The Songs of the Kings by Barry Unsworth

Author:Barry Unsworth
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: sf_fantasy, sf_social
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

4.

The afternoon was almost over when the summons came for Iphigeneia. She and her younger sister Electra and Sisipyla and an older woman who had once been nurse to the princess were playing a game of throw and catch in the small open courtyard adjoining the south staircase. For the ball, Sisipyla had been sent to fetch an old cloth doll, a limp survivor of Iphigeneia's earliest childhood that still had a place in the box of old playthings in the princess's bedroom.

The nurse was on the heavy side and rather unwieldy, and she had not really wanted to play. They had found her spinning wool in a shady corner of the courtyard and Iphigeneia had coerced her into it. 'We need four people,' she had said. 'Less than four is no use at all.' And she had narrowed her eyes and looked intently at the nurse, in the way she had when meeting with opposition.

Sisipyla, watching this briefest of contests – the nurse did not resist long – had known at once why there had to be four players. The yard was square, the game had to be square too. She had long ago, while they were still children, recognized in her mistress an imperative need for things to match up and to be perfect; not only particular things, like her make-up or the combs in her hair, but forms and arrangements too, things you couldn't touch or really see, a puzzling matter for Sisipyla. She had watched, with the familiar sense of puzzlement, while Iphigeneia stationed the players in positions exactly corresponding to the angles made by the corners of the walls, forming an exact copy of the square.

The thing that gave the game its edge, however, was the opposite principle of disorder. None of the players could know whether the doll was to be thrown her way or not; it was permitted, it was even required, to make feints and pretended throws and to change direction at the last moment. The game had begun with a great deal of laughter but then deteriorated fairly quickly. Iphigeneia was getting crosser and crosser, first because the nurse dithered and fumbled, and this slowed the game down, then because Electra, in her eagerness to be tricky, would try to change direction at the very moment of throwing, and this made her aim erratic, so that the doll went flying at an impossible angle and could not be caught however quick one was.

'How could anyone be expected to catch that?' Iphigeneia demanded furiously, after the doll had come flailing towards her at knee-height. 'Why don't you learn to throw straight?'

'Well, that's that,' Electra said, she too flushed and furious. 'I won't play this game any more, not ever.'

These words brought a certain pause; even at this early age she was known for one who kept her vows. The doll lay with arms outflung at Iphigeneia's feet. She had started life as an elegant doll, a luxury product, with black silk hair

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