Helen of Troy (105 page)

We pushed the doors open and went inside. Nothing was altered. I and Menelaus might have left it yesterday. Silently I passed down through the corridors. I reached the bedroom. Moonlight shone in, touching the bed.

“Tomorrow we will see it all,” said Menelaus. “We will see it, and know the worst. In daylight we can face it.”

The moonlight was slanting, withdrawing its fingers from the chamber. Soon it would be dawn. I did not know if I could confront it. Where was Hermione, a grown woman now? I wanted to see her, embrace her; yet I did not want to. I knew she would hate me. How could she not?

The unkind sun came up. He would not spare us. We must behold Sparta. Menelaus, apprehensive but less so than I, dressed himself and made ready. I did not know what awaited me. I was soon to find out.

My father tottered out to see us; his guards had informed him of our arrival. At first I did not recognize him—he was a bent, crippled old man. He could not hold his head up but had to peer at us sideways.

“Daughter?” he said. His voice was thin and quavering.

“Yes, Father,” I said, coming to him and taking his bony hands. Now that I was close, I saw that he was almost blind; a white film lay upon his eyes.

He embraced me, and it was like being embraced by an empty cocoon. “Daughter,” he kept murmuring. Then he pulled back and squinted at me. “You are old!” he said. “Your hair is gray!”

I laughed, for the first time since I had entered this place. “Yes, Father. Much time has passed. Or perhaps it is your eyesight?”

“I don’t see much these days, but I can see that silver is crowding out the gold in your hair. And—your face has lines.”

“You see altogether too well, then.” And my aging must be very visible, for him to see it. “Tell me, Father. Tell me what has passed.”

“My dear child . . .” His dull eyes filled with tears. “So many deaths. They are all gone—your mother, your brothers. And your sister Clytemnestra is a murderess. She killed Agamemnon the moment he returned.”

“What?” Menelaus cried. He swung around and grabbed Father.

“Agamemnon landed, with all his war booty and his . . . that woman he brought from Troy. Clytemnestra greeted him with all ceremony, pretending to be overjoyed at his return. The beacons had alerted her, and she knew he was coming. She ushered him inside with great fanfare. He went first to the warm bath she had prepared for him in a silver tub. Naked, un-protected, exulting in his return—she entangled him in a net and stabbed him to death!”

I felt a rush of . . . yes, pride. After all Agamemnon had done to her. It was justice for Iphigenia! Was this what I had passingly glimpsed in my vision?

“Now, Odysseus, he was just the opposite,” said Father. “When he returned to Ithaca—”

Must we hear about Odysseus? Would that he had been stabbed as well!

“—he went in disguise, to see what had happened in the palace in his long absence. Wily man! For the palace was beset with enemies, although his wife had remained faithful. He had to kill them all before he could resume his rightful place. Agamemnon was not so foresighted. And so he lies in a tomb, whereas Odysseus reigns again in Ithaca.”

“What of . . . the Trojan woman?” Menelaus asked.

“She was killed as well,” said Father. “Before she even entered the palace.”

Cassandra. Cassandra, another Trojan casualty.

“But who reigns in Mycenae, then?” Menelaus sounded desperate.

“My daughter Clytemnestra,” he said. “My shame! And her lover, her cousin Aegisthus. Oh, the curse on my house has been fulfilled!”

“And the rest?” I asked him, not wanting to hear any more about the curse. “There were others, returning home. And Hermione?” I remembered the dreadful taunt of Neoptolemus, that he would have her.

“Oh, they came. That son of Achilles stormed in here and took Hermione against her will, forced her to marry him. But it was short-lived. The violent man attempted to steal treasure from Apollo’s temple in Delphi, and was killed. Now people speak of ‘the debt of Neoptolemus’—meaning that as you kill, so shall you be killed.” Just as he had cruelly killed Priam at an altar, he himself had been struck down beside one.

“Hermione? Where is she?” I asked.

“Here. Here in the palace. She is a childless widow, with no hope of another marriage: her mother’s notoriety and her husband’s violence have stained her.”

Hermione—in her thirties now, alone.

“I must warn you, she is not pleasant,” said Father. “I hesitate to say this about my own grandchild, but much has befallen her.” He took my arm. “Do not attempt to see her, not right away.”

