The Women of Troy

18

The day following that incident, Pyrrhus ordered the men to muster in the yard and spoke to them from the veranda steps. It was an ill-judged performance. After telling them that an attempt had been made to bury Priam (they knew) he went on to say that anybody who tried that again would face the death penalty. He concluded by haranguing them on the subject of loyalty, though the Myrmidons were the most fiercely loyal to their leaders of any contingent. They raised a cheer for him at the end, but it was muted, and as the crowd dispersed, I saw glances being exchanged, though nothing was said.

I kept busy; the hut had never been so clean. But as soon as I sat down and closed my eyes, my mind again filled with images, like the tide tumbling into a rock pool: Amina pinning a wreath of purple daisies in Andromache’s hair; Pyrrhus’s flushed face and braying laugh; Calchas spread-eagled in the dust. One thing I did—and this may strike some people as treacherous—I asked Alcimus to get the guards to patrol the area around the women’s hut. Whether he remembered to tell them or not, I don’t know. Later that evening, I went with Andromache to the hall where we served wine at dinner, and the atmosphere there was tense.

Somehow Pyrrhus’s speech seemed to have increased the bad feeling that had developed between the young men he’d brought with him from Skyros and the Myrmidons, a division that Pyrrhus appeared to encourage. I had no sense that these young men were his friends—I’m not sure Pyrrhus had any friends—but he seemed to feel a need to ingratiate himself with them. Towards the end of the evening, a fight broke out between one of the Skyros ringleaders and an older Myrmidon. He wasn’t generally known as a quarrelsome man; he’d simply had enough. Alcimus intervened, followed by Automedon, but Pyrrhus gave them absolutely no support. If anything, he was undermining their authority, even though his own position depended on their ability to control his men. The meal ended with the lads from Skyros jumping on the tables in what amounted to a victory dance, applauded loudly by Pyrrhus. I had to keep reminding myself he was only sixteen.

That night, I slept badly, jerking awake long before dawn and staring into the darkness, knowing that a new sound had woken me. I sifted through the various noises the wind was making: it was running through its usual repertoire of moans, groans, sobs and whistles. The cradle at the foot of my bed creaked. Nothing new in any of that, but then it came again: an urgent hiss from the other side of the wall. Somebody determined to wake me, but not wanting to attract attention by banging on the door. I put my lips to a gap between the planks and asked: “Who is it?”

“Maire.”

I was so drugged with sleep it took me a moment to bring her face to mind. She was the heavy, lumpen girl whose eyebrows met in the middle, who was always shrouded in a loose black robe—even inside the hut. Excessively modest; not even Amina went as far as that.

“What is it?”

“Amina’s gone.”

“Gone? What do you mean—gone?”

But I knew what she meant. Without waiting for an answer, I grabbed my mantle and felt my way along the passage. She was turning the corner of the hut as I opened the door, her pale moon-face looming out of the blackness. “You go back,” I said. “I’ll go and look for her.”

She nodded and was about to set off, but I caught her arm. “How long’s she been gone?”

“I don’t know—we were all asleep.”

“All right, you go back now. Tell them not to worry.”

How much did the others know? One of my fears was that Amina was capable of dragging the other girls into her crazy crusade, though I didn’t think she would. She was too proud of her isolation, her solitary, joyless rectitude. She’d be in no hurry to share the credit for the risk she was taking, though as I left the hut, part of me was still thinking: No, she won’t do it. Not now, not with guards posted near the body, and Pyrrhus hell-bent on finding the culprit. She must have heard his speech; everybody in the compound had heard it. But there was another possibility—that she’d simply run away. Perhaps I might even—inadvertently—have encouraged her. She’d seen how much food there was in the abandoned Trojan kitchen gardens. She might think she could hide there, though what future would there be in that? With marauding crows, feasting flies, burnt-out houses, ruined temples—winter just round the corner? For months, at least, she’d be facing total isolation—and, in the end, vegetables rot in the ground, fruit on the trees. The supply of food that now looked so plentiful would rapidly run out.

I imagined her running across the battlefield, not because I thought she had, but because I knew she hadn’t, and the alternative was so much worse that I couldn’t bear to contemplate it. What I actually thought was evident in the movement of my feet, which were taking me to the stable yard. My mantle was made of blue wool, a blue so dark it could easily be mistaken for black, and I’d wound it tight round my head so that everything was covered except my eyes. I crept along the side of one hut, waited until I was sure I wasn’t being observed, and then dashed across the open space into the shadow of the next. Through the wooden walls, I heard groans, murmurs, now and then a cry. Very few of the men in the camp slept well. At night, in the dark, memories of what had happened inside Troy were not so easily erased. I peered ahead. Either my eyes were becoming accustomed to the dark or it was just beginning to get light. There wasn’t much time.

Torches were burning in the stable yard, their lights wavering as they always seem to do in a high wind. I had to be careful, because I knew a boy-groom slept in the tack room at the far end, from which he sometimes emerged, slack-mouthed and vacant-eyed, with bits of straw stuck in his hair. I hesitated and the horses, sensing the presence of a stranger, began to weave from side to side. They were restless at the best of times because they hated the wind. One snorted and kicked the door; another whickered a reply. I made myself stay put, but none of them whinnied again, so I left the shadows and crept across the yard.

