Helen of Troy

by Margaret George

  “Too late, too late!” I said. “I tell you, hurry! Let the others follow, but let us go as quickly as the horses can pull us.”

  He looked at me quizzically. “It is not good for them. They’ll overheat.”

  Was my fate always tied up with horses? “Forget the horses!” I cried. “Something worse will happen—is happening—if we do not get there in time!”

  He started to argue, but I was his queen. “As you say,” he grunted, and took his whip to them.

  We tore up the hills, gravel flying out behind us. It was the closest I would ever come to flying, but my heart was not soaring. I was gripped by the blackest dread I had felt since the dream of Paris and the arrow.

  Just over the next rise! I remembered the landscape well. Almost there, almost within sight of it. It was always invisible, tucked in its mountain gap, until you rounded that last bend, and then you could see it, stone fastness rising, blending into the mountainside.

  Lathered, the horses tried to slow, but I begged the driver to keep their speed up. Everything looked in order, undisturbed. For an instant I felt both very foolish and very relieved.

  Then, bursting from the gateway, a chariot rushed toward us. The horses were as wild-eyed as demons, and their driver was screaming and forcing them into a faster gallop. Behind him, on foot, people were pursuing; archers shot after him, but he was beyond bowshot range. Screams and yells carried across the hill.

  “He’ll run us down,” my driver said. The narrow road would not permit two chariots. He attempted to get our chariot out of the way, but one of the wheels stuck in a rut, and we were only halfway clear when the fleeing chariot seemed to fly over a rise and make right for us. The charioteer tried to pull aside, but had to veer to one side and finally stop. He leapt from the chariot and took the reins, to guide his panting horse around us.

  Blood covered his mantle and his forearms; his red hands had smeared the reins. “Stand aside!” he commanded us, pulling out a sword. “Do not look at me.”

  But I could not help it. He was young, well built, and under the blood his face might have been handsome. “Who are you?” I cried. “What have you done?” Somehow it was as if my special vision gave me the right to question him. But he could not know of that, only that I had disobeyed him.

  He turned slitted eyes at me, started to say Who are you? when the thing I had always hated saved me. “Helen. You must be Helen. The cause of it all, of whatever I’ve done.” But he did not plunge his sword into me.

  “I have nothing to do with what you have done. I know not what it is.”

  “I’ve avenged my father. It’s taken me many years, but I was only a child when he was murdered. A son must grow strong enough to take revenge, and that takes time.” He jerked his horse past us, as if he spoke of fishing or the seasons.

  Murdered . . . father . . . revenge . . .

  “Oh, who have you killed?” I cried.

  “My mother,” he said.

  It was Orestes, the baby son! “You have killed . . . your mother?” As horrible as the deed, almost equally horrible that he could speak of it calmly and proudly.

  “It had to be done. Yes, and I killed her lover Aegisthus, too.” He looked dazed, and I could see now that he was not proud or careless, but so stunned he hardly knew what he did. He jumped back into the body of his chariot, now cleared of ours. “Go clean up the mess,” he said. “She’s your sister. My sister hates her, and might desecrate the body.” Yelling at his horses, he sped them into a gallop and disappeared in a cloud of dust.

  I sagged against my driver. “So that is why I knew we must hurry.” I knew my words sounded foolish, as they always do in such times. There are no words big enough. “And yet we were not in time.”

  The pursuing mob breasted the hill and confronted us. “You let him get away!” they screamed.

  “We could not stop him,” my driver said. They moved threateningly toward him, spears, bows, and swords drawn.

  “Do not waste your time with us,” I commanded them, “but continue after him. I am Helen, the queen’s sister. Pray, let me pass, that I may tend to her.”

  Now they became more agitated and angry. “The cause of it all!” one man hissed. “Without you, he never would have gone away. Had he never gone away, then none of the rest of it would have happened.”

