Helen of Troy (83 page)

“Achilles has slain him,” Priam told her. “My son, your husband, has fallen.”

She gasped and clutched at her cheeks, then fainted and tumbled down, her headdress and veil becoming dislodged and rolling on the ground beneath her. Just so her life with Hector, as he had so grimly foreseen, had been tumbled into the dust. Laodice and others crowded around her. But now I knew I must speak. “Let me attend her,” I insisted. My promise to Hector had come to claim me.

I oversaw her conveyance back into her rooms—already glaringly empty because Hector would never stride into them again, singing and calling and embracing her. Astyanax wailed from his crib, piercing cries.

But we could not be concerned with him now. He would not remember this day, and there was mercy in that. Already Andromache had fallen into a fever, or a wildness of mind. “Hector! Hector!” she called. “Hector, come to me!”

“Calm yourself.” I attempted to comfort her. “Hector has fallen defending you. He gave you his love up until the last instant. He thinks of you now.”

“I must see him!” she cried. “I must prepare him—oh, I cannot—no, I cannot live without him. I will see to his funeral, then I shall join him.”

“Yes. The funeral. It may take time. Arrangements—”

“I shall—I shall—” she struggled to get up.

Now the dreadful news. “Achilles has taken his body. We cannot have a funeral until we retrieve it.”

She gave a cry of anguish and fell, weeping, upon her couch.

“But we will retrieve it. We
will
.”

Night fell, and the plain before Troy remained empty. Priam sent men out under cover of darkness to try to retrieve the bodies of the fallen, repeating his orders not to weep. But the men disobeyed, their tears shielded by the veil of night. So many bodies could not be found; the vanquished at the Scamander had washed out to sea, others were lying forlorn in marsh grass. One body that was found was that of the twelve-year-old Polydorus, Priam’s adored last son. I was told that when he beheld it, he stared long and hard at it, finally saying, “He is hand in hand with Hector now.” He kept his own orders not to show tears in public.

But Polydorus was not hand in hand with Hector, for Hector could not pass over into Hades until he had had proper funeral rites, and his naked corpse was lying untended before Achilles’s tent.

Gelanor was the man of the hour; only his spies could know what was happening within the Greek camp, and they had to keep hidden lest they betray themselves. They could not run messengers to us, and so we waited to hear, waited in agony. At last, one man dared to come to us and reported that the night before, Achilles had held a funeral feast for Patroclus. “Patroclus ordered it,” the man whispered. “His ghost came to Achilles and demanded burial. He begged Achilles to set him free to pass over. He had lain unburied for three days, while Achilles dragged the body of Hector around him. As if that would please Patroclus! But nothing appeases the dead except being allowed to pass unhindered into the realm of the underworld.” So this very morning Achilles had constructed the funeral pyre and, along with it, reflecting his own cruelty, he had killed twelve young Trojan captives as well as hunting dogs and horses, and carefully arranged their limp bodies around the pyre as offerings. For what? His own guilt at his friend’s death? It could be none other than that. The smoke had ascended to heaven, and then funeral games were announced.

“Funeral games?” said Priam wearily. “He is having funeral games?” The very words bespoke superficiality. That was what Achilles was made of—outward show.

“Yes, the usual chariot racing, running, boxing, wrestling, javelin throwing.”

Priam gave a howl of pain. “Games! While my Hector lies dishonored, naked and desecrated!”

Then someone dared to ask—who were participating in these games? The answer: Diomedes, Antilochus the son of Nestor, Idomeneus of Crete, the two Ajaxes, Odysseus, Teucer the archer, Agamemnon, and—oh, the shame of it—Menelaus!, and most of the other commanders. Menelaus, Odysseus, and Agamemnon had healed speedily, then. But better if their wounds had kept them from this dishonor.

“But now it is over,” said Priam. “Patroclus is sent on his way, and Hector can be returned to us.”

Paris leaned forward, his face blank, trying to mask his pain. “Remember he rejected Hector’s plea for honorable rites. He said that . . .” He shook his head. No need to repeat his threat about the birds of prey and the scavenger dogs. We all knew it.

Priam leapt up, his stoop gone, surging with his old vigor. “I will go myself, retrieve him!” He bolted from the room like a madman. He succeeded in rushing through the gates—on his own word, they had to be opened—but once out on the plain, Paris caught up with him and restrained him, laying strong hands on his father’s person. Right behind him was Deiphobus, determined not to be outdone. Already the jockeying had begun for position among the king’s remaining sons. And beside him, Helenus of the red hair and the flat eyes contended for notice. Paris shook them all off and brought his father back within the gates.

Now the third night fell since Hector’s death, and the weeping and lamentation within Troy could be heard even within our chambers high above the city. I turned to my weaving. It would calm me, steady me. Hands shaking, standing before my loom, I tried to draw the wool through my tapestry, but it stuck and I turned away in tears.

Paris stood beside me. “I swear here and before you that I will avenge Hector,” he said. “I will kill Achilles.”

Hector had said so, with his dying breath. Paris had heard it, and taken it as his sworn task. But how could this be?

“I do not care what means I must use to kill him, I don’t care about honor and custom, I only care that he dies. If it is to be by a contaminated robe, or by an arrow dipped in poison, what matter? The noble Hector faced him in fairness and he died. I
will
kill Achilles. He shall fall by my hand.” He took my hands, kissed them. “Do you understand what I say? I will kill him. If I die, and if anyone calls me dishonorable for the way in which I did it, do I have your promise that you will never be ashamed of me?”

