The Children of Jocasta

A year after her baby had died, Jocasta looked at her hair in the blackening, pock-marked mirror, and wondered when she had begun to look so haggard. One day she had been ripe, her belly stretched taut like a peach around its stone. After that, she had ignored her reflection as the days slid into months: her torn skin and rent garments were nothing she wished to see. And now, after a year, she saw that somehow she was no longer young. And although this seemed like a minor loss after everything else, she felt the pain of a fresh wound rushing up from her gut to her throat and she opened her mouth to scream.

*

Two years later, Jocasta wondered if Teresa would replace the mirror which (having hated it for as long as she could remember), she had finally smashed against the hard stone floor of her bedroom. The housekeeper, often so quick-tempered, had not even shouted when she saw the floor covered in dark shards. Slaves had come running from every corner of the palace courtyard; even Jocasta had been startled by the noise it made as each piece sprang free from its bonds. She laughed as she watched the glittering angles spin around her feet. It was not until later, when Sophon was picking splinters of glass from her legs with a pair of small silver tweezers, that she even realized she was injured.

*

The following year, Jocasta spent every day kneeling before the shrine which Teresa had arranged to have built in the courtyard. Laius had refused his wife, when she had petitioned him, but the housekeeper had eventually persuaded him that Jocasta would be quieter if he gave way. Laius was himself a pious man, and he made his offerings in the temples in the main courtyard of the palace. But his wife was no longer able to walk among the people of Thebes to pay her devotions: the eyes of strangers overwhelmed her and she was swiftly reduced to tears. Even the women turned away from her, fearful that her ill-fortune might be contagious, might afflict their own future children. Once, she saw a woman make the sign to avert the evil eye. She would have sworn she had no evil in her, but at the same time, she knew she must have affronted a powerful god; why else was she punished so cruelly?

*

After three more years, Jocasta no longer trusted she would one day see a grave marker for her son. She had dedicated years of her drawn-out life to pleading with Teresa but the woman was obdurate. She insisted there was no grave, no stone to signal the place where Jocasta could take a lock of her hair to her beautiful boy, and pour wine into a wide, shining dish for him. Jocasta did not believe her: how could she have simply disposed of the boy, as though he were nothing but refuse, like mouldering cabbages thrown away from a too-warm kitchen?

She demanded to see her husband and ask him the same questions. But Laius, who had long since given up speaking to his wife, and now avoided the palace almost entirely – preferring to live out on the mountains in all but the harshest weather, rather than find himself within earshot of Jocasta – had no consolation for her. He either did not know or did not care what had become of the baby. Once it was dead, he was satisfied. The opposite was true for his wife, who would never be satisfied again.

*

In the eleventh year after her son’s death, Jocasta began sending messengers to the Oracle. Although Delphi lay several hundred stades away, across territory which was rarely safe, she had concluded that the Pythian priestesses offered her the only comfort she might find. Making offerings to Apollo in her home was no longer sufficient. The wine was poured, the entrails were burned, but she was no closer to happiness. Fear and revulsion still coursed through her whenever she thought of her own body almost tearing in two. The mere sight of a pregnant woman left her panting for breath. She longed for her missing child, but she could not imagine having another. Even Teresa had stopped suggesting it. The grief it caused was too disruptive for the whole palace.

The Oracle returned Jocasta’s interest with gnomic utterances but only occasionally. There was no certainty her messenger would survive the journey there and back: bandits, robbers and mountain lions all fed on her slaves from time to time. And those who did return brought messages whose meaning twisted away from Jocasta, like snakes in her hands. She would take the message gladly, and when she first heard it, she felt better, somehow lighter. The Oracle was benign, it offered sage advice.

Then, over the next day or two, she would reflect on its hidden meanings and on the Oracle’s possible motives. How could she truly know what it meant when it was so vague? Was it really saying that her son was alive, when it referred to him as ‘cursed’? Or was his death the curse itself? That she too was cursed she had no doubt. Almost more cruel than the loss of her child was the terrible, suffocating uncertainty. After several days, she would demand that another messenger be sent to request clarification. But the clarification, when it came, if it came, was no less vague than the previous message.

