The Women of Troy: A Novel Read online

  “I’m sorry to get you up.”

  “You didn’t. I was working.”

  I noticed there was a loom in the far corner, with lamps lit all around it. Helen and her weaving. I remembered a cruel story I’d heard when I was a girl. People believed—or at least affected to believe—that whenever she cut a thread in her wool, a man died on the battlefield. I wondered, now, if she’d known that’s what people were saying—and, if so, whether it had frightened her as much as it ought to have done. Every death in the war laid at Helen’s door.

  She was staring at me, not stepping aside to allow me into the room. I realized she didn’t recognize me, so I pushed my veil away from my face. “Briseis.”

  Instant delight. “Well, look at you!” She caught my hands. “You’re as tall as I am.” She sketched the air between our heads. “And so beautiful. I knew you would be.”

  “Then you were the only one. Everybody keeps telling me what an ugly duckling I was.”

  She shook her head. “Eyes, cheekbones—you don’t need anything else.”

  Said the woman who had everything else. She pulled me towards a chair and sat opposite me. There were two pink spots on her cheeks; she was warm, friendly, excited. There was no doubting the sincerity of her welcome.

  “You haven’t changed.”

  I meant it as a compliment, I suppose, or a simple observation. Nobody ever really complimented Helen on her looks—what would have been the point? But the words lingered on the air, sounding slightly accusatory. And yes, I did feel that some sign of grief or regret, some external mark, would have been welcome—a few faint lines around the eyes and mouth, perhaps? Would that have been too much to ask? But no, there was nothing.

  If there was an edge to my voice, Helen didn’t appear to notice. She was busy mixing wine and pouring it into cups. As she handed one to me, she said, “Pregnancy suits you. Achilles’s child?”

  I nodded.

  “A great, great man. Menelaus always speaks well of him.”

  I didn’t know how to answer that. Obviously, the past had been wiped clean. Helen was Greek again, no longer Helen of Troy—that was over, finished. She’d gone back to being Helen of Argos. Queen of Argos. So many thousands…

  I cut the thought off. “I was wondering whether you know what happened to my sister?”

  Immediately, Helen’s expression changed. “I saw her that day—she came to the house, we had a cup of wine sitting out in the courtyard, in the shade. She was happy, I think—or as happy as she ever was. And then there was this great outcry, shouting in the streets, I couldn’t think what was going on—the slaves were all running around gabbling something about a horse, so we went outside to see. I knew it was a trap. I know it’s easy to be wise after the event, but I really did know. I felt there was something living inside it, and that could only be men. And Cassandra was there, of course, screaming her head off: Don’t let them in! Until Priam told her to shut up and go home. After it was dark, I went back. I walked all the way round it, singing Greek songs.”

  Love songs. I’d been told about this, though there was something strange about the story. Some of the men hadn’t heard her singing at all—Automedon hadn’t; Pyrrhus hadn’t—and even those who did remember her singing could never agree on the song. It was as if every man had heard the song that meant most to him.

  “Why?”

  “Why did I sing? Oh, I don’t know, I suppose it was a way of…reaching out?”

  “You weren’t trying to get them to reveal themselves?”

  “No.” She was shaking her head so vigorously she might have been trying to dislodge a wasp that had got caught in her hair. “I wanted to go home.” Her voice broke on the word. Raising her hand, she dabbed the corner of one perfect eye.

  “Helen—you could have left at any time.”

  “Could I? You’ve no idea how difficult it was.”

  Somehow my sister had disappeared from the conversation, but that was Helen all over. I saw something at that moment that I’d never been aware of before. You couldn’t imagine a more feminine woman than Helen nor a more virile man than Achilles, and yet in every way that mattered, they were alike. It was always about them.

  “Ianthe,” I said, firmly.

  “Oh, yes. I was told—I don’t know if it’s true—she threw herself down a well. Apparently, a lot of women did. There was a whole group of them who used to meet in the temple of Artemis—widows, you know…She did become very religious after her husband was killed. No children, I suppose, nothing to hang on to…A bit of a temple mouse, I’m afraid…” Helen looked at me. “As I say, I don’t know for sure.”

  “Well. Better than the slave market, I suppose.”

  Because that was the only other possibility. My sister was much older than me, and women nearing the end of their child-bearing years are routinely sent to the slave market—and in many ways it’s a worse fate. Older women can be picked up cheap and worked to death. Why not? You can always buy another. I made my mind up at that moment to believe that Ianthe was dead.

  The business of my visit was over, and yet I lingered. We stayed silent for a while, though not awkwardly. Rather to my surprise, something of the old intimacy had returned.

  “You were such an odd little thing,” she said.

  “I wasn’t very happy.”

