‘The Greeks are coming.’
Hecabe raised her ravaged face, thick purple lines showing the place where she had raked her fingernails across her skin. ‘What do they want?’ she wept. ‘Are they planning to stop me from burying my son? Is that what comes next? Will they add one more impiety to so many others?’
‘Perhaps,’ Helen replied.
‘Don’t antagonize her,’ Polyxena said. ‘Please. Haven’t you done enough?’
‘I’m not trying to antagonize her,’ Helen said. ‘I’m doing her the courtesy of telling her the truth. Perhaps they have come to take Polydorus away. Perhaps they have come to take me away. Or you. Or any of us.’
‘How can you be so guiltless when all of this is your fault?’ Polyxena asked. ‘How?’
‘It isn’t her fault,’ said her mother, her voice ragged from the long night. ‘It is mine.’
‘Yours?’ said Polyxena, and Andromache saw that she and Helen shared a brief expression of perplexity. ‘How can it be your fault?’
‘We were told when he was born that he would be Troy’s downfall,’ cried Hecabe. ‘The prophecy was clear: we were to kill Paris or he would live to kill us all.’
There was silence. ‘Why didn’t you . . .?’ Polyxena could not finish. Even as they were inhaling the smoke from their ruined city, she could not say it. Why hadn’t they killed the brother she did not even know she had until he walked into the city as a grown man and demanded his birthright?
‘Why didn’t we heed the advice of the gods?’ Hecabe said. ‘You are not yet married.’
At this Cassandra let out a low howl, but no one paid her any heed. Hecabe continued: ‘You cannot know what it is like to look at your own newborn child and be told that he will be the downfall of your city. He was so . . .’ She hesitated, unable to find a word which was not painfully bathetic. ‘Small. He was so small, and his eyes were immense, and he was perfect. And we could not – I could not – suffocate him, as we had been told to do. He was too small. When you have your own child you will understand.’
‘So what did you do with him?’ Helen asked. She never spoke of Hermione, the girl she had left behind in Sparta. Helen could not even say for sure that her daughter was still alive. She did not mention it, because she knew she would be harangued by Hecabe or Polyxena for having the audacity to claim she missed a daughter she had willingly abandoned. But you could abandon someone and still miss them.
‘We gave him to Agelaus, my husband’s herdsman,’ Hecabe said. ‘We told him to expose the child outside the walls of Troy. On the mountain somewhere.’
‘You sent Paris to die?’ Polyxena asked.
‘To save you all,’ Hecabe replied. ‘To save all our other children, even the ones not yet born. The terrible destiny belonged to Paris and Paris alone. If he died, the rest of you would live. The city would stand. Priam and I both agreed it was a price worth paying. We just couldn’t bear to watch him die.’ Polyxena stared at her. She had always known her mother could be ruthless, but this was something different, a strange combination of sentiment and brutality. As Hecabe spoke, Polyxena found herself struggling to see her mother’s usual expression or hear her reassuring, irritable voice.
‘But the herdsman ignored your husband’s command,’ Helen said. ‘That is not your fault.’
Hecabe usually refused to look at Helen, depriving herself of the sight. But now she stared up into Helen’s perfect eyes.
‘It is,’ she murmured. ‘I knew the herdsman would betray us. I knew he was weak, I knew he would take the boy and keep him as his own. He was always soft-hearted. He couldn’t even kill a wolf-cub if he found one away from its mother. Imagine that! A herdsman who can’t kill a wolf. I knew he would be too feeble to kill a child. But I said nothing.’
‘Did Priam also know the herdsman had this weakness?’ Helen asked. Hecabe nodded. ‘So, again, it is not your fault. Or at least not your fault alone,’ Helen said. ‘Priam made the same decision, and Paris was his son, Troy his kingdom. You were his partner in all things, but you were not his ruler. The larger share of the blame lies in Priam’s hands.’
