The Return From Troy

by Lindsay Clarke

  Polyxena could not prevent her teeth from chattering as she crouched beside her mother who sat nursing Andromache’s head in her lap. Beside them Cassandra whispered prophecies that the Trojans would prove more fortunate than their enemies. They had at least died in defence of their sacred homeland, while thousands of the barbarian invaders had perished far from their homes, and those who made it back to Argos would find a cruel fate waiting for them.

  ‘Agamemnon will see that he has taken death into his bed,’ Cassandra chanted. ‘Already the lioness couples with the goat. A blade glints in the bath-house. A torrent of blood flows there. I too shall be swept away on that red tide. But the son of Agamemnon shall bring a bloody end to Neoptolemus. He will leave his impious body dead beneath Apollo’s stone. As for that ingenious fiend Odysseus, Blue-haired Poseidon will keep him far from the home while others junket and riot in his hall. The Goddess will seize his heart. Hades will open his dark door to him. Death will crowd his house.’ But none of the women believed the mad girl any more than they could silence her. So they sat together under the portico, watching the sun come up and dreading what the day must bring.

  Exhausted from the efforts of the night, most of the Argive leaders were relaxing in the palace across the square. The first elation of victory had passed and the rush of wine to their heads brought, at that early hour, only a queasy sense of what they had achieved. Odysseus had wandered off alone somewhere. Apart from Menelaus, who still brooded in the mansion that Paris had built for Helen, the others were carousing together, but there were grumbles of dissent from Acamas and his brother Demophon when Neoptolemus claimed the right to take Polyxena for his own before the lots had been apportioned.

  Annoyed that even in this hour of triumph, discord should have broken out so quickly among his followers, Agamemnon stood uncertainly. He knew there was some justice in the complaint but he was reluctant to offend Neoptolemus who had shown a ferocity in the fight against the Ethiopians that had astounded older, battle-hardened men. Also he knew what fate lay in store for Polyxena if he acceded to this demand, and his thoughts had involuntarily darkened at the memory of what he had done to his own daughter Iphigenaia.

  Seeing his hesitation, Neoptolemus declared that the shade of his father had demanded in a dream that the girl who had betrayed him should be sacrificed on his tomb. ‘Does the High King not believe that the man who did so much to win this war should be accorded such justice? Would you deny my father’s shade?’

  Immediately Agamemnon made the sign to ward off the evil eye. A quarrel with Achilles had almost lost him this war once. He would not risk another with his angry ghost. ‘Take her,’ he said. ‘It is only just.’

  So Neoptolemus came to claim Polyxena in the early morning light. Again he summoned her out of the huddle of women. Again Hecuba rose to protect her youngest daughter. But the weary young warrior was in no mood to listen to her pleas and insults. ‘If you don’t want to feel the flat of my sword on your old bones,’ he snarled, ‘tell your daughter to show herself.’

  Polyxena rose from the place where she had been crouching. ‘I am here,’ she declared in a voice that shook as she spoke. ‘Achilles asked for me more gently. If you hope to emulate your father, you must learn to speak with something other than your sword.’

  ‘Come into the light,’ Neoptolemus answered. ‘Let me take a look at you.’

  Loosing the hand of Laodice, Polyxena stepped between the women huddled round her and stared without flinching at the youth. Being his senior by three years or more, she might, in other circumstances, have taunted him for parading in the suit of armour that had been made to fit his father’s broader shoulders. But she knew that her life stood in graver danger now than when she had met with Achilles in Apollo’s temple at Thymbra. Her face was flushed with fear. Her breath was drawn too quickly. When Neoptolemus smiled at the swift rise and fall of her recently budded breasts she glanced away.

  ‘I understand that my father sought to befriend you,’ he said. ‘Is that not so?’

  ‘Achilles asked to speak with me, yes.’

  ‘But it was you who made the first approach.’

  Nervously she whispered, ‘My father asked it of me.’ Polyxena’s gaze had been fixed on the ground beneath her. Now she looked up hopelessly into those cold eyes. ‘We thought it the only hope of having Hector’s body returned to us.’

