Iphigenia at Aulis

The wind threw the tent flap into Agamemnon’s face.

He caught it and pushed outside. Across the bay at Aulis, the ships lay crowded together, their ropes pulling taut against the moorings. A sailor was shouting from a pitching deck. Farther along the shore, two men dragged a spar out of the wash before the sea could take it.

The army had gathered to sail against Troy, where Paris had taken Helen, the wife of Agamemnon’s brother Menelaus. Kings had come with their ships and fighting men. They waited for Agamemnon to lead them.

He could order the ships launched. He could not make them pass the headland.

Calchas stood beside the altar, his cloak pressed against his legs by the wind.

“You know why,” the seer said.

Agamemnon remembered the deer falling in the hunt. He remembered his own pleasure in the shot, and the words that had come so easily afterward: Artemis herself could have done no better.

Now the goddess held the fleet at Aulis.

“What offering?” he asked.

Calchas looked toward the ships before he answered.

“Iphigenia.”

For a moment Agamemnon heard only the ropes striking the masts.

“No.”

The seer did not argue. He stood waiting, and beyond him stretched the camp: cooking fires struggling in the wind, men squatting outside their tents, a whole army growing hungry and restless on a narrow shore.

Agamemnon went back inside.

A little later he sent for a messenger.

His daughter was to come to Aulis. Her mother was to prepare her for marriage. The bridegroom, the message said, would be Achilles.

Agamemnon spoke the name clearly. He made himself repeat the instructions. When the messenger left, he remained beside the table, looking at the place where the man had stood.

The Wedding Summons

Iphigenia arrived looking for her father.

The camp was larger than she had imagined. Ships filled the water; spears stood in bundles beside the tents. Men turned as she passed, then lowered their eyes. She thought at first that they were being respectful to the commander’s daughter.

Agamemnon came to meet her.

She ran the last few steps and put her arms around him. His hands settled on her back, heavy and slow.

“I thought you would already be at Troy,” she said.

“Not yet.”

She drew away enough to look at him.

“Are you ill?”

“No.”

He tried to smile. She had seen him stern, impatient, delighted after a hunt. She had never seen him work so hard at so small an expression.

She asked about Achilles.

Her father turned toward the altar.

“There must be a sacrifice first.”

That did not trouble her at once. A marriage had its rites, and a voyage had its offerings. She followed him along the shore, holding her clothing clear of the damp ground.

Then she saw the waiting men and the space they had left beside the altar. There was no animal there.

Her father stopped.

“Why are they looking at me?”

Agamemnon’s mouth moved without a sound.

She stepped closer to him, lowering her voice as though he might explain a mistake before anyone noticed it.

“Where is Achilles?”

The wind pressed her dress against her knees. Somewhere behind them a loose length of sail snapped loudly, and she flinched.

Calchas began to speak. She heard the goddess’s name, the fleet, the price of sailing. The words made no sense together until she looked again at her father.

He would not look back.

“No,” she said. “Father.”

She took his wrist with both hands. He was warm, solid, familiar. She could remember being lifted by those arms to see above a crowd.

“Send me home.”

He shut his eyes.

She tightened her grip. “You sent for me. You can send me back.”

The men waited. Agamemnon opened his eyes, but there was no command in them that would save her.

When they led her toward the altar, she kept turning, certain that he would call her name.

The Goddess’s Shore

The stone felt cold beneath Iphigenia’s fingers.

She could no longer see the ships clearly. The people around her had closed the view. She heard the ritual words and tried to find her father between the shoulders of the men.

A brightness passed over the altar.

For an instant she felt neither the stone nor the hands that had brought her there. The wind stopped touching her face. She reached out into an empty whiteness.

Then she was standing on different ground.

At Aulis, a deer lay where the girl had been.

Men recoiled from the altar. Calchas looked upward. Agamemnon searched the space around him, then pushed through the people as if Iphigenia might be standing just beyond them.

She was nowhere on the shore.

Artemis had taken her.

The winds changed. Out in the bay, a sailor raised his head. Orders began to pass from ship to ship; men ran for the moorings. The weather for which they had waited had come.

Agamemnon stood a little longer beside the altar before he went to his ship.

Far away in Tauris, Iphigenia heard waves breaking under a strange sky.

The coast was not Aulis. No Greek fleet covered its water. She turned, searching for her father, for the men, for any familiar face. The fear had not left her simply because the altar had vanished.

Artemis had carried her beyond the army’s reach. Here she would serve as the goddess’s priestess, alive and far from the home to which she had begged to return.

Iphigenia took a breath. Then another.

Below her, a wave spread thinly over the unfamiliar stones and drew back into the sea.