From that day onwards, Cassandra had at least muttered her curses and madness more quietly. Her family and slaves still made signs against the evil eye when they saw her, but she was easier to ignore. Even now, as the women waited to find out where they would go and to whom they would belong, Cassandra barely spoke above a murmur. She did not dare.
So Hecabe knew that if she could have kept one of her women with her, over the months and years to come, it would be Polyxena. Her most beautiful daughter. The youngest, with golden hair quite unlike any other Trojan woman. People used to say that a goddess must have favoured her with such beauty and yet Polyxena was never conceited. She was a kind and thoughtful girl, everyone’s favourite. Hecabe shuddered, thinking which Greek would take her. The butcher Neoptolemus, who had cut down Priam, Polyxena’s father, as he clung to the altars and pleaded for sanctuary? The devious Odysseus? The idiot Menelaus?
She said nothing, but Polyxena suddenly grew restless, as if she could sense her mother’s thoughts. She stretched her arms above her head and sat up on her heels. ‘I don’t think it was the Amazon,’ she said. Her mother bit back her irritable retort. She already had one daughter whose every utterance was meaningless, she had no need for another.
‘You don’t think what was the Amazon?’ asked Andromache quietly. She had found her tongue again at last. But the baby still slept and she hoped to keep him that way. When he awoke, he would be ravenous, and she had only a little milk-softened grain to give to him.
‘Troy didn’t fall because of the death of Penthesilea,’ Polyxena said. ‘It fell because the gods willed it so. We were almost saved before, remember? But the gods must have changed their minds. Even an Amazon could have made no difference then.’
‘Before?’
‘When they took the priest’s daughter, Mama. And the girl from Lyrnessus.’
10
Briseis and Chryseis
No one ever needed to ask which priest’s daughter, although Troy had plenty of priests and they had plenty of daughters. If someone was talking about the daughter of a priest, they always meant Chryseis, daughter of Chryses. Who else would have been sufficiently cunning to escape a besieged city, and sufficiently careless to be captured by the Greeks?
They stabbed the shepherd boy she had been sneaking outside to meet, who tended his flocks on the lower slopes of the mountains. He had been mortally afraid that the Greeks would catch sight of him on a moonlit night, and kill him, taking his flock to sate their hunger. But he never shared his anxiety with her, because he was shy and he did not wish to appear afraid in front of a girl who seemed entirely without fear. And so, when the night finally came that a pair of Greek scouts – hunting around the edges of the city like weasels looking for birds’ eggs – found them, she was entirely unprepared for what would happen.
They killed him exactly as he feared they would. But she didn’t see his blood flow out from his chest, because it was too dark, and she had dropped her torch when the men attacked and knocked it from her grip. The ground was damp, and its flame was extinguished straightaway. She felt the men’s greasy hands on her flesh and on her clothes as they dragged her back to the camp. She was frightened, but she did not cry out, because she was still more worried that the Trojans would find her than that the Greeks would kill her, even though she realized this was ridiculous. She thought of the sweet soft mouth of the shepherd boy, and felt a sudden twisting hurt in her side that she would never kiss it again.
As the men pulled her towards the shoreline, away from the city, she caught sight of the sacred flames burning in the temple of Apollo, on the citadel of Troy. Her father would be serving the god at this hour. The pain she had felt at the loss of her shepherd boy redoubled when she acknowledged to herself that she had abandoned her father.
Chryses was a broad-backed, black-haired servant of Apollo, whose wife had died giving birth to their daughter. Her lifeblood had ebbed out with the baby and had never stopped. Wan and grey, with matted locks of hair stuck to her pale cheeks, she died before her daughter was a day old. Her heartbroken widower had no appetite for fatherhood, and gave the child, still unnamed, to a wet-nurse with no instruction as to whether she should be fed or left to die on the slopes of Mount Ida. By the time his grief had subsided and he could bear to have the girl in his presence, his daughter had been named by others: Chryseis, daughter of Chryses.
Chryseis took after her mother. Dark brown hair flowed over her shoulders and her eyes were almost black. Her skin was golden, and she took small, neat steps, like a dancer. But where her mother had been a patient, obedient woman, always where she should be, shuttle in one hand and wool in the other, Chryseis was as headstrong as a donkey. People said the troublesome spirit had entered her when she was a baby, because they could think of no other explanation for why, if there was any trouble inside the city, Chryseis always seemed to be involved.
And now she had found herself in trouble outside the city. The youngest Trojans had grown up under a siege: they knew no other life. For Chryseis, only sixteen years old in this tenth year of the war, the city was her home and her prison alike. But unlike the daughters of Priam – Polyxena and the others – she refused to be contained. The city was riddled with secret pathways which could take an adventurous girl out into the plains below, if she was only daring enough to find them. It never occurred to her that the other sons and daughters of Troy might not have been looking to escape the city, or that the pathways went unused from fear rather than ignorance.
