The Women of Troy

9

I thought about Priam a great deal over the next few days. Seeing his ring round Andromache’s neck brought everything back. There was nothing I could do to prevent the dishonouring of his body, but at least I could visit his widow, Hecuba, and perhaps make her life more comfortable in some small way. So, one morning, I set off to see her, taking Amina with me. I could have taken one of the other girls, but I thought the walk might give me a chance to talk to her. I was still concerned about her; she seemed unable to accept the reality of her situation. In fact, she was steadily and dangerously defiant. But there was no possibility of speaking to her on our way to the arena. The wind was so strong it made speech impossible. I had to walk head down, muffled in my veil, while Amina trailed obstinately behind.

A group of men was raking the sand on the arena floor. Alcimus’s idea of holding competitive games was proving popular and many of the events were to be held there. I stopped to watch them work, noticing little piles of offerings at the feet of the gods’ statues: fruit, big bunches of purple daisies, as well as other more eccentric gifts: models of shields and spears, a pair of new sandals, a child’s toy horse. Looking around the circle, I saw that some gods—Athena, in particular—were doing better than others and I realized this was a visual guide to what ordinary Greek fighters were thinking. Why are we being kept here on this bloody awful beach? Which god have we offended? Answer—or at least best guess: Athena. And why Athena? Because it was in her temple that Cassandra had been raped, and the rapist, Ajax the Lesser—Little Ajax—had not been punished as he ought to have been, which arguably made Agamemnon and the other kings complicit in his crime. Of course, it wasn’t the rape that bothered them; it was the desecration of the temple. That was a violation Athena might well be inclined to avenge.

Amina was staring at the piles of offerings, her eyes darting from one statue to the next. I wondered what she made of them. They must have been splendid when they were first erected, but they’d fallen into a state of dilapidation over the years: rotten bases, flaking paint. Artemis, the Lady of Animals, goddess of hunting, was in a particularly bad state: her features half erased, barely a trace of paint left on her robes.

Since I was there, I thought I’d visit Hecamede, Nestor’s prize of honour and, after Ritsa, my closest friend in the camp. I found her sweeping the hall, a stack of fresh rushes by the door waiting to be laid, though, as she pointed out after we’d hugged each other, the hall scarcely needed cleaning. There’d been no celebratory feasts in Nestor’s hut; his youngest son, Antilochus, had been killed in the final assault on Troy. Antilochus: the boy who’d loved Achilles. His death had plunged the whole compound into mourning. You felt the stricken atmosphere the moment you stepped over the threshold of the hall—the loss of a young, promising life. Amina lingered by the door; I perched on a bench with my feet raised while Hecamede finished sweeping, then helped her lay the rushes.

“How’s Nestor?” I asked.

She pulled a face. “Not good.”

I couldn’t believe Nestor was really ill. He was like an ancient tree that bends in every gale—you think at any moment it’s going over, but next morning there it is, still standing, surrounded by acres of healthy saplings uprooted in the night. Though I could see why this illness, whatever it was, might be preying on Hecamede’s mind. If Nestor died, what would become of her? If she was lucky, one or other of his surviving sons might take her, though sons don’t normally inherit their father’s concubines; more likely, she’d be awarded as a prize in Nestor’s funeral games. Exactly what would have happened to me if Achilles hadn’t given me to Alcimus.

We finished laying the rushes and sat on one of the benches. There was a smell of burnt sugar and cinnamon and further along the table were two trays of small cakes, scarcely more than a mouthful each, but utterly delicious. The popular name for them was “come-again cakes,” because nobody ever managed to stop at one. “Can’t be much the matter with him if he’s eating those.”

“Oh, they’re not for him—they’re for Hecuba. I was just going to take them across if you’d like to come?”

“Yes, of course. I was on my way to see her anyway. I just couldn’t resist coming to see you first.”

“Good, we can go together. I’ll just need to check on Nestor first.”

Apparently, he’d been talking of sitting out on the veranda, but when we put our heads round the door, we found him asleep—snoring loudly, his upper lip pouting on every breath. Even at this distance, I could see his nose and lips were blue. “It’s the sharpness I don’t like,” Hecamede said, touching the tip of her own nose. “They get like that before they go.”

