Page 12 of Arch Conspirator
She pressed her mouth into a line.
“I came to ask you if you’d like to perform Eteocles’ Extraction,” she said.
I felt as if I’d drunk poison. Bitterness filled my mouth, my throat. Bitterness soured my stomach and dried up my tears. To offer this to me as if it was a mercy was the height of cruelty. Of course I would perform Eteocles’ Extraction. Of course Kreon would permit it—my brother had died defending him. Of course.
And Polyneikes would rot.
I followed her through the hallways to the courtyard. It was bright outside, the sky a white haze, and the rest of the bodies had been cleared from the courtyard. The bloodstains had been sprayed down and then covered with a fresh layer of dirt. Thetrampled plants had been removed by the root, the places they occupied packed down and smoothed over. And lying on his back under the cypress tree was Eteocles.
His skin was coated in dust. Blood had dried around his mouth. Someone had put his hands at his sides and straightened his legs, a posture he had never taken when alive, so he looked unlike himself—like a statue of my brother instead of the actual form of him. I stood at his feet for a few long moments.
Eteocles knew me, and I knew him. How he struggled to make sense of things, sometimes; how he found it easier to simply follow the rules. How he craved not praise but affirmation that he was doing what was expected of him. How he envied the lively energy of our twin siblings, and shared with me a desire to be like them, all edges, always on the verge of some kind of revelation. But we were not like them. We were like each other. Quiet and level. A cup of flour skimmed with the flat of a knife. A picture frame hanging just so on a wall. The click of a metronome.
Three elderwomen stepped out of the house. There were always three, waiting for the Extraction to be done. They would wrap the body in cloth and then carry it, two at the head and one at the feet. I looked over their rounded shoulders to the street beyond the courtyard, where a cart waited for Eteocles’ body. They would take it back to the mortuary, and burn it.
There would be only women there. No man would dare touch a body, fearing its emptiness. Empty things were hungry. They wanted to take. But women were different. Once we could no longer bear life, our sole responsibility was to attend the dead.
“Can I have some water,” I said to one of them. “And a cloth.”
I knelt at his head and waited. The oldest of them—or so it seemed, her face had the deepest lines—brought me a small bowl of water with a folded scrap of linen a few minutes later, and I began to clean his face. I scrubbed at the dried blood around his mouth. I ran the wet cloth along his cheeks and brow. I discovered my father anew in his crooked nose, my mother in his attached earlobes.
When I was finished, Eurydice handed me an Extractor. I lifted Eteocles’ shirt. There was a scar on his abdomen from an appendix removal. I touched four fingers to his cold stomach, below his belly button.
I was a woman, so this was my task, mine and Antigone’s. We had learned the right procedures from our mother, and she had learned them from hers. No one had asked us if we wanted to. No one had asked us if we could bear it.
As it happened, I couldn’t bear it, but I did it anyway.
I said the prayer. I plunged the Extractor in.
8Antigone
Rumor—passed along by the maid who came to change my sheets later that morning—said that Polyneikes’ body was on display in the street just north of Kreon’s house, guarded by soldiers. As of twenty-four hours after his death, his ichor would no longer be viable, and the body would be removed.
They unlocked my door and I walked to the north end of the house, where two walls separated me from my brother’s body. I thought about looking out the window to see the grotesque display, and my stomach roiled at the thought. When I left a few minutes later, I left through the back door and took the circuitous route, walking through the Neïstan District to get to the North District. When I turned back to see if I was being followed, I could just barely see the glimmer of the Trireme, nose pointed at the sky.
I expected my head to be busy, maybe even frantic. Instead, I felt stillness. I saw the sagging buildings, the shops with their beat-up pots and pans stacked high on the street, the food carts with smoke hanging around them like a cloud, the children selling bouquets of weeds, the drunk men slumped in doorframes,the old women sitting on front steps to stitch old garments, and I didn’t think about my brother, about the Extractor in my bag, about his body as a crude monument to Kreon’s cruelty. I didn’t think about anything. I walked for the better part of an hour. The North District was the next one over from the Seventh, where I lived, but it was one of the larger ones; it spanned quite a few miles.
When I arrived at Parth’s door, he greeted me with a nod and let me in. His apartment was on the ground floor, so all the noise of the street filled it. He lived there with several others whose names I didn’t know and his mother, a wry, hunched woman with a scarf wrapped around her hair, who looked at me when I came in and said, “If I wasn’t already dying, that face would probably kill me, girl.”
“Don’t look at it, then,” I replied, and her laugh was like a wheeze.
Parth sat me down in his kitchen with a glass of water, and I waited for Ismene to arrive. I knew she would come, because I had asked her to, and Ismene always did what I asked her to. I was hoping that quality would extend beyond a long walk to the North District.
In the apartment above, someone was playing music. The bass rippled through the water in my glass, which sat untouched on the table. Some time passed before I heard Ismene’s knock, a faint tap. She came into the kitchen, her hands folded in front of her. Her eyes were red with tears.
“Tig, what’s this about?” she said, and I felt a deep ache. That name. Pol was the one who gave it to me, when we were children.
“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to—”
“I know,” I said. “I just needed to talk to you someplace where I knew no one would be listening.”
We both looked at the door separating the kitchen from the living room.
“Where I knew Kreon wouldn’t be listening,” I amended.
Ismene sat in the chair across from mine. I slid my water glass toward her, and she sipped from it as I reached into the bag at my side and took out the Extractor.
I set it on the table between us.