  ‘And because my father had a noble heart he acceded to that hope, did he not?’

  Polyxena nodded and averted her eyes.

  ‘Yet that was not the last time you saw him?’

  Her arms were crossed at her breast. Now she was trembling so much that she could barely speak. ‘But it was Achilles who sought me out.’

  ‘Perhaps you had given him cause to do so?’

  ‘I swear not,’ she gasped. ‘The priest told me he had come looking for me many times. The thought of it frightened me. I didn’t understand what he wanted.’

  ‘But still you came.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you didn’t come alone. You told your treacherous brother Paris that Achilles was to be found unguarded at the temple of Apollo. You told him exactly when he would be there. You told him to bring his bow and kill my father in vengeance for the death of your brother Hector.’

  ‘That is not how it was!’ Polyxena cried.

  But Neoptolemus was not listening. He was remembering that Odysseus had told him how, in a quiet hour together, Achilles had confessed his tender feelings for Polyxena. Looking at the girl now — the tousled ringlets blowing about her face, the delicate hands at her shoulders, the shape of her slim thighs disclosed by the pull of the breeze at her shift — he thought he understood how this alluring combination of poise and vulnerability might have tugged at his father’s heart.

  It did so now, seditiously, at his own.

  Yet this girl had betrayed his father, whose shade cried out for vengeance.

  ‘And is not Thymbra under the protection of the god?’ he demanded. ‘Isn’t it a sacred place of truce where men from both sides — Argive and Trojan alike — were free to make their offerings without fear?’

  Seeing that her truth and his must forever lie far from each other’s reach, Polyxena lowered her head again and consigned herself to silence.

  Accusation gathered force in his voice. ‘But you and your brothers lacked all reverence for the god. Together you violated the sanctuary of Apollo’s temple. Your brothers were afraid to face my father in open combat like true men, so they set a trap for him. And you, daughter of Priam, were the willing bait in that trap.’

  In a low whisper Polyxena said, ‘I knew nothing of what they planned.’

  Neoptolemus snorted. ‘I think you’re lying to me — as you lied to my father before me. I think, daughter of Priam, that it’s time you were purified of lies.’

  He turned away from her and gestured to the two Myrmidons who stood at his back. The women who had listened with pent breath to their tense exchanges began to moan and whimper as the Myrmidons stepped forward to seize Polyxena by her thin arms.

  Swaying where she stood, Hecuba screeched, ‘Where are you taking her?’

  ‘To my father’s tomb,’ Neoptolemus answered coldly. ‘There is a last service she can perform for him there.’ Then all the women were wailing again as they watched Polyxena dragged off through the gritty wind blowing across the square, past the impassive effigy of the horse, towards the Scaean Gate.

  Walking at dawn through ransacked streets where only the dead were gathered, Odysseus disturbed vultures and pie-dogs already tugging at the silent piles of human flesh. They cowered at his approach or flapped away on verminous wings, peevishly watching as he stared at the horror of what had been done.

  During the course of the night a living city had been transformed into a vast necropolis. Its very air was charred and excremental. As though some swift, inexorable pestilence had struck out of the night sky, all its men folk had lain down in droves, their necks gaudy with
wounds, their entrails flowering in garlands from their bellies, their eyes gaping at the day. Here lay a man who might once have been a jolly butcher, now with his ribs split open like a side of beef. There, in a slovenly mess, crouched two twin boys — they could only recently have learned to speak — with their infant brains dashed out against a wall. And over there a youth sat propped against an almond tree, evidently puzzled by the broken blade of a sword that had been left protruding like a handle from his skull. And still, in the boughs of that tree, a linnet sang.

  When he came out into a small square strewn with bodies, Odysseus saw three men who had followed him to Troy from Dulichion. They were quenching their thirst at a fountain while another milked a nanny-goat into an upturned helmet clutched between his knees. Across the square a half-naked woman with blood splashed at her thighs sat weeping in the doorway of a house.

