Memoirs of a Bitch (13 page)

A calm, informal tone. I gripped the arms of the throne and the raw silk of the king's wide sleeve. Priam smiled.

“I very much doubt Princess Helen would wish to undertake another journey. I believe she finds her present arrangements agreeable.”

“No doubt.” Again that smile. “But her husband requires her to return to him.”

“Her husband is here beside me, Ulysses. And this is her home; you can see that for yourself.”

Ulysses ran his eyes around the great hall one more time. Then he nodded. “Very well. I believe we shall need something more
persuasive
to convince Queen Helen that it is now time for her to come back.”

He fixed his eyes on Priam, running them past me as though I didn't exist; his pupils narrowed in the strong light like those of a cat.

“As you wish. We shall be ready to make a suitable response.”

I could see the disastrous irresponsibility of Paris in Priam's smile. An inevitable blood inheritance from father to son. But I didn't react when Menelaus fixed his eyes on me and took two steps toward the throne, wailing in the voice of neither warrior nor king, but simply that of a lonely man, “Helen …”

Helen. Under my intricate Egyptian hairstyle, Helen. Looking at the man and his ravaged face and hearing the broken supplication in his voice, I knew I couldn't go back. I looked away, abandoning him to that cold hall of marble and gold. Menelaus looked down. Anywhere else he would have wept. Ulysses turned icy eyes on Menelaus: “Let's go.”

Abrupt and impatient, but not quite an order. A statement. As if he was not surprised. Menelaus said no more. He turned and followed the man from Ithaca across the white mirror of the floor, past the guards carved in stone, and over the black granite threshold. Hector, motionless on the steps of the throne, turned his head and looked me in the eyes. His own were clear and expressionless, like a dried-up well.

“War,” he said quietly. The courtiers turned toward him in a single movement like a school of tired fish. The Greeks sailed away before sunset.

First came maneuvers. We were wakened next morning by the sound of officers yelling commands and cavalry gathering in the courtyard. I ran barefoot to the window. Hector was riding bareback, his face hidden by a bronze helm, shouting orders with his sword unsheathed. The Trojan army was responding to his commands and falling in beyond the gate. A serpent of soldiers, their armor glittering in the light haze of dawn. Without consulting anyone else, he was starting preparations.

Paris, who had been sleeping in my bed, came up behind me and kissed my shoulder. “Only to be expected,” he murmured, smiling and hugging my waist.

“He's right.” My throat was dry, and I felt an unaccustomed heaviness in my limbs. I looked toward the horizon, at the red light on the metal sea, as if from
one moment to the next dawn might vanish, shrouded in a thousand sails.

Paris laughed. “Troy will be too strong for them. Nothing to worry about. Go back to bed.”

His fingers crept down my sides to my thighs. I looked out again at the stern unsmiling young man in the midst of his soldiers in the courtyard. The long hair escaping from under his helm was dusty against the opaque metal of his cuirass. It was like another world. But I believed in Paris and refused to see it, to understand it.

A year of respite followed. It was another year before I heard any more about Greece, about Mycenaean messengers, beaten roads, and consolidated alliances. If I close my eyes I can imagine the palace in Sparta without me, Menelaus crumpled on the throne like a dead leaf and Menippus inspecting troops in the open space beyond the Eurotas. And I can imagine, without seeing it, Agamemnon studying maps of the Aegean, checking a list of those of the kings he had summoned who had agreed to come, arming and loading ships. And I can see very clearly, because I knew her so well, the spark in Clytemnestra's eyes when the king departed, leaving her alone in Mycenae. Probably pregnant yet again, but able to expect a very long period of having what she had always wanted: to be powerful and on her own.

