A Thousand Ships

by Natalie Haynes

  She jerked her head at the Greek soldiers, carrying their heavy burden along the shoreline.

  ‘Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter.’ Cassandra’s voice was quietening to a whisper.

  ‘Polydorus is not here,’ Hecabe hissed at Polyxena. Her youngest son had been closest to Polyxena, of all his siblings, yet they had concealed his exit from Troy even from her until after he was gone. ‘He is safe. We sent him away months ago to keep him safe.’

  ‘I know, Mother. Do not concern yourself with Cassandra’s words. You know they’re nonsense. They always are.’

  Andromache said nothing, but placed her hand between Cassandra’s shoulder-blades and patted her gently. Coaxing Cassandra from her worst excesses was like consoling an anxious mule. ‘Shh,’ she said. ‘Shh.’

  Cassandra reverted to mouthing the words without sound. And by the time the Greeks arrived at the women’s camp, such as it was, she was barely moving her mouth at all. Tears flowed freely down her face, mingling with the mucus which streamed from her nose.

  The Greek soldiers exchanged some words with one another, and they put their litter down on the sand. It looked like a pile of rags, but the two men straightened up with obvious relief. The nearest man rubbed his knuckles into the small of his back while the other spoke to Hecabe.

  ‘You’re the wife of Priam?’

  ‘The widow of Priam.’

  ‘If you prefer, lady.’ The soldier grinned. There was nothing more amusing to a conquering army than an uppity slave who fancied her former status would carry any weight in her new life. Especially when the slave was a self-satisfied old hag like this.

  ‘Do you know who this is?’ he said. He kicked the wrappings at his feet, but nothing moved. The cloths were too damp to unfurl. He swore and bent down again, catching the edge of a piece of fabric and throwing it aside.

  No one would have recognized him from his face. It was bloated and blackened from the water, and the rocks. Part of his left cheek was torn away and there were purple welts around his neck. It was the embroidery on his tunic which forced a low, guttural cry from Hecabe’s throat. She remembered seeing him wear it for the first time, catching his reflection in the polished edge of a goblet and laughing to see his face distorted in its curve. She remembered her slave woman making the tiny stitches along the neckline of the red cloth. And even though that tunic had lost some of its colour in the salt water – bleached to a fleshy shade that turned her stomach – she knew it.

  Polyxena ran to her brother’s side and threw herself upon him. ‘No,’ she cried. ‘No, no, no.’

  ‘So you know him,’ the Greek soldier smirked, but his compatriot clicked his tongue in disapproval.

  ‘Leave the body here,’ said the older man. ‘Leave them with their grief.’

  ‘Odysseus said to bring anything we found to the camp,’ the first man replied, losing some of his glee.

  ‘We’ll tell him what we found. Let her mourn her child, man. You would want the same for your own mother.’

  Sullenly, the younger man nodded, and they headed off to the Greek camp.

  ‘My brother,’ said Polyxena. ‘My beautiful brother.’ She drew her nails across her face, leaving four bright furrows on each cheek. Andromache took Polyxena’s place beside Hecabe, holding the old woman tightly, as the sobs wracked her brittle frame. She wanted to tear her hair, but she had not yet the strength to do so.

  And somehow they all forgot that Cassandra had told them this was coming and they persuaded themselves that she had claimed something completely different. Something which had been proven false, as always.

  20

  Oenone

  Oenone did not fit any more. She hadn’t for some time. She knew where she used to belong, and that was in the mountains, running along beside the springs, resting under the shady trees, playing the pipes to rival the birds in their song. When her life had been that of an ordinary mountain nymph, she had known how to live. And then she met Paris, and everything changed.

