His old nurse, Agatha, was chattering in the background. She was a large, bear-like presence, her eyes, though weak, still sharp in her fleshy face. He looked at her wrinkles, lined with all the troubles of the House of Atreos.

She had been near middle age when Agamemnon had apparently sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to the goddess Artemis; she had seen Agamemnon slain in turn by his wife Clytemnestra after the Trojan War; and she had seen Orestes and Electra kill their mother in revenge, and all the torments that followed.

Yet she’d remained within the palace walls. She had suffered, but she had survived.

‘The Furies never rest,’ Agatha was saying. ‘They’ll keep on wanting their revenge. I don’t like that Erigone. She is the daughter of Aegisthos, after all.’

Tisamenos accepted a goblet from her.

‘Drink this, you look awful.’ She began dabbing at his face, and instead of batting her away, he let her continue. She combed his long blond hair, muttering as she did.

‘… and your poor aunt Electra, all mad, though I shouldn’t say it, and nobody ever going to visit her, though I do sometimes, if only to give the poor thing a kind word or two, and at least your aunt Iphigenia came out all right in the end, thank the Hunt Goddess.’ He’d heard all this before, many times, but rather than stopping her, he wanted her to continue. He understood how much she might know. She made a move as if to tie a bow round his hair, and he batted her away playfully.

‘Nurse,’ he said, when the heavy wooden door had closed behind the last servant, and Agatha was plumping the finely worked cushions on his bed. ‘Have you ever heard of the Last Gorgon?’

She stood up sharply and fixed him with her gaze. ‘Where did you hear about that?’

‘I heard someone on the street near the agora. I’d never heard of the Last Gorgon before. I know about Perseus and Medusa …’

‘You don’t want to go getting mixed up with anything like that,’ Agatha said, blinking furiously.

‘I don’t know what you mean. It’s just a story. Isn’t it?’

‘There are stories and then there are stories, my boy. Don’t you forget I’ve known you since you were a little puling infant crawling about on the tiles. The Last Gorgon is one of the ancient terrors of the earth. She is Medusa’s sister, who crawled back here after Medusa was slain, to hide herself. Last I heard of her was when your father Orestes was clearing out the countryside of such beasts. She was killed, like all of the others.’