Helen of Troy (61 page)

At that, Priam cried out and clasped his head between both hands. “Five hundred! Even if there are only five hundred, and in each ship there are only fifty men, still it is . . . twenty-five thousand men! And if it’s the worst it can be, a thousand ships, with a hundred men each, it’s—a hundred thousand of them!”

“Yes, sir,” the lookout said.

Priam slowly lowered his hands and held his head high. “Very well. It is what it is. What—and I ask you all—in your considered opinion, should be our first action?”

“That’s obvious!” said Antimachus. “Attack them on the beach when they are attempting to land. Catch them at their most vulnerable. How many do we have at full-trained battle strength?”

“We have near seven thousand,” said Hector. “The best in Troy.”

“Then we are outnumbered at least five to one?” cried Antenor.

“This does not count the allies, who will soon even out the numbers,” said Hector. “I’ll lead them!”

Priam nodded. “Of course. And Deiphobus and Aeneas will bring up the second rank.”

“And I?” said Paris.

“We don’t need archers on this mission,” said Deiphobus. “Stay back and guard the walls.” The flickering light hid the pleasure on his face, but I could hear it in his voice.

“And I,” Troilus cried.

“You’ll stay inside, away from the walls,” said Priam. “Along with little Polydorus and Polites.”

“And I?” Hicetaon asked. “My armor has been burnished, the leather bindings replaced, and it’s as supple as ever.”

“But you are not,” said Priam firmly.

“I can still thrust and slash with the best of them.” His eyes narrowed in his wrinkled face.

“But you can’t run. You’re as slow as a hobbled donkey.”

“That’s not true! Who told you that?”

“I’ve seen you try.” Now Priam’s voice grew gentle. “We are of an age, and our swift days are past.”
My javelin arm is still strong, and once I could have
raced any one of these lads into the ground.
The old athlete. Had he begged to join Menelaus, too? Had Menelaus shaken his head apologetically and turned him away?

Lampius looked at me and shook his head. “There she is, her beauty frighteningly like that of the immortal gods. But no matter her loveliness, it would be better for Troy had she never come!”

“It is done, Lampius, and cannot be undone,” Priam told him. “It was willed by the gods.”

How accepting they all were of this. How different from Greeks, who never embraced their fate until they had first tried unsuccessfully to trick it.

“At first light, then, to the ships!” cried Hector. “We will arm and prepare all night!”

A great roar of excitement swept the hall, filling it like smoke.

When we were alone together in our chamber, Paris stood with his back to me, staring out toward the dark sea. “We know they are there,” he said. “Just knowing makes everything different.”

I turned him around to face me. “I feared this day might come,” I said.

“You
said
you feared this day might come, but did you really?”

“No, I did not want to,” I admitted. “Do you remember the waterfall on Cythera? The long one, where we stood at the top and looked down, and could barely hear the water splashing far below? I feel as if we are holding hands, jumping off into it together, and we cannot see the bottom. Oh, Paris, I am so fearful of what harm may come to Troy, and on our account.”

“Then the prophecy would have come true, about my causing the destruction of Troy,” he said. “In which case, once they decided to let me live, harm to Troy was inevitable. Therefore we need not punish ourselves for it.”

“You hold it so lightly, then?”

“No, I do not, but neither do I bear the entire burden for it.”

“I feel suffocated in omens and prophecies. When we ran away together, we thought we were fighting our way out of that net. Now I see the net is bigger than I imagined.”

“Fighting . . . the real fighting is about to begin. I was stung tonight when I was forbidden to join my brothers on the beach attack. ‘Stay back and guard the walls’—!”

“It was not the king who spoke thus, but Deiphobus.” The sly and malicious Deiphobus.

“The king did not contradict him, nor reprimand him.”

“Perhaps—”

“I must learn to fight better in the usual way. I’ll have new armor made. They’ll not hold me back!”

“Perhaps this is the only fight there will be. Perhaps they’ll give the Greeks such a thrashing they’ll pull up their freshly dropped anchors and head home.”

“Menelaus is a stubborn man,” said Paris. “It will take more than one skirmish to send him packing.”

No one slept that night, and before the dawn was even hinted in the east, Paris was gathering up his bow, arrows, and quiver and stealing out of the room. He assumed I slept; I pretended to, so he would not feel the need to assure me all would be well. The moment he was gone, I leapt up and threw on some clothes, my heart pounding, my hands shaking so badly I had to clasp them together to stop the trembling.

Standing with all the other Trojans at the high northern wall, I watched our men streaking across the plain toward the Hellespont, the place where the ships would have landed. Paris was somewhere inside one of the guard towers and there was a part of me so thankful he was not among those rushing headlong toward the Greeks. The other part of me, the Paris part, felt his anger and shame at being ordered to stay in Troy.

Night fell and the men were not back, and we could see and hear nothing. It was not until near sunset the next day that the army returned, wearing a fine coat of dust on their armor, sweat smearing their bodies, with litters carrying the dead. They had attacked the Greeks just as they were landing, and Hector had killed the first man to step ashore—a good omen, although he disdained omens. But the rest of the Greek company put up a fierce fight, and although they were driven back almost into the sea, they managed to attack and burn many ships of the Trojan fleet anchored at the mouth of the Scamander.

