We were in the little room we had occupied when Helenus and I were children. ‘There would have been two sacrifices last night,’ Adosha said, ‘if that skimpy creature hadn’t been nimble-witted enough to make a fuss and save you. Especially as the first sacrifice went so badly.’ She pointed at Naomi, who was putting a couple of sticks on the brazier. She must have acquired them in the grove the night before. While the sacrifice took place she had been collecting wood and hiding it in her clothes. It was bitterly cold. We were short of fuel and Naomi made her adherence to her own childhood religion, involving the magical box of laws, written on stone, and the god who was the wind, an excuse for believing in nothing.
There was a macabre satisfaction in Adosha’s warning voice, as if she had not forgiven me for being such a disturbing child when she was my girl-nurse. Or perhaps she shared the views of my fellow citizens, after the terrible foretellings she heard me utter that night She had lost two brothers, after all. She warned me, ‘When the spring ceremonies come, if the Greeks have not left, they may decide only you will serve as a sacrifice. There’ll be no need to bless the planting or the lambing or pray for a good harvest There’ll be no planting. There are scarcely any sheep left. Victory will be the blessing we seek from the goddess and who better to secure it than you?’
‘If my death can secure victory, if I am the sacrifice they require, then so be it,’ I said.
Naomi’s defiant sneer on hearing this shocked even me, who knew her so well. Adosha smacked her face, reproving her for her impiety at the same time. ‘That was a fearful curse the boy delivered as he died,’ she scolded. ‘We must show all reverence over serious matters. If your mistress can sacrifice herself for the city, surely you can behave properly.’
Naomi took the reproof and looked sombre. Yet I knew, underneath it all, she was an unbeliever. Of course, I was not. I had felt the great wings of a hostile Artemis in the grove that night, beating about in an atmosphere thick with her hatred. How to lift this curse I did not know. Unless it be by my own willing death.
Twenty-Six
Thessaly
Twenty years later, I thought of my readiness to sacrifice myself for Troy. Would it have made any difference? I doubt it. The fates are not generous enough to make life so straightforward. Would that they were. Even now, I suspect, they were urging us forward from war to the fatal moment when Agamemnon was to die. I thought of this as Helen gave me her sister Clytemnestra’s account of the events leading inexorably to that moment. The dead queen’s voice, burning ice, came into the darkened room. I shivered. It was as if she were there with us. But she herself had been dead for thirteen years.
The blood of the spring sacrifice in Mycenae that year ran over unploughed fields where grass, asphodels and poppies grew wild. We had not ploughed in autumn or in spring; now we could not plant our grain. Many of the fields had been fallow the year before, or, if they had been planted, by menfolk before they set out for Troy, the crops had not been properly tended or harvested. Saplings were sprouting unchecked at the margins of the fields, weeds and wild flowers sprang up where ploughs should have made furrows. Earth was already beginning to seize back her land. We were, of course, hungry and would become hungrier. Harvests had been poor, stock eaten instead of saved for breeding. The women had sheared as best they could the previous year, but had little time for weaving or even mending clothes. The spectacle of the under-tended farms, harassed women and overworked, neglected children distressed me greatly, whatever my other thoughts and plans. Unfarmed land, ungathered harvest and stricken farmers are a chilling and shaming sight for any ruler.
Meanwhile messages came from Troy demanding reinforcements. In Argos Aegisthus, in his role as a loyal relative, rounded up all men between the ages of fourteen and forty-five, no matter how their mothers or grandchildren clung to them, no matter how sick they claimed to be. The force that had gone out, high-hearted, in search of a quick victory, wealth and slaves, had lost many to plague and battle. Now we were down to the old, the young, the sick and the cowards. We had ground the ears; now we had to grind the husks. Many houses were now bereaved. All were anxious. The news of sickness in the camp at Troy caused as much fear as the war itself. The people were gloomy and disheartened.