There was one such path, which tunnelled beneath the city walls, behind the temple of Apollo where her father spent his days. It was this one Chryseis had used to escape and meet her shepherd. She felt a fresh pang of sorrow for the soft-mouthed boy, and then a sharp jab of anger at her father who had left his bored, resourceful daughter alone for hours outside the temple while he tended to the god’s needs. He knew she would get up to mischief; she often did. She had been beaten once, by a senior priest, for playing with the goat kids which were kept outside the precincts for sacrifices. They were not pets, he had shouted as his large square hands slapped her face and arms, they were sacred animals. How dare she pollute them with her childish touch? Her father stood by and watched the man hit his daughter. It took time for her to unpick his expression, but eventually she concluded he had been embarrassed that she had brought shame on him. And yet he had left her to amuse herself, knowing she would get into trouble. Another emotion assailed her: perhaps he had not cared what happened to her. Perhaps she had tried his patience too often, embarrassed him too profoundly.
She had been wondering if she might try running from the Greek scouts, neither of whom looked as if he had the speed she knew she could produce. But the thought of her father’s disappointed face when he saw her and the memory of his mortification when she had been caught for other, lesser infractions kept her from making her escape. It distracted her and she did not notice her pace was slowing, until one of the Greek soldiers prodded her waist, grabbing at her flesh and laughing when she screamed.
Fear of upsetting her father had been a much greater influence on her behaviour than anything else, she realized. Since she had discovered the tunnel, she had explored the edges of the plains and the lower reaches of the mountains many times, hiding behind the trees and the rocks so that she wouldn’t be seen by the Trojan watchmen or anyone else who might tell Chryses. It had never occurred to her that she might be caught by Greek soldiers and slaughtered where she stood, her blood staining the grassy nubs in the sand beneath her feet. It had also never occurred to her that being captured by the Greeks might be worse than being killed by them.
When she arrived at the camp, she heard a great deal of shouting and jostling, but she understood very little of what the men said. Was it a different language they spoke, or simply a thick dialect? She could not tell. All were armed and armoured: the clanking of metal on metal was so loud it made her teeth ache. Eventually, she was manhandled towards a tent and pushed inside. She blinke
d in the guttering torchlight, and pulled her cloak around her body. The tent was full of women, other prisoners, huddled together with arms round one another, as though protecting each other from the cold. Chryseis scanned their faces, in the hope of seeing someone she knew. But all her friends and relatives were safe behind the city walls, where she should have been. These women were strangers, and none of them spoke to her.
Her gaze was drawn to the bright blue eyes of a tall, slender woman who stood with the others but was somehow apart from them. The woman’s hair was extraordinary, like gold in firelight, and her skin was pale. She resembled the chryselephantine statue of Artemis that dwelt in the temple near the shrine of Apollo where her father served. But the statue was the work of craftsmen, gilding the stone, painting the robes, coating the face with thin layers of ivory and the eyes with lapis. Chryseis had always thought she would never see anything so beautiful in her life until now, when she saw that the statue was a pale copy of this woman, or someone who looked very much like her. The priest’s daughter found herself thinking that so long as she stayed near this gold and ivory woman, everything would be alright, so she walked towards her and tried not to reach out and touch the woman’s hair.
‘Where did they find you?’ asked one of the other women. The light flickered behind her, and she was nothing but a silhouette. It took Chryseis a moment to realize that she understood what this woman was saying. Her accent was thick, but they spoke the same tongue.
‘On the edge of the plains,’ she replied. ‘At the bottom of the mountain.’
The tall woman’s expression did not change. The woman in shadow turned her head to Chryseis and stared at her. Chryseis could only see the torchlight glinting off the woman’s pupils but she could feel her annoyance. ‘You’re no shepherd-girl,’ the woman said. ‘Anyone can see that from looking at you. You’ve come from inside the city, haven’t you? How did you get caught outside?’
Chryseis had no answer. ‘Where did they find you?’ she asked instead.
‘Lyrnessus,’ said the woman. ‘We were all taken from Lyrnessus and Thebe.’
Chryseis paused. ‘Are they nearby?’
The woman snorted. ‘You’ve never been outside Troy before tonight, have you?’ Chryseis did not explain her previous excursions around the city. None of these women would be impressed by her adventurous spirit, the way her peers in Troy were.
‘Yes,’ the woman continued. ‘Lyrnessus is a day’s hard ride from here. The Greeks have been out raiding. All this time trying to crack open the nut of your home with no success. They need other places to feed them. They’ve ravaged every town between here and Lyrnessus already.’ Her voice softened. ‘No wonder you haven’t heard of the places they’re taking now. They cast their net wider with each passing year. They’re never happy unless they’re taking what doesn’t belong to them, and burning everything they can’t carry with them.’