I stared at him. “It is impossible that I should ever be ashamed of you.”

“It seems that you and I brought death with us to Troy,” he said. “Do we face it with strength or do we cower and hide?” He clasped me to him. “Helen, I want to live with you until old age snatches us, drags us from one another. But this war—”

The war that we brought, I thought. We cannot leave Priam and Andromache and Troilus to pay our price.

“Our war,” I said. “It is only fitting that we fall in it.”

“Then you truly understand.”

“I understand that we have brought this upon our heads and the heads of others. Oh, Paris, we should have sailed far from Troy, as we spoke of . . .” If only we had turned the sail of that ship.

“We did not. We are here. Here we must take our stand.”

The night passed slowly. In the morning, I arose and saw a long red stain marking the stones beneath one of my jewel cases. I knew what it was before I examined it: the weeping brooch of Menelaus was crying its blood-tears for the dead. It would be in vain to call for a cloth to scrub it, for the stain would never fade until this war ended, as Menelaus had intended.

The next few days seemed not to be days at all but perpetual night. When I remember them all I see is torches and shadows and night guards, bats and murk and dark corners. It seemed the sun would never shine again. Hector was dead, and Troy plunged into eternal night.

It had been eight nights since the funeral fires had blazed for Patroclus. The games had been played, and the bones of Patroclus had been gathered and placed in a golden urn. Yet the hatred of Achilles fed on itself and grew, rather than extinguishing itself like the pyre. Priam had collapsed in his palace, sleepless and half mad. He knew that Achilles was dishonoring the body of Hector by keeping him lashed to his chariot and driving around the funeral mound with glee. Eight days! The state of the noble form would have fallen into corruption, out in the open where all men could see it.

Priam’s messengers were turned away and his offer of ransom for the body were laughed at. “I told Hector himself that I wouldn’t ransom his body even for his weight in gold, no bronze, only pure gold. Even twenty times his weight! The birds will have at it, and what’s left over is for the dogs.” A wild screaming laugh had resounded off the messenger’s helmet, and Achilles had rushed over to his chariot and driven it off, with Hector trailing behind. “Look your fill!” he had screamed, lashing his horses.

Paris and Deiphobus had tried to go to bargain with Achilles, but Priam forbade them. “And do not disobey, like your two dead brothers!” he said. “No one but I shall go.”

The pleas of Hecuba, the begging of Andromache, the warnings of Helenus, did nothing to dissuade him. Priam would divest himself of all his kingly trappings and go in supplication to Achilles. “If he kills me, so be it. I am dead already, since I must do what no one else has ever had to endure—kiss the hand of the man who has killed my sons. So let me die hereafter.”

On the ninth night, he set forth by himself, driving a large mule wagon. The gates were pulled open for him and the wagon descended down onto the plain, making its way along the path through the fields and across the ford of the Scamander. He had two torches mounted on each side of the wagon, and we saw their blazing tips grow fainter and fainter and then vanish in the night. He had driven himself straight into the heart of the foe.

LIX

W
ill he return?” Paris fretted as we sat, paced, sat again. “He should have let me go, as I asked. I would have gotten close enough to Achilles to kill him. That was my plan. Now . . .” he spread his hands in despair.

“It would have been dishonorable to go on a peaceful embassy and then kill him,” I said. “That is something the Assyrians would do, not a Trojan.”

Paris gave a snort. “Dishonorable? Is there any revenge that could sink to the dishonor he has done to Hector?”

Hector, the most noble of Trojans, did not deserve such a death or its aftermath. “Hector was betrayed,” I said. “He thought Deiphobus was beside him. He turned to him. But it was some god in human costume, and that god deserted him. What perfidy.” My heart was heavy in thinking of it. “I hate them all!” I cried. “All the gods. Can they not behave as decent human beings do? Is that asking too much?”

Standing behind me, Paris put his arms around my shoulders. “They say—wiser men than I—that the gods do nothing but what would happen naturally. They may prod us, they may resort to dreams or visions, but in the end we could ignore them and nothing would change. Hector was doomed to die by the hand of Achilles, as Achilles was a stronger fighter.” Gently he turned me to face him. “And I was doomed—or privileged—to love you. The promise of Aphrodite had nothing to do with it.”

I remembered the warm rose-scented bower of Aphrodite. Could I honestly say she did not change my eyes so that I saw Paris differently when I first beheld him than I would have done without her? Looking at him now, I could not believe I would not always have loved him, no matter when or how I had first seen him. If I had seen him in a meadow taming horses . . . if I had seen him standing at the prow of his ship sailing for Sparta . . . if I had seen him tending his cattle . . . At this last thought I smiled. “In my heart I know you are right.”

“But my father—I cannot bear to think of him in the presence of that man!” He let me go and bolted to the edge of the rooftop, where he could look over the plain to the Greek camp. There was nothing there. No movement, no flares. Priam had been swallowed up in the night.

* * *

Early in the morning a small dust cloud marked the progress of a wheeled vehicle. We could not see what it was, but Cassandra shouted from the walls that her father returned, and before long Priam’s wagon came into view, with the old king driving.

He was safe! He was safe! But then, behind him, came another, fast-moving dust cloud, and yet another one behind that. Achilles had followed in his chariot. He outpaced Priam and pulled up before our walls, wheeling his mount around.