The messenger looked at the queen and then back at the slave woman who had accompanied him through the palace. But the woman said nothing, her eyes fixed on the ground in front of her feet. He turned towards the queen once again.
‘I worry I may not have made myself clear, highness,’ he said. ‘I was trying to convey to you that the king of Thebes is dead.’
‘You made yourself perfectly clear,’ she said. ‘It’s hard to imagine you could have been any clearer. Laius is dead. I understand. My question, which you perhaps misheard in your quest for clarity, was: what happens now?’
‘What happens now?’ The messenger was flummoxed. ‘Well, the king’s body will be brought back to the palace, I should think, and then—’
‘I’m sorry.’ Jocasta flashed him a gleaming smile. ‘You seem to be struggling to comprehend what I’m saying. What I mean is, am I in charge now?’
‘Er . . . yes, I would imagine so,’ said the messenger, trying to dispel doubt from his voice. ‘Yes.’
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘My husband had financial advisers, didn’t he? And political ones? Where are they? They didn’t all die too, I suppose?’ Her voice was almost wistful, and the messenger looked more perplexed than ever.
‘No, I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘If they were the men who journeyed with their king, they are now accompanying him back to the city. He travels in state, of course.’
‘It can’t make the slightest difference to him now, whether he travels in state or not,’ Jocasta said. ‘You could tie him facedown to the back of a mule for all he’d know about it.’
‘Madam?’
‘Unless he isn’t dead at all? Are you sure he’s dead?’
‘Madam, I regret to say that I am completely sure. He was stabbed by one of the Sphinx, and then . . .’ His voice tailed off as he saw that Jocasta was only half-listening.
‘The Sphinx?’ she said. ‘I can never quite remember who they are.’
‘Why, they’re . . .’
‘No, don’t tell me,’ she said. ‘I have enough to worry about without thinking about things that can’t be changed and don’t affect me. You will stay here, at the palace, I hope. Put him up in the guards’ barracks,’ she said to the slave woman. ‘And when the late king’s advisers arrive, which will be tomorrow? The next day? We’ll have to see how eager they are to reach me, won’t we? When they arrive, you will please show them to me in . . .’ She turned to the servant again, ‘Which of those rooms in the second courtyard would be the right size? I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.’
‘Phylla,’ said the woman.
‘Which room did the king use for his most important meetings? One of the big ones in the second courtyard?’
‘Yes, madam. The blue room, on the east side.’
‘You will show them to the blue room when they arrive, please. Then you will fetch this gentleman and bring him to find me in the private courtyard. He will escort me to them. Understand that I will accept no excuses if you fail to do precisely as I have asked.’ The girl nodded. Teresa could not punish her for obeying explicit instructions from her mistress. Jocasta turned back to the messenger.
‘You will be my ally in that meeting, do you understand?’
‘Yes, madam,’ said the messenger, confusion still playing across his face.
‘For every day that they are behind you,’ Jocasta continued, ‘I will give you a plain gold ring.’
The messenger blushed, greed suffusing his cheeks along with the colour. ‘Thank you, madam.’
‘Do you know why?’ she said, and he shook his head. He was not confident about anything the queen was saying. ‘Because the longer they take, the more it proves that you were trying to reach me as soon as you could. The more it proves that you were hurrying here to make me the ruler of this city, while they dawdled behind you, excusing their indifference to me behind their proper respect for the dead.’
The messenger thought for a moment, and decided it would be better for him, at least economically, if he agreed. ‘Yes, madam,’ he said.
Jocasta turned to walk away to her room. She seemed taller than usual, Phylla thought, when she lifted her gaze from the ground. Perhaps her strange haircut had added to her height, with spikes of hair sticking up at every angle.
‘Excuse me,’ the messenger called after her. ‘Please don’t go. I didn’t introduce myself, madam. And I have only told you half of the story.’
Jocasta slumped a little. This was the longest time she had spent speaking to a man other than her brother since – she couldn’t remember. Oran? But she didn’t like to think of him. She was growing tired and fretful, and wished she could scratch at her forearms with her nails, because they were beginning to itch intolerably. Nonetheless she turned back to face the stranger and raised her eyebrows.