I was, of course, urged to offer great sacrifices for victory, conduct impressive ceremonies throughout Mycenae. This I did not do. The spring ceremonies are for goddess and land, because we depend on them and they on us. I could not offer for victory at that time, even if I had wanted to, because rebirth and regeneration are in direct opposition to war, which is an act of man. It would have been impious to unite them. Desperation – and the people were becoming desperate – has to be controlled, or madness takes over.
By now most families in Mycenae and throughout the rest of Greece had received news of a death – son, uncle, husband – from disease or on the battlefield. I, unluckily, had not. Good men died. The bad ones stayed alive. Agamemnon and Menelaus remained obstinately unwounded and free of disease, as if under the protection of some mad god who deflected sickness, arrows and spears from them, while the innocent perished.
I knew when this war ended the country would be full of injured men and of women telling each other, ‘My son fell at Troy,’ ‘My husband died of a spearthrust at Troy,’ ‘When I was a girl, before my father died in Troy –’ Meanwhile the country was going to seed. Men were dead and maimed, women sad and weary, and the palace coffers emptied as I despatched more arms, horses and provisions and bought in corn and barley both for the army and to prevent want from turning into famine at home. This waste was what those brothers, my husband and Menelaus, had produced.
I went to Pylos and visited Nestor’s queen. She took me to the temple of Artemis and I consulted the oracle there. This oracle, a young handsome man, looked into the future and after a few sentences fell to babbling in a strange tongue. I knew he saw, but would not say what he saw. When I bade him farewell he would not meet my eyes. I was a guest in Pylos, so I could do nothing about this and went to Sparta straight away, leaving Nestor’s queen, the Queen of Pylos, terrified – by what she guessed of me and by what the oracle had not dared tell me.
It was a hard journey. Everywhere I went it was the same sad story – broken walls, overgrown fields, unpruned trees and vines going wild – little stock, burdened people – widows, orphans – hunger. The roads were strewn with rocks and pitted, and in places blocked. In other spots they had been washed away by the winter rains and not repaired for want of manpower. In Pylos they had told me Achilles’ old father was barely holding off a Thracian band who wanted his farm. It was said that Achilles and the Myrmidons were on their way back to Thessaly to help him. I rejoiced to hear it With Achilles gone the Greek army would be beaten. Though I did not know if the account were true; rumours flew everywhere.
When I reached Sparta, Sostris, the Regent there, an old man with a withered leg, told me late at night as we sat by the embers of the fire in the great hall, ‘The bandits are all but uncontrollable. I can do little. If only Menelaus would return. I fear the future.’ He brightened up, though, as he said, ‘If they win, Menelaus has promised me Lycia.’
‘If all the men who had been promised Lycia were together in this room,’ I told him bluntly, ‘the crowd would be so large we would have to stand.’ There in Sparta I also saw Helen’s only child, my niece Hermione. This girl was intended to be the bride of my son Orestes. She asked me about him – young as she was, I thought she was in love with him. The marriage was planned of course, to confirm the alliance of our states, Sparta and Mycenae, and keep our wealth inside the family – sensible, but in this case probably unwise, for Orestes and Hermione were double cousins. I did not think my husband or his brother sane; a farmer would hesitate to breed animals like that. I told Hermione that Orestes was at King Strophius’ court – not adding that I believed my husband had sent him there in case of a Trojan victory. I and his sister would be killed or enslaved but Orestes would be protected by S
trophius.
I had not come to Sparta to see the Regent, or Helen’s daughter. I had come for the Old Woman, the most famous oracle in Greece. Even before I visited the palace I went to the cave in the rock below the citadel and persuaded the Old Woman there to come back to Mycenae with me, promising her much gold. Sostris said wearily, ‘You are taking away the Old Woman. If you want her, take her. Consult her about the outcome of this war. She will promise victory because she thinks if she does not, she will die.’ I did not want to know about the war, though I did not tell him that. He was a man afraid. If Menelaus died, if the Greeks lost the war, the Trojans would seek him out and kill him. He had two sons in Troy, also.
‘If your sister went back to Menelaus, would the war end, do you think?’ he asked.
