The Women of Troy

6

That night, once again, I ate alone. After dinner, instead of waiting up for Alcimus, I went straight to my own room. This was easily the smallest in the hut, just large enough to contain a bed and—recently acquired from the looting of Troy—a cradle. The cradle was so finely carved, so lavishly embellished with ivory and gold, that it could only have belonged to an aristocratic or royal family. Lying down on the bed, I stared up at the roof beams while the baby inside me—who’d been restless all day—settled slowly into its own version of sleep.

Flat on my back like that, I didn’t have to see the cradle. Alcimus had presented it to me with such pride, I knew I couldn’t get rid of it, or even suggest moving it into one of the storage huts, and yet I loathed it. I couldn’t stop thinking about Andromache’s son, the little boy whom Pyrrhus had hurled to his death from the battlements of Troy. I had no logical reason to believe this was his cradle, and yet I knew it was. I felt his small ghost in the room.

It was difficult to sleep with that thought in my head, but I did at last manage to drift off. Only a few moments later, it seemed—though it might have been hours—I was jerked awake by a banging on the door. Getting up too quickly, I felt myself go dizzy, but managed to stumble along the passage. The banging had stopped, but then it started again.

“Coming!” Peering into the darkness, I saw one of the girls standing there, though I couldn’t see which one, until she took a step closer. “Amina. What’s wrong?”

“He’s sent for Andromache.”

She didn’t need to say any more. I got my mantle and stepped across the threshold, a mizzling rain immediately dampening my skin and hair. We scaled along the wall, staggering a little in the gap between two huts where the wind blew with full force off the sea. Amina tapped on the door and one of the girls let us in. I didn’t really know any of them yet, three or four by name, the others not even that. It didn’t help that many of them were still mute. They’d got their pallet beds from beneath the hut where they were stored during the day and arranged them in rows across the room. Each girl had a small rush light by her pillow. As they turned to look at me, the pallid flames illuminated their faces from below—they looked like their own ghosts. A girl called Helle said, “You’re too late, she’s gone.” She sounded spiteful, petulant—the way a small child might sound if her mother had failed to protect her.

“It’s all right,” I said. “I know where to find her.”

I did. I must have crossed paths with half a dozen past selves in the short distance between the women’s hut and the hall.

As I approached, I heard singing, banging of fists on tables, the braying laughter of young men drinking hard to celebrate, or forget. Pyrrhus’s voice rose louder than the rest. I walked along the veranda to the side entrance that led directly into his private apartments. Not much shelter there—as I opened the door, the wind blew me into the room. I looked around. A fire was burning, though the logs were green and smoking badly; my eyes stung. Two chairs faced each other across the hearth. The one opposite me had been Patroclus’s chair. I could see him now, as always, with a couple of dogs asleep at his feet: hunting dogs, twitching and whimpering as they chased imaginary rabbits across dream fields. One of them yelped and its paws scrabbled on the floor. Patroclus laughed and the man in the other chair, whose face I couldn’t see, looked up from his lyre and laughed too. And for a moment, I forgot Andromache waiting in the small room, Pyrrhus drinking himself stupid in the hall, and simply stared at the empty chairs—which in my mind were not empty at all. How powerful the dead are.

Another shout from the hall. More singing, louder now, accompanied by stamping feet. Hold him down, you Argive warriors! Hold him down, you Argive chiefs! Chiefs! Chiefs! Chiefs! Chiefs!

Hold him down? From what I’d seen of Pyrrhus, propping him up would have been more like it.

I knew Andromache would be in the room that opened off this one—the cupboard, I used to call it. I tapped on the door. “Andromache? It’s me—Briseis.”

Pushing the door open, I saw her face, pale, disembodied, floating on the darkness like the moon’s reflection on water.

“How did you know I was here?”

“Amina told me.” I realized, even as I spoke, that I’d answered the wrong question. “Oh, don’t worry, I’m very familiar with this room.”

On my first night in the camp, Patroclus had given me a cup of wine. I couldn’t understand it—such a powerful man, Achilles’s chief aide—waiting on a slave. That simple act of kindness has haunted me ever since. Turning to the table on the left of the door, I filled two of the largest cups I could find and gave one to her.

She looked anxious. “Do you think we should?”

“I don’t see why not. It’s Priam’s wine and I don’t suppose he’d begrudge us a cup.”

Uncertainly, she raised hers to her lips.

“Have you had anything to eat?”

She shook her head, so I went back into the other room, picked up a basket of cheese and bread and set it down beside her. I didn’t expect her to eat, but at least now she could if she wanted to. I squeezed onto the bed beside her and we sat in silence for a while, listening to the singing in the hall.

“You’ll be all right.” That sounded feeble, but anything said in this situation would have sounded feeble. “It’ll soon be over and then you’ll be back in your own bed.”

“You know he killed my baby?”

Sometimes there are no words. I put my arm round her shoulders—she was so thin, birdlike, I almost expected to feel her heart fluttering against her ribs. At first, she was unresponsive, every muscle tense, but then, suddenly, she curled into my side and rested her head in the crook of my neck. I put my lips against her hair and we sat like that for a long time. My free hand rested on the coverlet. The pattern of leaves and flowers was so familiar I could trace it from memory without needing to see it. I was thinking about my friend Iphis, who’d so often waited in this room with me. After my first night in Achilles’s bed, she’d had a hot bath waiting for me when I got back to the women’s hut; she’d understood how you needed to feel clean, to immerse yourself in that all-enveloping warmth. I decided then and there that there’d be a hot bath waiting for Andromache whenever he let her go.

The shouting in the hall had died away to a low rumble with ripples of laughter running through it. Oh, they were pleased with themselves, these Greeks, celebrating the destruction of Troy. With their bellies full of looted beef, drunk on looted wine, their voices drowning out the roar of the wind, it was easy to forget they were trapped on the beach with no hope of launching their black ships. Only now the evening was drawing to a close—and the wind would whistle round their huts all night. Suddenly, they were singing the final song. I knew every word of it; I’d heard it sung so many times as I’d sat waiting in this room. It’s a song about friendship; friends parting at the end of a good evening, a celebration of warmth and life, but tinged with melancholy too. As the last notes fade into silence, they tip the dregs of their wine onto the rushes as a final libation to the gods.

I squeezed Andromache’s shoulder. “I have to go.”

She nodded, bracing herself, knowing that the next time the door opened it would be Pyrrhus. And at that moment, all the protective numbness I’d built up over the last months vanished and I was back in this room, sitting where she was sitting, waiting for Achilles—experiencing all over again the terror I’d felt when the door opened and his huge shadow blotted out the light.