Sinon didn’t much fancy the honour of being the sacrificial goat, so he fucked off and hid in the marshes. He was found and given the choice to bleat his blood out on a stone, as planned, or to go undercover and trick the Trojans into believing that we’d all finally just got up and fucked off. It was a dangerous game to play, but it gave him the chance to stay alive.
Beaten and bruised, caked in filth and dried blood, fettered up to his balls and smeared with faeces, he was left behind on the shore when we sailed away – no further off than Tenedos, a couple of hours’ sailing time on a good night. With the fleet tucked well into the creeks and coves and out of sight, Sinon’s mission was to convince the blackheads that he was a deserter and had escaped execution.
They didn’t take too much convincing – we’d done a good job on him. He was found by some shepherds, who swallowed his story and took him into Troy to be cleaned up and questioned. Priam drank it all in, every word. It was obvious anyway, wasn’t it? We’d burned our camp, and why the fuck would we fire the huts if we’d be needing them again? And we didn’t. Any idiot could see that. We’d left Troy – and without Helen. We’d had enough. We’d thrown in the sponge. The war would become a byword for a classic shambles, Greece’s greatest catastrophe and cock-up of all time. Sinon was simply confirming what their eyes told them was true, and, instead of slitting his throat, they crowned him with laurels – after they’d scraped the shit off him. The partying got under way, much jubilation. There would be a bunch of sore heads come dawn. And some poor cunts with no heads at all. What cures a Trojan headache? A Greek axe.
But let Penelope tell it her way. Truth can be too trite, too simple a trick for legend to accept: a fake withdrawal and a spy covered in shit, followed by a surprise attack when the enemy was off his guard, not to say blind fucking drunk. Banal? That’s what made it work, the simplicity, the unoriginality, the traitor within the gates, the stuff of annals, old in story. But not the stuff of myth. And after such a long and bloody struggle, mass slaughter and men turned into smoke, maybe you do need something else, something other than just a cheap swindle, without a drop of drama, or glamour. What you want is something big and unusual and memorable. What you want is the Trojan Horse.
There it stands in the web for all time, towering before the Scaean Gate, a lofty stallion, all in polished pine, purple, gilded, glorious, its amber eyes installed in emerald, sea-green, incorruptible, its white ivory teeth twinkling in the dawn. Behold the golden bit and bejewelled bridle, the flaming reins, the flowing tail twisted with gold, with bright silk ribbons richly hung, and the hooves all mounted with polished tortoise shell. All this the astonished eye can see.
What no eye can see is the secret trapdoor, the belly than can open like a woman’s and bear men. What you see is what the Trojans themselves saw, a splendid steed and a magnificently crafted tribute to the horse-taming tribe, the people of Troy, traders in horses, an acknowledgement of their special mastery and eulogy to the equestrian art, even an apology, if you like, for the death of Hector, tamer of horses – and for the long war of occupation. A parting gift.
A deadly gift. Into the belly of the horse, hidden in the hollow body, crept nine Greek soldiers along with myself: Anticlus, followed by Epeius, the shipwright and builder of the horse, Thrasymedes, son of Nestor, Eumelus, Demophon and Aeamas, sons of Theseus, Little Ajax, Teucer, brother of Big Ajax, dead over the arms matter – and of course Menelaus, eager to be first on the scene, ready to slit his wife’s white throat.
This is the litter of nine to be delivered by old Odysseus, Odysseus of the many wiles, master of stratagems. The horse will give birth, Sinon will kindle a fire on the grave of Achilles, the fleet will return, the traitor’s hand will slide the bolt, and the city will fall. This is the litter of nine that will suck the dear life of Troy away.
Impossible, surely impossible. Look, the plains of Troy lie empty and deserted. Except for the horse, they haven’t left a straw. And on the wide sea not a sail in sight. It’s over, the long siege is over, the war is ended. Troy held out after all. The sacrifices were not in vain.
And yet. And yet . . .
