Read Alcestis for Free Online Page B

starting near the chamber and spreading through the crowd. All around me voices leapt into the chorus. I didn’t know the words to this song; I didn’t want to know them, but I couldn’t help hearing, for the village boys and girls pronounced the words clearly, with devotional ease. The boys sang of prowess and protection, the girls of virtue and fruitfulness. Faith and honor till I die, they sang.
    The girls began a dance, or perhaps the boys did, a circling pattern of clasped hands and swinging legs. Several of the girls held out their hands as they passed me, forgetting who I was, forgetting that they could not touch. They were giggling, spinning, the words of the song fragmented by mirth. Faith . . . honor . . . I die. One girl managed to grab my wrist, and I yanked it back hard and ran toward the edge of the great hall. I reached the wall panting and leaned my head back against the cool stone.
    All my life I had been given warnings: eyes down, voice soft, knees together. You’re different, the servants had told me. You are not like us. We are not like you. A royal girl must lie like an undiscovered island, quiet and empty, skin clear and pure as miles of open shore just waiting for that first footprint, the rut of the hull in the sand, the press of discovery.
    I’d listened, and I’d believed them, but I had not cared. Purity came easily to me—I was young and alone and untempted. But as I watched the dancers, I thought I saw what the serving maids had meant. I was meant for marriage. I would marry, but I could never reveal to a man what was damp and hungry in me, not like these girls, these laughing children, destined to be shepherds’ wives or sailors’ mistresses, to die bearing or beaten or old. I leaned against the wall and I felt the skin of my inner thighs brush, the dry slide of hot skin and tiny hairs.
    Over the boys’ singing, I heard a distinct female cry from within the bedchamber.
    I twisted to look back at the closed doors—but there were no more noises, no disruptions in the song. Had I imagined it? I stood on my toes, looking for Pisidice, but couldn’t see her in the crowd. Just braided heads and curly heads bent together, all the same, all oblivious—but no, there was a girl with narrowed eyes; there was another who had stopped singing and stood with her head tilted, listening. Their faces were exposed, like unpainted walls. They’d heard the cry too. They knew.
    One by one they turned their eyes to me. Their faces were no longer friendly and laughing but cold, sharp, slightly panicked. They were thinking not of the Mycenaean woman but of my father—of what he might be doing to make her cry, of what that sound promised for them. They slipped other faces over his, and they felt other fears, but I had no other faces to conjure. I thought all kings must look as he did and rage as he did, and I, Alcestis, I would marry a king.
    I pushed away from the wall and shoved through the crowd, jabbing with my wrists and elbows. The girls turned their faces away, but the boys watched me. Their eyes felt like hands reaching out to stroke me.
    I burst through the knot of bodies at the door and into the cooler air of the porch, my breath coming fast and shaky. The porch was empty save for the two guards standing watch at the edge of the steps, hands behind their backs, faces half lit by their torches. I looked over my shoulder toward the glow of laughter and heat within the palace, but no one had followed me. I pressed my fingers hard against the beat of blood in my temples. Sweat was drying on the back of my neck; I told myself that was why I was shivering.
    I walked to the top of the stairs, between the guards, and looked out toward the grave circle where my sister’s burial mound lay hazy in the faint light of the torches. I was not allowed to visit Hippothoe at night—I wasn’t supposed to visit her during the day either, but I woke early enough to leave the palace and return without being caught.