  “I am weary of this,” I said. And in that moment I knew I had listened meekly to the last round of blame I ever would permit myself to endure. If this had not happened, then that would not. Yes. But how long, and how far back, could this be pursued? There was, in truth, no end to it. “Enough of it. I need to tend my fallen sister. Get out of my way.” They fell away like leaves.

  Now there was no need to hurry. We waited for the other chariot to catch up with us, and the cart with its useless gifts. Then we rolled toward the fortress-palace, going as far as we could on the road, as if there were safety within the chariots. But we had to abandon them as we reached the base of the citadel, which was hidden in a cleft between two mountains. A steep path led to the entrance gate, with its lions snarling down at us from the lintel. There had never been a time when I had passed beneath them with good feelings, but now all those other times seemed happy in comparison.

  How quiet it was. No guards, no workers, and the gates were gaping open like a wound, exposing the inner flesh of the palace. We entered, seeing no one about. Had they all left, pursuing the murderer? Fearful, we kept ascending, until we reached the top where the palace sprawled. It had its own gate, also standing open, and we walked through it. There were the workshops and storage houses, but there was only one thing that drew us: the palace itself. I rushed ahead of them to enter it first, alone. The eerie quiet lay over it like a fog. Then, as my eyes grew used to the dim light inside, I saw huddled forms, whimpering and choking, around something.

  This must be where she lay. I approached; not until I was standing beside them did the cloaked figures perceive me. “Is this the queen?” I asked.

  One of them looked up, threw back her hood. “Who are you?” she whispered. Then she shook her head. “It cannot be, but I think it is Helen.”

  “It can be, and I am,” I said.

  “She thought you were dead,” said the woman matter-of-factly. “Lost after Troy. Now it is the opposite—you live, she is dead.”

  “What has happened?” I needed to hear it from people who had loved her, not from her murderer. Oh, let a sympathetic telling of it sponge away the horror of what Orestes had so proudly recounted.

  Others in the mourners’ circle now spoke. “She was attacked and killed by her own son, in the act of welcoming him. He had been away for so many years, and had just returned, rejoicing her heart. But he had returned for only one reason, to kill her. He stabbed her when she reached out her arms to embrace him. The first thrust was true. She only had time to say, ‘Orestes?’ and then she fell. And here she lies. We covered her, but we did not touch her. To prepare her for burial, that is the task of the family. But there is no one here to do that duty.”

  “Elektra?” I asked. But I remembered Orestes’s words.

  “She will not perform the rites. She is even now sacrificing at her father’s grave, telling him of the murder.”

  “But that is nothing new,” another witness said. “She goes to her father’s grave every morning and every evening. She pretends the purpose is to honor him, but in truth she only steeped herself in hatred and thoughts of bloody revenge. Day after day she kept him company, whipping herself into a black fury of malevolence. I truly think he himself could not hate Clytemnestra as much as his daughter did, on his behalf.”

  “It was she who summoned Orestes here so that he might be her arm and do the killing. Now it’s he who will be pursued by the relentless Furies, but what is that to her? No, she’ll not prepare her mother for the tomb,” one woman said, finally answering my question.

  “Then I shall,” I said. “And willingly.” I bent over to pull the cover away, dreading to see, yet I mus
t begin. Slowly the cover slid past her head, past her shoulders, down to her waist. Her long hair covered her face, but the blood painted her from her shoulders to below the waist, and made a thick dark pool underneath her, a pool that her fingers clutched. “Oh.” I flinched. Gently I tried to brush her hair away, but the ends of it were stuck in the blood. Finally I saw her face, eyes wide open and staring in surprise. Surprise at seeing Orestes at long last? Surprise at the pain of the knife? Surprise to be dying? Gently I closed the lids. Some warmth still lingered, but the cold stones would soon rob her body of the last of it.

  “Two sad reunions,” I told her. “Had ours been first, then perhaps the second might have had a better ending.”

  A shrill voice cut through the chamber. “Or ended with two deserved deaths rather than one.” I swung around to see someone coming toward me, a young woman dressed in sad black robes like the others, but with a sneer on her face.

