by Pat Barker
Calchas nodded to Pyrrhus, who glanced over his shoulder at the men standing behind him, but then stepped forward. The lad who’d been stroking Ebony’s neck to steady him led him closer and, seeing Pyrrhus, the horse neighed a greeting. The crowd hushed, Pyrrhus drew his sword—and then turned to face Agamemnon and the other kings.
“Yesterday, Calchas said in front of all of you that I have to sacrifice my horse Ebony at the foot of Priam’s funeral pyre.” A pause, during which he looked round at the circle of familiar faces. “I’ve thought long and hard, and, in all honesty, I don’t believe the gods require this of me.”
A sharp intake of breath. All around us, men were turning to stare at each other—their expressions ranging from surprise to shock and even horror. Pyrrhus raised his arms and waited for silence before he spoke again.
“So, I’m going to make another more personal sacrifice.”
He raised his sword, pulled his thick plait forward and hacked it off, as close to the scalp as he could get. This might seem an inconsequential sacrifice, but to the men watching it was no trivial matter. Greek fighters were—are—immensely proud of their long, flowing hair. It’s almost as if they think their strength resides in it. A man will throw a lock of hair onto his father’s or his brother’s funeral pyre, but it’s rare to cut off the entire length. Achilles did it for Patroclus—I can’t, for the moment, think of anybody else. The hacking took no more than a few seconds, then Pyrrhus turned, threw his plait onto the logs at Priam’s feet and, before anybody had time to react, seized a torch from one of the guards and lit the pyre. Immediately, men with more torches scrambled up the heap of logs setting fire to the kindling in as many different places as possible. Sometimes, however well larded with fat, a pyre will fail to light—it happened at Patroclus’s funeral—but there was no danger of that today. Bone dry after the long drought, the logs blazed instantly. A fierce wind blowing straight off the sea fanned the flames, sending a column of black smoke and sparks whirling into the upper air. One or two of the men near the top of the pyre nearly got caught by the flames and had to leap to safety.
As soon as Hecuba saw the pyre begin to burn, she raised her voice in lamentation, a wordless ululation of grief. The vast crowd of men around us stayed silent. Pyrrhus and Calchas were still staring at each other. I was aware of Pyrrhus’s drawn sword, of the ranks of helmeted Myrmidons massing behind him, fanning out on either side, so that he stood in a semicircle bristling with spears. Calchas glanced uneasily at Agamemnon, who shook his head slightly and waved at him to step back. At that moment, two of the sea eagles who nest on the headland flew over the pyre.
Pyrrhus pointed to the sky. “Look!” he said. “Zeus has accepted the sacrifice.”
It suited the Myrmidons to believe it. I doubt if anybody else did, but seeing the Myrmidons solidly behind their leader, obviously prepared to fight—and armed—nobody felt like arguing.
The pyre would burn all night. Normally, the sons, grandsons, brothers and nephews of the dead would keep watch beside it, but there was nobody left to do that for Priam. Perhaps Helenus might creep up to the headland after dark and perform this last service for his father—or perhaps not. He might be too frightened—or ashamed.
The gathering had started to break up. One or two of the men walking past our cart were inclined to complain. “Calchas said sacrifice the horse. Nobody said anything about hair.” “If it was one of us, we’d have had to do it.” A rumble of agreement. “Yeah, well, that’s it, though, isn’t it? One rule for them—another for us. Always the bloody same.” The grumbling wasn’t loud, but it was persistent. Pyrrhus wasn’t in the clear, not yet. In the end, either the wind would change—or it would not.
I don’t think Hecuba heard a word of it. She’d gone on staring at the blazing pyre, the wind lifting her white hair until it whirled round her head like flames. I was still holding on to her tunic, but even so was taken by surprise when she fell. I staggered, but caught her easily enough—she was no weight at all—and lowered her to the bench.