‘In Priam’s grave,’ Hecabe said. ‘But among the living, I carry the guilt. And now Paris has cost me my youngest, blameless son. One last grief to reproach me for my selfishness and my folly.’
‘Polydorus would not reproach you.’ Andromache spoke quietly but still everyone turned to hear her. ‘He was a kind boy, open-hearted and sometimes foolish, but not reproachful or cruel.’
Hecabe felt her eyes prickling, but she did not intend to cry again. ‘He was a kind boy.’ She nodded.
‘He would not be angry with you, Mother,’ Polyxena agreed. ‘Let us seek the Greeks’ permission to bury him.’
‘And what if they refuse?’ Hecabe asked. Her anguish was already shading into a quiet fury.
‘We shall throw dust over him now,’ Andromache said. ‘He will enter the gates of Hades, and he will dwell on the island of the blessed. The formal burial will come later, or it will not. But by then he will already be where he belongs.’
The women carried out their duty in silence. They washed Polydorus clean of his blood and of the sand and weeds which clung to him, and they cast handfuls of dust over his body and murmured prayers to Hades, and Persephone, and also to Hermes, who would accompany him to the Underworld and show him the way. The Greek soldiers were almost upon them, but Polydorus was safely out of their reach.
23
Penelope
My dear husband,
Another year gone, and still you are no closer to home. Or maybe you are. I heard a tale from one old man, some wandering bard in search of his supper, that you had earned the favour of Aeolus, god of the winds. And that thanks to him, you had sailed to within sight of Ithaca, our rocky outpost. Then your sailors did something foolish – disregarded some simple instruction – and the winds turned against you once again and blew you all the way back to the island of the wind-god. Even Aeolus will not aid the same weary traveller twice. He knows, as we all do, that such misfortune must be the result of divine disfavour. And who is he to argue with another god on behalf of some mortal?
I’ve no doubt that you believe Poseidon is simply toying with you for a while, forcing you to sail now this way, now that. But what if he is not, Odysseus? What if this is your punishment for the blinding of his son, the Cyclops? To a god, a human life is nothing more than the blink of an eye. He could keep you from home for one year or ten. To him, they would feel no different.
I worry about you, of course. The story of Aeolus and the favouring winds he tried to offer you is a frustrating one. To think you might have been only a short distance away from me, and I didn’t know it. I can almost taste the disappointment, sour on the back of my tongue. But compared with the other stories which have reached us here, it is a positively encouraging tale. If I believed even a tenth of what I had heard about your tortuous journey home, I would be certain that by now you were dead. Perhaps you are dead. I feel I may as well be scratching my message into the sand as the tide comes in, for all the certainty I have that you will one day know what I wanted to say to you.
I hope you have not lost every ship but your own, as the old bard claimed in his song. Be assured that I did not give him a comfortable bed to sleep in that night. He dined on hard bread and slept on hard stone. The next evening, he sang a sweet sequel to his tale, where you were safely beached on a shore somewhere. It was obvious that he had composed these new verses to appease me. It did not work.
I have already forgotten the name of your safe haven that he sang about on that second night. A strange word, but it will come to me. On the first night, he had you under attack by more giants. First the Cyclops, he sang, and then – after your audacious escape – the Laestrygonians. We had not heard of these giants before, but the poet assured us they were a gargantuan race of cannibals. I asked him how they differed from the Cyclopes, since Polyphemus (the name of the one you blinded, Odysseus, since you didn�
��t trouble to ask) had also been determined to eat you and your men. The bard had no answer apart from some half-hearted half-line about the number of eyes they have. No wonder I find it hard to believe much of what these poets sing.
Because really, how many cannibalistic giants can one Greek plausibly meet as he sails the open seas? Even I, expert in your ability to create trouble, think one set is probably sufficient for your story. But then, if you did not meet with the Laestrygonians, if you are not deprived of most of your companions, if you have not lost every ship but your own, then what is the answer to the question that is on my lips from the moment I wake every morning: where are you?
