by Ben Bova
“Tell me, then.”
And there, in the moonlit night, with the cook fire slowly dying and the wind sighing in from the sea, while two armies waited for tomorrow’s battle, Apet told me of Helen and how she had come to Troy.
II
HELEN’S STORY
1
Men have said—Apet told me—that Helen is the most beautiful woman in the world. If that is true it is not her own doing, but the work of the gods, and must be accepted. Yet it has caused her nothing but grief.
Helen is the daughter of Tyndareos, King of Calydon, and Leda, his queen. Some say that mighty Zeus himself begat her, in human guise. Her mother never told her of it, but only smiled knowingly when Helen asked her what the other children meant by that.
Even as a baby—Apet went on—Helen was sweet and happy. Her laughter could make your heart soar. So beautiful. So delightful.
Years before, I had been captured by her father, Tyndareos, in a raid on my village in the Nile delta and taken to Calydon as a slave. I served the barbarians faithfully, and when Helen was born her mother made me her nursemaid.
Before she was twelve years old, word of Helen’s beauty spread so widely that princes from every kingdom in Achaia sought her hand in marriage. She was introduced to each of them as they visited her father’s palace to court her. Most of them were older men, twice Helen’s age, although not as old as her father or his brothers. Still, she held her breath and said not a word to these huge bearded men while they looked her over like butchers inspecting a heifer.
I stayed at her side always, and after a brief few moments with each visiting prince I was bade to take Helen back to the women’s quarters, where she could remove the stiff gold-worked corselet and gown that her father insisted she wear—and breathe again.
Helen tried to tell her mother of her fears, but her mother told her to be grateful that she was sought after by the richest and most powerful families in the land. It was only to me that she could confide her fears.
“Apet, they’re so old! And the way they look at me … it frightens me.”
“Come, come, my nursling,” I would say, soothing her. “The gods have graced you with great beauty, and men are dazzled by such.”
“Their eyes … they stare at me so.”
“Don’t be afraid of the princes, my sweetest. Learn to use your beauty to get them to bring you gifts and do your bidding.”
Gradually, while the royal visits continued, I explained how she must think like a woman and use a woman’s strengths to make the best of her life. She began to understand; she had seen the barnyard animals in rut and once, while her parents were away, had even gone out to the stables and watched a stallion mount a mare before I caught her and whisked her back inside the palace.
Among those barbarians women have no say in their own destinies; daughters are exhibited to prospective suitors, then bargained for and decided upon by their fathers or other male kin.
The suitors besieging her father’s house were many and powerful. Helen’s father favored Menalaos, King of Sparta, because his own ancestry was rooted there. When Menalaos came to the palace Helen was allowed to have dinner with him and his companions. While I watched from the kitchen doorway, she sat next to her father, quaking inside through every moment without me by her side. Menalaos was more than fifteen years older than she, already past thirty; flecks of gray showed in his hair. He jabbed at his food with a dagger and dripped wine into his beard. She was terrified of him.
Her father, Tyndareos, had different worries. He feared that whichever one of the besieging suitors he chose, the choice would antagonize all the others. They were hot-tempered men, powerful and quick to make war, each of those who sought Helen’s hand; they would make deadly enemies. Yet the longer her father hesitated, the more the eager princes pressed him for a decision. Helen waited in an agony of suspense, wishing that she could run far away.
I had told her about the splendor of Egypt since she’d been a baby, of the magnificent cities and great pyramids that had been erected before the beginning of time.
“I wish we could go to Egypt,” Helen said to me, more than once during those nerve-stretching days.
“Ah, there is a land where a beautiful princess is treated properly,” I told her. “There is a land of true civilization.”
She sighed and pined for glorious Egypt while her father struggled over his decision about her fate.
