Page 20 of Arch Conspirator
“It is my right,” I said. “To be judged in the presence of my peers.”
“This is ridiculous,” Haemon said. “There should be no hearing, there should be no judgment in the first place!”
But both Kreon and I ignored him, our eyes locked together like two swords crossed at the blade.
“What do you think you will gain?” he said quietly. His voice was like poison dripping down my throat. “Do you thinkthat if there is some kind of public outcry, I will be moved to change my mind? Well I warn you, girl, I am not so easily swayed.”
I pursed my lips, as if to saywe’ll see,but really, I had no doubt: Kreon was a stubborn ass, and that’s what I was counting on.
11Kreon
The statute to which my traitorous niece referred had been proposed by her own father, years before, in response to a particular tendency of the government—then not under my command; that came later—to simply disappear dissenting voices, here one day and gone the next. I remembered the day he had advocated for it before the array of men in jackets buttoned up to their throats, his voice unfaltering, never intimidated even when he ought to have been. It was not confidence so much as a belief in his own invincibility. He never did understand survival—his own, or his children’s. He might not have cursed them with his unstable DNA if he had.
Nevertheless, it was not unfathomable that she should remember that statute, as she remembered so many of her parents’achievementsand routinely reminded me of them. What was startling, then, was not her talent for recall, but her willingness to engage in a public hearing that could only run counter to her best interests. She had been caught with an Extractor in hand, the needle end poised over her twin brother’s belly. She had beenwrestled away from said body and taken back to her bedroom, where she had been contained since the crime occurred. She could not very well stand before me in the public square and deny any of it.
And besides—what would she have Extracted? There was no soul in Polyneikes’ cells. I had permitted the charade for Eteocles, but it was all utterly pointless. There could be no resurrection where there was no pattern to convey.
I had expected her to come trembling to my office, to perch at the edge of the chair and beg me for her life. Despite the ornery streak that ran through her, I knew her to be a practical person above all else. When she had first arrived in this house, I had seen quite plainly the hatred she bore me, yet she had thanked me for my mercy and given me a curtsy that any high-status lady of society would have found acceptable.
So how to account for her attitude in my office? Perhaps she was overconfident in the public’s favor and in my unwillingness to be momentarily unpopular. Perhaps her view of things was simply too narrow to account for anything other than her own particular situation. She did not understand the intricacies of leadership, and how could she have? Her life, up until this point, had been one of clinging to the branch until the fruit was ripe enough to pick. One only saw one perspective when dangling for so long.
I scheduled the public hearing for that afternoon, to be announced in the square between the house and the Trireme, according to the requirements of my brother’s statute. I doubted that anyone would heed it. I returned to my study, where a cup of coffee waited, lukewarm now thanks to the deviation in my routine. Rather than summon one of the staff to warm it, I clutched it in both hands to preserve the last of its warmth and sipped it at my desk.
Eurydice joined me for lunch, as she often did, setting up platesand napkins at the table on the balcony. Today she put a bud vase between the plates with a paper flower in it, folded dozens of times to make geometric petals. It was red, and her dress was red, too. There was a fragility to her that was on display for all to see, but I was the one who saw her strength. Her calloused hands, from working the ground. Her flat feet, from running barefoot as a child. The scars on her knuckles, from bearing the blows of a cruel teacher’s ruler.
When we were sitting across from each other at the table, she said, “About Antigone.”
“I don’t wish to speak of her again,” I replied. “What she did weighs on my mind already.”
“Only remember that she is our niece, and she is just a girl,” she said softly.
“She is not a girl, she is an adult.” I set my jaw. “And as to her relationship to me, well, her brother was just as closely tied to me, and see whathetried to do. See what hedid,firing a bullet into his own flesh and blood!”
My hands shook. I gripped the edge of the table, and looked down at the courtyard where I had seen Eteocles’ body. A shameful waste, I had thought even then. Eteocles was not, perhaps, as strong of mind and heart as my own son—not a leader of men, that much was clear. But he had been a thoughtful and capable assistant to me, quick to heed my words and eager to please. And such a thing was not easy to come by.
I had disposed of his ichor after allowing his sister to Extract it. There was no point in storing it. But Ismene was a gentle girl, incapable of the kind of vitriol that readily spilled from the mouth of her sister, and Eurydice had wished to placate her after her sister’s violent reaction to the sight of the bodies. She claimed Ismene would be easier to manage if she was not inflamed to rage like her sister. I resented having to manage them at all. Long had I been held hostage by their impurity, and now my house had beenriven in two by deception, with my son straddling the divide as if he could keep the land from parting just by wishing it.
Eurydice laid a hand over my own.
“You will do what’s right,” she said to me. “I know it. I’ll go to the hearing, if you want me to.”
“Yes,” I said. “I could use someone there who will support me.”
“Of course.”
As she was so skilled in doing, she turned the talk elsewhere, to the garden, to her friends’ chatter, to the gossip from the household staff, to anything but what mattered. And I was glad of it.
I heard the crowd that had gathered in the square before I saw it, the murmur penetrating the walls of my house. As I walked with Nikias at my heels through the courtyard, I almost felt the heat of them. I had never been fond of crowds. The mass of humanity only reminded me of how senseless we were, playing games of maturity and civilization when really we were no different than a flock of birds moving as one, each one reacting to the movements of the one in front of it. I had seen more than one riot start because of a stray impulse.
I saw the shadow of my niece in the hallway adjoining the courtyard, smaller than the soldiers that surrounded her. She would enter after me.
I waved to the guards at the gate that separated the courtyard from the street, and they opened it. Dust swirled across the hard-packed earth, a haze appearing between me and my public. My shoulders back, I strode forward. The street was clear now of my traitor nephew’s body, removed to the safe room beneath the house after my traitor niece’s arrest, so the only thing between me and the crowd was a line of soldiers with staffs inhand. It may as well have been a wall; no one dared breach the invisible line that kept us apart.
I didn’t delay. “We are here assembled for a public hearing, in accordance with our statutes, of a woman accused of treason: my niece, Antigone. Lest I be accused of showing favoritism to my own kin, I present my judgment in this matter before all those gathered here. Bring her forward.”
She emerged from the courtyard framed with ivy. Her hair was loose and long, and I had not seen it so for months. It made her face look rounder, younger. She had changed clothes—she was still in black, but her shoulders were bare now, and there were faint ripples next to her sternum where her ribs were beginning to show. She was spare, though we had not suffered a food shortage in years, thanks to my rule. Distribution was now strictly controlled, each person given a particular allocation according to their work output, an elegant calculation of calories burned and calories consumed.
Today, her spareness spoke to her fragility.I am just a child,her appearance seemed to say, and I was certain this was purposeful on her part. As she had stood before her closet, sorting through black frocks, she had chosen this one for a reason.