  The soldiers leapt to their feet at his approach, pressing knuckles to their brows as though expecting a reprimand. When Odysseus merely asked if he might share their water, he was offered goat’s milk but said that water was all he wanted. Before he could reach the fountain however, the weary men relaxed and began to congratulate him on the success of his ruse. Only a man out of the Ionian isles, they declared, could have been canny enough to dream up a scheme as clever as that of the wooden horse.

  ‘We shall have tales to tell when we get home, sir,’ lisped the oldest of them, a grey-headed man who had taken a scar across his mouth and lost half his teeth in the rout at the palisade much earlier that year.

  ‘Do you think there was ever a night of slaughter such as this?’ asked another.

  Odysseus shook his head, unspeaking.

  The man who had been milking the goat said, ‘There’s been times I’ve wondered whether I’d ever get to see my wife again, but thanks to you, sir, I expect to come home a rich man now.’

  The first man nodded, grinning. ‘It seems the gods were with us after all.’

  Around them, the bodies of the dead paid scant attention to these ordinary men, their murderers. And when Odysseus opened his mouth he found he could not speak. His hands were trembling again. When he lifted them to where water splashed in the basin of the fountain he realized that his arms were still stained with blood up to his elbows.

  Hurriedly he washed them clean, then cupped his hands at the spout and lifted them to his lips. Water splashed across his tongue like light. He stood swaying a moment, possessed by brief startling intimations of another life in which, with a frenzy entirely alien to his nature, he too had joined the massacre. He saw the Ethiopian mumbling in his blood; he saw the fat man’s eyes staring back at him.

  Then he returned to time. He heard the water splashing in the bowl and the woman sobbing still.

  Nodding at the soldiers with a weary, distracted smile, Odysseus walked out of the square towards the gate, making for the sea.

  At a windblown dune not far from the burial mound of Achilles he came to a halt and stood alone beside the sea, watching a flight of pelicans flag their way across the bay. Then his gaze shifted westwards with such concentration that his keen eyesight might have travelled out across the turbulent Aegean and over the mountains of Thessaly to focus on his small homestead island of Ithaca. He was thinking about his wife Penelope and his little son Telemachus, who must now be almost as old as Neoptolemus. With a fervour that amazed him, Odysseus heard himself praying that, unlike the son of Achilles, his own boy would never rejoice in a night of slaughter such as the one he had just endured.

  Hunched against the wind, he remembered the dream that had come to him on Ithaca — the furrows of his fields sown with salt, his infant son thrown down before, the ploughshare. Ten years, the sibyl at the Earth-mother’s shrine had said, ten wasted years must pass before Troy fell. And now Troy had fallen, destroyed by his own ingenuity, and those long years of war seemed waste indeed, for he had lost more in a single night than all the gold of Troy could redeem. He had done such things as would chill his wife’s blood should she ever come to hear of them.

  The white caps of the breakers rolling in off the Hellespont clashed against the shore. The wind banged about his ears. Odysseus swayed where he stood. His breathing was irregular, his tongue dry as a stone in his mouth. Shivering, he lifted a hand to his brow and found that his temples were rimed with sweat. His fingers trembled. He sensed that his nerves had begun at last to mutiny.

  He had been standing alone by the clamour of the sea for perhaps an hour when he saw the small party making its way towards the burial mound of Achilles. Two lightly armoured Myrmidons were pushing along the slight figure of a girl whose hair was winnowed by the breeze. Clutching a blanket about her shoulders, she trod the shingle gingerly in bare feet. Behind them walked a smallish warrior in a golden breastplate: Neoptolemus.

  Instantly Odysseus knew what the youth intended to do. In the same moment Neoptolemus recognized him and called out that Agamemnon had been asking for him. ‘The division of the spoils will take place soon,’ he said. ‘Let me do what I have to do, then we can walk back together.’

  Shielding his eyes against the glare from the sun, Odysseus said, ‘Is that Polyxena you have there?’

  ‘The whore that betrayed my father, yes. I mean to sacrifice her on his tomb. Come and stand witness.’

  ‘Have you questioned her?’ Odysseus demanded. ‘Have you heard her side of the story?’

  Neoptolemus frowned at his comrade across the space between them. ‘She claims she had no idea what Paris and Deiphobus were up to. But then she would say that, wouldn’t she?’