“That went well,” I said, gently, when she’d revived a little. “They gave him every honour.” She nodded and seemed to take some consolation from it, but Cassandra said, sharply, “He should have sacrificed the horse. Calchas made it perfectly clear.” It wasn’t enough for her that her father’s body had been cremated with all the honour due to a great king. She’d have thrown Pyrrhus onto the fire if she could, used his body fat to feed the flames. I was reminded of Achilles, who’d sacrificed twelve Trojan youths, the pride and hope of their families, on Patroclus’s funeral pyre. They were alike in their insatiable desire for revenge. Once, only a few days after the fall of Troy, with Achilles’s lament repeating endlessly inside my head, I’d thought: We need a new song. And we did. We do. But a song isn’t new merely because a woman’s voice is singing it.
Wanting to get Hecuba back home and into bed as soon as possible, I looked around for our driver. At last I saw him, striding up the hill towards us. When he saw Hecuba, he looked concerned. “Don’t worry, love,” he said to me. “We’ll have her back home in no time. Just let this lot get clear first.” He waited for a bunch of stragglers to walk past, then we lurched forward, Hecuba all the time twisting round to look back at the fire.
A little further along, I saw Andromache walking alone. She must have got left behind when Pyrrhus and the Myrmidons marched off. When I called her name, she looked round. “Why don’t you come with us?” I said. “There’s plenty of room.” She agreed, and I helped her into the cart. Cassandra greeted her sister-in-law rather coolly, I thought; Hecuba was more welcoming and reached out to clasp Andromache’s hands. And so, jerking and swaying, we passed through the stables, where I noticed Ebony’s sacrificial garlands lying torn and trampled in the dirt.
Andromache and I got down outside the women’s hut, and together we watched the cart trundle through the gates.
35
Later that afternoon, it began to rain. That’s an understatement. The ground was too parched to absorb the sudden deluge: puddles grew out of nowhere; every hill became a river. Huge grey columns of rain swept across the camp, driven by a wind that blew with undiminished ferocity straight off the sea. I wondered if Calchas was beginning to feel nervous, but then I thought: No, he doesn’t need to be. He could always blame Pyrrhus for not having obeyed the will of the gods. Despite the downpour, I still went for a walk, though before I’d gone a few yards, my hair was plastered flat against my skull. Blinking water from my eyes, I almost bumped into Machaon, who waved cheerily as he splodged past. “What did I tell you?” he shouted over his shoulder, pointing both hands at the sky. “WEATHER!”
A deep uneasiness spread through the camp that evening as men grappled with the fact that the gale was still blowing, and that their situation had been made worse by the added misery of lashing rain. Alcimus came home briefly, but then left again immediately. He had to take a work party up to the headland, where they were struggling to keep the pyre alight. Holding my mantle over my head, I splashed across to the hall because food and wine would need to be sent up to them, and I didn’t trust anybody else to organize it. On the way back, I called in on the girls and found them listless, bored and fractious. I decided that wasn’t my problem, and went for another walk instead.
Everywhere you went you were greeted by smells of wet hair and wet wool. Men with their cloaks pulled over their heads huddled round the fires—fires that smoked and spat and threatened to go out altogether. The meat was half cooked, at best; wine was the only reliable comfort, and they were certainly downing plenty of that. No singing, no laughter, no conversation—and the little there was, mainly grumbling. Oh, they’d still have fought for Pyrrhus, even now, if they’d had to—but his claim to know the will of the gods better than Calchas, who was, after all, the army’s chief seer, didn’t sit well with them. Most of them would rather Ebony had been sacrificed.
Th
e rain fell persistently all night. The groups round the fires broke up early, the men staggering off to find whatever comfort they could inside the huts. But in the past few weeks, a considerable amount of storm damage had been done and very little of it repaired. Consequently, leaking roofs added to the general discomfort. When I got back from my walk, I discovered three leaks had started in my own hut, so I fetched buckets from the yard and found a bowl big enough to catch the drips that were falling onto the sideboard. In the midst of all this chaos, I actually sat down and tried to spin, but the wool felt damp and it was full of those annoying little bobbles that are so difficult to get out. From where I sat, I could hear water plopping into the buckets and the bowl, but the plops came at unpredictable intervals, and each made a slightly different noise. That must sound like a very minor irritation but, believe me, after an hour of it I thought I was going mad, so I put the wool to one side and went to bed. The cradle creaked; the baby kicked. I thought I’d never get to sleep, and then, somehow, still listening to the rain, I drifted off.