When you run out of reasons that explain human stupidity, you can always blame the gods. But shifting the scene to Olympus doesn’t change the truth. The horse wasn’t fated to be taken into Troy. It didn’t have to be. Men are masters of their fates. There’s always a choice. And there’s always a right choice and a wrong choice. The Trojans made the wrong choice. Why?
Why? You could call it collective suicide. Nations do that all the time, committing suicide, pursuing policies contrary to self-interest. It’s written into a national psyche. Given time the nation will destroy itself. It will wage a futile war. It will show weakness when attacked. It will lose its borders, let them grow soft and porous. It will be taken over by foreigners. Its administrators will sink into gross incompetence, betraying the nation. That is the Trojan Horse. And bringing the horse inside the walls was the first step to self-slaughter. The leaders opted to pursue the policy that was contrary to the welfare of the country.
Was there an alternative? No, there was not an alternative; there were many alternatives, all sorts of options. Burn it, dismantle it, drag it out to sea, leave it to stand there on its four legs and rot in the rain, blister in the sun, a memorial to war, a monument to folly.
All of which they debate before bringing the horse within the gates, rolled in on its magnificent wheels. The Greeks have thought of everything, made it easy for them. Yet even now, now that it’s inside, even now there are choices left to them. Consecrate it to Athene? Hurl it back down from the walls? Chop it into kindling? Raze it to the ground? Yes, raze it, torch it! The hidden contingent starts to sweat, the smell of fear fills the darkened space, swells the horse’s belly. Suddenly the wooden womb is no longer safe. The men whisper about whether to reveal themselves, throw themselves on the mercy of the enemy. Mercy? What mercy? They know well enough there will be no mercy, not for men whose mission was to infiltrate and kill. But death by sword or spear is better than being burned alive. Better to die like a soldier, then. Crisis inside the horse . . . Until the bonfire idea is discounted and the men breathe again.
But the crisis isn’t over. Helen now appears on the scene. She wheedled out the truth about the wooden-horse scheme at the time of my Palladium mission, and now she plays her double game, her old favourite. Round and round the horse she walks, imitating the voices of the soldiers’ various wives, urging the men to show themselves.
But there’s nobody in there, the people say, laughing at her antics.
It doesn’t matter. If there are men in there and she teases them out and gets them killed, she won’t have to face the wrath of Menelaus, who’ll be dead. And if the horse is empty, so far so good, she survives another day. But the Greeks inside are suffering now, anguished, overcome by the familiar sounds of their wives’ accents. The impersonation stabs them to the heart. They are sick for home.
Three times she completes her circuit of the stallion, stroking its flanks, grasping the great phallus Penelope put on it for the purpose, rubbing it slowly up and down, bringing her lips to it, putting it into her mouth, sliding her tongue along its length, making the mob cackle and roar, getting them on her side, cooing all the while to the spellbound men that if only they come out they’ll get the same treatment. The wives have waited so long for this moment. The people laugh all the harder. Helen is human after all, if over-fond of cock. She is a fun princess. And it’s good to be still alive and laughing in the good old city of Troy, with the Greeks gone and Helen forgiven.
Euphoria.
Too much for Anticlus, though. He is about to call out when I clap one hand over his mouth and chin and the other over his throat. He struggles briefly. I crack the neck and he goes limp in my lap. The small sounds he makes are soaked up by the laughter. We sit it out. And eventually Helen ceases her cooing.
Relief.
Short-lived. Enter Cassandra, priestess of cat
astrophe. She strikes the horse with her staff, demonstrating its hollowness. She utters auguries about the hollowness of Greek gifts and the Trojan triumph. An untrue offering, a hollow victory. But Cassandra is fated never to be believed, and the citizens of Troy have had more than enough of doom and gloom. It sits ill with their present mood. They want cheer and good hearing, not Cassandra’s spectral wailing. She is shouted down.
But it’s not over yet. Enter now, on Cassandra’s side, Laocoön. As the priest of Apollo, he supports her prophecies. The horse, he declares, is hollow in all senses and should be destroyed for the false thing that it is. The crowd is less inclined to laugh at the venerable priest.
‘This horse,’ he says, ‘has a bad pedigree. Let me tell you why.’