  At first, it changed for the better. But then, at first, she didn’t know Paris was Paris. Expelled from Troy as a baby because a prophecy said he would bring about its downfall, he should not have lived past his first day. Neither of his parents had the heart to keep him, but neither had the stomach to kill him. Priam and Hecabe gave the baby to a herdsman to take out onto the mountainside. But the herdsman could not bring himself to do what was asked of him. It was one thing to place an infant on an abandoned patch of ground, another to raise his staff high into the air and bring it smashing down on the child’s head. So he did not kill the baby, but secretly kept him and brought him up as a goatherd. What harm could a child do to a city? No one would ever find out the truth.

  So when Oenone first saw Paris on the lower reaches of the mountain, a lightly muscled, delicate youth, surrounded by goats, she thought he was the son of a herdsman. But he was so handsome, so pretty even, that she followed him for days, unseen. Oenone could hide herself among the saplings if Paris ever glanced her way. And why would he? She moved across the earth more quietly than any of his scampering goats. He played the pipes too, holding them up to his chubby lips while he sat and watched the animals graze. By the time she presented herself to him, she was already half in love.

  On their wedding day, he told her that the herdsman, Agelaus, had adopted him, and that he came from the palace of Troy. But, gifted in the twin arts of prophecy and medicine, she had known him to be the son of Priam and Hecabe from the first time they spoke. She felt a strange buzzing in her head when she thought about their future together, but she disregarded it. How could she not, when she was already expecting their son?

  They lived in perfect happiness until the goddesses came demanding Paris’ judgement. Oenone never revised this belief, although she knew others would find it hard to credit. Paris did not leave her, he was taken from her. That first time, at least, he was taken. He told her guilelessly what had happened that day: he had been grazing his flock in the foothills before finding himself shrouded in mist. And then he was in the middle of a high mountain glade, standing before three goddesses, each insisting that he choose her and award her some bauble over which they were squabbling. Oenone did not need to hear their names to guess who it had been.

  She was not entirely clear on the criteria he had employed to make his decision, nor could she be sure how the argument was resolved. She knew only one thing: he returned home late, long after it was dark, because he had to clamber down the mountainside and retrieve his goats. He was uncharacteristically distracted and short-tempered that night. The next morning, he bade her farewell and said he must go to Troy and confront his parents. He had never mentioned meeting them before, never suggested he might harbour a desire for life within the city walls. Oenone knew there was no point in trying to stop him, and anyway, she thought he would return in a day or two, his questions answered.

  Only once he had left did her thoughts become unmuddled. Paris would not return tomorrow, or the next day, she saw. He was heading to Troy to be acknowledged as its prince. And then – she rubbed at her temples thinking she must have this wrong – he would sail away to Greece. To Greece! What on earth for? For what reason could a happy man leave his wife and son to sail across open seas? He had no quest to fulfil, no god had set him a task to perform, she was quite sure of it. For all her gifts of prophecy, she could not see what Paris was up to. Her visions of the future were usually so detailed, but where Paris was concerned, there was now a clouding of her sight. She even asked her father, Cebren the river god, what might be happening, but he knew no more than she did.

  So when Paris returned to Troy, she still expected him to return to the mountain. To return to her. It was from another nymph, all cruel smiles, that she learned the truth. Paris, her husband, was living in the city with a new wife, a Greek. Oenone watched her boy, their boy, teeter across the baked earth and wondered how a man could care so little for his son. And how a man she knew so intimately could prove so false? Ever
ything she had believed she knew had been lost in a small chaos.

  Oenone knew that war would follow the woman. Even from the peaks of Mount Ida, she could sense the clash of metal and the stench of blood to come. So when the tall ships sailed into the bay, she was not surprised. She kept her boy safe in their mountain hideaway: what had seemed so romantic for her and Paris had become expedient, with Greek soldiers roaming the lower reaches of the mountains to pick off cattle and goats for their feasting. They never discovered her sanctuary, put off by the fast-flowing River Cebren nearby. Oenone had been abandoned by her husband, but her father still watched out for her.

  *

  After ten long years, Oenone had almost forgotten Paris, his sweet smile and low-lidded eyes. He seemed more like a dream than a man, and only her son – now a slender youth with hazel eyes and nut-brown skin – was proof that Paris had existed at all.

