by David Malouf
Here for eleven nights another man has been wrestling with dark thoughts as he lies sleepless on his couch – but sleepless in his case, like so much else in his life, is a manner of speaking. It is what he feels is proper to his grief.
In fact he has slept, but so fitfully, picking his way past eddies of murky flame, and corpses heaped in piles round fallen archways or crammed into wells, that when he wakes it is to a deeper exhaustion.
The grief that racks him is not only for his son Hector. It is also for a kingdom ravaged and threatened with extinction, for his wife, Hecuba, and the many sons and daughters and their children who stand under his weak protection; and for Troy, once a place of refinement and of ceremonies pleasing to the gods, now, in the waking dreams that night after night trouble his rest, a burnt-out shell, whose citizens – though they believe themselves quietly asleep and safe in their beds – are the corpses he moves among: headless, limbless, savagely hacked, hovered about by ghostly exhalations and the fires of the dead. Flies cluster at their nostrils and the corners of their eyes. Dogs lick up the spatter of their brains, gnaw at their shoulder-bones and skulls and on the small bones of their feet. Above, among towering smoke trails, birds of prey hang waiting for the dogs to be done.
Priam groans, and the chamber servant on his cot at the entrance starts awake. ‘No, no,’ he calls, but weakly. ‘It is nothing. There’s nothing I need.’
The servant settles. The room falls still.
But something now is different. The air, as in the wake of some other, less physical disturbance, shimmers with a teasing iridescence.
Priam comes to attention. He knows from long experience what is expected of him. Stays ready but still.
Often, in the lapse of light in the chamber where he sits nodding, or in a leisure hour beside the fishpond in his garden, one or other of the gods will materialise, jelly-like, out of the radiant vacancy. An old, dreamlike passivity in him that he no longer finds it necessary to resist will dissolve the boundary between what is solid and tangible in the world around him – mulberry leaves afloat on their shadows, the knobbly extrusions on the trunk of a pine – and the weightless medium in which his consciousness is adrift, where the gods, in their bodily presence, have the same consistency as his thoughts.
Two of his children, his daughter Cassandra and the high priest Helenus, have inherited his powers, but in a form that sets a question against them. For all his reverence – he might say as a necessary part of it – he is wary in his dealings with the gods, who do not always act openly, or so he has discovered. He treads lightly in their presence.
Cassandra, enraptured and pure, has none of his pious trepidation. Poor child! Her brothers taunt her without mercy, seeing in this half-crazed mystic and self-proclaimed bride of Apollo a girl who has always claimed too much for herself, a practised attention-seeker – and Priam is inclined to agree, but is too fond of the child to speak openly against her. Intoxicated, overwrought, in service to a deity who takes her physically, or so she believes, in a swathe of flame, she alarms her father with the hot thoughts her god has breathed into her mouth, some of which, however terrible he finds them, he cannot wholly dismiss.
Helenus, by contrast, is Apollo’s consecrated priest. What exists quite naturally in Priam as an aspect of daily being, and in Cassandra as self-induced hysteria, has in Helenus taken a sleek professional form. Austere and commanding but entirely conventional, he is a man, Priam feels, who is too comfortable in the flesh.
Only in Priam has what is both a blessing and an awful responsibility remained close to the source. His nature is open at any moment to presences in the air around him that, when they settle out and take a bodily form, have the names of gods.
So it is now. Seated on the edge of his couch, what Priam catches out of the corner of his eye is the hem of a vanishing garment, and on the air the last breath of a message he has now to fix his mind on and recall.
He is obliged, in his role as king, to think of the king’s sacred body, this brief six feet of earth he moves and breathes in – aches and sneezes and all – as at once a body like any other and an abstract of the lands he represents, their living map.
Holding in his head all the roads that lead out to the distant parts of his kingdom, he feels them at times as ribbons tied at the centre of him, for the most part loose but sometimes stretched taut and pulling a little, according to what is occurring out there – events that his body is aware of as a dim foreboding long before the last in a relay of messengers, who for days have been running down dusty roads, bursts in to deliver it as news.
He has, two or three times during his reign, gone with a train of companions on a progress through his far-flung territories. To show himself, and to see a little of what it is out there that he represents. But his more usual role is to stand still at the centre, both actual and symbolic in the same breath, and to experience those dual states quite naturally as one.
As now, when from high up in the coffered ceiling of his chamber he catches an echo of what in other circumstances might be words.
After eleven days of watching and silent prayer, in which no food and not a drop of wine has passed his lips, a response!
His son Hector had fallen before his eyes. From a bastion at the highest point of the city walls he had looked on helpless as Achilles, working quickly, like a man under instruction from his daemon or following the contours of a dream, dragged the corpse to his car, secured it, knot after knot, to the axle-tree, and hauled it off through the tumbling dust.