Then ever-shrewd Odysseos, her father’s friend, suggested a solution. Upon a visit to Calydon Odysseos listened to Tyndareos’ fears, then told him to make all the suitors take a solemn oath that they would accept his choice and support her betrothed, should the need ever arise. They all agreed soon enough, each man hoping to be the one favored above all the others, each fearful that winning Helen would also win the jealousy of all the other princes. Thus they swore their pledge.
As he had planned to do all along, Tyndareos wed Helen to the King of Sparta: Menalaos, of the house of Atreos, brother to mighty Agamemnon. It seemed a good match to her father, but Helen was not happy with it. And she feared the anger of Athene, for Helen had dedicated herself to Aphrodite, the goddess of love and beauty, and the omens told of Athene’s displeasure with her.
To doubly assure his safety, her father also wed Helen’s older sister, Clytemnestra, to Menalaos’ brother Agamemnon of Argos, King of liongated Mycenae. His house was thus doubly bound to the house of Atreos and the two most powerful kingdoms in Pelops.
Sparta was a crushing disappointment to Helen. She had dreamed of a well-built citadel, with many servants for the new queen, and a kind and loving husband. Instead, Menalaos’ house was like a cold, dreary stone dungeon; its floor was bare earth and the smoke from its hearth fire made your eyes sting. The serving people were dull, surly. Her husband and his noble kinfolk talked of nothing but hunting and war. She was a queen, yet she was expected to spin and weave and serve her lord without question. She was his possession, his chattel. Helen felt that even Aphrodite had abandoned her.
All that she knew of the arts of love was what I had told her.
“Your duty is to please your husband,” I instructed Helen on the day of her wedding in Sparta. “Your own plea sure is not so important as his.”
I knew Helen had heard tales of married women who had taken lovers. And of what happened to them when their husbands found out.
“Should I expect no plea sure at all from my husband?” she asked me tearfully.
I grasped her chin gently. “Light of my days, women are vessels for men’s passion, and we must be satisfied to please them. A woman’s happiness comes from the children she bears. Think of them when making love with your husband.”
Her wedding night was no surprise, then. While her husband drank and caroused with his male relatives and friends, I helped Helen out of her gold-embroidered wedding dress and into a shimmering nightgown that clung to her young body. When Menalaos lurched through the bedroom door, Helen flinched with terror, yet she dutifully stepped to the well-draped bed and waited with wide, fearful eyes for him to strip while I went to the next room and shut the heavy oaken door with troubled, trembling hands.
And listened.
More than half drunk from the feasting, Menalaos used her, took her virginity, then rolled over and fell asleep. No surprise, but still Helen felt bitterly dissatisfied.
2
Helen’s life in Sparta fell into a wearying, dull routine. Most of the time she was kept inside the citadel, like a royal captive, closely watched and guarded against the eyes of other men. Yet her husband allowed her to attend the feasts when important visitors came to the citadel. Menalaos would sit her at his side and grasp her wrist possessively. Thus she met ambassadors from Athens and Thebes and even far-off Crete. They all remarked wonderingly of her beauty.
“Am I not the most fortunate of men?” her husband would boast to his noble kinfolk and the visiting dignitaries, leering at Helen between cups of honey-sweetened wine. “Gaze upon my wif
e and see for yourselves how the gods have favored me.”
Yet when they were in bed together he barely spoke a word to her beyond the grunting of his clumsy, pawing passion. In truth, Helen had little to say to him, for whenever she did try to speak to him he either ignored her or commanded her to be silent. Helen fell into long, tearful bouts of desperation, seeing nothing in her life but dreary, meaningless years of misery.
“Be steadfast, my nursling,” I would tell her. “Soon enough you will have children to cheer your days.”
Yet she did not conceive, and I began to wonder if the gods had indeed marked her to be barren. Or was it Menalaos that the gods were punishing?
If I had not been there to comfort Helen, I fear she would have gone mad. She prayed to Aphrodite and to Hera, patroness of motherhood, that bearing Menalaos a child would change his attitude toward her. And her prayers were answered! She became pregnant at last. But when she gave birth, her baby was a daughter and Menalaos was furious.