The people are quiet now. His story is an intriguing one. His talk is authoritative, enthralling. Minos, King of Crete, had a wife, Pasiphaë, who wanted more than he could give her sexually. She craved satisfaction, and in the end she wanted it from a bull, excited one day by the sight of its member, a red gleaming poker sticking from its belly. This poker was adapted to the fires of her hot lust. So to get close to the bull, she hid herself inside a wooden cow, and the bull entered her and she uttered a deep long sigh, her lust at last slaked. But the hybrid offspring of that unnatural coupling was the half-man half-bull creature that fed on human flesh, none other than the terrible Minotaur. A forbidden union, a monstrous outcome, concealment, deception, a wooden replica, bringing death and terror.
‘And this horse is made in the same mould and must be destroyed before it destroys Troy.’
One more time we sweat, thinking that surely now the game is up. And it surely would be, except for one final entry: the sea-snakes.
These marine monsters would have some distance to travel overland, but Penelope shows them coming straight out of the salt sea, with the spume shaken from them like flakes of white fire. They seize the old priest and both his sons who have run to his side to defend him. The terrified people run back, turning to stand and watch from a safe distance as all three, caught in the deadly coils, are slowly strangled. The bones crack, the muscles burst, sinews snap, the life is brutally crushed out of them, and the breathless bodies lie mangled in front of the horse, the gods’ displeasure made obvious to all. The horse is no deception; it was Laocoön who spoke false. Apollo sits powerless on the clouds, Athene triumphs, and the monsters slither back into the sea, back to Poseidon who sent them. The horse is hung with garlands. The city is doomed.
Another good story and, as always, with a speck of truth. There were snakes all right; there are always snakes. But the snakes that killed the Trojan priest were Greek ones, the snakes I’d slipped through the gates already, snakes in disguise. They were the usual suspects, speakers of northern Anatolian, agitators and spies. They roused up the rabble against Laocoön and had him removed under so-called official escort, to a place where he would be persuaded to see the error of his ways and let the people have their way. When your head is filled with political error, an axe is the best persuader. Or a good strong pair of hands in the case of this troublesome priest. He was strangled, certainly. Only the stranglers didn’t come out of the sea, they were much closer to hand. After that the agents whipped up the celebrations, kept the mood buoyant, the drink flowing.
That was the point at which Aeneas left town. Nothing left to keep him, nothing to stay on for, not in a city that mocks its priestesses and murders its priests. The spies reported that he’d led a small unit of soldiers south of the city to his own territory in the Dardanian valley, under Mount Ida, and so avoided the onslaught that he knew was to come.
A rat from a sinking ship? A realist rat. And Penelope gave him glory. She made him stay on and fight his way out from where the action was hottest, carrying his father, old Anchises, on his back, leading his family to safety, away from the flames of burning Troy that licked the stars.
Night holds its breath. The city lies drunk asleep under the sky, oblivious to the sea’s huge hush. Sinon lights his beacon on Achilles’ tomb. Helen, who has gone home with Deiphobus, waits until he is asleep then lights a lamp and sets it in her window to guide Menelaus to her side if and when the time comes.
The lookouts on Tenedos see the lights in the sky, more lovely than moonlight. The Greek fleet steals back across the dark waters, aiming to reach the beaches well before moonrise.
As soon as the moon rises, visible through a chink, Epeius slides back the bolt in the belly; the trapdoor opens, and the horse litters the deadly offspring, the lethal few, chosen to slit the throats of the snoring sentinels and open the gates to the Greeks.
Night and negligence – great allies, especially after the enemy’s drunken day-long celebrations. It doesn’t take long to dispatch the guards, unseam the city. The beacon dowses the stars, the torches flare over the dead sentries, their gashed throats glittering, flickering, the pale face of Artemis turning the dark face of ocean to gold, the waiting sails etched black on the beaches against the serene backdrop of sea and sky – a scene of infinite beauty and calm.
