The Women of Troy

34

Women don’t normally attend funerals, so I didn’t expect to go to Priam’s. From early morning, the camp was buzzing with expectation. The Myrmidons had built a huge pyre on the headland near the horse pastures. Priam’s armour had been brought out of storage and polished till it shone. For me, sitting alone in my hut, this should have been a day of real—if meagre—consolation, but instead, I felt increasingly frantic. I didn’t know where I wanted to be, and so, in the end, I decided I’d simply get out and walk along the shore. Think about Priam. And Amina too.

Normally, at that time of day, the beach would have been deserted, but today it was black with crowds of men gathering at the water’s edge to purify themselves. Most of them were rubbing oil into their bodies. Usually, after a hot bath, that’s a pleasant thing to do, but out here, the wind blowing sand everywhere, sand that stuck to the oil and had to be painfully scraped off, followed by immersion in a cold sea dotted with scuds of dirty yellow foam…Not so pleasant. Somebody started singing a hymn to Zeus, but the singer’s voice was drowned out by a cacophony of yelps as salt water slapped against abraded skin.

I sheltered near the ships and watched, but after a while my deliberate self-isolation began to seem selfish. There were others in the camp who had more reason for grief than me. Hecuba, for one. Hecuba, above all. So, turning my back on the beach, which by now was more crowded than the camp, I made my way to her hut. She was out of bed, wearing a clean tunic, two hectic spots on her wasted cheeks. Only recently, I’d sometimes thought she wouldn’t live another day, but I’d reckoned without the sheer force of will that carried her on. I knelt to touch her feet; as I stood up, she pulled me into her arms and embraced me. The top of her head scarcely reached my chin.

“I’ve sent for Odysseus,” she said, smoothing her hair to make sure it was tidy.

Sent for? She was his slave. Looking at her feverishly bright eyes, I thought her mind must have gone at last—only a mad woman talks like that. I said, as soothingly as I could, “Well, you know, he mightn’t come…”

She patted my arm, almost patronizingly. “He will.”

She was too excited to keep still; she kept making little forays up and down the hut, like a small girl who’s been given new clothes for her birthday and isn’t allowed to put them on yet. At last, I persuaded her to sit down and conserve her energy. “It’s a long way,” I said. “You don’t want to wear yourself out.” I didn’t believe she’d be going anywhere. I gave her a cup of diluted wine, but she pushed it away after only a few sips. When the doorway darkened, she looked up, obviously expecting to see Odysseus, but it was only Hecamede, bringing bread and cheese, moist, crumbly white cheese made with herbs, bread warm from the oven, but Hecuba couldn’t eat anything, and it seemed disrespectful for us to eat without her.

“Nestor’s going to the funeral,” Hecamede said. “Calchas says all the kings have to be there.”

Hecuba brightened. “Well, if that decrepit old git can get there, I’m bloody sure I can. I’ll walk if I have to. Or ask one of those young men to give me a piggyback.”

“You will not!” I said. It wasn’t often I managed to be firm with Hecuba, but really this was too much.

A few minutes later, another shape darkened the open door. Once again, Hecuba looked up. I actually heard her breathe Odysseus’s name; but it wasn’t him this time either. It was Cassandra—tall, young, strong, richly dressed, very much the future queen of Mycenae. She might only enjoy the status for a few days, or weeks at most, but evidently, she meant to make the most of it. Hecamede and I scrambled to our feet to greet her. Hecuba had gone very still.

It didn’t feel like a meeting between mother and daughter. I’d spent so much of my life missing my own mother that I expected tears, embraces, reconciliation…but there was nothing like that. Cassandra stepped forward—reluctantly, I thought—knelt and touched her mother’s feet before offering her cheek in an awkward, arm’s-length embrace. She was wearing a green robe with a yoke of fine embroidery and looked as exotic as a tropical bird in the squalid little hut. After the embrace was over, Hecuba sat back on her heels and looked at Cassandra with bright, sceptical eyes. A lot of pain there, but she was keeping it well hidden.

“Cassandra,” she said, taking in the dress, the elaborately styled hair, the necklace, the rings…“You look well.”

“I’m as well as I’m going to be.” A tense pause. “You know I’m married?”

“Yes. So, he actually did it…I must say, I never thought he would. What do you think his wife’s going to say about that, then?”

“I imagine she won’t be pleased.”

Without bothering to hide her distaste for her surroundings, Cassandra sat down, tucking her legs underneath her as neatly as a cat. Whatever attempts at a real connection these two might be inclined to make could only be hindered by the presence of other people, so I jerked my head towards the door and Hecamede and I left them alone. Out on the veranda, I was delighted to see Ritsa’s broad back and mop of straw-coloured hair. I sat beside her—we hugged and cried a bit, and then turned to watch the men repairing the statues in the arena.