  “Why, you must be Elektra, that gentle creature I have heard so much about.” I was surprised at the sharpness of my own response. “Sweet, loving, and kind.”

  “Ask my father, he will tell you that is so. Ask her and she will say otherwise. It all depends on who is speaking.” She was now close enough that I could see all her features—heavy and dark like Agamemnon’s. For an instant I felt I was confronting him again.

  “You and my mother are true sisters,” she said. “Adulteresses and husband-leavers.”

  “As the curse on our father foretold,” I said. “It is a grief to have daughters who are married many times, that I admit.”

  “Married?” she jeered. “Is that what you called it?” She drew herself up proudly. “I would like to wield a knife and send you to join her.”

  “But you are too much a coward for that,” I said flatly. “You lurked and plotted and waited for years but had to send for your brother to do the deed. Bah, what a pitiful false warrior you are.” I hoped to goad her into trying to strike me, for I was sure—in spite of her younger years—that I was stronger than she. I wanted to fight with her; my heart cried out for an immediate punishment for her, and I wanted to be the one to deliver it. It was not noble, but, gods help me, that was what went through my mind. And she, already furious, lunged at me. She was easy to overcome, and I flung her against the wall and pulled her head back by her hair. Panting, I said, “Your father would be ashamed of you now. You have no more strength than an old incontinent dog. But then, he was a blusterer, too. So perhaps he understands.” I let her go before I might smash her head against the stone wall, committing another murder in the hall. I recognized, with shame, that I had used her in this way to attack her father, which I had long burned to do.

  “Go!” I ordered her. “Leave us, so you do not vex your mother’s ghost.”

  The attendants had sat speechless all this while, stunned. When Elektra picked herself up and fled from the room, they murmured, “Good. Now we can proceed.”

  “Where is the body of . . . him?” I asked.

  “Outside,” one of them said. “He was preparing a sacrifice of welcome. Orestes ran him through from the back with a spear, and he fell onto the altar.”

  I shuddered. “A fine pair, this brother and sister.” The best of the children, then, was the one Agamemnon had had the folly to sacrifice, Iphigenia, leaving these two monsters. He had never been very intelligent. Or perhaps he felt Artemis deserved the best and he must offer it. I shook my head. No more thoughts of that man, nor of the war. They must not be allowed to pollute the rites of burial.

  She already had a tomb, beside Agamemnon’s. The idea of her resting beside him seemed wrong, but I told myself that she had had years to prepare another tomb for herself, so this must be her chosen place. As the attendants and I drew the shroud up over her face, I whispered a final goodbye. “Thank you for taking me to Sparta that day,” I said. “Thank you for showing me a world outside our gates. I shall never forget.” We scattered wildflowers over the shroud—some of the same ones I remembered from the fields that day—and then we had the melancholy task of sliding the heavy stone lid in place. We strained to do it, but in the end it moved under our own strength and we did not have to ask for help.

  LXXVII

  The years passed, but not as they had in Troy, when what seemed to be loose, fluffy days were spun into tightly wound yarn, compressing time. No, in Sparta it was the reverse. The threads untwined themselves, spread out, so that one day seemed like ten. So I use weaving and spinning terms to explain my life in Sparta. I spent, it seemed, so much of my time with the weaving and spinning, although I produced nothing of beauty like the lost tapestry I had created at Troy.

  Seasons came, seasons went, suspended in that floating timelessness. Father died; after hearing of Clytemnestra’s fate, he seemed to shrivel, shudder before what he felt was the fulfillment of the curse brought down on his house. There was only a faint sorrow at bidding him farewell. In truth he had departed long ago.

  Now everyone from Sparta was gone. Mother, Father, brothers, sister. Only I, Helen, was left, and my only surviving family was Menelaus and Hermione. Menelaus and I lived in peace with one another, a shuffling, old-person’s peace—the peace that descends when all other concerns have either died or fled. Like ancient, stooped warriors, we looked at one another across the battlefield—strewn with perhaps our betters who nonetheless had not survived—as comrades.

