4.

The afternoon was almost over when the summons came for Iphigeneia. She and her younger sister Electra and Sisipyla and an older woman who had once been nurse to the princess were playing a game of throw and catch in the small open courtyard adjoining the south staircase. For the ball, Sisipyla had been sent to fetch an old cloth doll, a limp survivor of Iphigeneia's earliest childhood that still had a place in the box of old playthings in the princess's bedroom.

The nurse was on the heavy side and rather unwieldy, and she had not really wanted to play. They had found her spinning wool in a shady corner of the courtyard and Iphigeneia had coerced her into it. 'We need four people,' she had said. 'Less than four is no use at all.' And she had narrowed her eyes and looked intently at the nurse, in the way she had when meeting with opposition.

Sisipyla, watching this briefest of contests – the nurse did not resist long – had known at once why there had to be four players. The yard was square, the game had to be square too. She had long ago, while they were still children, recognized in her mistress an imperative need for things to match up and to be perfect; not only particular things, like her make-up or the combs in her hair, but forms and arrangements too, things you couldn't touch or really see, a puzzling matter for Sisipyla. She had watched, with the familiar sense of puzzlement, while Iphigeneia stationed the players in positions exactly corresponding to the angles made by the corners of the walls, forming an exact copy of the square.

The thing that gave the game its edge, however, was the opposite principle of disorder. None of the players could know whether the doll was to be thrown her way or not; it was permitted, it was even required, to make feints and pretended throws and to change direction at the last moment. The game had begun with a great deal of laughter but then deteriorated fairly quickly. Iphigeneia was getting crosser and crosser, first because the nurse dithered and fumbled, and this slowed the game down, then because Electra, in her eagerness to be tricky, would try to change direction at the very moment of throwing, and this made her aim erratic, so that the doll went flying at an impossible angle and could not be caught however quick one was.

'How could anyone be expected to catch that?' Iphigeneia demanded furiously, after the doll had come flailing towards her at knee-height. 'Why don't you learn to throw straight?'

'Well, that's that,' Electra said, she too flushed and furious. 'I won't play this game any more, not ever.'

These words brought a certain pause; even at this early age she was known for one who kept her vows. The doll lay with arms outflung at Iphigeneia's feet. She had started life as an elegant doll, a luxury product, with black silk hair and slanting eyes made of dark amber and a cloth-of-gold dress with ivory buttons, the naming-day gift of a vassal chieftain from the island of Cythera, off whose shores Aphrodite was said to have risen from the sea. But the doll was hairless now and she was blind – there were only the stitch marks where her eyes had been. Her gold dress was gashed here and there and the stuffing showed through.

Iphigeneia bent to pick the doll up. 'You won't get your hands on Maia again, that's for sure,' she said.

'Who cares?'

'You won't touch her again.'

Sisipyla was swept by a rush of sympathy for her mistress. Whatever the others might think, she knew without needing to find the words in her mind that it was not Electra's erratic aim or scornful manner that was upsetting Iphigeneia now, but self-blame, the sudden sorrow of seeing her doll, the familiar companion of childhood, dishevelled and defenceless, with her limbs sprawled out. She was trying, too late, to protect Maia and make things up to her.

'Whoever would want to touch your smelly old doll?' Electra said.

At this difficult moment, a woman named Crataeis, one of Clytemnestra's companions, entered the courtyard. She had been looking for the princess high and low, she said. The Queen required her presence immediately, was awaiting that presence even now in her apartments. Alone, the woman added, with a hostile glance at Sisipyla. What the Queen had to say was for her daughter's ears only.

Iphigeneia began to follow the woman across the courtyard, but realizing that she was still holding the doll, she turned back and handed it to Sisipyla. 'Look after Maia for me,' she said, exchanging looks with her sister that were unforgiving on both sides. 'You can keep her with you till I get back.'

Sisipyla, bearing the bedraggled Maia back to her room, thought how similar the sisters were in some ways, and wondered what Clytemnestra could have to communicate to her daughter so urgent that it could not keep till the evening hour, when Iphigeneia always attended on her mother. Something to do with the riders she had seen, half-shrouded in dust, with the pennants flying above them. But they were from Aulis, she had heard. What possible message for Iphigeneia could come from men about to embark for war?

Maia lay on the narrow bed in an attitude of ruin and abandon. Light from the high window fell on the pale patches where her eyes had been and on her pulpy nose – Iphigeneia, when she was teething, had gnawed away at Maia's nose and reduced it to a mangled stump. After a while Sisipyla began to feel a certain horror at Maia, and did not want to look her way any more. She waited, listening for footfalls, sitting on the floor with her back to the bed. While she waited the sun sank behind the horizon and the brief summer twilight came down. The old slave woman, whose task it was, came with a long-handled pan of fire and lit the lamps in the vestibule and in Iphigeneia's apartment.

Darkness had come when the princess returned, and she was accompanied by two attendants who had lighted her way with torches. Iphigeneia was standing between the bearers, and the torches were still burning when Sisipyla passed through into the vestibule, so that her first impression, coming from the dimness of her room, was of the leaping and trembling of reflected flame, on the walls, on the bronze standards of the torches, on the face of Iphigeneia and the silver threads of her bodice. The princess's expression was serious and exalted and she held her head high. She dismissed the torch bearers and waited till they had gone shuffling away in the loose felt slippers that all palace servants wore. Then she turned to Sisipyla and moved towards her, as if she wanted to speak low. Sisipyla saw her mistress's expression change, now that they were alone together, saw it become more openly and tensely excited, and was carried back in memory, in these moments before Iphigeneia spoke, to the radiant face of the six-year-old princess and the questions and the laughing men.

'They have come with a proposal of marriage,' Iphigeneia said. 'You will never guess who it is.'

She paused for a moment, it seemed for effect rather than in expectation of guesses. In any case, Sisipyla made no attempt to reply. Her hand had risen in an unconscious movement to clutch loosely at the waist of her skirt.

'It is Achilles. He thinks of me day and night. He wants me – he can't wait till after the war. He wants me to come to Aulis and be married before the whole army. Just think of it, a thousand spectators. My mother is full of joy. That generation always exaggerates everything, of course, but she says he is quite the most eligible hero alive today. And there is also the fact that he is of divine descent on the mother's side.'

Becoming aware now of Sisipyla's silence and stillness, she looked more closely at her companion's face, and saw there an expression that she altogether misunderstood. 'Do you mean to say you didn't know that? No, it's no use, I can tell from your face that you didn't. Good heavens. His father was Peleus of Pthia, and he married the sea-goddess Thetis. All the gods came to the wedding, which was a great distinction because it is very rare where a mortal is concerned. When Achilles was a baby Thetis dipped him in the river Styx to make him immortal, but she must have been thinking of something else at the time, she kept hold of his heel, so he is immortal in every part but that. My mother says I must have made a tremendous impression on him when we met, though it was only once and I was only in my tenth summer at the time. You were with me, you saw him too.'