Just before dawn, I jolted awake and lay, dry-mouthed and panicky, staring into the darkness. For a moment, I couldn’t even remember where I was. I listened, straining to identify whatever it was that had woken me. Alcimus coming in? One of the girls knocking on the door? Then, very slowly, I began to realize that what I was hearing was silence. Of course, it was only the pre-dawn lull that for weeks now had tormented us with a daily renewal of hope—invariably dashed. With any luck, I might manage another hour of sleep before I needed to get up, so I turned onto my side and pulled the covers up to my chin, but I couldn’t settle. The silence went on. And on. There was no sound at all except for the tick-tick of drops falling into the buckets. Even the cradle had stopped creaking.
In the end, I got up, reached for my mantle and went out. All over the compound, doors were opening, dazed-looking men staggering out, blinking at the light. Their movements seemed jerky, stiff, as if they were suits of armour learning to walk. I glanced to my right and saw the girls had tumbled out of the hut and were standing on the steps, looking around them as if they were seeing the place for the first time. The strange thing was, nobody spoke—as if we were all frightened of breaking this infinitely fragile silence.
Then, ripping the soft silk of the air, a man shouted—and instantly others joined in; they danced, they sang, they splashed in puddles until mud caked them to the thigh—and then they ran. Ran headlong to the ships, a stampede there was no stopping, though I heard Automedon yelling at them to stop, to go back. The ships weren’t loaded, two of them needed repairing, they couldn’t just leap on board and start rowing for home. After a while they started to show sense, if dancing and turning cartwheels on the sand is sense. Pyrrhus appeared, looking, with his short, jagged hair, rather like a half-fledged chick. Behind him stood Helenus, both of them red-eyed from the smoke. They must have done the night watch together. They might even have raked through the ashes to collect Priam’s bones.
After talking to Automedon, Pyrrhus went inside to get dressed. Within minutes, all the action had shifted to the beach. The women were left alone in the compound, as we used to be every morning when the men set off for war. It was a strange experience, listening to those shouts of jubilation, trying to imagine what this meant for us. It was obvious what it meant for the Greeks: they were going home. Where were we going? I looked at Andromache. There was nothing for her here now, everybody she’d ever loved was dead, and yet I knew she wouldn’t want to leave. She’d given birth here; her dead lay buried in this ground. That’s home.
All the girls seemed subdued, facing up to the desolation of exile. I kept telling myself nothing was certain yet. And a part of me still expected the wind to start up again at any moment, though I didn’t say that to the others.
In the end, we simply huddled together, listening to the men shouting on the beach. Watching the rain fall.
36
Odysseus was the first to leave. He’d always been the one chafing at the bit; the one most desperate to get home.
I watched Hecuba being led away. The women had all gathered on the beach to bid her farewell, though she scarcely looked up from the gangplank beneath her feet—and, even when safely on board, she stood in the stern gazing out over our heads towards the blackened towers of Troy. We shouted: “Goodbye, good luck!”—waving her into the distance until that pinpoint of white hair was wholly swallowed up in mist.
As the women dispersed, I saw an immensely tall man stalking elegantly through the crowd, like a grey heron in a puddle of ducks. Calchas—it couldn’t be anybody else—but Calchas as I’d never seen him before: no face paint, no scarlet bands, no staff of office. I was about to walk past when he called out a greeting. As I turned to him, I realized I was seeing his face for the first time, meeting him for the first time—that’s how it felt. It was possible to see that he must once have been extremely beautiful, but what really struck me was how shy he was. I’d never noticed that in him before.