The bards all sing of the bravery of heroes and the greatness of your deeds: it is one of the few elements of your story on which they all agree. But no one sings of the courage required by those of us who were left behind. It must be easy to forget how long you have been gone, as you bound from one misfortune to another. Always having to make impossible choices, always seizing opportunities and taking risks. That passes the time, I would imagine. Whereas sitting in our home without you, watching Telemachus grow from a baby into a child, and now a handsome youth, wondering if he will ever see his father again? That also takes a hero’s disposition. Waiting is the cruellest thing I have ever endured. Like bereavement, but with no certainty. I’m sure if you knew the pain it has caused me, you would weep. You always were prone to sentiment.
Ah, the name of the safe haven has returned to me. Aeaea. I wonder where it is, or if it exists at all. The bard must have run out of man-eating giants to set upon you, so he created an even stranger story about what happened to you when you landed on Aeaea. After the Laestrygonians had hurled boulders at you, drowning most of your men, you and your crew sailed as far and fast as you could, then disembarked on the first island you saw. To have lost all those ships, Odysseus. All those men. I cling to the hope that the bard sings your story wrongly. Or how will you tell all those fathers and mothers, all those wives and sisters, that their menfolk survived Agamemnon’s war, but not Odysseus’ voyage home? How will I look them in the face, after visiting such horror upon them?
So if that is true, and so many of your companions are dead, I can well believe what the bard said happened next. That you instructed your men to wait by the ship while you went to explore the island. You would not have put the last of your comrades in danger after what you had all suffered. You would have undertaken the risk yourself. That is the man you are. So you set off with your spear (always so proud of your sharp eyes and keen aim) to try and find food. You explored the lush greenery, remarking to yourself that you had never seen such fertile soil so close to the ocean before. Almost as though the island were enchanted. And even as you said that last word, a shudder passed through you, and you hoped it was just the cool sea breeze. You had climbed the steep dunes from the water’s edge and soon saw that you had moored your ship on the high side of the island, which turned out to be thick with tall pines. Ahead of you, you saw that the land rolled gently downwards. You had to look twice, to be sure, but you made certain of it: there was smoke rising somewhere ahead of you, among the trees. Your pulse quickened when you thought of those other two perilous islands where you had recently hoped to find succour. You did not want to take the risk of exploring the centre of this island yet, not if you could avoid it.
And – because you are my clever, wily and, above all, lucky husband – you could. Because at that very moment, a huge stag stepped out of the undergrowth ahead of you. You were barely into the woods, and here was your prize offering himself to you, with his high, reaching antlers and his proud neck. You had not seen it yet, but your sharp ears could hear it: you were right on top of the spring where he came in the heat of the day to drink.
I could see it as the bard sang. I could see every moment. You did not pause. You reached for your bronze-tipped spear, and let fly. Your blade pierced the beast’s neck, and it sank to its knees by the water. You hurried down the rock-strewn ground, which cut away beneath you, and when you arrived to claim your prize, you saw your eyes had deceived you. The stag was far bigger than it had appeared from above. You could barely lift such a creature, but you would not abandon your kill. You wrenched your spear free and the beast gasped its last breath.
Then you hacked at the vines which grew along the ground, and used them to tie the stag’s feet together. You could not carry it on one shoulder, but had to sling it across your neck so you could stand under its weight. You used your spear as a walking stick, to help you keep your balance as you staggered back to the curved prow of your ship.
You and your men feasted that night on roast venison and sweet wine, and then you slept on the shore and imagined what you might find further inland. The next morning, you decided you needed more men to cover more ground. But you preferred a more cautious investigation than you had employed with the Cyclopes and the Laestrygonians. Your men were understandably wary after two such terrifying experiences, and they readily agreed to split up. The bard was quite specific: you took one team, your friend Eurylochus led the other. Twenty-two comrades each. You and Eurylochus set off in opposite directions, agreeing to meet back at the ship before sundown.
