A Thousand Ships

by Natalie Haynes

  4

  Theano

  Theano, wife of Antenor, mother of four sons and one daughter, bent over to light the candle and blinked in its small, smoky flame. Mother of four sons who would not bury her, when her time came. Four sons who had not survived the war. Sons obliterated by the folly of another woman’s son. Her tears came from the smoke, and also from the anger which burned at her core, like the wick of the candle she carried to the table and placed in its centre. Her husband sat opposite her, his head in his gnarled hands. She had no pity for him: the war was raging through its tenth year outside the city walls and he was too old to fight. She would have given his remaining life – lived uncomplaining as a widow – to spend a single moment with one of her dead sons.

  ‘You have given Priam every chance to heed your warnings,’ she said, as Antenor shook his head. His thick grey eyebrows pushed their way out from behind his fingers, and she reached around the candle and pulled his hands down to the table. ‘Every chance,’ she repeated. His filmy eyes met hers, and she wondered if she looked as old and feeble to him as he looked to her: snowy hair, creased skin, etched grief.

  ‘He refuses to listen,’ her husband said. ‘He cannot see past her.’

  His wife spat on the ground. There was only ever one ‘her’ in Troy, and that had been true for ten long years. Ten years that had taken her four most precious jewels.

  ‘You have served him well,’ she said. ‘Years have passed since you first advised him to return the whore to her husband.’

  ‘Years,’ Antenor echoed. They had conducted this conversation so many times in the past that it had come to seem to him like a song, in which he no longer had to remember his words, any more than a man had to remember his way home. It was simply a part of him.

  ‘Priam has been too prideful,’ his wife continued. ‘The goddess has told me, more than once.’

  Her husband nodded. Theano had been a priestess of Athene when he first saw her, with her parents in the temple precincts. How many years ago was that? He couldn’t recall. She had been a lithe girl, he remembered, bright-eyed with a sharp intelligence which had, over the years, attenuated to impatience.

  ‘I made the offering of the robe,’ she reminded him. The women of Troy had embroidered an ornate ceremonial robe for the statue of the goddess, and his wife had dedicated it to her the previous summer. It had done nothing to win Athene’s support away from the Greeks and in favour of the Trojans. They might as well, Theano had whispered as the body of their youngest son was carried back from the battlefield, have offered her a pile of rags, for all the good it had done. Her husband had begged her not to blaspheme, but with only one child – their daughter Crino – left, his wife was in no mood to be told. The goddess was quite clear, Theano said: return Helen to Menelaus. Purge the pollutant from our city. Send ten gold kraters – Priam’s largest and most highly decorated – and ten finely worked red and gold tapestries along with her. Send Paris to abase himself before the man whose wife he had stolen, and beg his forgiveness. If it was unforthcoming, his wife had added, Priam’s over-indulged son would have to pay for his folly with his life. It was not an unreasonable price for taking a man’s wife from her home, overturning generations of tradition, which rightly said that a guest must respect his host.

  ‘Priam will not force his son to lose face,’ Antenor said.

  ‘Lose face!’ she snapped. ‘Reputations can only be lost if they have not already been trampled in the mud. Only a deluded man could think Paris has any reputation beyond that of a philanderer and the woman who shares his bed will always be known as a whore.’

  ‘The king cannot see it.’

  ‘He will have no choice.’ Theano paused. ‘But you do have a choice.’ The conversation had never turned this way before. She watched her husband’s eyes flicker to hers, barely able to see her expression. ‘You have heard the message, Antenor. You know they will act tonight.’

  ‘They may not,’ he said, his voice quavering. ‘The message only said that they are lying in wait somewhere nearby.’

  ‘You know where,’ she snorted. ‘They are inside the horse. They must be.’

  ‘But how many men would fit inside a few planks of wood, Theano, even if your suspicions are correct? Five? Ten? It is not enough to overthrow a city like Troy. It is nothing like enough. We are proud citizens who have withstood a ten-year war. We cannot be overthrown like children from a wooden fort.’

  ‘Quietly,’ she chided him. ‘Crino is asleep.’

  He shrugged his shoulders, but spoke more softly. ‘You know I’m right.’

  ‘We only know half of the story,’ she replied. ‘The Greeks have made a big show of sailing away. What if they have not? What if they are waiting for a few warriors to be smuggled into the city inside their votive horse? What if those men open the city gates to a whole army?’