She was here, nearby. Only a few steps away. Yet I must wait. “Neoptolemus—did he not have another woman from Troy with him?” He had taken Andromache. What had become of her?

“Oh, yes, that tall woman. She escaped from him when he married Hermione, and ran off with someone—they went north.”

Andromache. Safe. I had not been able to vouchsafe it myself, but now Hector could rest.

“My dear brothers?” I had to ask, had to hear it all.

“They fell together. They were preparing to join the Trojan folly. But the arrows of Apollo felled them first.”

So Agamemnon had been right, with his cruel words. They were gone; we would not hunt or ride together, ever again. But I had not killed them. Almost alone of the men I knew, they had not perished in Troy. Persephone had been gracious, and did not call them because of me.

Suddenly I was so tired I could barely stand. The bright daylight swirled around me. I was back in the palace, but all was changed, and everyone was dead.

Menelaus collapsed on the bed with me. “I shall never clasp his arm again. And we quarreled when we parted.”

It took me a moment to understand that he meant Agamemnon. “We are always tortured by our memory of the last time we were with anyone, what we said, what we did not say. With Mother—oh, Menelaus, how can any of us bear what the years have put upon us?” I thought longingly of the elixir and its mercy, but no, I needed to feel this.

“We cannot,” he said. “That is why the aged are so stooped.”

I needed to see it all. The palace, with all its rooms that called out to me, each with a memory. The megaron, where Clytemnestra and I had selected our husbands. The gates, the back one where Paris and I had run away, the other where Clytemnestra and I had stolen away that day, to the city. The great meadow, where Menelaus and I had first strolled as husband and wife, and where we had seen Gelanor. Gelanor . . . gone now, too. The woods where I had hunted with my brothers, and the riverbank where I had raced, and oh! they were all still here, but the moments when they changed my life were gone, as vanished as Troy.

The Hermione tree had grown huge in the years since it was planted. Its leafy crown rustled quietly in the benevolent midsummer breeze. The horse mound, yes, that was where the evil had all begun. I must go to it, confront it, must stamp on its earth and curse it.

The mound lay a fair distance outside Sparta. I remembered how long it had taken us to reach it, my heart hammering and my whole being gripped by confusion and embarrassment. Now I retraced those steps, walking calmly, aware of everything I had missed before: the quiet valleys on either side, the dark woods, the heat of midday stilling the land.

Raise a mound to it, so that it remains a memorial to this day and this oath,
Father had said. His voice had been loud and strong that day, not the cricket’s song it was now reduced to.

I saw it up ahead. It was lumpy and uneven, but it was unmistakable.

Mounds—the tumulus of Achilles, the memorial of the horse. One led directly to the other. Hideous things, ugly on the landscape.

Closer to it, the earth was higher than I had thought. I climbed up one side, aslant, grabbing tufts of grass to pull myself up. Under here, under here the bones lay—oh, the men had kept their promise! I sat down on the top of it, remembering the men who had sworn. Father had thought to avert blood-shed, and instead he had induced it.

Omens. If I were beginning again, starting out in life, I would ignore all omens, neither heeding them nor trying to disable them. If we chose to pass them by, then perhaps they would lose their power, as old gods and goddesses, no longer worshiped, fade away and lose their grip on us.

How sweetly the wind blew over these grasses, caressing them. Like the grass at Troy, that the horses fed upon. Horses. Troy. Live ones and wooden ones. Troilus and his horses, Paris riding wild horses. Hector, breaker of horses. Dead ones littering the Plain of Troy. The mysterious little horses on the island of Scyros. The slaughtered horse, sleeping here.

I sank my head down on my knees, closed my eyes. I did not know what I had expected to find here, but it had not been this slumbering, drowsy mound. I must have dozed, for when I opened my eyes the tall, swaying grasses swam in my vision and a woman stood before me.

It was no one I knew. She was looking at me with narrowed eyes, bending down to see my face.

“Not so beautiful,” she said.

Who was she? “Good,” I said. “For that old song has grown wearisome, past its time.”

“But I suppose there are some who would insist on pretending that it is still there.” Her voice was hostile, and she kept staring at me.

I did not rise, and she sat down beside me, shading her eyes.

“I heard—we all did, here in Sparta—that Helen had returned.”