“So, you’re Cassandra’s maid now?”

“Looks like it.”

“Do you ever go into the hospital?”

“Not often. There’s less work than there used to be. Few young idiots tearing chunks off each other…but that’s all.”

All the same, Ritsa was a healer. Cassandra could have had any woman in Agamemnon’s compound as her maid.

Hecamede touched my arm. “I’ll have to go. Nestor’s going to need a lot of help getting ready.”

We watched her walk away across the arena, threading her way between the fallen gods.

“How is she?” I asked, meaning Cassandra.

“Still a bit up and down. She’s like a child sometimes. But, you know…I saw her when she was at her worst, pissing herself sometimes. And she’s a proud woman. Some days, she can’t stand the sight of me.”

“She should be bloody grateful.”

“Ye-es—but we both know it doesn’t work like that.”

We watched a team of men lower the statue of Athena to the ground, two of them hauling on ropes, others reaching up to steady her in case she suffered even worse damage from a too abrupt descent.

“Anyway,” Ritsa said. “You must be pleased. Priam cremated.”

“Not yet!”

“No, but he will be. And as for that little squirt…I thought Calchas could have made a lot more of that. I’d like to see him following Priam’s body on his hands and knees. Still, at least he’ll lose the horse. Not much, though, is it—a horse, for a child’s life?”

I wondered which child she meant. Andromache’s baby? Polyxena? Amina? The girls must have seemed like children to her. I was about to make some comment, but at that moment a shadow fell across us. I looked up and there, incredibly, was Odysseus. We shuffled along the step to let him pass and, ducking his head, he went into the hut.

Ritsa looked as astonished as I felt. “Do you know she actually sent for him?” I said.

“Well, there you are. You’re taken at your own evaluation in this life. In her mind, she’s still a queen.”

A murmur of conversation from behind us. Odysseus: a low rumble; Hecuba: frail, breathless, resolute; Cassandra: a penetrating, ever so slightly nasal whine. “How much did she have to do with Calchas’s speech?”

Ritsa shrugged. “I don’t know. They thrashed it out between them, but they couldn’t have done it without you. Apparently, Alcimus and Automedon weren’t at all keen to talk—till they realized Calchas knew anyway.”

Movement inside the hut. A moment later, Odysseus came out, nodded to me, ignored Ritsa, and set off in the direction of his hall. Shortly afterwards, Cassandra also emerged. “Go to my mother,” she told Ritsa. “She’ll need help getting down the steps.”

Pointedly, I got up and followed Ritsa into the hut. Hecuba was looking even more excited than before; dangerously so, I thought.

“He’s sending a cart,” she said. “He said I could have his chariot, only then I’d have to stand, so I said, ‘No, no, a cart’s good enough for me. I’m not proud.’ ” There she stood, in her poky little dog kennel: the epitome of pride.

I found a comb and began sweeping back her long white hair, thinking it might help to soothe her, but nothing could have calmed her down that day. She was euphoric. I’d always struggled to understand her moods and this was no exception. I was too young to understand that elation is one of the many faces of grief. At the funeral, in front of the entire Greek army, she would represent Priam. More than that: she would be Priam. Because isn’t that, ultimately, the way we cope with grief? There’s nothing sophisticated or civilized about it. Like savages, we ingest our dead.

As I finished dressing her hair, I heard the cart pull up outside. Suddenly anxious, she said: “You’ll come with me, won’t you?”

I’d been intending to walk, but of course I said I would. Odysseus had sent a team of horses—rather than mules, which would have been more usual—and, to drive them, a fresh-faced young man with a scattering of ginger freckles. He clearly felt driving the cart was beneath him—I thought I recognized him as Odysseus’s charioteer—but he was all gentleness as he lifted Hecuba onto the seat. Hecuba was flustered and pleased and even a little flirtatious as he put her down. Once settled, she looked around her with great interest, at the arena, and the statues of the gods, and the crowds of men returning from the beach. We might have been setting off on a pleasure jaunt. Beside her, stony-faced, Cassandra stared straight ahead.

The journey to the cremation site was long and hard, the cart wheels jolting over ruts in the cinder path. More than once Hecuba had to brace herself against the side of the cart, but she stayed bolt upright from beginning to end. We were surrounded by men who’d only just emerged from their ritual purification in the sea. There was an overwhelming smell of wet hair, of dampness trapped in folds of skin. They looked surprised to see women—as I say, women don’t normally attend funerals—but they stepped to the side of the path to let us through. Many of them openly stared at Hecuba, as if aware that they were seeing history pass.

Cassandra asked the driver where he was taking us and, when he pointed to the place, said, “No, we need to be closer than that.” By now, Hecuba had seen the funeral pyre and was holding her lips together in the way she sometimes did when grief and anger threatened to overwhelm her. I wanted to reach out and touch her, but held back. There was an isolation about her now that no amount of love could breach.

