.’

Ani ran back in with my oldest brother Polyn. ‘Look,’ she said, elbowing him hard in the gut. ‘I told you. Why don’t you ever believe me?’

‘Well done, Isy,’ Polyn said. He was stockier than Eteo, and his hair was a lighter, muddier brown. His eyes were light brown too, where Eteo’s were so dark they were almost black. Without looking at his brother, Polyn reached over and ruffled my hair. ‘We thought we’d lost you.’

‘No,’ I said, finally able to get the words out, now the water had released my voice, croaky but audible. ‘You just misplaced me for a while.’

Eteo laughed. ‘It was a while, Isy. You’ve been unconscious for three days.’

Three days. No wonder I was thirsty. ‘What happened?’

Eteo opened his mouth to say something, but Polyn grabbed his arm. Eteo recoiled from the unexpected contact, but he said nothing. Ani reached over to the bed and picked up the sewing she had dropped when she saw I was awake. She fed the needle carefully in and out of the corner of her cloth to hold it in place, and stuffed it into the pocket of her green dress. She almost always wears green, to match her eyes. Virtually no one meets her without remarking on their extraordinary colour, so her strategy works. My sister has no intention of going unmarried, no matter what people say about our family. She knows that will be my fate, and she pities me, but not enough to condemn herself to the same thing.

Eteo took the cup from my hands and went to the table opposite my bed to refill it from an old jug painted with a faded harvest scene: men holding scythes and carrying sheaves of wheat. Polyn adopted an expression which was meant to convey, I think, fraternal concern: head tilted, lips slightly pursed, creased brow. And a moment later, the door swung open again, and my uncle entered the room. Four guards followed and stood just behind him. The clanking sound which accompanied them told me they were armed, even though they were inside the palace, inside the family quarters. This would never have happened before. We have always tried to keep the areas of the palace distinct: the public courtyard at the front, the royal courtyard in the middle, the family courtyard at the back. My uncle is solidly built: he never forgets that all adult men have an obligation to fight for Thebes, if any army declares war upon us. That is why my brothers and my cousin have been training with weapons since they were six or seven years old. Creon has always kept himself and his family in the proper condition to fight. Nonetheless, it was disconcerting to see his soldiers in my sleeping quarters.

‘Isy,’ said Creon. ‘It’s good to see you awake. We were worried . . .’

‘Thank you,’ I said. I didn’t want to hear any more about people’s worry. It was making me afraid for myself in the past, a position I could already see Sophon dismantling as foolish.

‘You’re safe now,’ he continued. ‘There are guards at either end of the corridor.’

I wanted to ask why, but there were so many people in the room now, I couldn’t bear to tell them all that I didn’t remember what had happened to me, and how I got hurt.

Then I heard the voice I always wanted to hear. ‘Is she alright?’

My cousin Haem ran in, one hand pushed back through his hair to keep it out of his eyes. He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at Ani, of course.

‘She’s well,’ my sister said. If you didn’t know better, you would think they were talking about me.

‘I’m glad to see you’re recovering,’ Creon said, ignoring them both. ‘We have missed you at dinner, Isy. No one tells stories when you aren’t there. I’ve been waiting to find out what would happen next with the Medusa. If you had slept through another day, I would have had to send someone to read your dreams and tell me what becomes of her.’

‘That’s why I woke up,’ I told him. ‘I knew you couldn’t wait any longer.’

‘Well, we shall let you rest now,’ he said, smiling. ‘Perhaps you’ll feel well enough to continue the tale tomorrow or the next day.’

My uncle loves stories and songs. It is something we share. I learned to play the phorminx – a small lyre – when I was seven years old. Eteo plays too, but he rarely has time for such pursuits when he is ruling the city. Polyn has never played any instrument: as soon as Eteo showed interest in music, Polyn decreed it a worthless pursuit. Ani prefers to make things – sewing, weaving – but I have never had the gift for that kind of work. It requires a patience and attention to detail which I do not possess. She says the same is true for playing the lyre, but she is mistaken. Playing has never required my patience, only my concentration, which I give freely to music. My uncle loves songs about heroes and monsters, gods and men. I have played them for him after dinner for as long as I can remember, composing a little more of the story each day, or playing old songs for him again.

Creon beckoned Haem to follow him. My cousin flashed a pained glance at my sister and they withdrew, taking the guards with them. The room was suddenly huge, empty and safe.

‘I don’t know what happened,’ I said to Eteo.

‘What’s the last thing you remember?’ he asked.

I thought for a moment. Bright sun and blood on the papyrus.

‘Someone stabbed me.’

‘Yes,’ Eteo replied. ‘But we’ll find him, Isy. I promise. I have men interrogating everyone who was in the palace that day. Someone knows something and we’ll soon catch him.’

‘If I were king, the wretch would have been run through with my own sword a day ago,’ said Polyn.

‘Because you would have killed every man in sight, irrespective of whether he was involved or not,’ Eteo snapped. ‘Or tortured them until they named someone – anyone – to make you stop. How would that make our sister any safer?’

‘Stop it,’ Ani said. ‘You can see you’re upsetting her.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s been so awful,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand how someone could get into the palace to attack you. How are we supposed to stay safe if strangers can enter the palace unheeded?’

‘But I’m alright. I mean, I will be.’ I thought I was stating a fact, but as the words came out, I realized I was asking a question.

‘Yes, you will be,’ Eteo replied, his anger ebbing away. ‘The blade caught your left lung, Is, so you ran out of air. The girl who found you was hollering for help – she made an extraordinary racket. She frightened the birds out of their nests: they all flew up in a great clamour over the palace. It was lucky she was there – and Sophon came running. He moves quickly for an old man, doesn’t he? The moment he saw you, he knew what to do. You weren’t in danger for long.’

‘He was most worried about a fever,’ Ani added. She would have enjoyed the drama of it all, I thought, even though she loved me. She would have enjoyed being the sister of an almost-murdered girl. I could imagine her tying her dark hair back, frowning and calling for hot water, with no real idea of what she might use it for. ‘He stitched you back together and said we would have to wait and see what happened.’

I wondered what I would say to my tutor when I saw him. Should I thank him for saving my life? Apologize for bleeding all over his papyrus? It didn’t seem right that another person had seen the inside of me, laid eyes on a part of my body that I could never see. I struggled to imagine his gnarled hands pushing a needle through my skin. Once Ani had mentioned stitches, I could feel a pulling sensation, quite separate from the pain of the wound. My fingers itched to explore it, to test how much it hurt and how neatly Sophon had sewn it up. But I knew I could not. The old man was right to fear an infection more than anything else.

‘You were lucky, Isy,’ said Polyn. It was true, even though I didn’t feel very lucky. I felt like someone who was nursing a hole in her side, grit in her eyes and a sore throat.

I nodded, suddenly tired. ‘I think I might rest for a while,’ I said. ‘Would you ask Sophon to visit me later? I want to thank him.’

‘Of course,’ said Polyn. He sounded relieved. ‘We’ll see you later.’

Eteo squeezed my hand, and followed the other two out. I did want to thank my tutor, of course. But not as much as I wanted to ask him what more he knew, about my injury and about the attacker. My siblings – even Eteo – tended to treat me like a little girl whenever something bad happened. But Sophon always told me the truth. He understood when you have grown up as I have, there is no security in not knowing things, in avoiding the ugliest truths because they can’t be faced. There is only an oppressive, creeping dread that the thing no one has told you is too terrible to imagine, and that it will haunt the rest of your life when you find out. Because that is what happened the last time, and that is why my siblings and I have grown up in a cursed house, children of cursed parents.