The Women of Troy

29

Pyrrhus gave a great feast to celebrate his victory. Goats and sheep roasted on spits, wine flowing like water…Menelaus was guest of honour, though the other kings took their cue from Agamemnon and stayed away. Pyrrhus made a speech praising Menelaus to the skies: his courage, his wisdom, his horsemanship—and apologized, or very nearly apologized, for attempting to drive him off the track. When Menelaus stood up to reply, he was cheered to the rafters—everybody likes a good loser—and though he couldn’t resist one or two barbed remarks about hot-headed young men getting away with murder, it was on the whole a gracious speech. He concluded by saying that he hoped in future the two kingdoms would be even more closely allied since Pyrrhus had accepted Menelaus’s offer of his daughter’s hand in marriage.

Well, the hall erupted. You’d have thought they were all getting married too. I stood at the back and watched, thinking how secure Pyrrhus was, how lauded, how glorified—and a little blind worm of anger deep inside my brain reared its head and swayed from side to side.

Once the speeches were over, the serious drinking began. Everybody sang, everybody clapped, everybody danced—and somewhere in the middle of all this Automedon indicated to Andromache and me that we should withdraw. I walked Andromache back to the women’s hut; rather to my surprise she stopped at the foot of the steps and hugged me. She wasn’t sent for that evening and neither was Helle—though I suspect the women round the campfires had a rough night. I just hope they got a share of the wine.

When I woke next morning, the compound looked abandoned. Gradually, over the next few hours, first one man and then another surfaced, gathering round the fires, shouting for breakfast, though few of them managed to eat very much. Some just groaned at the sight of food and went straight back to bed.

Hour by hour, the sky darkened until, by noon, it was almost black. Everything looked jaundiced, including people’s skin—as if the only colours in the world were yellow and black. Warning colours they are, in nature—and indeed there was an increasingly threatening feel to the day. Several men pointed to the anvil-shaped cloud that hung over the bay, but others said that was a good thing. A storm was just what they needed. Thunder—a good heavy downpour—and then, at last, the wind would change.

Dinner that night was a subdued affair. Nobody felt like eating much and, although some of the younger men were going for the hair of the dog, the majority drank very little. The wind keened round the hall; the absence of the usual shouting and singing made it sound louder than before. Everybody felt like an early night. Some of the men were already on their feet, getting ready to depart, when there was a noise at the door. We all turned to look, as Agamemnon’s heralds entered and processed down the central aisle. Pyrrhus seemed surprised, but immediately stood up to greet them. They bowed low, then indicated they had something to say to him in private. Summoning Alcimus and Automedon to follow him, he left the hall, and although people lingered for a while, curious to know what was going on, he didn’t return.

I left Andromache at the door of the women’s hut. The air was oppressively humid, and yet to me it didn’t feel like thunder. Normally, before a storm breaks there’s a period of threatening stillness, but there was no stillness that night: just the same constant moaning of a wind that couldn’t rest, and wouldn’t let anybody else rest either. I was glad to go inside and shut the door.

Alcimus came in an hour later. “Agamemnon’s called an assembly,” he said. “Tomorrow, at noon.” He sat down on the bed and began unbuckling his sandals. “I suppose it’s surprising he hasn’t done it before.”

Remembering Agamemnon’s ravaged face, I wondered if he’d been in any state to take decisions. “Isn’t that a good thing?”

“If it brings people together, yes. But the risk is, it’ll just make the divisions public.”

“Aren’t they public already? I mean, Agamemnon didn’t come to the feast.”

“Well, he couldn’t really, could he, with Menelaus there? Can you imagine him sitting there, with Menelaus announcing the marriage? She was supposed to marry his son.”

“Poor girl,” I said.

He looked blank. He’d thrown his tunic off now. As I bent to pick it up, he caught my arm. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine.”

He let go of me, but perhaps reluctantly. For a moment it had seemed briefly, infinitesimally, possible that we might spend the night together. I felt suddenly that I had to speak, say something, anything…“Do you regret marrying me?”

“Why would I regret it?”

“It wasn’t your choice.”

“But I’m married to the second-most-beautiful woman in the world—how could I possibly regret that?”

What sort of man gazes deep into his wife’s eyes and tells her she’s the second-most-beautiful woman in the world? Well, Alcimus, of course. You mightn’t always like what he said, but you could be fairly certain it was the truth as he saw it. I don’t think I’ve ever known a more honest man. And, of course, that’s why Achilles chose him. I remember Achilles saying he hated the man who thought one thing and said another “as he hated the gates of death.” Well, nobody could ever have accused Alcimus of that.

He was still sitting on the edge of the bed, apparently trying to think of something else to say. “I was pleased you came to see the race.”

“I enjoyed it.”

And that was that. I turned at the door and looked back, but he was already pulling up the sheets, so I picked up a candle and took my second-best beauty off to bed.

A narrow bed, and hard. Alcimus’s bed was bigger, but no bed could ever be wide enough, as long as Achilles lay between us.

Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles…

We lived our lives in that vast shadow. That’s what was wrong with my marriage—and I saw no way of putting it right. Perhaps after the baby was born Alcimus might see me simply as a woman? Or acquire some faith in himself; faith that he was not always and irredeemably second best? Perhaps.

The crux was that Alcimus believed—or rather assumed—that I’d loved Achilles, and still loved him. He certainly wasn’t alone in that belief. Then—and now—people seem to take it for granted that I loved Achilles. Why wouldn’t I? I had the fastest, strongest, bravest, most beautiful man of his generation in my bed—how could I not love him?

He killed my brothers.

We women are peculiar creatures. We tend not to love those who murder our families.

But there’s another dimension to this and from my point of view a much less comfortable one. The night Priam came to the Greek camp, to ask Achilles to give him Hector’s body, I hid in his cart as it trundled to the gate, aware all the time of Achilles walking beside it. I could have stayed in the cart, I could have gone all the way to Troy, but then I’d have been facing the sack of another city, a second enslavement. There were good reasons to abandon my attempt to escape, but when Achilles asked why I’d come back I said, simply: I don’t know. And he just nodded. Because the extraordinary thing is that he’d known all along what I was doing—and he’d done nothing to stop me. I came back. He’d been prepared to let me go. So, when we met again, it was no longer, in any simple sense, a relationship between owner and slave. Some of the ties that bind people together are deeper than love. Though if you wanted to be cynical you could say that right from the start I’d been determined to survive and that I knew my chances were better in the Greek camp, under Achilles’s protection, than they would ever have been in Troy.

Where did all this thinking get me? Nowhere. Still lying in a narrow bed listening to the wind, aware of the cradle that was just beginning to rock. In my early days in the camp I’d sometimes prayed for things to change. I didn’t pray for that now. There was no need; the growing baby would bring change enough and, good or bad, there’d be no hope of stopping it. You might as well have tried to hold back the tide.