Finally, at long last, the jolting stopped; the driver dismounted and went off to join his mates. We were on a slight incline, so we had a good view of everything. No grave, of course—that would be dug later to receive the bones. Instead, the Myrmidons had built a huge funeral pyre, towering ten or twelve feet above the crowd. The ground was filling up fast. Men were still streaming up the path, but the upper slopes of the headland were already densely packed. The cart had become an island in a sea of heads and shoulders. The kings had not yet arrived; they’d be waiting till all the men were assembled before they made their entrances.

Gradually, one by one, they began to appear: Odysseus, first; he shielded his eyes and scanned the slopes, looking for Hecuba, perhaps. At any rate, his gaze seemed to alight on us, before he turned to greet Ajax. Nestor received his usual roar of applause. I caught a glimpse of Hecamede walking beside his chariot. Agamemnon arrived last, as was his right, glancing at Menelaus and delivering a slight, dismissive bow. As he took his seat, silence fell, except for the frantic yapping of seagulls wheeling overhead.

Then, we waited.

At last, in the distance, came a sound of drums and marching feet. Nothing else, at first, just that single pounding note, and then, slowly, the funeral procession wound into view. Ritsa and I helped Hecuba climb onto the bench so that she could see, both of us holding on to her skirt, the way you do with a little girl who wants to walk along a wall. Only when I felt she was secure could I look towards the cinder path and the procession moving towards us. Priam’s body, tightly wrapped in gold-and-purple cloth, was carried on the shoulders of six Myrmidon fighters. I thought I recognized the cover I’d used to make up his bed the night he came to see Achilles. As they came closer, the fighters started to bang their swords on their shields, as they used to do every morning before setting off for the battlefield. A solemn sound, but menacing too. And then, rising high above the clash of swords on shields, the pipes began to play Achilles’s lament, the music that had haunted me—driven me to the verge of insanity, almost—in the weeks after his death.

Immediately behind Priam’s body came Ebony, led by the slow-witted boy who was so good at calming horses, though even he must have been finding this a challenge. Excited by the crowds, Ebony kept tossing his head, pirouetting, dancing about…Perhaps, to him, this looked like the start of a chariot race; he had no way of knowing that he’d been garlanded for sacrifice. Pyrrhus, in full armour, his head bowed, walked a few paces behind the horse. In fact, all the Myrmidons were wearing full armour, though I suppose that was only fitting for the funeral procession of a king. As they left the path and began moving through the crowds of men in tunics and cloaks, they formed an alien, glittering stream. Myrmidons: ant-men. I’d always thought what a stupid name that was for men who were so sturdily independent, so ready to question authority, whose respect always had to be earned; but seeing them like this, hearing—and, in the vibration of the cart, feeling—the power and precision of those marching feet, I understood—for the first time, I think—the terror they inspired on the battlefield.

At last, they came to a halt at the foot of the pyre. The pall-bearers carried Priam up the steep slope and laid him on the bier while other men went round larding the logs with beef fat and oil. All this the crowd watched in total silence, though I could hear Hecuba whimpering a little beside me. Or rather, I thought I could—but when I turned to look, I saw that it was Cassandra making the sound. Hecuba neither moved nor spoke.

A solitary voice began singing a hymn of praise to Zeus. Gradually, one by one, other voices joined in until the whole assembly was singing:

I’ve heard that hymn sung in temples all over the Greek world, but never as movingly as it was that day. Even as the singing continued, Calchas emerged from the knot of men behind Agamemnon and went to stand at the foot of the pyre. As the music faded into silence, he called to Priam. “May it go well with you in the house of Hades. These, your enemies, salute you.” Immediately, at a signal from Agamemnon, the army gave three full-throated shouts for Priam—“Priam! Priam! Priam!”—and the seagulls that had begun to settle took off again and screamed overhead.

Calchas nodded to Pyrrhus, who glanced over his shoulder at the men standing behind him, but then stepped forward. The lad who’d been stroking Ebony’s neck to steady him led him closer and, seeing Pyrrhus, the horse neighed a greeting. The crowd hushed, Pyrrhus drew his sword—and then turned to face Agamemnon and the other kings.

“Yesterday, Calchas said in front of all of you that I have to sacrifice my horse Ebony at the foot of Priam’s funeral pyre.” A pause, during which he looked round at the circle of familiar faces. “I’ve thought long and hard, and, in all honesty, I don’t believe the gods require this of me.”

A sharp intake of breath. All around us, men were turning to stare at each other—their expressions ranging from surprise to shock and even horror. Pyrrhus raised his arms and waited for silence before he spoke again.