Half-mad with grief he had broken from the scene and rushed down to the Scaean Gates – meaning to do what? he hardly knew. And when Pammon and Helenus caught up with him and drew him back, had sunk down in the dirt and straw of the public street, and with howls that in their pain and desolation must have seemed bearlike fouled his head with excrement, that filth his crown – his only crown now as the gods clearly intended, so that when they looked down, those high ones, they would see with no possibility of disguise what they had accomplished: this ancient doll they had set up, and for so long prized and flattered, reduced once more to what he had been when they first reached down and plucked him out, an abandoned child, all grimed and stinking; a child now with seventy years on his back, and all that lies between, the extravagant pageant of his days as Priam, King of Troy, a mockery as they had all along intended.
‘No, Priam, you are wrong.’
He starts, and when he turns and looks his eyes dazzle.
Seated close by him on the couch is the goddess Iris. She is smiling. Indulgently, he thinks. The soft light she appears in has a calming effect, and his heart opens to what she whispers in his ear.
‘Not a mockery, my friend, but the way things are. Not the way they must be, but the way they have turned out. In a world that is also subject to chance.’
‘Chance?’
He has spoken the word aloud. Again the servant stirs. Priam turns quickly to the place, afraid that if the fellow wakes and calls, the dreamlike spell that is on him may be broken.
And in fact, when he turns back, though her words continue to drop directly into his thoughts, the goddess is gone. Only the last of her shining is on the room, and he wonders – he is by nature doubtful – if even this is only an after-effect of his waking.
But where else could such a dangerous suggestion come from if not from an immortal? One of those who are free to raise blasphemous questions, because in being just that, immortal, they will never be subject to what might follow from the answer.
Chance?
Bewildered, but also strangely excited, he sets his feet to the pavement and feels about for his slippers.
His mind is as clear now as if he had slept for the whole of these eleven days and nights and woken entirely restored, his spirits quickened and lightly expanding in him.
He sits very still, his shoulders in the spare frame a little sunken; and the picture that forms before him is of himself seated just as he is here, but in full sunlight
on the crossbench of a cart. A plain wooden cart, of the kind that workmen use for carrying firewood or hay, and drawn by two coal-black mules.
He himself is dressed in a plain white robe without ornament. No jewelled amulet at his breast. No golden armbands or any other form of royal insignia.
On the bench beside him the driver of the cart is a man, not so old as himself but not young either. A bull-shouldered fellow he has never seen before, in an ungirdled robe of homespun. A bearded, shaggy-headed fellow, rough but not fearsome.
Behind them, the bed of the wagon is covered with a wicker canopy, and something there is shining out from under a plain white cover. Gold or bronze it must be. It is pouring out light.
But he knows what it is – no need to lift a corner of the cloth and look beneath.
Quickly he rises, and passing the servant, who this time does not stir, swings open the door to his chamber and begins down the corridor. ‘Hecuba,’ he mutters. His blood is racing. This good news is for Hecuba, though he fears already – his doubting nature again – what her response will be when she hears his plan.
Outside, the corridor is dark, save for braziers set at easy arm’s reach along the wall and extending at intervals to the distant portal. The effect is of a black flood that has risen above head height, thick, solemn, lapping at the flickering redness of the upper walls, so that stepping out into it, what he feels is an unaccustomed lack of ease – he for whose convenience everything here is arranged by the conscientious forethought of stewards and the labour of a hundred slaves.
Here and there, as he passes, the faces of servants who sit backs to the wall, at this or that chamber entrance, loom up in the dark. Startled to see him at this hour and unattended, they stir and mutter the usual courtesies, but he is gone before they can stumble to their feet.
Yes, yes, he thinks, all this I know is unprecedented.
But so is his plan. This plunging at near dawn down a deserted corridor is just the beginning. He will get used to the unaccustomed. It is what he is after.
He feels bold now, defiant. Sure of his decision.
If he is to face Hecuba and prevail, he has to be.
He finds her already risen and sitting, very erect, on the day bed in her sitting room. A cruse lamp is burning at the top of a tall copper stand. At her feet a pot of embers – she suffers from the cold – throws out a feeble warmth.
She too has not slept. Her hair is awry – that is what he sees first. But as soon as she catches sight of him, with her old pride in her beauty, and the wish as always to appear at her best before him, her hand, in a gesture that like everything she does is precise, controlled, with its own practical elegance, goes to the bodkin that holds it, and in a moment all is restored.
He watches, says nothing. Moved again by the tenderness they have so long shared, he seats himself beside her and takes her hand. It is no longer white now but veined and mottled like his own with liver-coloured spots, the flesh between the fine bones, which his fingertips gently feel for, puckered and slack. He raises it to his lips, and she casts a piteous look upon him. Her eyelids are swollen with tears.
‘Hecuba. My dear,’ he whispers, and she allows herself, almost girlishly, to be held and comforted.
They sit a moment, holding one another like children. The lamp flickers. She weeps. When her tears have come to an end, and she has once again taken control of herself, he begins.
‘My dear,’ he says softly, ‘it is eleven days now since Hector’s death and we have done nothing, all of us, but weep and sit stunned with grief. I know I have wept, and I see from this that you are still full of tears. And how could we do less, any one of us, for such a son and brother, such a fearless protector of Troy and its people? And you most of all, my dear, who have lost so many sons in these last terrible years.’
