The War At Troy

by Lindsay Clarke

  ‘Do you know who?’

  Aphrodite nodded.

  ‘Are you going to tell me?’

  The thought appeared to make her uncomfortable. ‘I shouldn’t really.’

  Paris’s eyes strayed towards the golden apple on the grass beside him.

  ‘Oh no,’ she exclaimed, holding up her hands. ‘I’m not trying to bribe you. It’s not like that. Now you’ve made me feel bad. Look, her name’s Helen. She lives in Sparta.’

  ‘Is that near Troy?’

  ‘It’s a kingdom in Argos.’

  He frowned. ‘I haven’t heard of Argos either.’

  ‘Argos is a country three hundred miles away. Across the sea.’ His face fell in disappointment. ‘Then she couldn’t possibly know about me.’

  ‘Not yet. No.’

  ‘And she’s a foreigner.’

  Aphrodite smiled. ‘In love there are no foreigners.’

  ‘But three hundred miles! And I’ve never been to sea.’

  ‘So you don’t want to know any more about her?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  There was another silence.

  ‘Helen,’ he said. ‘It’s a beautiful name.’

  ‘It suits her. She’s the most beautiful woman in the world.’ His eyes widened at that. ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you rather see her? Yes? Then come and look into my eyes.’

  Scarcely breathing, Paris moved until he was only a few inches away from the naked body of the goddess. She lifted her hands and cupped his cheeks. He trembled at the delicate pressure of her fingertips. Every pore of his body seemed to be taking in her fragrance as he lifted his eyes to meet hers.

  And he was gone, vanished to himself, softly drowning in a sea-green iris of light, deeper than he would have thought his heart could take him, until he felt he was gazing upwards through blue fathoms at the dazzling surface beyond. Except that now he was suddenly looking downwards into the human face of a woman who gazed back up at him through the same compelling light -- a woman to whom he was making love with a tenderness and ardour such as he had never known. Hers was a face more luminous with passion and beauty than any he had ever seen before. It was as though, for those few timeless seconds, he was making love to the goddess herself, and even as the vision blurred he was feeling that, if it ever ended, his heart might die from yearning.

  Then he was back on the mountain and the face smiling gently across at him was the face of Aphrodite.

  ‘Helen,’ she said simply.

  Paris lowered his back against the grass and lay with his eyes closed, trying to hold on to the dream, savouring the exquisite pain of its loss. And yet, so intense was the memory, that he was filled with a fanatical conviction that, once having looked on that face, he could never forget it. Those eyes would be present to him each time he closed his own. There seemed no possibility that he would ever again dream any other dream than this.

  Minutes passed. He was lost to the mountain, lost even to the presence of the goddess, and absolutely still -- yet moving inwardly with a velocity that astonished him. Everything had changed. He could feel the blood pulsing through his veins. He could feel his heart blazing inside him. From this moment onwards, any instant of time less incandescent with life than this would not be life at all.

  Without opening his eyes he said, ‘I have to meet her. I have to make her mine.’

  The goddess whispered, ‘There’s something else you should know.’

  Eagerly he said, ‘Yes?’

  ‘Helen already has a husband.’

  Paris sat up in shock.

  Calmly she appraised his incredulous face. ‘I know what you’re thinking, and it’s a problem, yes, but there are all kinds of things you don’t understand yet.’

  Outrage and betrayal darkened his eyes. Better never to have seen that face than to have looked on its beauty and have it snatched away like this.

  ‘I understand well enough that she’s already married, that she lives three hundred miles away in a place I’ve never heard of-- and I suppose her husband’s the King of Argos, right?’

  ‘The King of Sparta actually.’

  ‘So what chance have I got of winning her?’

  ‘Without help,’ she said quietly, ‘probably none.’

  But he was back inside the dream again. That face remained intimately alive inside him and indelibly present. It felt as inalienable as his soul. And the whole meaning of his life depended on it now. Surely it was unthinkable that a man should be gifted with such a vision unless it was possible to make it real?

  Then he began to understand.

  Clearing his throat, he said, ‘What if you were to help me?’ Aphrodite pursed her lips in thought. ‘It would be difficult.’ She released a pensive sigh. ‘And it might cause all kinds of trouble.’

  ‘Suppose I gave you the apple in return?’

  The goddess made a small offended grimace.

  ‘It’s rightly yours anyway,’ he pressed.

  ‘You’re not just saying that because . . . ?’

  ‘No, of course not. I wouldn’t dream . . .’

  She had glanced away. Now she looked back, unsmiling. ‘Well, it could be done I suppose. But this is serious you understand? The matter of the heart is always serious -- even when it looks like a game.’ Her voice transfixed him.

  ‘You would have to be sure that you really wanted her -- whatever the cost.’

  She allowed a moment for the thought to sink in. Then she said, ‘Do you?’