“I want a son,” he snarled at her as she lay exhausted and sweaty in her labor bed.
He would not even look at their daughter. He ordered her taken from Helen and given to a wet nurse. When she tried to protest he sneered, “You can suckle me, instead.”
For days Helen begged him for her baby. Even when she was strong enough to get up from bed he refused to let her see her daughter. Then I discovered why, listening to the whispers of the serving women by the well in the citadel’s courtyard.
I rushed to Helen’s side, tears streaming from my eyes.
“Apet, what is it?” she asked.
I could not speak. Instead I raked my cheeks with my fingernails and flung myself on the stones of the hearth.
Helen dropped to her knees beside me, her whole body trembling. “Apet, what is wrong?”
I could only utter a strangled groan.
And she knew. “My baby!”
“Dead,” I choked out. “Left on the mountaintop for the wolves and crows.”
Helen screamed and tore her hair. The two of us wept uncontrollably, huddled together at the hearth, until long after the sun went down and the chill of night filled the bedchamber.
Menalaos did not come to her that night. Nor the next. When at last he did Helen stood by their bed fully dressed as I hid behind the halfshut door to her dressing closet with a dagger in my hand, ready to kill her husband if he struck her.
“Where is my daughter?” Helen demanded of Menalaos.
“She was sickly,” he said, avoiding her eyes. “Too weak to live.”
“Where is my daughter?” she repeated.
“I want a son.”
“Then go make a bastard with one of your serving wenches,” she said coldly. She seemed to be a statue of ice, showing no fear, no emotion what ever except hatred as hard as stone. Go ahead and strike me, she challenged him wordlessly. Beat me senseless. It makes no difference.
Menalaos raised his hand and took half a step toward her, then stopped. I gripped my dagger hard and held it at the ready. Then his shoulders slumped. Saying nothing, Menalaos turned about and left the bedchamber. I stepped into the room, the dagger still in my hand.
“Put that away,” Helen commanded me. “It won’t be needed.”
So she lived as a dutiful wife while Menalaos spent most of his days hunting with his companions and most of his evenings drinking with them. He visited Helen’s bedchamber a few times; each time she rebuffed him. Often the dog raised his hand to hit her, but she stood before him without flinching.
“I am not a helpless infant,” she said. “If you strike me I will return to my father and his brothers.”
He glowered at her. “You will remain here in Sparta! You are my wife.”
“Yes,” she said. “And the mother of your daughter.”
He fled from her room.
As the months dragged on the servants gossiped about the slaves he slept with instead of his wife. Helen cared not. Her life was ruined, what did it matter what her husband did or how the servants prattled? There were rumors of bastard babies; always daughters. I told Helen that Hathor and mighty Isis had put a curse on Menalaos for murdering her baby.
“He will never have a son,” I whispered to her, my eyes burning like coals.
“How can you be sure?” she asked me.
“I have invoked the power of the goddess,” I told her. “He will never father a son.”
“Perhaps,” she said. “But if he does, he will want to marry the mother and make his son a legitimate prince.”
I shook my head. “To do that he will have to kill you.”
“Yes,” she answered, and I realized the truth of it as she spoke. My eyes went wide. Helen understood the fate that lay in store for her better than I did.
For the first time in my life I felt fear for my sweet one, like a chill wave of sickness rising within me.
“If ever Menalaos has a son,” she said to me numbly, “our days are numbered.”
“Your father …”
“My father will never know,” she said, seeing the reality of it. “Menalaos will tell him that I died of a fever, or some such.”
“I will slay the dog first,” I growled.
Helen put her hand on my shoulder. “No, Apet. No. This life is not so lovely that I would cling to it.”
I felt shocked. “Don’t speak like that, my nursling! Don’t dwell on death!”
“Why not? What have I to live for?”