  His face contorted in pain. ‘Troy would be destroyed,’ he said. ‘They would loot it and burn it.’

  ‘And kill the men and enslave the women.’ She continued his thought. ‘All the women. Your wife, Antenor. Your daughter.’

  ‘We must warn them,’ he said, looking around himself, agitated. ‘I must hurry to Priam now, and warn him before it is too late.’

  ‘It is already too late,’ she said. ‘The horse is inside the city now. There is only one thing you can do to save us.’

  ‘What is that? What have you planned?’ he asked.

  ‘Go down to the city gates now,’ she said. ‘Open them yourself.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ he said.

  ‘The guards will have left their posts long ago. They believe the Greeks have sailed away. They think there is but one Greek left on Trojan soil, and that is the snake, Sinon.’

  Her husband rubbed his right hand against his left arm, as though it pained him. ‘He will unlock the gates if you do not,’ she said. ‘And they will reward him for his bravery, instead of you.’

  ‘You want me to betray our city? Our home?’ he asked.

  ‘I want our daughter to live,’ she said. ‘Go now, before it is too late. And quickly, husband. It is our only chance.’

  The old man returned carrying an animal skin and a stark message. He must nail the panther’s hide to the door of their home, and the Greeks would pass it by.

  5

  Calliope

  Sing, Muse, the poet says, and this time he sounds quite put out. It’s all I can do not to laugh as he shakes his head in disappointment. How does his poem keep going wrong? First he had Creusa, and she filled him with confidence. All the epic themes covered: war, love, sea-snakes. He was so happy taking her through the city, searching for Aeneas. Did you see how much he enjoyed the descriptions of the fire? I thought he might choke on his epithets. But then she lost her way when he was barely past the proem.

  I took him straight to the shore so he could see what happened to the women who did escape the fires and he didn’t even notice that the survivors were hardly any better off than poor Creusa. I’m not sure I could have made it more obvious, but he hasn’t understood at all. I’m not offering him the story of one woman during the Trojan War, I’m offering him the story of all the women in the war. Well, most of them (I haven’t decided about Helen yet. She gets on my nerves).

  I’m giving him the chance to see the war from both ends: how it was caused, and how its consequences played out. Epic in scale and subject matter. And here he is, whining about Theano because her part in the story is completed and he’s only just worked out how to describe her. Idiot poet. It’s not her story, or Creusa’s story. It’s their story. At least it will be, if he stops complaining and starts composing.

  6

  The Trojan Women

  The black cormorants wheeled above them, diving one by one to the surface of the dark sea, their feathered throats throbbing with fish when they rose again. Hecabe shifted her weight from one leg to the other. Her whole body ached from sitting on the rocks, pain spreading out from the base of her spine to her every bone
. She was hungry, but she said nothing to her women. They must all be hungry too. Foolish, to think that hunger and thirst would disappear, just because their lives lay in ruins. Even slaves needed to eat.

  Hecabe looked around at the women and children who surrounded her, trying to count them all. She hoped there were a few missing families, a handful of Trojans who might have slipped away in the smoking chaos. She counted her daughters and daughters-in-law before moving on to the other women. She realized that soft-tempered Creusa wasn’t there. Her husband Aeneas had survived ten years of conflict; had he died when the city was set ablaze? Or had he escaped with Creusa and their son? Hecabe issued a quick prayer to Aphrodite that it was so. Perhaps, even as she watched the birds feasting on the water, Aeneas and his wife were sailing out across the horizon to find a new home, far from the ravaging Greek soldiers.

  ‘Who else is missing?’ she asked Polyxena, who lay on the sand nearby, her back to her mother. Her daughter did not reply. Perhaps she was asleep. Hecabe counted again. Creusa, Theano and Theano’s daughter, Crino. All gone.

  A young woman with hollow eyes and pale skin, sitting near Polyxena, holding a small comb in her hand – wood, not ivory, so perhaps she would be allowed to keep it – answered for her. Hecabe couldn’t find the young woman’s name in her mind. The upheaval was too great. She was the daughter of . . . No. That too had gone.

  ‘Theano’s family was spared,’ she said.

  ‘Spared?’ Hecabe looked at the girl in astonishment. The Greeks had not appeared to her to be in the mood for sparing anyone. ‘Why?’