‘It’s too late now,’ I told him. ‘This has gone on too long. Too many have died. The army would not leave Troy now, whatever Helen did. And I believe Menelaus would not dare to take her back now. His own people would turn on him.’ I believed this. I had prevented Helen’s return when it might have ended the war. Now it was too late for her to come back.
Then I left Sparta, spring still bringing flowers and new grass to the neglected land. I took the Old Woman, wrapped in many blankets, back in my chariot. She was indeed very old, only skin and bone, and almost bald. They said she’d been captured from Troezen, when Helen’s brothers seized back their kidnapped, ten-year-old sister after her abduction. But I think the Old Woman originally came from further away than that. At any rate, she had been old, very old, almost twenty years ago. Menelaus had inherited her from Helen’s father as a kind of wedding gift and had her installed in the caves to prophesy. She was famous as a seer. If she said the Greek army would win the war, I thought probably she was right
Aegisthus was away on patrol when I returned with her. I let her rest: then, that night, I called her to me when I was alone. Alas for her, she told me horrors. Her words beat black and red waves into my head; a foul tide. She had delivered her prophecies in an old, weak voice, but now added, in a tone like a girl’s, ‘Now you will kill me, lady. I am old. I hate your world. You are already cursed, so kill me – you cannot make your own fate any worse. I am old, I wish to go home, to be at peace in the fields of the goddess. I do not wish to see any more of this – so kill me now.’
Her words washed to and fro in my bursting head. ‘Kill me,’ she said again.
Yet there was a moment, as I plunged my dagger into her thin, chicken’s breast, when she and I were equals, when I almost loved her. When she was dead I felt calm again. Perhaps, she was right, and I was indeed cursed. Perhaps I would go in death into the shadow-land where the dead moan and gibber in darkness, like chained madmen, I did not know or care.
We none of us know what happens after death and it is better not to care. I had been sent, a princess of Sparta, to Agamemnon at the age of sixteen at the same time my father had married Helen to Menelaus. Two sisters married two brothers. I had gone to my husband and borne what he could do to me, what he was, without flinching. Until he killed our daughter. He had never broken my pride till then. I was the daughter of a king, and the queen of another. I could endure anything because I was a queen. Then – Iphegenia. With the blow he struck to her, he murdered both of us, her in body, me in spirit And secured his own death, too, for then I decided to kill him. If that cursed me, then I was cursed. But the old laws by which we have lived up to now say a mother’s rights over a child are greater than a father’s. And in killing his daughter, Agamemnon had not only committed murder but flouted that ancient law. So – who had the right to curse me? Where would that curse come from? I, the mother, was taking vengeance on the man who had taken the life of my child.
I stood there with the Old Woman like a rag at my feet – she had little bone or blood left in her – until Aegisthus came in, dusty, in armour. I went to him with my arms out He took me here, on the floor, beside the body of the Old Woman. He burned out all the terrifying words she had used to me, the horrible pictures she had raised. As I screamed in orgasm the fear left me. I knew I would triumph.
Twenty-Seven
Troy
The sacrifice of the Greek boy slave brought no change of luck. We would have to endure the winter, hoping Suppiluliumas would send the reinforcements he had promised. We were cold and hungry; the sickness continued to take its toll. What I remember is how silent the city became. There was the sound of the anvil, the prayers in the temple, the cry of a child but otherwise nothing but the screaming of gulls over our towers and ramparts. We would gaze up at them, knowing they were free to fly where they wanted, over the sea, over the fields, over the Greek camp on our shores. The children, ragged and dirty, played less. And when they did play, their games were all fightings, chest-clutchings, hideous coughs and writhings – then death.
Six of the Hittites died too, including their captain. It is a sad thing to die in an alien land among strangers. The remains of their little force still guarded the entrance to the tunnel. They would not enter the city. It stank of sickness they feared to catch. They were weary with fighting and sick of living outside the city, involved in a war which had nothing to do with them, facing death miles from home.