  The war had raged across the Troad peninsula, first one way and then the next. Sometimes she and her boy would sit on tufts of grass and watch the chariots pour out of the Greek camp towards the Trojan defenders. They were too high up to see the faces of individual warriors, so she never knew for sure that Paris was still alive.

  Except of course he was, because otherwise the Greek, Helen (it had been years before Oenone used her name, even inside her own mind) would have been returned to her husband and the war would be over. Only the obstinacy of Paris could draw out a conflict for so long.

  But eventually, even a mountain nymph could see the war was lost, and won. The Trojan warriors had been so reduced in number. So too had the Greeks, but they had begun the war with many more men. When Hector fell, Oenone felt her heart wrench, as though he were her husband, her son. She had never met Paris’ brother, never seen his face, but she still watched his final, lethal combat with the Greek champion, knowing it was him. Everyone spoke of Hector, bulwark of the Trojans. The Greeks respected him, the Trojans depended upon him. He was, in every way, the opposite of his younger brother. No one felt anything but disdain for a man who had endangered his city for his bed. It was one of the few things on which allies and enemies were united.

  She watched a vainglorious figure preening on the battlefield – was it Achilles? She thought she had seen him die at Hector’s hands a few days earlier, but now realized she must have been watching another man wearing Achilles’ armour. This warrior was so fast, so slick, so cruel, it must be Achilles. She saw him cut Hector down, and then tie the corpse to the back of his chariot before parading it around the city walls, and knew she would never see such viciousness again. She tried to hide her tears from her son – to whom the whole war, battled on the plains so far beneath them, had the quality of a game – because she could not have explained to him that she was weeping for a man she did not know, because she somehow still knew he didn’t deserve to die.

  *

  Her gifts of prophecy again proved defective when it came to her husband, and the first she knew of Paris’ injury was when he staggered through the copse outside her hut and collapsed to the ground with a cry.

  ‘Oenone,’ he called. ‘I beg you.’

  Oenone’s first response to the sound of her name was to assume she had imagined it. No one had called her by name in ten years. Her son called her ‘Mama’, when he was not lost on the mountains with his beloved herd. Cebren the river god called her ‘Daughter’. The other nymphs used to call her by name, but she had forsaken their company years earlier, unable to bear the shame of having been shunned by her mortal husband. So she thought she must have put her name into the beak of a calling bird, as she had done many times after Paris left. But then again it came.

  ‘Oenone, please. Please help me.’

  This time, there was no mistake. She knew she had heard her name, and she knew whose voice had spoken it. She hurried towards the sound and saw something she had dreamed of a thousand times, first in fear and then in anger. When their love was new, she had loathed Paris to be away from her for long. She worried he would be gored by a mountain boar, or taken by wolves. Over and over again, she saw him lying before her, mortally wounded, and she knew it would take all her healing powers to keep him from the greedy maw of Hades. In the dark hours of the night, she told herself that this was the price to be paid for loving a mortal: the ever-present risk of death. Once he had left and she realized – too late for her dignity – that he was never coming back, she imagined the scene differently. Paris would crawl across the browned pine needles that carpeted her home, pleading for help. Her response varied: sometimes she would magnanimously allow him to beg her pardon and save his life; other times she would watch, unmoved, as his last breath caught in his perfidious throat.

  Now the dream was in front of her. Paris’ oiled hair still stuck to his forehead, bristling with sweat. His beautiful face was etched with lines of pain, and his colour – once the same lovely nut-brown as her son – was pallid and greyish. He had fallen forward, his head landing on his arms. His left leg sagged awkwardly, and she saw dark blood seeping through the cloth he had used to bind his wound. His breathing was ragged, and it took a powerful effort for him to summon up the strength to speak.

  ‘Oenone, I am dying. Without you I will die.’

