The day after the rest of the Ithakan envoys left us, I asked my father why he’d been so angry. He wouldn’t tell me, but when I went to my mother’s room with the same question, she gave me my answer. “Niobe of Thebes was a great queen but a foolish woman. She mocked Leto, mother of Artemis and Apollo, because the goddess had only two children while she had seven sons and seven daughters.” My mother picked me up and held me close, as if I were still a baby. “For her offense, the divine twins slaughtered all her children in a single day. Their arrows cut them down, every one, even when the queen threw herself across the body of her youngest child and begged Artemis and Apollo to take her life instead. There was no mercy, and when Niobe’s children all lay dead, there was no end to her weeping. The gods finally took pity on her and turned her to stone, but her tears for her children still stream down the face of the rock.”
I began to shake. My mother was shaking too. “Don’t be afraid, dear one,” she said, giving me a tight squeeze. “I know it’s a terrible story, but you mustn’t worry. Artemis won’t touch you or Clytemnestra or the boys. Even though your father won’t worship her, I do. You’re safe.” With that, she gave me a kiss and told me to go back to my nurse.
I refused. I faced my mother and declared, “That’s not fair! Father’s right, Artemis is cruel. It’s bad enough that she and her brother punished Niobe for one mistake, but then they made it worse. They had to turn her into a lesson. It’s not even a good lesson! If they really wanted Niobe to learn from what she’d done, they could have brought her children back to life and said, ‘Now do you see what can happen if you’re too proud?’ I bet she’d never have been proud again after that, because she’d want her children to live.”
“And I don’t want to risk your life even once,” Mother said, laying her fingers to my lips to hush me. “Don’t anger the gods, Helen.”
“You want me to be afraid of them,” I said.
“I want you to respect them,” Mother corrected me.
“I thought I was supposed to love them.”
Mother gave me one of her gentle smiles. “Can’t you do both, my darling? You know you’re supposed to respect Papa and me, but you love us too, don’t you?”
I admitted this was true. “But not because I’m scared of what you’ll do to me if I don’t,” I pointed out. “And that’s why I’m never going to love Artemis, ever. Just like Papa!”
Mother sighed. “I respect the moon goddess, but I must admit, I don’t…feel as fond of her as I do of some of the other goddesses. Still, there are some things that we must do, whether we like them or not. That’s true for queens as well as other women; remember that, Helen. I don’t think Artemis cares if we love her, as long as we worship her in the proper way. I hope that you and Clytemnestra will be good girls when you come with me to the huntress’s shrine for the festival.”
I made a face. “I don’t like Artemis and I’m not going.”
“We’ll see,” said Mother.
I knew what that meant.
My mother dragged me to the festival along with Clytemnestra and the other girls. I sulked through the whole thing, unlike my twin.
Clytemnestra and I were born together, but everyone said we didn’t look alike—aside from both of us having the same thick, long black hair as our mother—and we certainly didn’t act alike. The more I turned my back on the rituals that Mother and the old temple priestess were performing for the goddess, the more Clytemnestra behaved like Artemis’s most devoted worshipper. She copied our mother’s every gesture at the altar, and when the priestess nodded approvingly and some of the women began to murmur words of praise for her piety, she began to invent worshipful gestures of her own. Pretty soon she was raising and lowering her arms to the image of Artemis so vigorously that Mother finally intervened.
“That’s enough, dear,” she said. “I know you want to honor Artemis, but you look like a goose trying to fly.”
Clytemnestra stuck out her lower lip and glared. “You wouldn’t say that to Helen,” she whined. “She does everything right.”
“Nonsense. She hasn’t done anything at all,” Mother replied briskly, returning her attention to the altar.
My sister gave me a nasty look and started to stick out her tongue but quickly thought better of it and clamped her mouth shut. She smirked for just an instant, then walked to the altar and tugged at Mother’s skirt.
“Mama?” she asked in her sweetest voice. “Mama, can I make an offering to Artemis? All by myself, to show the goddess how much I love her? Please?”
Once again the other women witnessing the rites began to speak softly about what a good girl Clytemnestra was. My sister’s gloating smile grew wider and wider with every compliment she overheard until I thought she was going to burst with glee.
But she didn’t burst. She was squashed.
“What a wonderful idea, Clytemnestra!” Mother exclaimed. “I think that you and Helen should do it together.” She meant well, but her words were like a dipper full of cold water flung in my sister’s face.
“Her? Why her? It was my idea!” Clytemnestra objected strenuously.
“Me?” I was just as angry as she was. “Do I have to?”
Mother’s suddenly stern face was all the answer either one of us received. Without speaking a word, she let us know that we would behave like Spartan princesses or we’d suffer the consequences at the hands of Sparta’s queen.
Mother could make me sacrifice a few crumbs of incense to Artemis, but she couldn’t make me do it right. After my sister dropped her pinch of incense onto the coals and stepped away from the altar, it was my turn. Expressionless, I held my chubby hand over the brazier, opened my clenched fingers, and then…I missed. I’d held the pinch of incense very carefully, and then at the last instant I threw it away. The old priestess gave a little gasp as the costly crumb of sweet-smelling tree gum fell to the ground and tumbled down the temple steps, but neither she nor my mother nor the dancing maidens made any move to fetch it back.
“Oh, Helen, you clumsy thing!” Clytemnestra shoved me aside and ran down the steps so fast that she tripped, fell, and scraped her nose. She yelped with pain.
I was down the steps in an instant. “You’re bleeding!” I cried, helping her get back onto her feet. “Does it hurt a lot? Do you want some water or—?”