He has much to tell her and wants to lead up to it slowly. He wants her to see the plan he is about to lay before her not as something desperate and wild but as the result on his part – though it is not, of course – of consideration and careful thought.
But the look she casts upon him is so fierce that he draws back and cannot go on. He feels the hard purpose he has come with flutter in him and fail.
‘Tears,’ she mutters, almost to herself. ‘Oh, I have plenty of those. But not of grief. Of anger, fury, that I am a woman and can do nothing but sit here and rage and weep while the body of my son Hector, after eleven days and nights, is still out there on the plain, unwashed, unanointed, and eleven times now their noble Achilles has dragged him up and down before the Greek ships – my son, my dear son Hector! – and tumbled his poor head in the dirt. Oh, if I could get my hands on that butcher I’d tear his heart out and eat it raw!’
Priam quails before this small, fierce, straight-backed woman he has known and not known for so many years.
‘I carried him,’ she whispers, ‘here, here,’ and her clenched fist beats at the hollow under her heart. ‘It is my flesh that is being tumbled on the stones out there. Seven times now I’ve grieved for a son lost in this war. And what I remember of each one is how they kicked their little heels under my heart – here, just here – and the first cry they gave when I yielded them up to the world, and the first steps they took. Troilus was very late in walking – do you recall that, Priam? You used to tempt him with a little dagger you had, with a dog’s head on the handle – do you recall that?’ – and she searches his face for a response. ‘I was in labour for eighteen hours with Hector. That is what I recall when I think of his body being tumbled over the stones and left out there for dogs to tear at and maul.’
Priam shakes his head. This kind of women’s talk unnerves him. It is not in his sphere. He remembers nothing of a dagger carved like a dog, or that his son Troilus had been slow to walk. What he recalls is a series of small squalling bundles, each one presented to him like a bloodied human offering on the outstretched palms of an attendant. To be recognised as his, and blessed and gathered into his household. What he recalls is that Troilus is dead, like so many of his sons. Like Hector. This talk of dogs’ heads and daggers has diverted him from what he has come to tell her and makes it difficult for him to begin. But after a moment of quiet restraint he does so.
‘Hecuba,’ he ventures. ‘After all this time, these eleven days of doing nothing but weep and think and think again, I have come to a decision – no, no, let me finish, you can make your objections, I know you will have objections, afterwards, when I’ve had my say.
‘I am too old, I know, to put on armour and go to the field. To ride into the fray and leap down from my chariot and crack heads, and sweat and get bloody. And the truth is I never was a warrior, it was not my role. My role was to hold myself apart in ceremonial stillness and let others be my arm, my fist – my breath too when talk was needed, because outside my life here in the court and with you, my dear, where I do like to speak a little, I have always had a herald at my side, our good Idaeus, to find words for me. To be seen as a man like other men – human as we are, all of us – would have suggested that I was impermanent and weak. Better to stand still and keep silent, so that when old age came upon me, as it has at last, the world would not see how shaky my grip has become, and how cracked and thin my voice. Only that I am still here. Fixed and permanent. Unchangeable, therefore unchanged. Well, you know I am changed, my dear, because from you nothing of what I am, or almost nothing, is hidden. To others I am what I have always been – great Priam. But only because they have never really looked at me. And when they do look, what they see is what they are meant to see. The fixed mark to which everything else in my kingdom refers. A ceremonial figurehead that might just as well be of stone or wood. So – to come at last to what I want to tell you.
‘This morning, as I was sitting quietly on my couch just after waking, a vision came to me. Not quite a dream,’ and taking a good breath he begins to paint for Hecuba how he had seen himself seated in a wagon drawn by two black mules, plainly dressed in a white robe and with none of the signs
of kingship upon him, no amulet, no armband or any other sort of regalia; and just recalling it now, allowing the lines of the picture to grow clear as he adds one detail then the next, makes him more certain than ever that what he intends to do is what he must do.
But to Hecuba the image is a shocking one – she is more tied to convention than she believes – and as Priam warms to his subject she grows more and more disturbed.
What Priam is speaking of is a dream. Dreams are subtle, shifting, they are meant to be read, not taken literally. Hidden away in what they appear to present are signs that must be seized on by a mind that can see past mere actualities to what hovers luminously beyond. She has spent all the years of their marriage dealing with these visions that afflict him. She prepares now to reply as she normally would, but Priam prevents her.
‘No, no, my dear,’ he insists, ‘I am not finished,’ and the firmness of this, which is unusual, makes her pause. He goes on quickly to describe the driver who sits beside him on the bench, the wicker – work canopy over the bed of the wagon, the load they are carrying.
‘It shines out,’ he whispers, his voice touched with wonder as if the wagon were actually there in the room with them, ‘from under a plain white coverlet. And though I cannot see it –’ he blinks, he is very aware of her stopped breath – ‘though I cannot see it, I know what it is. It is the better part of my treasury. Gold coins, armour and arms, plate, tripods, cauldrons, the rare gold cup – my favourite, you know the one, that the Thracians gave me all those years ago when I went on an embassy to them – all shining out as I sit on the bench beside the driver and we travel on under the night.