  “No, I could see that.”

  There had been genuine affection between us. Poor woman, she’d had to find her friendships where she could. Her real friends were Priam and Hector, who’d always treated her kindly, but in the nature of things she’d seen very little of them. Like all women, she lived her life largely separate from men—and every woman in Troy (except my sister) hated her. And she them. Oh, in public she was always respectful, but in private it was a different story. Andromache was “the child bride,” Cassandra “the mad woman,” and Hecuba…What had she said about Hecuba? I couldn’t remember. Perhaps Hecuba had been spared. I could imagine that inside the walls of the women’s quarters Hecuba would be a formidable opponent, too intimidating even for Helen to take on. We lapsed into silence again and let the tides of memory wash over us.

  At last, hearing voices outside the hut—the compound was starting to come to life—I stirred. “May I see your weaving?”

  She brightened. “Yes, of course.”

  Jumping to her feet, she caught my arm and almost dragged me across the room. Helen’s weaving was unlike anybody else’s. Most women use motifs that are common in the culture—often stylized flowers and leaves, or incidents in the lives of the gods—but Helen’s designs were nothing if not original. She was weaving a history of the war, telling the story in wool and silk just as the bards sing it in words and music. I assumed she’d still be doing that and, sure enough, taking shape on her loom was a gigantic wooden horse. Inside its belly were two long rows of curled-up foetuses; man-babies lying in a womb.

  I stood there taking it in, my silence probably a better compliment than any words would have been.

  “This is for Menelaus’s palace, I suppose?”

  “Who knows?”

  Something in her voice made me turn to look at her. The light from the lamps she’d been working by fell full onto her face, but it wasn’t that familiar perfection which caught my eye; it was the necklace of circular bruises round her throat. Many different shades, I noticed—being, I’m afraid, something of a connoisseur in such matters—from angry red fingermarks all the way through blue and black to the mottled yellow and purple of old injuries. All of them on her neck and throat—he hadn’t touched her face. He’d throttled her as he was fucking her. As you would.

  Instinctively, she started to wrap the blue shawl more tightly round her neck, but then let her hand fall, meeting my gaze with that too steady, skinned look I’d seen so many times before—and since. She was ashamed, while knowing she had no reason to be ashamed.
She wanted to hide the bruises—and yet, at the same time, she wanted me to see.

  “Oh, Helen.”

  “Well, you know, he gets drunk and…It’s just one long list of names.”

  “Names?”

  “People who’ve died. Patroclus, Achilles, Ajax—”

  “But that was suicide.”

  “Doesn’t matter, he still blames me. Nestor’s son—what’s his name? Antilochus. Agamemnon—”

  “Agamemnon? Last time I looked he was very much alive.”

  “Yes, but it’s got very bad between them. He says he’s lost his brother—and what did they fall out over? Me.”

  Poor Helen. All that beauty, all that grace—and she was really just a mouldy old bone for feral dogs to fight over.

  “Oh, I know, it’s just grief and it’s natural, but it’s all the time—relentless. And, of course, it’s all my fault. All of it, every single death—my fault. When I was first returned to him after Troy fell he said he was going to kill me. Sometimes I wish he had.” She choked on a laugh. “Except I don’t, of course.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I need to get my hands on some plants.”

  “Not poison?”

  “No—I’d never get away with it. But there are drugs that make people forget—even if somebody they love dies, they don’t feel it, they don’t cry, they don’t mourn…They don’t get angry. It’s all just—” She swept her hand from side to side. “Smoothed away.”

  “I don’t know where you’d get your hands on something like that.”

  “Machaon?”

  “Well, you could always ask. He’d certainly give you a sleeping draught.”

  “No, that’s no good, he’d see through that straightaway. I need him awake—but calm.” She hesitated. “There’s masses of stuff in Troy. In the herb garden there.”

  I knew what she was asking. “That’s a long way away. I think Machaon’s your best bet.”

  I didn’t blame Helen for wanting to drug Menelaus. When I looked at her, I didn’t see the destructive harpy of the stories and the gossip; I saw a woman fighting for her life.

  “He will kill me,” she said.

  I shook my head. “If he was going to do that, he’d have done it by now.”

  “So, you won’t help me?”

  “Ask Machaon.”

  That was that. In the end, everything done, everything said, we simply stared at each other. Then she touched me lightly on the arm and led me to the door. As she opened it, the light revealed the full extent of the bruising, which went right down to her breasts. I sensed she wanted to leave me with that sight and I felt myself recoil from her.

  “You can’t blame me for trying to survive,” she said, closing the door till it was open no more than a crack. “From what I hear, you’re pretty good at that yourself.”

  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 s
et 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.