  He looked back into the solemn beauty of Aphrodite’s face, and saw that the moment of choice had come. He glanced at the golden apple gleaming on the grass and saw that it was just as she had said -- he had looked at Helen and everything had altered round him. Whatever else, he would never again be content to drive a dozy herd of cattle out to pasture and moon among the asphodels. He could no longer imagine what he would do with his life if he was denied the fulfilment of a desire that was now becoming an obsession.

  Paris thought of everything he had been promised by the other goddesses. Hera would make him a great king, yes, but great kings had great troubles, and he was already a High King’s son. Why should he want more wealth than that princely state would bring him? Athena had promised him wisdom and self-knowledge, but if he knew that the plain truth was that he wanted Helen, then wasn’t that already self-knowledge enough? As for wisdom, surely that was as much a matter of the beating heart as of the intellect, and the vision of Helen had filled his heart with a fierce longing for the wilder reaches of love.

  All the logic of the case pointed one way. Yet he looked up into the face of Aphrodite again and knew that none of that logic mattered to him in the least, for the truth lay far beyond logic in the hopeless, unrequited, irretrievable place from where, like a man passing sentence on himself, he said, ‘I don’t think I could live without her now’

  ‘Very well,’ Aphrodite smiled. ‘Give me the apple and I’ll see what I can do.’

  Priam’s Son

  Despite their earlier promise, Hera and Athena left the scene of their joint humiliation united in hostility both to Paris and to Troy. Happily, Paris was quite unaware of this, and Aphrodite was too delighted by her triumph to be troubled by her divine sisters’ ill will. As a goddess never much concerned with moral consequence, she too had her powers. She would do what she could for the city -- though it was hard to see how to preserve Troy from ruin while at the same time keeping her pledge to Paris. But to the latter task she was now utterly committed, and if a city had to burn as the price of passion, so be it.

  Meanwhile, dazed with wonder and in the grip of obsession, Paris cared only that the loveliest of goddesses had promised to give him the most beautiful of women. He would not rest now until this destiny was fulfilled.

  Night had fallen by the time he came down from the mountain.

  Knowing that Oenone was puzzled by his distant manner, Paris retired without saying anything either to her or to his foster-parents abo
ut what had happened on Mount Ida. For much of the night he lay awake thinking about Helen and wondering how best to assert his true identity. Yet the gloom of his rough bothy was so far removed from the visionary presence of the goddess on the high mountainside that there were times when he found it hard to believe that the events of the afternoon had been anything more than a marvellous dream. A dream from which he had woken into a world grown small around him.

  The next day, as always happened at that season, servants of King Priam came out of Troy to select from the herd a bull to be offered as prize in the funeral games that were held each year in memory of the king’s lost son. Paris had often resented losing some of his finest breeding stock this way. Now he began to understand how his own fate had always been deeply bound up with that of the chosen beast.

  Standing beside Agelaus, he watched the men from the city conferring over the bulls where they panted in the noon glare of the paddock. He already knew which one they would choose.

  As he expected the leader of the party, a wall-eyed man with a curled beard shaped like a sickle, eventually nodded at him and said, ‘Hobble me that white brute over there.’ He was pointing to the bull that Paris had once garlanded for Oenone.

  In previous years Paris would simply have jumped the rail and done as he was bidden. This time he studied the man steadily and said, ‘Would you not rather take the skewbald bull beneath the oak? The eating will be as good and he will give you a deal less trouble on the road back to the city.’

  The man turned his squint on Agelaus. ‘The King commands only the best. He will take the white.’

  ‘Then let the king hobble it himself,’ said Paris, and walked away, with the hobbling-rope slung across his bare shoulder. Behind him he heard his foster-father stammering out bewildered words of apology. Then he saw Oenone watching from a plane-tree’s shade. Involuntarily his eyes flinched away from her bewildered glance. He heard the bearded man saying that he had not come here to endure a yokel’s insolence. Nor did he have all day to waste. Then he was ordering Agelaus to bring the bull out himself. When the old man began to climb the fence, Paris turned quickly on his heel, shouting to his father that the bull was too fast for him and not to be trusted.

  ‘I was hobbling bulls before you were born, boy,’ Agelaus growled, and leapt down into the paddock. ‘Give me your rope.’ One of the younger bulls let out a low, disgruntled bellow. The herd shifted nervously in the packed arena. Dust rose from their hooves. Already heavy with the smell of dung, the heat seemed to shimmer where dust drifted between the old man and his son.

  Paris used his free hand to vault the fence. ‘You’re no longer as quick on your feet as you were. He’ll gore you where you stand.’

  Agelaus glared at him. ‘Do you mean to insult me also?’

  ‘No, father, but the truth is the truth. The bull is mine. He knows me. Leave him to me.’

  ‘Are you forgetting that this whole herd belongs to King Priam?’ said the bearded man, haughty and impatient. Paris stared at him for a moment, yielding nothing in pride or dignity, but it was to his foster-father that he said, ‘Does King Priam always take such care to hold on to his own?’ Then without waiting for an answer, he took the rope from his shoulder and advanced across the paddock to where, blinking among flies, with a tonnage of muscle twitching under its pelt, the chosen bull scraped a fore-hoof at the dust.