The shadows of the Peloponnese. My eyes remember them after many, too many years. The long march to the port at Aulis—I can see that with the eyes of the shepherds lifting their heads indifferently, only to lower them again rapidly, before the loose column slashing its way through the valleys in the heavy confines of a dark evening. All the way to that long gray beach on the Aegean coast. It was Ulysses who told me what happened next, one evening many years later when he was drunk and Troy had been reduced to ashes. With bloodshot eyes and an obscene burst of laughter, he told me about the lack of wind, the inauspicious oracles, and Agamemnon's daughter Iphigenia having her throat cut on the beach like a sacrificial goat. How her blood turned into polluted mud. How Achilles ineffectively tried to use his sword to protect the girl from the knife. Achilles. His ship with the others, the insignia of Peleus on its sail and the child Patroclus in the bows looking out to sea and dreaming of war. And Diomedes not far off with two ships under the banner of Argos. A wind in their sails that smelt of blood, their prows cutting the waves as though slicing human flesh. Heading for Troy.

Either Priam didn't realize it or he pretended not to know. He was so absentminded he would have been happy to approve anything Hector and the council
suggested to him. Antenor and the crown prince shared fierce looks on decisions already taken. Old men called on their allies. Young men prepared to fight. And one by one, Priam's sons fell under the spell of their eldest brother; we watched them give up their showy parade-ground cuirasses in favor of stronger, unornamented ones. Cebriones became Hector's charioteer, directing horsemen both in front and behind from his Hittite war chariot on the plain. Cassandra surprised me by saying nothing. But those who climbed the winding path up to the temple said they heard her weeping at the altar of Apollo.

I drowned my days at the parties which grew ever more frequent after the declaration of war. Not just in winter, but in summer too, I danced away my tiredness and anxiety, so as not to have to think. Looking back, I see that year as a whirl of bright delirium, of faster and faster dancing to blot out the imminent clash of arms.

Spring again. And once more that vague promise in the air of new days and longer sunsets, with the chill slackening its grip until it could do no more than caress my bare shoulders when I went out into the composed, elegant dawn of the palace gardens. In the little artificial lake goslings slept on the stones, while fish slid silently under the water, streaking with dark red the transparent glass of invisible currents.

I sat at the edge of the lake humming to myself; Paris had fallen asleep at first light with a satisfied smile on his face.

The water was a clear mirror above a dark muddy bottom. There were shadows, and my face was a pale ghost on the fragile surface. I reached out to touch it, shattering my image into a mosaic of fugitive fragments.
Then I heard a light laugh, and saw the morning sun resting on Cassandra's red hair. I steeled myself to face her anger, but her full lips were curved in a smile:

“They're here.” When I heard her speak, the word madness never entered my mind.

Cassandra was right: they had come. The whole horizon was black with them, and Hector, woken by his sister, was gathering his men for the first onslaught of war. That morning the court awoke to the sound of drums; and by the time Priam was demanding in a loud voice to be kept informed, Hector had already led the cavalry to the Scaean Gates, which were thrown open for the last time.

They waited for two hours, drawn up on the plain for a sun that did not want to rise, until the black line on the horizon moved forward and turned first into a formation of ants, then a sea monster with a thousand arms. Then the keels of the first ships were scratched by the sand of Troy and armed Greeks started jumping into the water from the bows. Among the first was a tall man in black armor that shone dully in the pale light. Achilles. He was leading the vanguard, heavy infantry to meet the Trojan cavalry before the chariots moved into action. Grasping the rough edge of the bastion I watched him, a black insect on the sandy plain; I was still fighting for
breath after the long run from the citadel, my ankles aching from the cobbles of the road I had run down in my over-elegant sandals. All the other women had stayed safely behind the second circle of walls to comment on the novelty of war with the sort of bored surprise that for a year and a half I had found amusing, but would quickly learn to despise.