“The gods will protect you,” I promised. “The old goddess, she who shaped the world even before your Hera and Aphrodite came to be …”
“But what of Athene?” Helen asked in a low, sad voice. “She is the one goddess that Menalaos honors, the warrior goddess who had been jealous of me since my birth. She would be glad to see me dead and in Hades.”
So with ever-mounting dread we lived the cold days and long, empty nights in dismal, gloomy Sparta, waiting for the inevitable day when Menalaos came to Helen with a son and a new wife and a sword thrust for her throat.
Then came a visitor to her husband’s court: Alexandros, known as Paris, a prince of mighty Troy, come to collect the annual tribute that all the Achaian kingdoms paid to Priam, the Trojan king.
3
Helen would never have met Paris, would not even have seen him, had not her husband been called away to Crete to attend the funeral of Catreos, his grandfather. Even so, she was kept well away from the visitor. Her husband’s kinsmen guarded her closely.
But I made it my business to see this Trojan prince with my own eyes. No one paid any attention to another serving woman in the great hall where the men took their meals. I slipped in with the other servants and took a good look at this prince of Troy. He was young, with a dazzling smile and eyes that gleamed like stars in the sky.
I rushed to tell Helen of him. “He looks like a godling, my precious: as handsome as Apollo, by the gods.”
The maidservants chattered of little else except Paris’ splendid appearance, his flashing smile and ready wit. Every serving girl in the palace dreamed of sharing his bed, and several of them claimed that they did.
“You must meet this royal visitor,” I told Helen.
“How can I?” she asked, gazing out the window of her chamber into the dung-dotted courtyard below. “I am a prisoner in this citadel of stone.”
“You are the queen, and your husband is away,” said I. “Your husband’s kinsmen are duty-bound to obey you.”
She turned and stared at me. “Do you think I could?” she wondered aloud. “Would it be possible?”
“You are the queen, are you not? Use your power, my lamb. Use your beauty to dazzle this prince of Troy.”
“What are you saying, Apet?”
I smiled at my lovely one. “Troy is a fine, noble city. And it is far from Sparta.”
It was a fantasy, a dream. We both knew that. Yet the idea of leaving Sparta, leaving this hopeless dismal life, seemed to lift the misery that had engulfed Helen, filled her with eager ex
pectation.
“At the very least, my heart’s love,” I said, “you will know a few hours of civilized conversation and gracious charm. Is that not worth the frowns of your husband’s kinsmen?”
“Yes!” she answered. “Yes, it is!”
Thus Helen became determined to at least cast her eyes on this charming visitor, desperate for some way to break the monotony of life in wretched Sparta. I learned from the servants that Paris went riding every morning. A woman did not ride in Sparta, not even the queen was allowed to. But I arranged to have Helen walking by the stables—well escorted, of course, by myself and a handful of young, chattering Spartan ladies—as noble Paris returned from his morning’s canter.
He and six of his Trojan guards rode into the stable grounds, past the open gate, their horses neighing and stamping up dust from the bare earth. The horses were well-lathered, I saw. Paris must have ridden them hard. I saw Helen shiver despite the warm morning sunlight. She told me later that at that instant Aphrodite sent a vision into her mind of what it would be like to have him riding her, to bear his weight upon her body.
Standing at the far end of the dusty ground that fronted the stables, with me close beside her, Helen forgot the smells of the horses and dung, forgot the stares of the stable hands at the sight of their queen, forgot even the cooing and whispering of her escorting ladies. All at the sight of Paris, prince of Troy.
He was stunning. Young, clean-shaven, with dark eyes that sparkled at Helen as soon as he caught sight of her. His midnight-black hair had been tousled carelessly by the wind. His shoulders and torso seemed slim, yet his legs, bare below the hem of his tunic, were strong and graceful. The tunic itself was a work of art, beautifully embroidered and shaped to his form.
He slid off the sweaty horse and walked straight to Helen, ignoring the grooms and his own men who had ridden with him and were now dismounting.