Autumn came, bringing with it the last aftershock. I stood in the courtyard waiting for it to end, warned as always by Cassandra; these were light tremors, as if the earth were stretching herself, to be ready for her long winter sleep. I had long been in the habit of keeping my more valuable possessions in chests padded with wool and now, wrapped in nothing but a shawl, I faced the brusque reawakening of the earth as nothing worse than an irritating habit. Like me, the Trojan court was waiting, but an invisible wall separated us, the Trojans caught asleep with disordered hair and swollen eyes, while the foreign women, Callira and I, stood motionless near the outer wall.
I could see the royal family grouped near the stairs; Polyxena’s long hair impeccable even in the light haze, and her tunic arranged in perfect folds as she chattered uninhibitedly with her sisters. Somewhere beyond the screen formed by the daughters of Priam stood Andromache; I could imagine her pale complexion in the dawn; perhaps she was holding little Scamandrius in her arms, unwilling to entrust him to a slave girl. My gaze wandered across the empty pavement between us, and I felt a sense of loss as I watched that great imperfect family with which my own had never assimilated.
I tried and failed to imagine myself in Polyxena’s place, with the lovely Leda beside me, perfumed with the essences she sprinkled among her bedclothes; and for a moment I thought I saw Castor and Pollux among the guard drawn up at the gate—with their closed helms and fierce looks those men could have been Spartans, and this city lost in mist could have been Sparta. But earthquakes had never shaken the Peloponnese, and nothing was left now of my family but ashes blown on the winds. Only Hermione still carried in her veins the blood of Leda and Tyndareus, of Castor and Pollux, and I wondered whether she was at least a little like them, carrying stamped on her face that remote parentage, a heredity of centuries written in the features of a child. Child? A girl now, almost a woman. Who knows, perhaps by now with Menelaus absent they had already married her off, but to whom? All the young men of Greece had been passing the best years of their lives before the walls of Troy.
Lost among my family ghosts, I did not notice Hector until I heard the familiar warmth of his voice behind me. “Helen.”
“Prince.”
I didn’t look at him, I didn’t want to look at my sad love, I didn’t want to find out if I still had the strength not to come after him. I could see the sky brightening, and the sharp edge of the wall, the promise of dawn climbing up it with a far-off golden sparkle.
“Helen.” That huskiness I knew so well; I could hear he had come closer, head bent and shoulders bowed, his lips near my hair. Desperate for safety and sunlight, none of the others were watching us, and even Callira had moved away in silence.
“Go away.”
“Helen …” The half-suppressed sob at the end of my name was too much for me; the precarious center of my world collapsed and I closed my eyes.
My voice was a thread. “For the sake of Scamandrius,” I murmured, “please go away.”
His was even thinner thread. “No.” His authority was like a rock beneath the waves, and I knew he would not move. I didn’t turn.
“I’ve missed you.” I frowned and gripped my own shoulders as if it was all I could do to hold myself together. He didn’t touch me, but I could feel his breath on my neck, and it was as if he had got under my skin and touched my heart with a warmth beyond words now we were no longer able to touch physically in public.
“A message has come,” Hector said quietly. “Signed by Agamemnon. Challenging us to battle.”
“When?”
“The first day of autumn, at daybreak.”
“So at last he’s had enough.”
“He’s not the only one.”
“What does the king say?”
“He says I can go.”
I nodded, not trusting the voice knotted into a lump in my throat.
“Helen …” But he said no more. I felt his warmth vanish and heard his steps move away. Opening my eyes, I saw that the promise of the dawn had matured into a veil of rose and yellow reaching to the horizon. But the soft light on my eyes could not warm me. When I turned, Hector was climbing the stairs to the palace, head bowed. Aeneas was following with his mouth pursed and his hands tense as if already grasping his sword. My prince looked around and found my eyes, so far away across that deserted courtyard. I nodded slowly; an imperceptible gesture, but he caught it and for a moment I could see anticipation of the day that must come carved on his features. His death was a black shadow around the corner of the road, but there was no despair; only the shadow of a smile with a hint of mist about it.