  Comrades was all it could be. Never again would we be husband and wife in the true sense. Companions, wary friends, battle veterans, fellows, yes, all those things. But not lovers, nor even true husband and wife. Troy and its wounds—physical and of the soul—had seen to that.

  There was comfort in that, a finality. I could reach my hand out to Menelaus and resolve to help him through the long years ahead, letting him lean on me if need be, expecting him to let me do the same.

  And Hermione? The years likewise softened her toward me. As we worked side by side with spinning, weaving (those woman tasks again! thank the gods for them!), seeing to the needs of the palace, I came to know her, and she came to know me.

  She was not like me. One’s child never is. But until your child has grown to maturity, you cannot believe it. Your children are part of you forever, from the moment of their birth, therefore you imagine you are part of them as well. But they are entirely apart, seeking their own secrets and bearing their own disappointments. If they choose to reveal them to you, you among mothers are fortunate.

  With watchful eyes I saw Hermione as she went about her ways: disciplined, lonely. She was pleasing to look upon, but no man wanted to look upon this daughter of the wayward Helen and widow of the cruel Neoptolemus. Through no fault of her own, she was a pariah, as she had lamented.

  She seemed to accept it; she accepted things better than I. Perhaps that was the Menelaus in her, the non-Helen. As I said, she was not like me. Eventually she even became, if not truly affectionate toward me, cordial and pleasant.

  And then Orestes came for her. Orestes, so different from the dazed, mad killer I had encountered on the road from Mycenae. This man was reserved, self-assured, polite. He sought out Menelaus to ask for Hermione in marriage, coming as a supplicant.

  He and Menelaus withdrew and I was not privy to their words. I knew not what passed between them until they emerged from the chamber and Menelaus muttered, “I am satisfied.” But then Menelaus was satisfied with everything now. Later—after Orestes had been treated to the traditional guest-friendship and put in a lofty chamber for the night—Menelaus told me he had at length atoned for the murder. The Furies had pursued him, so that he cut off his thumb to appease them and performed many other demanding deeds until they were finally satisfied. He had been tormented, under two irreconcilable mandates: to avenge the death of his father, and to honor his mother. It had come close to driving him mad. Perhaps he had even become mad for a time.

  “It is over, Helen,” Menelaus said. “It is finally over.”

  Yes, everything was over. I looked at him, seein
g an old man where once an eager strong suitor had stood. But what did he see when he looked at me? Something equally fallen.

  “Is it, then?” I asked, thinking he meant our story.

  “Yes,” he said. “The curse on the two houses ends now. Hermione is innocent of it, and Orestes has paid its dues, laid it to rest. Think of it—our grandchildren can be ordinary people. No curses, no half gods, no prophecies. How I envy them!”

  “They will have a freedom we did not have,” I admitted. But the glory would have fled.

  We gave Hermione to Orestes, performing all the rites. She was happy, delivered from her house of widowhood and bleakness. She had always fancied him, she confided to me (confided to me! what an unlooked-for gift she bestowed in that intimacy, little knowing what it meant to me), ever since they were children.

  “Some things come out right,” I told her. “Sometimes we are given our fondest desires.”

  They had a son, Tisamenus. Hermione asked me to attend her, and I did, joyously, although a midwife was nearby. I held my grandson in my arms even before his mother, gazing on his wrinkled red face and giving thanks for the dull years that had allowed me to be with Hermione and had placed her son in my embrace. A marriage, a birth: things I thought the horror of war had vanquished forever, now quietly resumed.

  “He will not be a hero,” she said, cradling him. “He will not be called to walk in high places, but merely to do his duty in the ordinary way of mortals.” She looked at me. “Mother, can you be content with this?”

  I leaned forward and stroked her hair, a gesture she rarely permitted me. But this was a precious moment. “I have had enough of heroes,” I assured her. “Tisamenus will have a better life without treading in that realm.”

  Menelaus stepped into the chamber. “The age of heroes is over,” he said. “And I, for one, do not mourn its passing.”