It was a relief to leave the room, with its smell of old, sick flesh. Outside, in the hall again, I took several deep breaths. Then, Hecamede picked up one tray, I took the other, and with Amina lagging as usual several yards behind, we set off across the arena where long shadows cast by the gods’ statues slanted over the freshly raked sand. Dazzled, we moved from light to shade to light again—a short, brisk walk in the gritty wind—and then, ducking our heads, emerged into the frowsty darkness of Hecuba’s hut. One sickroom to another, I thought. There the resemblance ended: Nestor slept in a king’s bed surrounded by all the trappings of wealth and power; Hecuba’s hut was more like a dog kennel than a human habitation. Though at least she had it to herself—a rare luxury in that overcrowded camp. Odysseus did seem to be treating her reasonably well. When the royal women were shared out among the kings, there’d been a lot of joking at Odysseus’s expense. Agamemnon and several of the other kings had got Priam’s virgin daughters, Pyrrhus a sprightly young widow—plenty of go in that one, if she’d only cheer up a bit—whereas Odysseus was left with a scraggy old woman. Odysseus just shrugged, brushing the laughter aside. He knew he’d be taking home the only woman his wife, Penelope, would have accepted—and, with any luck, he might be able to convince her that he’d slept alone for the last ten years with nothing to while away his lonely evenings beyond the occasional game of skittles with his men. He was clever enough to make it sound convincing—and, from all accounts, Penelope was quite clever enough to pretend to believe it. Everybody you spoke to praised Penelope’s wit and kindness. I could easily imagine Hecuba sitting in a warm room doing light embroidery and not, as so many older women were forced to do, scrubbing stone floors while being shouted at because they weren’t working fast enough. Oh, it might be a life of misery, ravaged by grief, but at least she’d be physically comfortable, for however many weeks or months she might have left.

All nonsense, these imaginings. Hecuba never, from the minute she saw Priam killed, intended to live.

At first sight, she was a bag of bones, huddled under a dirty blanket. The one arm lying outside the cover was so wrinkled and brown-spotted it looked more like the pelt of an animal than human skin. She stirred when she heard our voices and started trying to sit up, blinking in the sudden light. I was horrified to see how frail she’d become; even in the short time since her arrival in the camp, she seemed to have shrunk. I wondered how much she was eating. Hecamede touched her feet and offered the tray of cakes. Hecuba thanked her profusely, but immediately set it aside and peered up at me.

“This is Briseis,” Hecamede said.

I too knelt and touched Hecuba’s feet. I didn’t expect her to remember me. We’d met often enough during the two years I’d spent in Troy, but I’d been a child then. I must have changed out of all recognition since—and she did look puzzled for a moment, but then reached up and laid one thin hand on the side of my face. “I want to thank you, my dear.”

“Why? Hecamede baked the cakes.”

“You were kind to Priam when he went to see Achilles. He remembered you, he remembered Helen bringing you to the citadel. ‘Helen’s little friend.’ You must have been quite a child back then?”

“I was twelve.”

“He talked about you when he came back. He said you’d been kind.”

I couldn’t speak, I was so close to tears.

“Well, well.” Hecuba patted my arm. “Let’s have some cakes.” She was peering into the shadows where Amina stood, ostentatiously obliterating herself, as usual. I realized Hecuba couldn’t see very well.

“Amina?” I said.

She came forward then, knelt and touched Hecuba’s feet. To my surprise, Hecuba said, “Amina. My poor child. How are you?”

“All right.”

“You were given to Pyrrhus?”

“Yes—not what I’d have chosen…”

Hecuba made a curious sound midway between a snort and a laugh. “No, well, I think choice is a thing of the past.”

Hecamede handed round the cakes while I poured the wine. Hecuba was too excited to eat, though I noticed she drank rapidly. Well, let her drink. In her position, I’d have drunk the sea dry. Within minutes there were two red spots on her cheeks, contrasting garishly with the general greyness of her skin and hair. At first, she concentrated solely on the wine, but then she began to talk about Helen. Did we know Menelaus was sleeping with her again? She had a whole hut to herself—“not like this, three rooms!”—maids to wait on her, pick up after her. Oh, and a loom. Helen weaving again, like a spider waiting for the vibration that would tell her another fly had landed. Another victim sucked dry…Oh, the hatred in Hecuba’s voice as she spoke of these things. I wondered how she knew about the loom, but gossip flew round that camp—and of course Helen’s maids would be Trojans. Probably it all came from them. They’d be pressing their ears to the wall to hear Menelaus’s grunts, Helen’s ecstatic cries…And there’d be plenty of ecstatic cries; Helen was no fool. The whole camp resented his taking her back. Greek fighters and Trojan slaves united in one thing and one thing only: hatred of Helen. Menelaus had sworn so many times he was going to kill her—the minute he set eyes on her again! Then, that he was going to take her back to Argos and let the women stone her to death—and there’d have been no lack of volunteers. So many widows, so many women who’d lost sons…And yet there he was, back in bed with her. “All night,” Hecuba said. “What’s he trying to do—fuck her to death?”

