Helen of Troy (78 page)

“Tyndareus has sent her to Clytemnestra.”

“Also as Agamemnon said.” Oh, why could not these have been lies? He lied so much. “Why has he done this?”

“Perhaps he did not feel he could provide for her, there being no woman in the Spartan palace for her. So he sent her to her aunt’s in Mycenae.”

“Where she will learn of adultery and treachery!” Oh, my dear daughter!

Gelanor gave one of his strategic coughs. “Adultery and treachery . . . if I may say so, my dearest Helen, lessons begin at home.”

“I never committed treason!”

He laughed, and I joined him. There was no other response possible.

“But enough of Greece,” he said. “My spies here have been busy lads and girls inside that palisade protecting the enemy camp, and you will be most interested in what they report.”

“Should you not tell Priam?” I felt I owed him this respect.

“I tried,” he said. “He waved me away. It seems I am too closely allied with you and Paris, and some of his advisors wish to bar me from the king’s presence.”

“Should you not tell Hector, then?”

“Hector, in his nobility, also wants no information that might deflect him from his chosen course.”

“But only a fool refuses to take new knowledge!”

“Sometimes nobility transforms a man into a fool.” He said this with sadness. “Down in the Greek camp, dissension has broken out. It seems that Agamemnon insulted Achilles by taking away a woman he won in one of his nasty raids. The woman Agamemnon had taken for himself was the daughter of a priest of Apollo, and you know what havoc Apollo can cause when he is angered—yes, plague has broken out among the Greeks. So the woman must be returned, and Agamemnon must have another, else his loins will ache. So he grabbed Achilles’s prize as a substitute.”

Who cared what these squabbling men did? They were loathsome.

“I can see by your face that you do not understand our great good fortune in this,” he said.

“I hear you say
our
fortune. Have you become so entirely Trojan, then?”

“No. I still long for home, but my home and my people have nothing to do with the likes of Agamemnon and Achilles. If they perish, all the better for common Greeks. Our good fortune is that Achilles now refuses to fight under Agamemnon. He first threatened to sail away, but now is content to sulk in his tent. ‘Someday you’ll want me!’ he says. ‘And in that day . . .’ ”

“It shows how entirely selfish he is. For if the day comes when they are desperate, it means many of his countrymen have been killed.”

“Surely you are not surprised that he is besotted with his own importance,” said Gelanor.

“No, he has been since childhood,” I said. “He allowed that his cousin Patroclus existed, but no one else. One could hope he would have grown out of it, but I see he has not.”

“He has forbidden Patroclus to fight as well. And my best spy, who has ingratiated himself with Patroclus, told me that Achilles stormed and yelled and called upon his goddess mother to make sure that the Greeks were soundly thrashed, to punish Agamemnon for insulting the pride of the great Achilles.”

“I wonder if she will obey her darling son,” I said.

“Perhaps she has already. For Hector and the company are arming for an assault on the Greek camp. Something put it into their heads, after all these months of sticking close to the walls of Troy. Who can say it was not the goddess?”

Eager to breathe some fresh air, I walked with Gelanor out into the courtyard as he left. My palace rooms, shut up in winter, seemed suddenly stale and sealed; the herbs we burned to perfume the air only made it worse. But as I stepped outside, my mantle was almost ripped from me. Suddenly it was very cold, and a fierce wind was howling, its fingers tearing at my hair and clothes. Tiny pinpricks of chill landed on my nose, my cheeks, my brow. It was something I had not felt in a long time.

“Snow!” I cried, looking up at the sky, where swirls of white were covering the stars.

Gelanor grunted. “Chariot wheels will clog and there’ll be no fighting for a while.”

“Hecuba told me it snowed in Troy, but I didn’t believe her.”

“You should always believe Hecuba!” He laughed. “This is going to bury us!” Bundling himself up, he hurried away, down toward his house. “I hope I have enough wood at hand,” he muttered.

I stayed out in the courtyard for a few moments, relishing the sting of the cold and the roar of the wind. We had seen storms like this attacking the Taygetus Mountains back in Sparta, when they disappeared behind a mist of cloud and the next day sparkled an intense white from the new snow. And Mycenae turned into a palace of ice, so Clytemnestra had told me. Clytemnestra . . . the next time it happened, would she fold herself up into the arms of her lover and delight in thinking of Agamemnon shivering in his tent?

Now the Plain of Troy would turn white, the top of our walls would turn white, and all the streets of Troy would be muffled beneath a thick white blanket.

Paris came stamping in later, dusting snow off his mantle. I kissed the flakes from his nose and chin, lifting them delicately away with my tongue. They were an icy treat.

“Everything is closing down,” he said. “The gates are shut tight and you can be sure no one will be going in or out of the city for a while. No more battles.”

“If only that were final, not just a respite,” I said.

“Someday it will be,” he said. “There will come a day when the battles will cease and the plain will be empty . . . empty except for our fine Trojan horses—who can graze there once again—and for the trade fair, which will be bigger than ever.”

He sank down on a stool and reached across a table for a dried date, which he popped into his mouth. “I should not be profligate with these, I know our stores are running low . . .” He sighed. “All the way from Egypt you came,” he addressed a second fig waiting its turn in his hand. “From that placid place where the Nile runs through a flat desert and the only mountains are manmade ones, pointed things built of stone.” He ate it. “A strange place. A very strange place, so I am told.” Suddenly his eyes changed, and he got a faraway look. “Helen . . .” He took my hands, grasped them tightly. “When this war is over, when it’s all done, let’s leave Troy. Let’s go to Egypt. I could set up a trading center there for Troy, act as Father’s agent. If Troy could have some of the profits from a direct trade with Egypt, and we managed it ourselves instead of using Egyptian middlemen—”

“But . . . you are a prince of Troy! Does a prince become a merchant?”