It took six days to get the Trojan army ready. On the morning of the seventh I woke in Hector’s bed to find him gone, and sword, shield, helmet and spear vanished from the walls. I stayed in bed; there was a dusty new light on the coverlet. Birds were singing against a sick sound of far-off marching that echoed from the bare walls, hitting me like a hammer between head and heart. I was a ghost in that empty room, its sad light heavy with a long history of desertion. I hugged my shoulders, trying to remember the touch of my prince in the noiseless night, but I could only feel the delicate chill of the still air. Closing the door behind me when I left was like setting the seal on a story already concluded.
21
Some say an army ready for battle is like a serpent, some that it’s like a storm at sea, others that it’s like a shower of black pearls, but the fact is its members are all men and all poets. I gripped the battlements and looked down, and all I could see was ants. Tired ants in unfamiliar armor, exhausted by unfought war and endless siege. There was no hatred on the faces of the Trojans, and on the faces of the Greeks only a blind desperation. I don’t know who gave the command, but suddenly the Trojan cavalry charged, Hector’s black steed leading like a fragment of obsidian; then the Greek charioteers hit back at a gallop, deeply scarring the sandy plain. The cracked earth vanished beneath hooves and wheels as the armies collided, becoming indistinguishable in the dust.
*
The battle raged for two days, after which the Trojans stayed outside the city and set up camp halfway across the plain. Hector sent a messenger instructing us to stay where we were but to gather the royal guard at the Scaean Gates, which had stayed open; he also brought encouraging rumors of disagreements among the Greeks.
“One day of war and they’re already at loggerheads,” laughed Paris loudly; he had come back with the messenger, recalled to the city by his need for wine and whores.
“We’re winning, Father. Easy!”
Priam nodded, scarcely listening. The skin stretched over his bones was now like fragile parchment. The imposing man who had once assessed me like a cut of meat had gone, and even lechery had faded from his eyes.
“You want we bring tents?” murmured Andromache behind me. She still spoke broken Greek with a guttural accent, though in two years her childish face had grown more sophisticated and embittered. She was holding Scamandrius by the hand.
Paris shook his head. “Hector says no. He’s afraid the Greeks may try a sortie if they see civilians emerging from the city. It would help the hostages. Stay here, little sister.”
He smiled with that smile I knew so well, like a shadow on his plump overindulged face. Andromache looked away disdainfully and withdrew, taking the child with her. Hecuba followed, and as the court dispersed, Paris suggested a quick toast to victory. Searching the far end of the room for Callira, I quickly came out into the corridor. In the shadowy gloom beyond the torchlight someone grabbed my wrist.
I turned. Even in the dark I could see Cassandra’s eyes were wide with fear. Her hand on my wrist was like a claw.
“Tomorrow,” she whispered. “Tomorrow, the disaster. There’s no escaping it.” Her voice was tremulous and distant like the sighing of the wind, yet racked by agony.
“Cassandra …”
She gripped me harder. “You … tell him.”
Then she turned and vanished into the shadows. Callira,
behind me, looked confused, but suddenly the walls closed around me like black snakes, and my throat was locked.
“Can the Fates really move so fast?” I asked in a choked voice, but no answer came. I pulled my shawl more tightly around my shoulders and ran through deserted corridors and across the black well of the courtyard to the gates. Suddenly I was outside. There was no light, just a sharp, jagged sickle of moon hanging in the sky. I didn’t see Aeneas until I ran into him.
“Helen, what’s the hurry?”
“Cassandra,” I whispered breathlessly. The familiar grief and anger veiled his face, but he controlled himself. “Is she all right?”
I nodded. “But she says I must speak to Hector, that tomorrow—”
“I know,” he interrupted almost brutally, and in the dim light I saw his face grow tense. “Cassandra told me … last night.”