I think I may have been shocked; I didn’t know Hecuba as well then as I did later.

“Oh, and the lies she comes out with! She was raped—my son raped her? She couldn’t get enough of him! Oh, and saying we kept her a prisoner in Troy. Nothing of the sort; she could’ve gone home any time she liked. Who did she think wanted her there? My idiot son—nobody else! Any one of my girls would have taken her across the battlefield if she’d been too frightened to go on her own. I’d have taken her.”

And you could see it was true: she was dauntless. All this time, her mouth had been working constantly—even after she’d finished speaking, she actually had to pinch her lips together to keep them still. She looked like a frail, gaunt old bird—a storm thrush, perhaps—feathers ruffled by the blast, but still singing, still shouting defiance from its perch. I was struggling to understand her. Every day, I saw how erased by grief Andromache was—and I suppose I’d expected Hecuba to be the same, or worse. But she was nothing like that. Hatred of Helen consumed her. Perhaps she felt the kings were too powerful, too intimidating, to hate—or perhaps she’d always blamed women and exonerated men. Some women are like that. But it was making me rebellious.

I said: “You can’t just blame Helen! It wasn’t Helen who killed Priam—it was Pyrrhus. And who threw Hector’s son off the battlements? Pyrrhus. And who sacrificed Polyxena? Not Helen—Pyrrhus.”

“And what are you going to do about it?” Hecuba asked.

Silence. I had no answer to that. I knew Pyrrhus was far beyond our reach. Instead, I looked around the walls of the hut, and I just wanted to be outside, filling my lungs with clean air—if you could call that scouring wind with its whipped-up grains of sand “clean.” I wanted to be away from the stale smell that emanated from the dirty blankets on her bed; above all, I wanted not to have to hear that incessantly ranting, exhausted voice; and yet, at the same time, I felt pity for her, and a kind of awe.

At last she was silent. She actually ate one of the cakes, dabbing her mouth daintily with the edges of her veil. “Delicious,” she said, waving away another. “Do you know”—turning to me—“I don’t think I ever tasted cakes like that in Troy—and Priam had the best cooks in the world. Though I must say I still like the ginger cake best. Such a strong taste.”

Hecamede looked concerned. “Was it too strong?”

“No, no, perfectly balanced. Not too spicy, not too sweet.” She turned to me again. “And what about you, my dear?”

I wasn’t sure what she meant. “Do I bake? Well, yes, a bit—nothing like Hecamede.”

“But I’m sure you have other talents. They tell me you know quite a lot about herbs?”

“I wouldn’t say a lot.”

“You see—” She paused, looking around the little circle. “I’ve been thinking, about what we could do.”

I felt a prickle of uneasiness as I listened. She seemed to be asking Hecamede to bake a cake for Helen. A cake? For Helen?

And then she said, looking at me: “I know where to find the plants.”

Of course she knew. Like every other great herbarium, the garden at Troy had a gated area set aside for poisonous plants, because—paradoxically—poisonous plants produce some of the most powerful medicines. Administered in minute doses, under careful supervision, these plants can actually save lives. Henbane, wolfbane, foxglove, sweet clover—it sounds so innocent, doesn’t it? Sweet clover—snakeroot, castor-oil plant, strychnine tree…

Hecuba touched my arm. “You’d know which ones to pick?”

I glanced across at Hecamede and saw her realize what we were being asked to do. She reached for Hecuba’s hand. “Why don’t you leave her to the gods?”

“Because leaving things to the gods doesn’t bloody well work! You need to grow up, my girl.”

“Only the gods can judge.”

“Huh! You think the gods care about justice? Where’s the justice in what’s happened to me?”

She turned away from us then, hunching her shoulders like a hawk in the rain. For a moment, there was silence. Then she said: “Amina understands, don’t you?”

Amina nodded. “Yes.”

“Fortunately,” I said, “Amina isn’t allowed out of the women’s hut without me.”