‘In your tongue, my name is Oedipus, ma’am,’ he said, and she looked at him properly for the first time. He was young, this boy, with beautiful long dark hair and glinting brown eyes. His mouth was set in a serious line, but she couldn’t shake the thought that he normally laughed a great deal. He was tall and slender, and though his clothes were torn, his skin was golden from the sun, rather than brown from the dust. He reminded her of ripe apricots.
‘Have you worked for my husband for long?’ she asked.
‘I don’t work for your husband at all,’ he said. ‘I am not from Thebes, madam. I come from another city.’
Phylla gave a small choke, and covered her face with loose fabric from the top of her tunic.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Jocasta, brandishing her arms about her. ‘There hasn’t been an outbreak in over twenty years, for hundreds of stades in any direction. Not one. And anyone can see this man isn’t sick. Look at him.’
Phylla did as she was asked, but she didn’t remove the cloth from her mouth. ‘Leave then,’ Jocasta shouted. ‘If you’re so afraid. I will direct him to the barracks myself. Or perhaps I will invite him to stay in our guest quarters.’ Phylla scurried away.
‘Come and sit down, sir,’ Jocasta said, gesturing to a bench. She sat beside him, and smoothed her hair with an anxious hand. She found herself suddenly wishing she hadn’t cut it all off two days earlier. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I just assumed you were one of Laius’s boys. You look like them.’
‘No, I’m sorry,’ Oedipus replied. ‘I should have made myself clearer from the outset. I came across your husband and his men in the mountains. They were pegged back by the Sphinx – is that what you call them?’
‘I think so,’ she said. ‘I’ve never really known very much about the land outside the city. Just enough not to believe that every other city in Hellas is afflicted by the Reckoning, except ours.’ She jerked her head in the direction the maid had left. ‘They think Thebes is special. Blessed. They don’t understand that it is the opposite.’
‘Have you lived here all your life?’ Oedipus asked, gesturing around them.
‘In Thebes? Yes. In the palace? No. I’ve been here for almost seventeen years. But I lived on the other side of the city before that. My father was a trader so I was brought up not to fear the Outlying.’
‘So you’ve never been to the mountains? That’s a shame. They’re beautiful in the summer.’
‘Are they?’ It had never occurred to Jocasta that the mountains were beautiful at any time. As a child, she had thought of them as an impassable green wall behind the city. As an adult, she had seen them as her husband’s territory. She had never thought of them as an actual place, with characteristics of their own.
‘Where do you come from?’ she asked.
‘Corinth,’ he said. She looked blank. ‘A trading city on the other side of the mountains.’
‘Is that right? What do you trade?’
‘All sorts of things. Minerals, metals, oil, grain: whatever you need. We trade with everyone. We’re well located, on the isthmus.’
She nodded, but he could see she didn’t know what he was talking about. ‘We’re on the sea,’ he explained. ‘So everyone comes to us.’
‘And you’re a trader?’ she asked.
‘Not exactly.’ He smiled at her. ‘My father is an important man. He wanted me to stay in Corinth and learn the trade. But I wanted to see something of Hellas first. And the mountains are less dangerous at the start of the year, so they say, so I decided to try my luck. My parents know I can take care of myself.’
‘And they are right, because here you are,’ Jocasta said. It took a moment before she remembered that he had probably been about to tell her of her husband’s death when they got sidetracked, talking about the mountains and distant trading posts. She wondered if he had just realized the same thing, for his golden confidence dimmed slightly, while he tried to find his next words.
‘You found my husband and his men in the mountains?’ she reminded him.
‘Yes, they were in a bad way,’ he said. ‘They were pinned into a dead end. The mountain is full of them, you have to learn where they are. I don’t know how they got themselves into such a position. His scouts should be hanged, if any of them survived.’
‘You’re not very forgiving,’ Jocasta said.
‘No.’ He shrugged, unapologetic. ‘They led your husband into a trap. They were either incompetent or treacherous. There is no excuse for either.’
‘But you tried to help?’
‘I think I did a bit better than that.’ He smiled again, the sudden anger of a moment ago disappearing. ‘The Sphinx are very much less terrifying than people make them out to be, in their stories. They aren’t a mythical fighting force, they’re just a gang of mountain men. They know the paths and secret routes through the peaks better than anyone alive. But they aren’t an army; they have no discipline. If one of them is hurt, the others panic, or they get angry. Either way, it makes them weaker. People say they are numberless, but I doubt they are more than forty altogether. They seem to come at you from all sides, but that’s just because they know shortcuts that are hidden from the ordinary traveller. Of course they do – they have been born and raised on the mountains, they are practically goats.’