Soon, I was on the cinder path that led through the scrubland to the horse pastures. Here, I felt more exposed, with no walls to shield me, and somewhere in the distance I could hear men’s voices. Thick black clouds were moving across the sky, but I knew that behind them the moon was full and might emerge at any moment. I crouched down, trying to locate the guards, straining my eyes until the shapes of trees and bushes began to move about. Finally, I located them, two hundred yards further on. They’d lit a small fire and were gathered round it, their shadows flickering over the coarse grass. I counted three, but then one of them leant forward to throw a log onto the fire and I saw a fourth man behind him. Glimpses of bearded, fire-lit faces under hooded cloaks; they’d be well wrapped up because the temperature was beginning to drop. They’d positioned themselves downwind from the corpse, about as far away as they could get, while still plausibly claiming to be guarding it. I wasn’t so lucky. Already, I’d noticed a slight taint on the air.

The ground ahead of me, my own hands, suddenly became lighter. The wind had blown a hole in the cloud and the moon peered through it—an old moon, haggard, empty of everything but grief. I thought of Hecuba and shivered, but really there was no room in my mind now for anyone except Amina. Where was she? I’d heard no sound, detected no movement—I actually let myself hope the guards’ voices had frightened her away. She’d be on the beach, I thought, walking up and down as I used to do, schooling herself to accept the unacceptable. If I went back that way, I might catch up with her. I started to walk through the dunes, moving swiftly and silently, every few paces crouching down again to make myself less of a target for the wind. Above my head, the blades of marram grass shone silver in the moonlight. I told myself I might just walk quickly past the body, check she wasn’t there, and then slide down the slopes of sand onto the beach and go safely home. But, immediately, I remembered I couldn’t go back that way because the entrance to the compound was guarded and, though the guards would recognize me, it might be a little difficult to explain what I was doing wandering about in the middle of the night. Worry about that later. I dropped to my knees and crawled in the direction of the smell, trying at the same time to hold my mantle over my nose and mouth—a curious, crippled, three-legged crawl through loose sand. I kept stopping, straining to hear the guards, but either the wind was drowning out their voices, or they’d gone quiet. Asleep? Probably. I couldn’t imagine a more boring job.

But then, I did hear a noise: quick, shallow breathing. I thought of all the predatory animals that might be drawn to the body at night. I couldn’t shout to scare whatever it was away because that would attract the attention of the guards, so I had to continue on the path. It was getting lighter; the slope of sand ahead of me gleamed white. Any minute now the grooms, who were always up before dawn, would be taking the horses to pasture. One quick look, I told myself, and then I’d go back home. As I got closer, the breathing became louder, the smell indescribably vile—and then I saw her, a huddled black shape scrabbling away with both hands.

“Amina.”

She spun around, her face sharp with fear, realized it was me and hissed, “Go away.”

I crawled forward. The ground around the body was disturbed—her fingermarks everywhere like the claws of an animal. Forcing myself to look more closely, I saw the body was almost covered, but with one skeletonized arm still exposed. The hand seemed to reach out to me. I remembered that same hand with a silver coin glinting on its palm—only now there was no palm, no flesh left at all. The white bones pleaded with me to be covered up. Without ever making a conscious decision, I found myself scrabbling in the sandy soil, exactly as Amina had been doing. We didn’t look at each other—we didn’t speak—but two of us working together got the job done fast. I wiped my hands on my tunic and started to stand up. But then, to my horror, she began saying the prayers for the dead. Light perpetual, rest eternal…“Amina!” I said, struggling to keep my voice down. There seemed to be a blockage in my chest that stopped my breathing—not some irritating little impediment like you sometimes get with a sore throat or a cold—big, like a man’s clenched fist. “Look, you’ve done what you came out to do. We’ve got to go back now.”

She shook her head. “Not till I’ve finished the prayers.”

“You can do that in the hut.” I saw something on the ground on the other side of her, a hunk of bread and a jug of wine, both of them needed to complete the ritual. “You’ve done this once already.”

“No, I didn’t, somebody walked past, I had to stop. I’ve got to do it properly this time.”

“Do you think the gods care? You’ve done enough.”

But she wouldn’t listen. And I couldn’t leave her. So, we knelt there, gabbling the prayers for the dead: a safe crossing, a quiet sea, peace at the last…All the hopes we cling to, as we send those frail vessels out into the dark. I’ve never in my life heard the burial prayers rattled through as fast as we said them that night—and I’ve sat through some perfunctory funerals in my day. When we’d finished, Amina broke off a lump of bread and handed me the jug. The crust was hard, the wine sour—by the time I’d forced it down tears were streaming over my cheeks—and they weren’t tears of grief either. Amina managed to swallow her crust, though she almost choked, and then poured the last of the wine onto the sand as a libation to the gods. The ground was so parched the drops bounced, before puckering the surface and sinking in. I noticed Amina had a red stain at the corner of her mouth and, in noticing that, I became aware of how light it had become.

Abruptly, I was furious. “Now come on,” I said, seizing her thin arms and dragging her to her feet.

She was staring at me. I couldn’t understand why she didn’t move or speak, but then realized she was looking not at me but at something behind me. At the same moment, a hand grabbed the back of my neck. I felt a jolt run through my body; the baby inside me kicked. The other guards were coming up behind him. I twisted round, wanting them to see who I was, knowing the Myrmidons wouldn’t hurt me. But when I looked from face to face there were no smiles, no hint of recognition. These were the young fighters from Skyros, Pyrrhus’s men—and I knew I had no influence with them. Pulling our arms roughly behind us, they forced us ahead of them down the steep path to the camp.