The atmosphere had gone sour. I flared my eyes at Hecamede, asking: How soon can we leave? But then Hecuba turned to face us again and her whole demeanour had changed, almost as if the corrosive fantasy of poisoning Helen—which, I suspected, had been her sole companion during her long, sleepless nights—had fallen away and left her suddenly lighter. “Do you know, I think I might manage another cake.”

There was only one left. When she’d finished, she moistened her finger and picked up the last crumbs from the plate. “And now, I’d like to go for a walk.”

The three of us exchanged glances. We all thought it was nonsense: the wind would blow her away. I actually had visions of her being whirled up into the sky like one of those skeletal brown leaves you see in autumn, but I nodded and helped Hecuba to her feet. She draped her thin arms across Hecamede’s shoulders and mine and then, awkwardly, like a six-legged freak calf, we shuffled towards the door.

Once outside on the veranda, Hecuba stopped dead and I felt a tremor run through her. She was blinking in the harsh light, as if daunted by her own temerity. I half expected her to change her mind, to turn back and say she’d try again another day, but no, she was determined. One or two women who were squatting on the ground grinding corn looked up as she embarked on her perilous journey down the steps. I was terrified she’d fall. In the end, we simply lifted her down—she was no weight at all.

“Where would you like to go?” I asked.

She thought for a moment. “The sea. I haven’t been to the sea for years.”

So, keeping as far as we could to the shelter of the huts, we set off. Several times, we had to stop so she could wind her veil round her mouth; the wind was snatching her breath—as it was ours, but she had less breath to spare. Though she might as well not have bothered, because as soon as we left the shelter of the huts, the veil streamed out behind her and she had to let go of me to stop it flying away. Crows circled, their ragged wings black against the white sky. “Look at the buggers!” she said. “Better fed than we are.” And she made a sound that in other circumstances might have been a laugh.

Slowly, very slowly, we got her down onto the beach. By now, we were almost carrying her, our arms crossed over her bent back as she tottered towards the sea. Once her veil came off altogether. Amina chased it across the sand and brought it back, knotting it securely round Hecuba’s neck. On the shoreline, we stopped and watched the waves in their relentless assault on the land, each one failing, falling back, dislodging pebbles that peppered down the slope after it—then, the long, grating sigh of its defeat. But already, beyond the breakers, the sea was flexing its powerful shoulders for the next attack. Hecuba stared at the black, beaked ships that were lined up on the beach like a flock of predatory birds, seeing probably for the first time the forces that had destroyed her life. I was afraid she’d look along the beach to where crows and seagulls still squabbled over Priam’s body, but instead she drew a shuddering breath and turned to face inland.

A group of women had gathered a short distance away, slaves who’d come running out of Odysseus’s huts to see their former queen, but she looked over their heads at the ruined city. I followed her gaze and saw, through her eyes, Troy’s black and broken towers, like the fingers of a half-buried hand pointing accusingly at the sky. I waited for Hecuba to speak, but she said nothing. Perhaps, confronted by this sight, words felt like such debased currency she couldn’t be bothered to use them anymore. Somewhere deep in her throat a wordless sound was forming. I didn’t hear it; I felt it—running from her neck and shoulders down into my arm. And before I realized what was happening, she’d slipped from my grasp and fallen to her knees. She crouched on the hard sand and suddenly the grief burst out of her. She raised her face to the sky and shouted for Priam, and then for Hector and for all her other dead sons. And then again for Priam. Priam. Priam. She was pulling out chunks of hair, clawing her cheeks, beating the ground, as if she could make her cries heard in the gloomy halls of Hades. As if she could wake the dead.

I knelt beside her and tried to get an arm round her shoulders, made meaningless, soothing noises, desperate to calm her—as much for my own sake, I’m afraid, as hers. I couldn’t bear it. And then she threw back her head and howled, and the howling went on and on—it seemed to have no end. The watching women moved closer, gathering round her where she knelt on the filthy sand, joining their cries with hers—until they turned from women into wolves, the same terrible howl coming from a hundred throats. And I howled with them, horrified at the sounds I was making, but unable to stop. Hecamede howled, and Amina, all of us, for the loss of our homeland—for the loss of our fathers, husbands, brothers, sons, for everybody we’d ever loved. For all the men carried away on that blood-dark tide.

Surely, if ever living voices could penetrate the world of the dead, it was then; but nobody answered us. After a while, Odysseus came out of his hall to see what the commotion was about and, a few minutes later, a couple of guards appeared and ordered the women roughly back to work.