  ‘It may be the truth,’ Odysseus urged. ‘Think about it. You don’t want innocent blood on your hands. Your father was fond of her. He gave me reason to think that Polyxena was fond of him too.’

  ‘Such are the wiles of women. She’s tried the same game with me. The bitch is all temptation.’ Neoptolemus spat onto the sand. ‘Are you coming or not?’

  Odysseus looked across to where the girl stood desolate in the morning light, He found himself remembering Iphigenaia on the altar at Aulis — how she had been brought to her death on the pretence that she was to be married to Achilles. Then he was thinking of Deidameia, the mother of the baby who was to become Neoptolemus, and how bitterly she had grieved when Achilles left Skyros. And then about Briseis, over whom Achilles had quarrelled with Agamemnon in a dispute that almost wrecked the Argive cause. Whenever Achilles let his fierce radiance fall on a woman it seemed that disaster must ensue, as though he had inherited his mother’s glamour like a curse. Yet above all Odysseus was thinking about his own wife and what judgement she would pass on a man who stood by and watched a helpless girl dragged to her death by a half-demented boy.

  He looked up and saw Polyxena staring at him. Where he might have expected to find a desperate appeal in her eyes, he saw only the glazed terror of a trapped hare. The world was an immense snare, and she was caught in it, and struggle was of no avail.

  ‘Let her go, Neoptolemus,’ he shouted.

  When only a dubious silence came in reply, he added, ‘I’ll buy her from you if you like, out of my own share in the spoils.’

  ‘Fancy her yourself, do you?’

  Odysseus shook his head in pained incredulity. ‘I can’t believe that your father would want this.’

  ‘Oh but you’re wrong.’ Neoptolemus smiled. ‘He came to me in a dream. He told me that his shade would know no rest until the whore who betrayed him lay dead on his tomb.’

  Odysseus stared across at that fanatical young face, already aware that nothing he could say or do would ever penetrate such certainty. ‘But you never knew your father,’ he protested. ‘You were too young. How can you be sure it was him in your dream and not just some shadow of your own rage?’

  Neoptolemus merely jeered again. ‘And I thought you were the one who put his trust in dreams.’ With a flash of sunlight off his breastplate, he turned away, ordering his men to push the girl on towards the top of the great mound where his father’s
ashes lay buried in a golden urn, mingled with those of Achilles’ beloved friend Patroclus.

  Odysseus stood trembling as he watched them go. Having always prided himself on his ingenuity, his resourcefulness, his intelligence, he saw in those moments that he possessed no more than a callow understanding of the aptitude for evil lurking in human nature, doggedly awaiting its chance to thrive. And the failure was a failure of self-understanding also, for as the past night had just shown he was in no way exempt from this terrible propensity. Yet after ten years of war, he remained, it seemed, the merest novice in those ordeals of anguish through which deep wisdom might be learned; and if he had been so easily made Agamemnon’s dupe, it was only because for far too long he had duped himself, proclaiming things in which he had no belief, acting as he had no wish to act, capering before the world as a clever, but morally derelict, cipher of a man.

  Overwhelmed by a stultifying sense of his own futility, Odysseus knew that what he was about to see must be seared for ever on his mind, but he lacked the will even to avert his eyes. When the figures reached the summit of the mound, he saw the girl pushed roughly to the ground. He could hear nothing, for if words were spoken, the wind snatched them away. He saw Neoptolemus draw his sword, but before he could raise it to strike, Polyxena got to her feet. She stood with the wind wrapping her thin dress taut about her limbs, lifted her chin, and tore open the cloth at her chest so that her small breasts and neck were bared. Momentarily Neoptolemus seemed disconcerted by the act. Her pride, her refusal to be cowed, must have struck him as impertinence. To his strict mind there was something shameless in the way she flaunted before his sword. It was as if she was choosing death as her lover in preference to him. Then with a curt tilt of her head Polyxena swept her hair back and lengthened her neck before the blade. Her eyes remained open. Odysseus felt sure that she was looking precisely in his direction as the sword sliced through the air.