He looked at me with a sort of painful defiance, but I said nothing. It wasn’t my business and I had no wish to ask. If other farewells had been said in the dark before the battle, that was not for me to know.
“All she can see is this death, and that there’s no escaping it,” Aeneas murmured in a rough, bitter voice. “If she’d only told me—”
“I have to see him,” I interrupted, suffocated by a sense of urgency.
It was as if the moon was hidden by a thick veil, with night oppressing me from all sides. I had to go, if only to say goodbye. Aeneas understood at once. “Ride with me.”
Without waiting for an answer he went out of the gates, sentries saluting him in hoarse voices. I turned, and with a quick nod to Callira who was on the stairs, hurried to follow. A guard was holding Aeneas’s horse by the bridle.
“But why …?”
“The Hittites have sent a courier,” said Aeneas, arranging the saddle with a rough gesture. “They’ve swum the Scamander to reach the camp as quickly as possible. They’re nine days’ march away.”
“Nine days …”
“We’ve spent nine years shut up inside the walls,” said Aeneas bitterly. “And now we can’t even afford to wait nine days.”
He grabbed me by the waist and hoisted me into the saddle, then mounted behind me. Troy passed us at a rapid trot; quiet streets with people leaning from their windows to look at the great wound of the Scaean Gates, open again after being closed for nine years.
Aeneas against me was one single compact knot of tension; we did not speak as we passed through the gates and reached the plain with clouds of sand and earth thrown up by the hooves of our racing horse. A huge fire had been lit outside the gates, guarded by twenty men, and beyond a brief space reconquered by shadow I could make out the bivouacs of the camp. For a moment stars appeared above our heads and the two rivers that flanked the plain, before the fires reappeared and blotted out everything beyond their own pale field of light. A reddish glow against the perfect blue of the sky. Aeneas dismounted at the edge of the encampment and helped me down. Before I could get my bearings he was already leading me into the center of the camp. We passed through the mass of tents, far from the lights of the bivouac, and soon Aeneas was pushing me through the entrance to a tent no different from all the others, no larger or more beautiful.
“What does my father say …?” Hector looked up and saw me. First he looked astonished, then angry, and then with a couple of steps he was at my side. I stood still, uncertain of my reception. But in the weak penumbra of the oil lamp he took me in his arms and hugged me, and for a long moment nothing existed but the drumming of his heart against mine and his dusty hair in my eyes. Then we moved apart, but he didn’t release me.
He looked exhausted, as if he had lived through a hundred years in a single day. At last this was war; this was what he had wished for and searched for through all the long inglorious years of the siege. His face seemed to have developed another layer of skin. He had a wound on his right shoulder, but beyond that nothing but scratches, even if the shield propped on the ground had been damaged by new dents.
“You didn’t say goodbye before you went,” I said, but instead of the bitter reproach I had intended, all I could summon up was the tremor of tears. I suddenly felt ashamed, a fool in a place where I should never have been, as I looked at our huge shadows on the cloth wall, two human beings reduced to mere twisted hunchbacked shadows.
Hector said nothing but hugged me again, and still holding me made me sit down on a mat. A mat, a coverlet and his weapons; Hector’s tent was just like his room, and to one who had spent so much of her life chasing purple and gold, that now meant nothing. When he held me in his arms I wanted only to lose myself, to bury myself in him and never leave him, to be inside him like a second heart. I pulled back from him and gazed at him, stroking his face. “My love.”
The words were so simple, saying them came so naturally, and the quivering flame threw deep shadows in his eyes. He took my hand and kissed it. I studied his bent head and the powerful curve of his neck, passed my fingers through the loose hair tumbling down his back and smiled.
“Tired horse,” I sighed, winding his hair around my fingers and gently clearing it of dust and twigs. He did not object, and with his back to me I said softly, “Don’t go tomorrow.”
He stiffened, but did not speak.
“Don’t go,” I repeated. “Come back into the city. Cassandra has spoken, she says it’ll be tomorrow. That from tomorrow there can be no turning back.”