‘Is that what they did to your town? Looted and burned it? Couldn’t your men fight for you?’ Chryseis asked. Who were these poor women whose menfolk had abandoned them? The Trojan warriors, her father among them, were far braver than these women’s husbands and sons.
‘What men?’ said the woman. ‘They killed all our men.’
‘All of them?’ Chryseis said. She had been told many times by her father that the Greeks were no better at fighting than any other men. No braver, no stronger, no more beloved by the gods. Had he lied to her?
‘You don’t see much inside your city walls, do you?’ said the woman. ‘That is what the Greeks do. They kill the men, they enslave the women and children. They have done it across the peninsula. And it’s what they will do to Troy, when the Fates compel it.’ Chryseis shook her head. The day would not come. Her father sacrificed to Apollo and made offerings every morning, and he was one of many priests in temples to all the gods across the whole city. The gods would not abandon Troy, so full of willing servants. Of course they would not. ‘Your walls cannot keep them out forever,’ the woman added. ‘You may be the first Trojan woman they’ve captured, but I promise you will not be the last. And when they come for your sisters and your mother’ – Chryseis did not trouble to correct her – ‘your menfolk will be no more help than ours were. A soldier can’t fight if he’s dead on the ground, and the Greeks outnumbered us by so many that we never had a chance. They are not an army, these Greeks. They’re a pestilence.’
‘I’m sorry for what you have lost,’ said Chryseis, using the formulation she had heard her father say so many times.
The woman nodded curtly. ‘Our losses will be shared,’ she said. ‘You should save your sorrow for yourself.’
Chryseis looked away and found herself staring at the tall woman with the blue eyes. ‘I’m sorry for what you have all lost,’ she said.
At last the golden-haired statue looked down and seemed to see her for the first time. ‘Thank you,’ she said. Her voice was low and soft, her accent less guttural than the other woman’s.
‘May I sit beside you?’ Chryseis asked her.
The woman in shadow replied on the statue’s behalf. ‘You can sit where you like, Trojan. The men will divide us up in the morning. It will make no difference then.’
‘Just for tonight, then,’ Chryseis said. She had convinced herself that if she could have this one wish granted, her lot would improve. ‘I have no one else,’ she added.
The statue patted the ground beside her, and they sat down together. ‘I have no one else either,’ the woman said quietly.
‘No one?’ asked Chryseis. An inappropriate feeling of warmth began to creep over her. If this woman was alone too then Chryseis, paradoxically, felt less alone. The woman shook her head. She looked less like a statue up close, now Chryseis could see the tiny golden hairs on her skin.
‘He killed them all,’ she replied. ‘My husband, my father, my three brothers. They were fighting to defend our home, and he cut them down as if they were stalks of wheat.’ Her voice was strangely melodic, so even as she told her terrible story, Chryseis half-imagined it was a poem, a song about another woman, another lost family. She could not bear to think of this woman experiencing anything so terrible.
‘It was so quick. One moment they were there, armed and ready to attack. And then they were on the ground, all of them at once. I thought they were playing a trick at first. There’s a pause, you know, before the blood starts to flow out beneath them.’
Was this what had happened with the shepherd boy? Had his blood paused like that? Chryseis could not bring herself to interrupt the woman, when she had lost so much and Chryseis so comparatively little: just one boy, just tonight, the memory of whose fingers wrapped round her wrist still made it feel warm. She felt her eyes prick but she would not allow herself to be overcome, because she did not want to distract this woman from her own tale.
‘For a heartbeat before that happens, they could still be alive. But then it pools beneath them, so much, more of it than you can imagine. He’d killed them all, just like people said he would. And I thought I had lost everyone when I saw a grey-haired woman, mad with grief like a Maenad, hurl herself at the legs of his horse. She didn’t have a weapon. I don’t know what she was trying to do. Unseat him, kill him, kill herself? His horse didn’t even break its stride. He just leaned a little to his right, it looked like he barely moved his sword arm, and then she was on the ground too, cut right through at the neck. I didn’t understand at first that it was my mother he had killed. My mother lying there on the hard dry earth next to the men she had lost. So when I tell you I have nothing, you know I speak the truth. They took me before I could throw a handful of earth on any of them, so I don’t even have that.’ Chryseis gazed at the woman, whose eyes were not puffy, whose hair was not torn and whose tunic was not ripped. The woman saw her looking and nodded. ‘They will not see my grief,’ she said. ‘They have not earned it. I will grieve for my family when I am alone.’
‘What if you never are?’ Chryseis asked.
‘Then I
will weep for them in the darkest hours of the night,’ the woman replied, ‘when no one can see. What is your name, child?’
A Thousand Ships Page 6