  But even as she said it, she knew. She knew that Antenor had betrayed them. His cautious counsel to appeal to the Greeks and ask for terms on which the Trojans could return Helen had not been advice for the benefit of his city, but for the benefit of himself.

  The young woman shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I just saw the soldiers pass their house by. There was a leopard skin nailed to the door. The Greeks saw it and they took their swords and their torches to the next house. It was a sign.’ She stopped. The next house had been the one before her own.

  Hecabe snorted. The double-faced traitors, friends to their enemies, enemies to their friends. But even as she opened her mouth to express her contempt for such treachery, she paused. Antenor’s behaviour was despicable, certainly, but there was no denying that he had won a better fate for his women than Priam had for his own family. Theano and Crino: free women; Hecabe and her daughters: enslaved.

  She saw that Andromache, her son Hector’s wife (Hector’s widow, she corrected herself again), was listening to her conversation. Andromache did not speak, however. She had not spoken since the day before, when the Greek soldiers brought her out of the city, pushing her between themselves, grabbing at her breasts and laughing, before shoving her into the circle of Trojan women. Andromache had held her baby tightly in her arms as she fell forward onto her knees. She did not notice when her ankle, scraped along the sharp edge of a rock, began to bleed. Hecabe had glared at the men, and one of them made a sign to ward off the evil eye. Hecabe snorted. It would take more than a gesture to combat the bottomless sea of sorrows she was wishing upon them all.

  Hecabe wondered if Andromache was doing the same thing as she was, stacking up the names in her mind. Creusa was dead or had escaped somehow. But Theano, Crino: their names would be added to the curses Hecabe ran through every morning when she woke and every night before she slept. She was not so foolish as to believe that she herself would have the chance to punish all the traitors and murderers and wrongdoers who had contributed to the downfall of her city. But she would have the gods remember who they were. They would take vengeance on the oath-breakers. It was all she could wish for.

  She would have been startled to discover that her daughter-in-law was doing precisely the opposite thing in her mind. Creusa, Theano, Crino: three Trojan women at least who were free, either in death or in life. Andromache marked each one with a silent joy. Everywhere she looked she could see only women in her own condition: fallen into slavery, the property of soldiers and thugs. But there were three who belonged to no one.

  Polyxena awoke with a sudden cry. No one chided her, though the Greek soldiers who had been charged with keeping the women together looked over in annoyance. They all had nightmares now. Hecabe watched her daughter’s breathing slow again, as she saw where she was. Still living in a nightmare, but a lesser one than the one in her sleep. Polyxena moaned quietly as she sat up at her mother’s knee. ‘I keep dreaming that the city still stands.’

  Hecabe nodded. She had already learned that the worst dreams were not the ones where the flaming walls were crashing down on you, or where armed men were chasing you, or where your beloved menfolk were dying before your eyes. They were the ones when your husband lived again, when your son still smiled, when your daughter looked forward to her wedding.

  ‘When did you know they would take Troy?’ asked Polyxena.

  Her mother thought for a moment. ‘We knew this day would come when the Amazon fell,’ she said. ‘Your father and I guessed before then. But the day the Amazon died; that’s when we knew for sure.’

  7

  Penthesilea

  They were so alike, the Amazon girls, that when Hippolyta died, Penthesilea felt she had been deprived of more than a sister. She had lost her own reflection. For as long as she could remember, she had known what she looked like by looking at someone else: every shift in her own skin, every line, every scar almost, was matched on the body of the one she loved the most. And so as Hippolyta fell – her face creased with pain, the arrow piercing her ribs – Penthesilea knew that she was losing her sister and herself at once.

  They had always used weapons. Long before she could walk, Hippolyta had taught Penthesilea to sling stones across their mother’s halls. The older they grew, the sharper the blades became: wooden swords and soft-wood spears were soon exchanged for the real things. And she had revelled in it. They both had. There was something so immeasurably delightful about being young and strong. The girls would ride for hours on near-identical horses: gentle trotting and then cantering and then galloping through the lower reaches of the mountains, their hair plaited tightly to hold it in place, pinned beneath their bright leather caps. They would dismount in the outskirts of the forest, and leave the horses, running until they collapsed on the ground, too breathless to groan at the pain in their lungs. They would lie amid the pine cones and look up at the sky between the upper branches of the trees, and know there was no one alive who was happier than them.