After the conventional enquiries had been stumbled through, he said, “I’m going to miss her.”
“Yes, me too.”
We walked on together. Glancing down, I saw he was wearing the same short tunic the Greek fighters wore—which meant that I was also meeting his legs for the first time. They were spindly and pallid from their long confinement underneath ankle-length skirts—altogether, a disgrace to Trojan manhood. Helle’s were better.
“Are you about ready to leave?” I asked.
“I’m not going.”
“Not going?”
“No.”
I looked around at Odysseus’s deserted compound. “But there’ll be nothing here.”
“There’s plenty of food in Priam’s gardens. And I don’t suppose I’ll be here for ever—I expect I’ll move on.” He smiled. “See if I can find a city Achilles didn’t sack…”
“But why?”
“Why am I staying? I want to go back to Troy. I was only—I don’t know…twelve?—when I was taken to the temple. My parents were poor, I didn’t get on with my father, it was a solution of sorts, I suppose—but I didn’t choose it. And now I want to go back.”
“Actually into Troy?”
He shrugged. It wasn’t necessary for me to point out what horrors he’d be facing there; he knew perfectly well.
“I just want to go home,” he said. “Isn’t that what we all want really? To turn time back…?”
“Ye-es, but it’s not usually considered possible.”
“Well, then, I’ll fail.”
We stopped and looked out to sea. At that moment, almost miraculously, the mists parted and we saw Odysseus’s ships just as the men stopped rowing and began to hoist the sails.
“I hope she’ll be all right,” I said.
“Penelope’s kind—or so everybody says.”
“It’s not freedom, though, is it?”
Glancing sideways, I saw that he was choking on tears. He turned to me, attempted to speak, but then just shook his head and, with a hurried bow, strode up the beach towards the huts.
I looked out to sea again, but the mists had rolled back and Odysseus’s ships were nowhere to be seen.
And now I’m going to break my own rules. So far, in telling this story of my youth, I’ve tried to make no reference to facts I only learnt later; sometimes—as with the fate of Odysseus and his ships—many years later. But I think I’m justified in making an exception of Hecuba. After all, if the mist hadn’t closed in again, I might well have seen what happened next.
At the precise moment the sails were hoisted, Hecuba, who’d been huddled in a corner out of the way, was transformed into a mad dog with slavering jaws and red-rimmed eyes and, before anybody could stop her, she climbed to the topmost mast, where she stood, snarling her defiance at the Greeks below—and then leapt to her death.
Nobody seems to know whether she
burst open on the deck or fell into the sea. I like to think it was the sea.
* * *
——————
No crowds came to bid Helen farewell. I went to see her off and stood alone on the beach, watching, as a dozen or more cylindrical rolls were carried carefully onto Menelaus’s ship. A tall figure in a dark cloak was supervising the operation—a man, I assumed, until it turned to face me and I saw that it was Helen, making sure her tapestries were safely stowed. Nothing else, I think, mattered to Helen in the end. Not her daughter—and certainly not any of the men who’d loved her. She lived solely in, and for, her work.
We stared at each other, across a great gulf of time and experience. She gave one wave of a small white hand—a barely noticeable gesture—and then went swiftly below deck.
* * *
——————
Inevitably, the day arrived when Agamemnon was ready to leave. I walked across the almost deserted camp to see Ritsa, determined not to upset her by crying. I found her outside Cassandra’s hut, supervising the loading of household goods onto a cart. She came towards me, wiping her hands on the sacking cloth she’d knotted round her waist—a painfully familiar gesture. She’d always done that whether her hands needed wiping or not. Our parting was, like all such partings, awkward. I think we both wanted it to be over—to have the relief of putting it behind us—and yet, at the same time, we clung to every passing second. I remember at one point a group of women walked past on their way down to the ships. I spotted Maire’s bulky shape, the baby still tightly strapped to her chest and half hidden by her shawl. Even as I recognized her, she glanced back at us and smiled. A few moments later, she was out of sight.