This was when they married me to the husband I mentioned, because his father, too, was tired of committing troops to a battle further off, tired of the reports of deaths of his own people. That was when I led my skeleton of a dog out to make his own way in the world, blanked my mind in order to give my body to my new husband, rose next day, heartsick, to look out to sea at the Greek camp behind their rampart.
Then Achilles returned. Why he had come, what had been said to persuade him, I do not know. The sight of his many troops setting up camp again was like a black cloud settling over us. As we watched, as ever, from the ramparts, Paris stood with his arm round Hector. ‘He’s come to fight this time,’ Paris said.
Hector did not reply.
‘He’s fated to lead a short life,’ Paris went on. ‘Perhaps this is the end of it.’
I tried to conceal the tears in my eyes. Andromache’s child lifted a thin arm, pointed, and said, ‘Ships – ships.’ Poor child, he had learned the word by seeing them from a distance, I doubt if he would have recognised one if he had been standing beside it, on the beach, in the fresh air, touching the wooden hull.
For many days Achilles did nothing but amuse himself. Then his friend Patroclus, bored, perhaps, with this inactivity, went into battle, wearing Achilles’ own armour. Hector killed him.
Achilles’ grief was overwhelming. Some days after Patroclus’ funeral he recovered. His mighty grief gave way to rage on the same scale.
From the ramparts at dawn we watched Achilles’ tall figure running at speed from behind the Greek rampart up to the little rise outside the city walls. He was naked to the waist, bare-legged and barefoot. He raised his spear and called, ‘Prepare to die, Trojans.’ Hector’s spear was against the wall. He seized it This great, bronze-tipped weapon thudded down beside Achilles. We saw Greeks on the ramparts gesticulating, saw them calling him back. His beaky nose was raised towards us. His hair, brown as a horse’s, flew about in the wind. He cried, ‘Thank you, Hector. I shall cherish the spear. I shall kill you with it, too.’
‘You can try. You must be fresh enough, since so far you’ve done no fighting,’ Hector called down. ‘This we can all understand. Most men fear battle. And yet – most overcome it.’
Achilles smiled. ‘I like you, Hector. I shall regret your death. I’ll marry your sister when you’re dead,’ he called back. He gave a great roar of laughter. ‘And your mother too, most probably. Hector, brother-in-law, son, prepare to die.’
By now other spears were being flung at him. There was a flight of arrows, and Achilles turned, still laughing, and ran back. A chorus of yells followed him.
Hector was angry. ‘I shall kill him, that madman. They say he’s a satyr, too. He seduces or rapes whatever moves. No woman is safe, or man. His best friend was, they say,
his lover. He was disguised as a girl when a child, to protect him. That may have saved him from being murdered, but damaged his mind. He knows no law now, not men’s law, nor women’s. He’s like a perverted animal.’
‘This is rumour,’ said Paris. ‘But one thing is certain, he fights like an animal. Do not dare to attack him without others round you.’
‘I’d attack him unarmed, with my bare hands if I could, though he had a sword and a shield,’ muttered Hector.
I knew that Achilles was more than an animal, more than a man, was imbued with some strange spirit, like the gusts of spring wind blowing from the sea which were catching us now – like a lion, like a river in full spate. I had seen him kill my brother Hector so often in dreams and visions. Now, blackness swept over me anew. I lifted my arms. I prophesied this and much else, or so they told me.
Then the citizens turned on me. They had not forgotten what had happened after the sacrifice of the Greek boy. Now, tired, hungry, bereaved they turned on me. They beat me until Hector stopped them, of course. Then they had me carried away. When I came to myself I was lying on a stone floor, alone, in darkness. I guessed from the smell of oil and herbs I must be in an empty store-room below the great hall. I was in great fear because my visions were still with me, though coming with less force, and I was alone, in utter blackness. Later I felt my way round the walls and across every inch of the floor space. I found there was nothing in the room, not a stool, blanket, jar of water. There I lay for a day, hungry and thirsty, feeling, or hearing muffled feet overhead, hearing thuds, sometimes a voice. I knew eventually they would bring food – Naomi, Polyxena, someone would smuggle it to me – but when would I be released?
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