“True, I am a prince, but I shall never reign here. Hector will inherit, and after him there’s Deiphobus.”

“That lecherous ape!”

Paris laughed. “Father seems to think highly of him. As concerns fighting, that is, and with Father that is all that counts.”

Then Priam is a fool,
I wanted to snap, but I knew that Paris was touchy on this subject. “When the war is over, he may value other traits,” was all I said.

“I cannot wait for that day. Oh, Helen, let us go make our lives elsewhere. I was wrong to bring us back to Troy. I know it now. We can never be anything here but curiosities . . . curiosities rejected by our families. And every Trojan death will be laid at our feet—rightly, I fear. Oh, I never should have come back!” His eyes pled with mine. “Listen to me. Let us just go and be free people in another land.”

It was a mad dream, I knew that. But a tempting one for us, locked in tonight by the falling snow and the cessation of everyday life. Let us play our little game, for just a little while. “Very well, then. Where shall we go?”

His face had a dreamy look. “We’ll sail from here, along the coast by Rhodes and Cyprus, but we won’t stop there. Oh, unless you want to?”

“No, let us make our way quickly to our final destination.”

“Egypt,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to go there. There are so many places I want to see, and so far I’ve seen nothing but Troy and Mount Ida and a bit of Greece. My life of exploration was interrupted when I found you—but now we can do all the things I would have done alone. We will sail up the Nile—it has seven mouths, I’m told. We’ll choose one and follow it as it goes deep into Egypt. It will get hotter and hotter . . . there will be no winter . . . and we’ll visit their huge stone mountains.”

“But wouldn’t you want your trading colony to be nearer the sea?”

“Oh, yes, of course, but I want to explore Egypt first. And I want to do it secretly. We already have other names—Alexandros and Cycna, remember? So we’ll call ourselves that. No one will know.”

I laughed at the happy realization that to him, now, I was just Helen, and my face was just the face he saw every day. But the world might recognize Helen, unless I went back to the hateful veiling. But perhaps not. Perhaps my face had changed in the years since I left Sparta. I hoped so.

“Their king has an odd name, or title.”

“Yes, pharaoh,” Paris said. “And they marry their sisters. And worship gods with animal heads. But”—he bent forward and whispered—“they do unspeakable things to dead bodies. They gut them and salt them and wrap them up in linen. They think they will come back to life someday.”

“I shall take care not to die there,” I said. “Where do they put these bodies?” I imagined they must keep them in their homes, to have them always at hand.

“They construct elaborate tombs,” said Paris. “But we can’t get inside them. They are all sealed up.” He poured himself some wine and tilted it thoughtfully in his cup. “Farther up the Nile there is a vast city where the priests have a temple that is bigger than Troy. It has statues five times the size of a man. We must go there. As soon as this war is over.”

Outside, the snow fell, smothering Troy, holding the war at bay, but not ending it.

As I moved through the room in the hush, Paris whispered, “I know as well as you it cannot be.”

LV

T
he snow must have been under the command of Ares, for it did not stay long, and soon the streets of Troy resounded with the thump of warriors’ feet as they marched out toward the Scaean Gate to attack the Greeks. Reinforcements were on their way to Troy—the Paphlagonians and Thracians and the Lycians, under the command of the renowned Sarpedon, as well as the Amazons. Paris was welcomed at Hector’s side, and together the brothers swept down the main street and mounted their chariots. Other brothers—Deiphobus, Aesacus, and Helenus—were right behind them. I saw Antimachus striding quickly, leaping into his chariot just beyond the gate.

I dreaded to see Paris go. His hasty and guilt-ridden training with the sword and shield—were they adequate? I had urged him to take his bow, the weapon he excelled at, but he scoffed at me. He was determined to prove himself in the arena that other Trojans honored. But he was many years behind them in practice. On the slopes of Mount Ida where he grew up, herdsmen did not fight with spears and swords against wild beasts—only a fool would, and that fool would soon perish.

On across the plain. The Greeks were advancing to meet them. So orderly and measured. Then they all vanished into a dark mass as they clashed. We could see nothing.

Night. Darkness fell and only stragglers had staggered in, beating on the gates for admittance. They told of a melee, of Aeneas being wounded, but no other warrior of note.

Oh, thank all the gods! Paris was safe.

Later they all came back, wearily carrying their injured. More men to lie on blankets in the lower city, to be tended as best we could. Aeneas was hobbling, leaning on two men, his shoulder a red stain. Diomedes had done it.

Paris stumbled in, beside Deiphobus. He was panting and mud-covered, but Deiphobus was laughing, fresh as a newly unfurled flower. “Here’s your husband, lady,” he said, pushing him toward me. “Restore him, as you know best.” He gave a smirk, then peeled off to continue trooping up to Priam’s palace, where they would all be welcomed with wine and food and, better than that, would be honored.

“What happened?” I clutched Paris, feeling the sweat-soaked corselet under my hand.

“They were waiting for us,” he said. But his voice rang with pride. “We gave them a good thrashing.”

“Did you drive them back to the ships?”