So she was a woman from the town. “Yes, after many a journey.”

“Twenty-four years it has been, to be exact.” Her words were clipped, but there was something in them, something in the tilt of her head . . . I looked into her eyes. Brown eyes, staring back at me.

“Time has not passed in a normal fashion for me—the gods confused the years for all of us at Troy—but I trust your reckoning.”

“Twenty-four years means your daughter is now thirty-three. Hermione, whom you left. Did you ever think of her?”

This townswoman was bold, to question me so. I was still, and again, queen of Sparta. “Every day,” I said. “She was with me in Troy. She walked the streets with me, she warmed herself before Priam’s fire, she trudged with me to Mount Ida.”

“No, I did not.” The words were bitten off, flung out.

Hermione? I could not think. “But—you are—?”

“Your abandoned daughter!” Now she leapt up, the better to look down upon me. “The one you ran away from! Left me here like a toy that is tossed aside! Yes, I am Hermione!”

I pulled myself up, not as quickly as she. “My dearest daughter, I—”

“Daughter? I am ashamed to be your daughter. The daughter of Helen of Troy! A byword for shame!”

I looked at her. There was nothing there I could recognize from the child I had left. This woman had brown hair, brown eyes, a face that was pretty but unremarkable, and wide feet, clad in sturdy shoes, peeking out beneath her gown.

“My shame is not your shame,” I said.

“I come here often, to try to understand what began here.”

“But you cannot,” I said. “It is but an empty mound, its grasses sighing as the wind passes over it. You would have to hear your grandfather speak, see the men gathered.” I reached out; I needed to touch her. She stepped away.

“How could you have left me?” she asked. “How could a mother have left her child? And to run away with that boy, he was only a few years older than I—”

“I did not leave you. I tried to take you with me. You did not want to come. You wanted to stay with your tortoises and your friends.”

“I was nine years old! How could I comprehend what you were asking?”

“You could not.” I took another step toward her, but again she drew back. “Paris knew that.”

“Paris! Do not say that name! The name that robbed me of a mother, and drove my grandmother to end her life.”

Once she had liked him. But now he was just a symbol of her loss. “Paris—”

“I said do not say that name!” Now she turned to go.

“Wait—” I reached out for her. “Please, do not leave!”

She whirled back, drew herself up, gathered her mantle around herself. “How many times have I wished to say that to you, to beg you? But you were out of earshot.” She paused. “
Long
out of earshot.”

“My mother . . .” I held out my hands. “Please, tell me.”

“It was I who found her. Yes!”

As if I had been struck, I shrank back. This horror I had never imagined. I had thought it was one of her attendants, one of the guards. Not Father, not Hermione. “No—”

“Who did you think it was, then? Or did you not think of it? I came into her chamber early—she always liked to share a breakfast with me, and after you were gone, I had nowhere else to go. I went in there, even before the sun was up—and found her. She had been dead since night, so they told me, because she was so blue—and I took those cursed swan feathers and burned them up in the brazier, and if I could, I would have burned
you
!”

Now . . . now I must hold her. In spite of her pushing me away, I enveloped her in my arms, and I was sobbing. “That would have been justified,” I said. “The swan—let him be gone from our lives.” Oh, the glory of the gods and their brief visitations—not worth the sorrows that trail thereafter.

Hermione did not pull away, but let me embrace her. “Take me to her tomb,” I said. “Let me leave an offering there.”

The tombs lay in a partially natural cave, not far from the palace. A small grotto in the hillside had been enlarged to allow their carving. There were four of them: Mother’s, Castor’s, Polydeuces’s, and an empty, waiting one for Father.

“I come here every day,” said Hermione. “As my cousin Elektra comes to her father’s grave, and vows to avenge him.”

Little Elektra. But, of course, she would be a grown woman now. How could anyone mourn Agamemnon, least of all the sibling of the sister he had so mercilessly slain? “I am not sure what needs avenging,” I said, hesitantly, not wanting to alienate Hermione.

“That mother who took a lover!” she said fiercely. “It seems to run in the family.”

Now I could not help but smile. “It was a curse, a powerful one, visited on us. I see it has come true.” But I did not want to talk about it. All I cared about, now, was my daughter. And the tombs of my dear mother and brothers.