“So, I’m going to make another more personal sacrifice.”

He raised his sword, pulled his thick plait forward and hacked it off, as close to the scalp as he could get. This might seem an inconsequential sacrifice, but to the men watching it was no trivial matter. Greek fighters were—are—immensely proud of their long, flowing hair. It’s almost as if they think their strength resides in it. A man will throw a lock of hair onto his father’s or his brother’s funeral pyre, but it’s rare to cut off the entire length. Achilles did it for Patroclus—I can’t, for the moment, think of anybody else. The hacking took no more than a few seconds, then Pyrrhus turned, threw his plait onto the logs at Priam’s feet and, before anybody had time to react, seized a torch from one of the guards and lit the pyre. Immediately, men with more torches scrambled up the heap of logs setting fire to the kindling in as many different places as possible. Sometimes, however well larded with fat, a pyre will fail to light—it happened at Patroclus’s funeral—but there was no danger of that today. Bone dry after the long drought, the logs blazed instantly. A fierce wind blowing straight off the sea fanned the flames, sending a column of black smoke and sparks whirling into the upper air. One or two of the men near the top of the pyre nearly got caught by the flames and had to leap to safety.

As soon as Hecuba saw the pyre begin to burn, she raised her voice in lamentation, a wordless ululation of grief. The vast crowd of men around us stayed silent. Pyrrhus and Calchas were still staring at each other. I was aware of Pyrrhus’s drawn sword, of the ranks of helmeted Myrmidons massing behind him, fanning out on either side, so that he stood in a semicircle bristling with spears. Calchas glanced uneasily at Agamemnon, who shook his head slightly and waved at him to step back. At that moment, two of the sea eagles who nest on the headland flew over the pyre.

Pyrrhus pointed to the sky. “Look!” he said. “Zeus has accepted the sacrifice.”

It suited the Myrmidons to believe it. I doubt if anybody else did, but seeing the Myrmidons solidly behind their leader, obviously prepared to fight—and armed—nobody felt like arguing.

The pyre would burn all night. Normally, the sons, grandsons, brothers and nephews of the dead would keep watch beside it, but there was nobody left to do that for Priam. Perhaps Helenus might creep up to the headland after dark and perform this last service for his father—or perhaps not. He might be too frightened—or ashamed.

The gathering had started to break up. One or two of the men walking past our cart were inclined to complain. “Calchas said sacrifice the horse. Nobody said anything about hair.” “If it was one of us, we’d have had to do it.” A rumble of agreement. “Yeah, well, that’s it, though, isn’t it? One rule for them—another for us. Always the bloody same.” The grumbling wasn’t loud, but it was persistent. Pyrrhus wasn’t in the clear, not yet. In the end, either the wind would change—or it would not.

I don’t think Hecuba heard a word of it. She’d gone on staring at the blazing pyre, the wind lifting her white hair until it whirled round her head like flames. I was still holding on to her tunic, but even so was taken by surprise when she fell. I staggered, but caught her easily enough—she was no weight at all—and lowered her to the bench.

“That went well,” I said, gently, when she’d revived a little. “They gave him every honour.” She nodded and seemed to take some consolation from it, but Cassandra said, sharply, “He should have sacrificed the horse. Calchas made it perfectly clear.” It wasn’t enough for her that her father’s body had been cremated with all the honour due to a great king. She’d have thrown Pyrrhus onto the fire if she could, used his body fat to feed the flames. I was reminded of Achilles, who’d sacrificed twelve Trojan youths, the pride and hope of their families, on Patroclus’s funeral pyre. They were alike in their insatiable desire for revenge. Once, only a few days after the fall of Troy, with Achilles’s lament repeating endlessly inside my head, I’d thought: We need a new song. And we did. We do. But a song isn’t new merely because a woman’s voice is singing it.

Wanting to get Hecuba back home and into bed as soon as possible, I looked around for our driver. At last I saw him, striding up the hill towards us. When he saw Hecuba, he looked concerned. “Don’t worry, love,” he said to me. “We’ll have her back home in no time. Just let this lot get clear first.” He waited for a bunch of stragglers to walk past, then we lurched forward, Hecuba all the time twisting round to look back at the fire.

A little further along, I saw Andromache walking alone. She must have got left behind when Pyrrhus and the Myrmidons marched off. When I called her name, she looked round. “Why don’t you come with us?” I said. “There’s plenty of room.” She agreed, and I helped her into the cart. Cassandra greeted her sister-in-law rather coolly, I thought; Hecuba was more welcoming and reached out to clasp Andromache’s hands. And so, jerking and swaying, we passed through the stables, where I noticed Ebony’s sacrificial garlands lying torn and trampled in the dirt.

Andromache and I got down outside the women’s hut, and together we watched the cart trundle through the gates.