It occurred to Tisamenos as he made his way, deflated, back to his own quarters, that he knew very little about his half-aunt Hero, or where she might be found. He remembered the swallow. Had that been real magic, or a trick of the streets? He had seen people casting voices before, in the agora. Was that what Hero had been doing? Had she simply caught a swallow and, by some clever sleight of hand, made it appear in her grasp?

But the voice had been inside his head. It couldn’t have been Hero speaking. The thought made him uneasy.

The wedding guests were now all stirring, and some were thronging the feasting hall, calling for their breakfast, shouting, eating the spitted meat of a boar recently killed in a hunt, quaffing from drinking horns. There were going to be games that day, wrestling, chariot races, foot races. Somebody threw him a challenge as he went by – a young handsome prince from Athens, a grandson of the famous Theseus – and Tisamenos batted it away without thinking.

The hall was decorated with flaking murals showing his ancestors and, by order of Orestes, they were depicted in all their crimes as a constant reminder. There was Tantalos, the bunch of grapes always out of his reach. There was the kinslayer Atreos, whose terrible acts made Tisamenos’s stomach turn, even thinking about them. He turned away from the sight.

Instead, he looked about for Hero, in case he had missed her in the throng.

Seeing the huge, crumbling stone throne that Orestes ruled from caused a pang of memory. His mother Hermione would take her place there by his father’s side, her long blonde hair piled up in some fantastic arrangement, and she would feed Tisamenos sweetmeats and honey from her golden plate as the kinghouse inhabitants laughed and drank and feasted around them. ‘My little lion cub,’ she would say. Only Hermione called him that. Her tender fingers stroking his cheek. ‘This world is full of evils. Know things, and know the names of them, and you will have them in your power.’

A shout from nearby brought him back to the present. One of the guests, calling to another about some argument they’d been having the previous day.

He turned his mind back to the swallow. It was a message. But of what kind? What could Hero want from him? And could he trust her? He chewed on a piece of crackling, and watched a tussle between two men of Mykenai, squaring up to each other over which of them might win a foot race.

Orestes entered the room as the quarrel began to get serious, and there was a ragged cheer. The two men stopped and shook hands. Orestes limped to his stone throne and took a golden goblet, finely decorated with a stag hunt. He lifted it high and said, over the cheers, ‘I drink to Hera, the Goddess of Childbirth!’