No sooner had the gates closed behind our men than the Greeks followed them across the plain, as if they could not wait to behold Troy. Our high, polished walls and stout gates repelled them, and they withdrew under a hail of arrows and stones hurled from the ramparts.

Their futile march across the plain allowed us to see how large their army was. It filled the basin between the two rivers, and from our heights, it looked like a blanket, a moving blanket. There was an occasional flash of light from a shield angled to catch the sun, and the clank of their armor made a dull music as they marched.

I recognized no one amongst the leaders, but their helmets obscured their faces and the light was fading in any case. In armor all men look alike.

XLIII

W
ar. We were at war. How chilling to utter those words, to realize them. Inside our chamber it was safe, with all the pretty playthings enjoyed in peace scattered about—lyres, mirrors, gaming boards of ivory. Outside, the streets were bustling with grim evidence of war—soldiers, of course, but also boys carrying baskets brimming with arrows, men leading donkeys staggering under the weight of stones to be thrown from the parapets, taking them to be piled up at stations around the walls, women rushing toward the safe southern gate to take their washing to the troughs outside before it was too late. The horse-keepers were leading their animals to the springhouse and watering troughs before penning them up behind the first barricade in the lower town. And everywhere the traditional horsehair crests atop the war helmets were waving, as men swaggered down the streets enjoying the narrow vision from behind their eye slits.

The mood in Troy was defiant. The Trojans gloried in the strength of their walls—the strongest and highest anywhere in the world, they said—and in their brave warriors.

The prospect of many young men losing their lives filled me with dread. When I voiced my sadness, Deiphobus just laughed in that dismissive way he had. I had disliked Deiphobus from the beginning and the feeling was growing. “You think overmuch of the men and little of the needs of the army. An army needs to win. It does not care about the individual soldier.”

“But the land that gathers the army must care about its people.”

“Perhaps it should, but it does not.” He pointedly put on his helmet. Now his face was encircled with bronze; only his tight lips showed beneath it. “You choose an odd time to be tender-hearted, lady,” he said. “You are the cause of all this. You should revel in it. You cannot undo it, so you should embrace it.”

“I would have done everything I could to stop it, but some unknown enemy prevented me.”

He laughed, and the laugh echoed oddly within the bronze of the helmet. “Oh, Helen, do not seek to shift your guilt that way.” He fastened the strap under his chin. “It is only a pity that it is Paris you chose . . . but women are fickle, and nothing is forever.”

I turned away, but only because I was speechless. There could be no clever retort, no response, to such an insult.

The Plain of Troy was empty. After their first heady dash across the flats to our walls, where they spent themselves like foaming but futile waves, the Greeks withdrew.

A walled city was difficult to assault. Did not Agamemnon know this better than anyone, snug behind his walls at Mycenae? He must search his mind, think of how someone might exploit Mycenae’s weaknesses to be victorious, and then translate that into a plan for Troy.

The odd suspension of activity unnerved the Trojans, as the enemy had seemingly melted away. Our spies reported that they had beached their ships in rows upon the shore, with the last row bobbing in the water, held by stone anchors at their bows and cables at their sterns. We had succeeded in placing a number of spies in their midst already, and the wave of Gelanor-trained prostitutes were soon to follow. He thought that we should allow the lust of the men to grow outsized before we provided for their relief.

“They are milling around down by the shore,” said one of the spies. “The ships have been drawn up in a special order, with the warrior known as Achilles on one end, a huge chunk of a man called Ajax on the other, and one known as Odysseus in the middle.”

“So those are the real leaders,” said Priam. “And where, in all this, is Agamemnon? And his brother Menelaus?”

“Tucked away somewhere along the row,” said the spy. “But you are right, Achilles, Odysseus, and Ajax seem to be the tent poles. Achilles is reputed to be a warrior of supernatural prowess, Odysseus is clever and devious, and Ajax is simply huge and immovable.”

Achilles! But he had been on Scyros, disguised as a girl. How came he here to Troy? “How can Achilles be such a great warrior?” I cried. “As for the other two, Ajax is dumb as a well bucket, and Odysseus fights with his wits rather than his sword.”

“Achilles is lauded as their foremost warrior,” insisted the spy. “I do not know on what basis they have decided this.”

“Sometimes one just knows,” said Priam. He shook his head. “I have heard that Achilles has a goddess mother. We cannot match that. We in Troy are mortals. All are born of a human father and a human mother.”

“That will assure that defeating him adds even more to our glory,” said Hector, who strode into the room. He looked around at all of us. “Huddling like a group of old women at a well? That is what it looks like.” He ripped his helmet off and tossed it into a corner, where it clanged mournfully, as if protesting. “I do not give much credence to the ‘son of a goddess’ whispers. There is agreement on Olympus that the gods will not rescue their offspring, lest they challenge fate, so what difference can it make?” He laughed, a glorious ringing laugh. “I pit the sons of man against the sons of a god any day,” he said. “We have no unrealistic ideas of being rescued, and that inspires a man to fight at the top of his powers.”

Paris and I had returned to our palace when we were summoned by Antenor to meet him at his house. It was located midway down the slope of the city, a fine dwelling with latticed windows. Inside, it was spacious and airy; there were few objects to clutter the surroundings. He ushered us in and then led us to a smaller chamber, shutting the door behind us.