  And the games they used to play. Running up the slopes, picking up white pebbles, or an abandoned birds’ nest, running back to the bottom of the hill to add it to a pile of woodland treasures, each one eyeing the other’s growing hoard with envy, marvelling at her swiftness and strength. And the speed test, which Hippolyta always won. The two girls would stand beside one another on open ground, and count themselves down: ready, steady, go. Penthesilea would fit an arrow to her bow, and shoot it high in an elegant parabola. At the same time, Hippolyta would begin to run, laughing at her own ability to cover so much ground so quickly that by the time the arrow began to descend, she was waiting, ready to catch it in her hand. She never failed, until the last time.

  And so Penthesilea had lost her sister, dearer to her than life itself. Not only that but she had killed her. An accident, the others said, trying to comfort her. As though there could ever be any consolation for this. And because she had lost the thing she held most dear, and because she had not merely lost it but had herself destroyed it, and because there was no possibility that she could go on living without Hippolyta, Penthesilea resolved to die.

  Death itself would not be enough, however. For the terrible crime she had committed she could face only one death: that of a warrior, in battle. Which battle it was did not matter particularly. The only requirement was that there must be a warrior skilled enough to kill her. Most men (Penthesilea was not arrogant, merely aware of her talents) did n
ot have the capacity to beat an Amazon in combat. There was one man, however, that even the Amazons spoke of in whispers. Quicker even than them, one had heard. The fastest warrior ever to fight. And so Penthesilea took her women on the long journey south to the fabled city of Troy.

  The journey was not arduous for the Amazons, who were a nomadic people. Their horses were strong and they rode from dawn to dusk without ever growing tired. They slept only briefly during the hours of darkness and began their journey again as the sun rose the next day. If her women wished to stop their princess – to beg her to reconsider her plan to die – they respected her too much to do so. They rode alongside her, and they would fight alongside her. If she was resolved to die, they would die alongside her too.

  Their arrival was not a complete surprise to King Priam, whose scouts had heard a rumour that the women were coming south. Two Trojans rode out to meet Penthesilea, and ask her intentions. Whose side did she intend to take, in this, the tenth year of war on the Scamandrian plains? Greek or Trojan? Were the women aggressors or defenders? Priam had sent two large gold tripods and jewel-encrusted bowls to try and win an alliance with the Amazons. Penthesilea accepted them without a second glance. She cared nothing for trinkets – what use were baubles for a woman who lived on horseback? – but she did not wish to give offence by refusing them.

  ‘I’ll fight for your king,’ she said. ‘Ride home and tell him the Amazons will fight the Greeks, and that I will fight Achilles, and I will kill him, or die in the attempt.’ She did not add that these two outcomes were equally desirable to her. The scouts bowed and sought to flatter her with desperate thanks. But she bustled them away. She did not need to know that Priam was grateful for her support. Of course he was. The story of what had happened to his son, to brave Hector, the Trojans’ greatest warrior, had penetrated even the northern reaches of her Scythian home: how Hector had defended his city for ten long years, and how he had led his men in many famous victories. Penthesilea knew, everyone knew, how he had once fought a man dressed in Achilles’ armour and killed him; how for a brief moment the Trojans believed that Achilles himself was dead, and how they pushed the Greeks all the way back to their camp, the greatest day of fighting in the whole war. But then Hector stripped the armour from the fallen Greek to discover – incensed – that it was not Achilles, but rather another man, Patroclus, wearing Achilles’ arms and fighting in his stead. The rage of Achilles when he heard of the death of his friend was instant and implacable; she knew how he had roared like a mountain lion and sworn his revenge on Hector and any Trojan who crossed his path. He was as good as his word, and stalked through the battlefield, mauling every man he saw, until Hector stood before him. Penthesilea knew how he slaughtered Hector – thick, black arterial blood spattering on the mud beneath their feet – and screamed his savage joy. How he mutilated the corpse of his enemy, and tied leather thongs through his feet, turning man into carcass with no thought for the impiety of his actions. How he drove the body of the Trojan prince around the walls of his own city, dragging the battered corpse three times past the eyes of his broken parents, his pitiful wife, his uncomprehending infant son.