“The time for turning back has gone, Helen,” he said coldly. “Tomorrow, or the day after … I must go forward, until I find the road blocked by my own ashes.”
I dropped the hair I had tidied and let my hands fall on my lap. My useless hands. “Don’t you believe Cassandra?”
He turned. His expression was grim. “I believe her. But you more than anyone should know me well enough to realize that I can’t stop.”
There was nothing more to say. My hands moved over his face, his temples, his hair, and stroked them as if trying to learn them by heart, to be able to remember them forever in my skin.
“My love,” I repeated, saying farewell not only to him but to all those I had lost and found and consumed, up to this war and this eve of battle, on this silent starry night, at the same time opaque and sharp, out here on this plain.
Hector said no more, but I knew what was in his mind when his lips found mine. It was not a kiss, barely a caress.
He got to his feet, towering over me in the low tent, and held out his hand. I grasped his familiar rough palm and stood up, and he embraced me for the last time as if he still hoped somehow to put off the moment of my leaving, of my being swallowed up again in the darkness beyond the oasis of light that was the tent. We stole one more moment from the Fates, his skin and mine close together for a last fragment of time, then, without looking back, I pushed aside the flap of the tent and felt cold sand invade my sandals and caress my feet.
Aeneas was sitting on the ground outside, and when he saw me he got up and without asking questions showed me the way to his horse. When I looked back, Hector was standing at the entrance to the tent, dark and tall against the black interior surrounding him like a soft halo. I wanted to run and collapse like a falling tower into his arms, to throw myself on the ground and weep and howl and beg him to come home with me to the city walls and their illusory protection, to the monotony of our lost sunsets in the cold of the siege; but I did nothing. My bones full of lead, my heart heavy with iron in my veins, I turned away, tearing my soul up by the roots like a tree. He did not move, himself immobilized by that light and that moment, by that last heavy duty. Aeneas was waiting for me outside the cone of shadow, and his horse was ready. I mounted in silence, and when the horse moved I knew without looking that he had already gone back inside. We’re made of stone.
The return journey took a century yet passed in a split second; everything was far away and out of focus, yet at the same time sharp and strangely distinct, as if outlined by an inexperienced painter in black. We passed the fire and entered the Scaean Gates, the f
amiliar uphill streets ran by under the horse’s hooves, and it was not until we reached the courtyard that I realized I had never looked toward the fortifications and the Greeks on the other side of them. It was as if they had had no existence, though they too were part of the darkness and the silent black menace of the night. Aeneas took leave of me with a glance and a simple gesture, his horse already handed to a guard. Callira emerged from the shadows of the colonnade, her face full of mute questions. I shook my head to forestall her, and watched Aeneas pass through the gate, absolutely certain of the route he had to take in the bluish light, toward the hillside and up to its white temple, and the restless priestess who prophesied doom but no longer had the strength to lament it. Framed by a pale halo edged with an unwholesome iridescence, the moon was setting.
22
Troy woke at dawn with her gates open and the plain once more under Trojan control. A crowd was manning the bastions, men hanging like bunches of grapes from precarious ladders. Happy faces everywhere, preparing themselves for battle as if for a play they had already seen, its conclusion foregone. Standing aside, I watched the Trojans dismantle their camp, and the Greeks open the double doors of their own wall. Getting ready for battle as for a day at work, their movements marked with the unthinking repetition of a ritual learned by heart.
Cassandra was at my shoulder. “Watch my prophecies come true, Greek woman. Victory will be followed by defeat, and every defeat will be a new victory.”
The dust was agitated, down there on the plain, victory and defeat spiraling together in a confused dance.
*
The Trojans broke through the Greek defenses. We saw them charge at the double through the wide open gate in the wall; charge, and pass between the houses like the shadow of a storm, dividing and spreading in streams among the stone camp buildings, as far as the beach and the pale foaming edge of the sea. Ants, or better, wolves.
Memoirs of a Bitch Page 14