All so easy, really, once the horse is inside the gates, simply to lie and wait for night and for Sinon’s signal. Two hours from Tenedos, another two for the five-mile march overland to the city walls. Then they slip from the belly, slit the throats, slide the bolts and the troops pour in. Down goes Troy. The broad straits of Sigeum reflect the flames. The Greeks sack the city and win the war, beating the enemy with their own best weapon, the horse.
Except of course that there was no fucking horse – unless you call an abandoned siege-tower a horse, the one we left outside the walls the day we took out Paris. A wooden horse? That’s a fucking laugh. If there had been a horse, you wouldn’t have caught me inside it. The chances of being rumbled – too high by half. A grand stratagem for the web. But not for war. No, we did it the old way, the tried way. Get your man inside, get him to spin his yarn, and if they buy it, they’re fucked. No glamour in that. The blackheads bought it, and it was all over: nothing left to do but the sack – and all the usual slaughter.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Odysseus, sacker of cities, tell it as you saw it, old man, but tell it quickly. All sackings are much the same, Troy like any other, except for the easy entry. The fleet stole back beneath the blanket of the dark, the first soldiers arrived at the open gates and stormed through, making for the citadel, killing as they went. Black night was ripped open, silvery with the screams of women and their children.
Children falling from the walls, tumbled onto spears, crushed underfoot like rotten apples, women’s thighs parted savagely, wives and daughters raped in their rooms, in the streets, in open doorways, wherever they were found, and the old and bedridden slaughtered where they lay, waiting for the swords. Down from the citadel came the prizes, the princesses, dragged off to the hell of their new lives, the loom, the bed, the well, sexual slavery, to be spat on by foreign women and tormented by their brats, to eke out a miserable old age in an alien place. For them, only suicide could end the only end to war.
Some of the Trojan women did kill themselves first, as some women always do, preferring to escape the humiliation. But they were still raped. When soldiers are on the rampage after a long war, no woman is too old to be raped. Or too young. Or too pregnant. Or too ugly. Or too dead. Some were raped repeatedly, squad-raped, and some were buggered till they bled and sometimes died.
What else to expect? Many soldiers had never seen their own children, born to them in their long absence. They had watched their comrades die, one after another, with no wives’ tender hands to give them their obsequies. In hundreds of Greek homes, widows died unhusbanded and old men were left childless, sitting in the shadows. Or their sons came home too late from the war to see their fathers buried. Soldiers who have suffered want their enemies to suffer, and rape is a better revenge than killing because it’s extended. You kill your man and it’s over, the gore goes cold, congeals. But you part the legs of his widow, his daughters, as often as you
are inclined, taking your revenge slowly, over and over, slaking a double lust, desire and anger. Rape outlasts war. It can go on for the rest of your life.
After all, they raped your queen, took her from her home – and now you rape their women, a fair exchange for fair Helen. Anything wrong with that? And just for good measure you fuck them up the arse, because they fucked up your life, and your family’s lives. All’s fair in love and war, and rape is always there, the eternal weapon, wherever there are wars, wherever there are men. All is excused, all are culpable.
Raping their way through the city, the soldiers reached the citadel. One of the contingents was led by Achilles’ son, Neoptolemus, eager to get revenge for his famous father, though for my money he was an opportunist. We burst into the inner citadel with him, along with Little Ajax and Menelaus and their men. Priam and Hecuba were clutching the altar of Zeus with their son Polites. Other than Aeneas, who’d already exited the theatre of war, he was about the only son left to them now. Their arms were wrapped around Andromache and Astynax, their grandson, who was also with his nurse. Cassandra was apart from them at the altar of Athene. Helen was nowhere to be seen.
Neoptolemus went straight into action, hurling his javelin at the Zeus-altar group. Polites took the spear in the chest. Neoptolemus grabbed him by the hair and hacked off his head, throwing it over his shoulder. It rolled all the way to the palace doors. Hecuba screamed and ran at him.
‘You savage bastard! You’re a disgrace to your father! At least Achilles gave us Hector’s body back because he remembered his own father!’
‘Shut your mouth, you old hag!’
‘You’ll have to shut it! Achilles? You don’t even belong to him, you young cunt! Some fuckpig lay with your mother!’
‘I’ll fucking shut you up myself!’
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