  She looked at the man who lay at her feet, and wondered how she had ever loved him. He was so frail. So human. There was something displeasing about mortals, which gods never spoke about, because they all knew it to be true. They had a strange smell – faint, when they were young, ripening to a stench as they grew old – but always present. It was the odour of death. Even the healthy ones, the uninjured, even children had it, this invisible, indelible mark. And now Paris reeked of it.

  ‘Please,’ he said.

  ‘How did you get here?’ she asked.

  ‘I walked until I could only crawl,’ he said. ‘And then I crawled.’

  ‘My father let you across.’

  ‘Yes. He said you might refuse to see me.’

  She nodded.

  ‘But I begged him and he slowed the waters so I could reach you.’

  ‘You came in vain,’ she said. She had not known this would be her reply until she heard the words. A spasm of pain crossed his face.

  ‘You could heal me,’ he said. ‘If you chose.’

  ‘And what if I do not choose?’ she asked. ‘What if I prefer not to staunch your bleeding and tend your wounds? What if I choose to keep my healing herbs for my son, for his goats, for someone who has not betrayed me? What then?’

  ‘Oenone, don’t say this. Don’t be so angry. It has been more than ten years since I left . . .’ His breath ran out and he coughed, then cried out from the fresh pain.

  ‘More than ten years since you left me widowed,’ she said. ‘You abandoned me and our son, the son I bore you. You cared nothing for us. Now you crawl back to life, and I am a widow no longer? Did it occur to you once – once – on your journey up here to ask yourself if I might have grown accustomed to my widowhood? If I might first have learned to live with it, and then grown to prefer it? Did you think for a moment of what I might want, how I might feel?’

  ‘No,’ he said, and a mortal woman would have struggled to hear the sound. ‘I am dying, Oenone. I thought only of that.’

  ‘And that is why I will not heal you,’ she said. ‘You thought only of yourself. Even now, when you should be prostrate before me—’

  ‘I am prostrate before you.’ A faint smile ghosted across his cracked lips. That was the man she had loved.

  ‘But not for me,’ she said. ‘For yourself. I cannot heal you, Paris. And you must leave the mountain, or you will pollute it with your death.’

  She turned and walked away. And much later, as she went to welcome her boy back from the pastures, she saw there was now no trace of Paris, not even a drop of blood on the pine needles. And though she was sure that this time the conversation had been real, she nonetheless found herself thinking it must have been another of her dreams.

  21

  Calliope


  You know, I like her. Oenone, I mean. I know the poet grows weary of these women who appear and disappear from his story, but even he is starting to grasp that the whole war can be explained this way. And would he really have overlooked Laodamia, as so many poets have before him? A woman who lost so much so young deserves something, even if it’s just to have her story told. Doesn’t she?

  There are so many ways of telling a war: the entire conflict can be encapsulated in just one incident. One man’s anger at the behaviour of another, say. A whole war – all ten years of it – might be distilled into that. But this is the women’s war, just as much as it is the men’s, and the poet will look upon their pain – the pain of the women who have always been relegated to the edges of the story, victims of men, survivors of men, slaves of men – and he will tell it, or he will tell nothing at all. They have waited long enough for their turn.

  And for what reason? Too many men telling the stories of men to each other. Do they see themselves reflected in the glory of Achilles? Do their ageing bodies feel strong when they describe his youth? Is the fat belly of a feasted poet reminiscent of the hard muscles of Hector? The idea is absurd. And yet, there must be some reason why they tell and retell tales of men.

  If he complains to me again, I will ask him this: is Oenone less of a hero than Menelaus? He loses his wife so he stirs up an army to bring her back to him, costing countless lives and creating countless widows, orphans and slaves. Oenone loses her husband and she raises their son. Which of those is the more heroic act?

  22

  The Trojan Women

  Helen was first to see the men approaching from the Greek camp. Hecabe had spent the night grieving for her son. Polyxena, Andromache and all the Trojan women had joined her in her lamentations, although it was hard to say whether Cassandra had accompanied them or whether she had just been weeping of her own accord. Helen approached the women who despised her and told them the news.