Your party had an uneventful day: though no deer presented themselves to you this time, you caught some rabbits, which pleased the men. You returned to your ship as the light was fading and the sun was riding his chariot past the distant ocean. There, you waited for the second team of men to come back, but they did not. Only Eurylochus eventually appeared. And the story he told was scarcely believable.
He wept as he told you his men had set their course for the centre of the island, where the trees thinned away. They approached a clearing and were startled to see high stone walls. Several men wanted to turn back. This building was more than tall enough to contain a giant or two. They argued quietly among themselves about staying or fleeing, before discovering that they were surrounded.
Mountain lions had emerged from the woods and as the men turned around, backing away, they found that a pack of wolves had crept up behind them. But although the men were afraid, they soon noticed that the animals were behaving oddly. The lions flicked their tails, as though begging to be scratched, and the wolves nuzzled at the men’s hands, like loyal hounds. Your men did not know, of course, that these animals were not animals at all, but men. And they did not wag their tails in affection, but in desperation, because they had lost the power of speech.
Then the gates of the palace flew open, and there stood a nymph, whose beauty (as the bard sings it) was all-surpassing. Her hair was twisted into intricate plaits and she sang a low song that made your men ache for home. For Ithaca.
Of course they followed her inside, and of course they sat down at her table. It sounds foolish, doesn’t it? They were so trusting, these men of war. But I know that they had endured ten long years of sleeping on the ground, eating charred meat from their fires. Then another year at sea, buffeted from one disaster to the next. So is it any wonder that when a beautiful woman bade them sit on carved wooden chairs, they were caught off-guard? The dignity was as tempting as the food. They wanted to feel like men again, having lived for so long like animals.
She gave them cheese and barley and honey, and they washed it down with wine. She had laced all of it with her drugs, of course, but they could not taste it, unaccustomed as they had grown to the delightful sweetness of honey. Only Eurylochus had held back, had waited outside the palace doors, watching through the crack between door and wall, suspicious but unable to say why. His men stuffed their mouths with as much as they could.
It takes a certain kind of cruelty, Odysseus, to look upon desperate men and see only swine. But that is what Circe saw, and that is what she did to your men. Eurylochus watched in horror as his companions finished eating, and seemed to shrink. He rubbed his eyes, hoping to see the men as they usually were. But he was not mistaken. First their arms shortened, and then their legs, and then they tipped forward onto all fours. Th
eir faces were suddenly bristling with blonde hairs. Their teeth sprouted from either side of their jaws, and their noses turned up into snouts. Circe took her staff and smacked the nearest man into his companion. She drove them out into her pigsty, where they clustered together. The men had lost their human shape, but inside their piggish forms, they retained their minds and memories. They squealed in horror at what had become of them, imprisoned together with a trough of acorns as their only nourishment.
Eurylochus raced away from the palace, running through the woods without caution, desperate to reach you and tell of the dreadful things he had witnessed. When he found you, he begged you to leave your transformed comrades behind, to set sail with him and the men in your crew who still walked on two legs. But you decided to take matters into your own hands. You had lost too many men already to sacrifice twenty more.
You set off alone into the woods. So impetuous, Odysseus, which is not like you at all: you have always preferred to make meticulous plans. Perhaps you have changed, in the time we have been apart. Or perhaps you were, as the bard suggested, inspired by some god. As he tells it, you followed the route your comrades had taken, up the steep hill and down through the woodland towards the smoke you had seen the day before. A tall young man, handsome and proud of it, stepped out from behind a tree, and you shouted in alarm. He grabbed your arm.
‘The thing the gods like about you, Odysseus – well, most of the gods – is how determined you are. Even when the odds are against you. What chance do you have – one man, alone – against an enchantress like Circe?’
‘I must rescue my men,’ you replied. ‘Let me past.’
The young man held your arm a little tighter. ‘Your pigs, the last I heard. But if you accept my help, you will set sail with them again as men.’
‘Who are you?’ you said. You have never liked surprises.
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