I watched the battle accompanied, from time to time, by no one but heralds sent out from the palace to collect news. They would take the steps at a run then cling, like me, to the battlements, assessing with anxious eyes the throng of tiny creatures four stadia below us. I would tell them in neutral tones what I had seen, and they would thank me with a bow before running off again. In their eyes, though they tried to conceal it, I could detect amazement at seeing me there, my expensive veils fluttering in the cutting wind and my necklace of pearls and silver sparkling in the weak light. I wound it around my fingers, and did not move until the light itself began to fade, clouds like puffs of smoke chasing each other to meet in the middle of the sky. The gray soon turned black and the first drop of rain landed on my right shoulder. It was impossible to continue fighting on the thick, sticky mud of the plain, and Hector was forced to retire. When I saw the rearguard retreat I went down the steps, and from the top of the rise in the road watched
the last soldiers return. Pouring rain glued my clothes to my body and turned my hair to heavy rats' tails down my neck, while the water crushed the crest on Hector's helm and streamed down his cuirass, making him look like a demon from the deep. Supervising the retreat in that underwater world, panting with exhaustion and still carrying his darkly bloodstained sword unsheathed, he turned and saw me. He held my gaze for a moment, then turned back to the soldiers and drew his right hand sharply down in a gesture against which there could be no appeal. The sentries understood and closed the gates. While they were being fixed in place I watched the sea beyond them gradually fall back. No shudder ran through me; no flash of lightning, no premonition or sense of certainty to guide my steps toward home or engrave them with a new consciousness. The siege of Troy had begun, but I had no idea what that might mean. Perhaps at that point even Hector thought it might be possible to make another sortie from those gates next morning. Sheathing his sword while Aeneas gathered the men together, he came up to me, followed by Cebriones holding the reins of his horse.

“What are you doing here?”

Possibly the first words he had addressed to me for many months; I could not make out why the dark eyes under his helm were shining so clearly in that darkness.

“I've been watching the battle,” I answered, since with Hector the truth was always the only possible answer. He nodded slowly and took the reins his brother was holding out to him. He mounted his horse and reached down to me.

“Come, I'll take you back to the palace.”

I looked at his hand, dirty with dust and smeared into long streaks by the rain; I could see the long history of the maneuvers of the Trojan army written in his hard, cracked skin. I entrusted my slender fingers to his powerful palm, and his strong arm hoisted me on to the saddle. He murmured something I did not understand, perhaps in the local dialect, and the horse set off up the road to the second circle of walls.

All I remembered afterward of that race across Troy was the unreal whiteness of the houses in the rain, and the intermittent line of cobbles under the black hooves of the horse. And touching the skin of my neck the slight chill of the edge of Hector's helm.

“Priam won't let them out.”

Just back from the council, Paris was taking off his belt and offering his neck to my expert hands.

“He says we must wait for our allies. Hector's furious. Keeps saying we're in no condition to stand a siege. Nonsense, if you ask me. Yes, that's the spot, go on!”

My fingers moved gently at the edge of his hair, up into his curls and down again, searching for his shoulder blades under the hem of his tunic.

“How did the battle go?”

“We lost the beach, so Priam takes the view that Hector no longer has any right to speak. He says we can still negotiate, though I doubt it.”

We lost the beach?
“You weren't there.”

“What?” He looked at me with his head on one side. “What d'you mean by that?”

“That you weren't in the fighting today.”

“Of course I wasn't.” Paris was scornful. “Fighting? What next? This war has nothing to do with me.”

“Paris!”

“Surely you can't really believe they've come to get you?”

“Well no, but …”

“But what? Troy's invincible. Don't worry. And don't go on at me about it.”

“But it's your duty as a prince to—”

“Duty! That's rich, from you. What about
your
duty,
Queen
of Sparta?”

Paris bit his lower lip hard as he sat on the bed and looked at me. There was a cutting edge I had never seen before to his laughing eyes. I pursed my lips and answered firmly: “My duty was with you. I thought you knew that.”

He smiled, but his face was no longer beautiful, and not because of the light. “Come here then. And
do your duty
.”

“No.”

There were bound to be other occasions. Times when the features of Paris would seem superimposed on those of Menelaus, till it was difficult to distinguish between them. But now he just stayed there, waiting for me. Sitting
on the edge of the bed with the hooded eyes of a sulky adolescent. I stayed standing on the other side of the room with my shoulders against the wall.