‘And how do you know the mountains so well?’ Jocasta asked. ‘I thought this was your first trip to Thebes.’
‘I don’t know the mountains all that well, but there are other mountains nearer Corinth which are not so different, and which are home to similar men. So I have the good sense to move carefully on unfamiliar terrain. And I don’t travel with a huge retinue, making a racket and drawing their attention. Your husband – forgive me, madam – was practically begging to be attacked by brigands.’ She waved his apology away. ‘Besides,’ he admitted, ‘I had something more important than knowledge on my side. I had luck.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I came up behind the Sphinx, completely by accident. Their attention was focused entirely on your king. No one was keeping watch behind them, because they were embroiled in a skirmish ahead. Your husband’s men outnumbered them, even though they weren’t well prepared for a fight. So the mountain men had their hands full, fighting. It was easy to pick a few of them off, one by one.’
‘But people say the Sphinx can’t be killed,’ she said.
‘People say all kinds of nonsense,’ he replied. ‘I told you, they’re just men.’
‘So if you killed the Sphinx, what happened to my husband?’
He coloured. ‘That is harder to explain, madam.’
‘Perhaps you might try,’ she said.
‘It was an accident,’ he replied. ‘Your husband was distracted by the carnage around him. He saw one man after another fall. And he was injured himself. He had taken a knife wound to the right shoulder. You can’t imagine how that must feel. His whole arm would have gone numb.’
‘You know a lot, for someone so young,’ she said.
‘My city is not as civilized as yours, Basileia.’
‘Don’t call me that,’ she snapped. ‘And my city is a great deal less civilized than it appears to you.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But I’m afraid your husband was disorientated. He was slashing at anyone who came near him with a knife. The sweat was pouring into his eyes; I doubt he could see very much.’
‘So what happened?’ she asked again.
‘I approached him to tell him that the threat was over, that many of the mountain men lay dead, and the rest had run away. He lashed out with his knife.’ The boy raised his left hand and she saw a long cut down the leather guard he wore on his forearm, the bare skin beneath it flaming red. ‘Lucky I move faster than your husband, or I’d be bleeding out in the mountains instead of talking to you now.’
‘He tried to kill you.’
‘Yes.’
‘So you killed him.’
‘Not intentionally,’ Oedipus said. ‘I shouted at him to stop, but he wasn’t listening. He backed away from me to prepare for a second attack. And he lost his footing.’
‘He fell?’
‘Not very far, but he landed horribly. Like I said, he couldn’t see. He broke his neck – it would have been very quick,’ he finished.
‘And so you came here to tell me that you are responsible for my husband’s death?’ Jocasta asked.
‘In a manner of speaking,’ he said. ‘I saw his men collect his body and decide to bear him home. That’s how I found out he was the king: I was watching them from the rocks above. If he’d stayed with the main party, he would still be alive, Basileia, I swear it.’
‘I said not to call me that,’ she said. ‘Did you not think it was a risk? Coming here to a strange city to tell me you’d killed the king? What if I decided to have you executed?’
‘From what I overheard, madam, your husband’s men didn’t seem to think you would be unduly saddened by his death. They seemed to think you could be removed from the palace quite easily.’
She nodded. She had never been popular with her husband’s men. Of course they would want to replace her.
‘And I suppose I took a chance. Your husband deserved to die, madam. He was foolish and vain. He should have been more careful and he should have hired better scouts, and treated the mountains with more respect. But I couldn’t see that you had done anything wrong. I thought I would ride ahead of them and tell you what had happened. So you could prepare yourself.’
‘That was kind,’ she said. She reached over and touched his arm.
‘And then, when I told you he was dead, you said I was your ally.’
‘I thought you were one of his boys,’ she said again.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘Just, when you said it, I decided it was true.’
‘My hair doesn’t normally look like this,’ Jocasta said, wishing she had not hacked it off with a blunt blade two days earlier.
‘I don’t imagine it does,’ he replied. ‘It suits you, though.’
