This morning I was awoken by the sound of prayer.
A tune curling through my window: God is greatest, God is greatest, God is greatest.
It's Eid al-Adha. The Eid of sacrifice. Honouring when Ibrahim/Abraham was willing to kill his son, and for his devotion, his son was saved.
Of course, when Ismail (or Isaac) is replaced by a ram on the altar, I immediately start thinking of another sacrificed child. Replaced by a deer, in some versions. In others, not.
Not a test of faith who was always destined to be saved. A punishment, a dare, or a wretched bargain: lose the girl or lose the whole army.
And Artemis took pity on the girl - she had no fault in all this. She had a further life. But either way, her father did the damning deed. He was not only willing, but he went through with it.
There's no winning in war.
And the clever thing The Burnt City did was to link up all the lost children of the war: not just killed, but sacrificed. Not only Iphigenia and Polyxena, parallels already drawn in the text between these two slaughtered princesses. Also Polydorus: in this version, not only killed for man's greed, but also sacrificed at the request of a god. A dark god, outside the pantheon, worshipped in secret.
Hidden away in a labyrinth.
"Boys are harder to find," I once heard Polymestor say. All the boys had been sent away already. All the boys were already off being killed. (Sacrificed to Ares.)
All except one prince, still protected by his mother.
He, too, must feed the unquenchable thirst for blood, one way or another.
The labyrinth is the city and the city is war. It repeats over and over and over again, and were it not for the war, nobody would know its name.
And all sacrificed children are the same child. When Polydorus takes me into his refuge under the stairs, he tells me a story, but the story belongs to Mycenae. The tale of the lion cub is from Aeschylus' Agamemnon. But he is not just Polydorus, he is every child that has been lost or thrown away for what was deemed a greater cause. When Iphigenia takes me into her hut, she tells not the story from her own text, but instead a story of a world that's all merciless and fake.
Every child lost to war is a loss to the whole world. Nobody comes out victorious.