*

By the fifteenth year, she was given a new mirror, and was shocked to see she had grown old. She had a mesh of fine lines around her eyes that she had never seen before. Her mother had died that spring. When her brother arrived with the news, he had been tentative, not wishing to add further grief to a sister bowed down by the weight of what she had already borne. But, if anything, Jocasta had been relieved. She had taken the carriage across Thebes to attend her mother’s burial: it would have been impossible to do anything else. And as she cast the damp earth over her mother’s grave, murmuring the ritual words to grant her mother safe passage to Hades, she felt no grief. She said the words again, beneath her breath, for her dead boy, and cast an extra handful of dirt over his imagined corpse.

*

The following winter, her father followed her mother into the boat of Charon and across the River Lethe. Again, Jocasta scattered earth and poured offerings to his shade. Although she conducted the rituals as was proper, she rent her garments and tore her hair because custom and the gods demanded it, not because she felt any fresh pain. In her own mind, she had been orphaned fifteen years earlier, when they gave her to the king. And then orphaned again when her baby died. Why was there a word to describe the child of dead parents, but no word to describe the mother of a dead child? The question had plagued her for years: there should be a word for her, for what had happened to her. Yet there was not.

*

It was sixteen years since her son had died, and only Creon existed as the bridge between her past life and her present existence. She found her brother’s visits both reassuring and difficult. Firstly, there was the problem that he had grown up. He was twenty-one now, and she found it disconcerting when he arrived a stranger: taller, darker, his face lengthening and hardening as he left childhood behind. Only his voice stayed the same: calm, deep, measured. His voice and his pale blue eyes.

Jocasta wished her brother would move into the palace and keep her company all the time, so she would have someone to talk to, someone who connected her to a time in her life when things had been easier, happier. But he wouldn’t agree to it: on his last visit he had mentioned a girl he was hoping to marry. Perhaps once they had married, they might consider moving nearer to the palace and the hub of the city. Jocasta thought he should hurry: Creon was no longer a boy. It began to look peculiar if men went unmarried for too long.

She thought she would send a messenger to ask him to visit her. But were the only reliable slaves all away in Delphi? She could not think when she had last received an oracle. Perhaps one was due back today. Or perhaps he had been due back yesterday or the day before, and she had lost another man to the perils of the Outlying. The anxiety rose in her: if her messengers kept dying, she would soon have no one left to trust. And then what would she do? How could she find someone else who wasn’t in Teresa’s pocket, telling Jocasta not truths which emanated from the god, but stories which came from the old housekeeper? How could she be sure the slaves she had already sent were loyal to her rather than Teresa? She could not.

Her hair had grown wispy and lifeless. It hung down behind her ears, when once it had – she was sure – curled over them. Realizing she hated it, she opened one dresser-drawer after another until she found what she needed. She bundled the hair in her left fist, and hacked into it with a blade that should have been sharper. She placed the offending hank on the table and immediately wished someone would take it away, so she couldn’t see it any more. Once it was no longer attached to her, she was revolted by it.

*

Two days later, when a messenger, a foreigner, arrived and asked to see the queen, the palace staff were perplexed. There must be some mistake. Did he want to see Teresa? She was in the agora somewhere, and would doubtless return before nightfall. She had left no instructions for what they should do if someone asked for Jocasta. No one ever did except her brother, Creon, and they all knew him. But the man – or he was really nearer a boy – stood firm: he must speak to the queen, immediately.

There was some quality in his manner, his urgency, which spurred them into an action they did not want to take. Two slave women – who usually acted as Jocasta’s maids – hurried him through the courtyards, each one noticing that the messenger had clearly travelled in haste: his boots were mud-spattered, his cloak had a small tear on the lower back, as though he had caught it on a branch, and wrenched himself free. They entered the private courtyard and found Jocasta kneeling before the shrine, as she often was these days. She was murmuring something to herself, a prayer to the god who tormented her.

‘Forgive me,’ said one of the slave women. She had the wit to know Teresa would probably have them both flogged if she found out that they had allowed a stranger into the company of the queen. Looking across at her fellow slave, she jerked her head in the direction of the kitchens. They should disappear into the bowels of the palace and then they might be able to deny their involvement later. ‘Excuse me, madam, but this visitor needs to speak to you.’

Jocasta turned. Her eyes darted to the stranger and she noted his dishevelled appearance. She reached one hand to the altar, to support herself as she stood. Then she bent down and brushed the dust from her dress. ‘What is it, sir?’ she asked.

‘It is the king,’ he replied. ‘I’m very sorry, madam. He is dead.’

‘Dead?’ Jocasta asked. The messenger nodded, his face a mask of mute sympathy. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘So what happens now?’