  An hour later, as they watched the king’s servants cart the tethered beast away, Agelaus said to his foster-son, ‘Are you going to explain yourself?’

  Paris said quietly, ‘I mean to follow the bull to the king this year.’

  ‘Has some demon got into you today?’ the old man demanded. ‘Is there not enough to do here among the bulls that you must go chasing trouble in Troy? Take a dip in the river, boy. Cool your head.’ He was about to walk away, when Paris said, ‘Tell me again about the time of my birth.’

  Agelaus stopped in his tracks. He turned, frowning, and was slow to reply. ‘You know the story well enough.’

  ‘Tell me again.’

  ‘It is as I said. I found you lying in the woods. A she-bear had suckled you there. I brought you home in my wallet and raised you as my own.’

  Amazed that he had never thought to ask the question before, Paris said, ‘Yet who among the Dardanians would dream of leaving a child alone to die?’ When Agelaus glanced away, he spoke more firmly. ‘Do you swear to me that you know nothing else?’

  The old herdsman studied Paris gravely now. This was the first time the youth had directly challenged him, but he had always known that the question must come, and he was too honest a man to lie to the foster-son he loved. Drawing in his breath, he told Paris of the night when the king’s horseman had come to the house, ordering him to kill the child, and how his heart had refused to obey. ‘So instead of becoming your murderer, I became your father. Have you not been happy with us?’ he demanded gruffly. ‘What better life could you have wished for?’

  ‘None,’ Paris answered, ‘except the life to which I was born.’

  ‘And what if that life was cursed?’

  ‘Whatever the case, at least that life would be my own.’

  Paris saw the hurt in the old man’s eyes. Immediately he regretted his own curt manner. ‘You have always been a good father to me,’ he said more gently, ‘and I love you for it with all my heart. But a god has told me who my true father is, and there is a fate that comes with such knowledge.’

  Remembering all the years during which he had watched the boy grow, Agelaus looked up into the noble features of the young stranger who stood before him now. ‘Then who am I to argue with a god?’ Biting his lip, he began to walk away, leaving the youth standing alone. But he had gone only a few yards when he stopped and stared down at the ground, shaking his grizzled head. Then he turned to look back at his disconsolate son. ‘If fate requires it, go to Troy,’ he said. ‘Present yourself before the king.

  Tell him that Agelaus gave you to the gods on Mount Ida and that the gods gave you back to me. Tell him that if there is fault in this, it is none of mine.’ Then he turned again and walked away.

  As Paris watched him go, he saw Oenone waiting for him in the plane tree’s shade. The nymph had listened to the exchange with the same anxious foreboding that had kept her awake throughout the night, and she already knew that nothing she could say would deter Paris from his purpose. Feeling grief gather inside her now, she watched him approach across the glade.

  Oenone listened in silence as he told her how a vision of Hera had come to him on Mount Ida and informed him of his true estate. Clenching her breath, she nodded when Paris asked if she understood why he must seek out the fate to which he was born. But when he promised that he would never forget the love that was between them, it was as though a louder noise was roaring inside her head. And when Paris lowered his mouth to kiss her, Oenone pulled back a little to fix his eyes with her own.

  ‘I have the gift of prophecy from my father,’ she whispered. ‘I know that if I begged you to stay, you would still go out into the world, and I know that the world will do you harm. But my father gave me the gift of healing too.’ She gazed up at him. ‘One day you will take a wound that only I can heal. Come back to me then.’ She reached up to kiss him swiftly on the mouth, then pulled free of his embrace and -- as she had done once before, on the day that first made them lovers -- Oenone ran from him into the shelter of the trees.

  The drums were beating as he approached the city. The sound carried on the wind that swept over the plain of Troy, across the sheen of the rivers and through the swaying fields of wheat. From the distance he could see a large crowd gathered around the walls, shouting and cheering as they urged on the chariots racing there. He had often looked down from the mountains on the walls of Troy, but he had never seen them shine like this. Nor, he saw as he came closer, had he ever dreamed how massive those stones were, or how dauntingly high they stood. And he had never seen so many people before either -- charioteers checking their axl
es and harness, athletes oiling their limbs, horse-breakers and farriers debating the merits of their mounts, acrobats and fire-eaters, snake-charmers, musicians and dancing girls, mountebanks and merchants, all looking to lighten the purses of the crowd, while among them beggars made a show of their sores and drunkards lolled among the women or snored beneath the makeshift stalls. The air smelled of spiced wine and charring meat, and the skin of his cheeks smarted at the sharp sting of dust blowing everywhere on the wind.

  No one took much notice of a farm-boy come down from the hills to mingle with the crowd and the youth was wondering how he would ever make his presence felt among this multitude when he heard a voice calling for more contenders in a bareknuckle boxing championship. Approaching the ring of people, Paris recognized the young man at its centre as someone he had seen once before at the festival in Lyrnessus near the mountains. It was Aeneas, son of Anchises the King of the Dardanians, and though Paris had never spoken to the prince, he felt strengthened by the sight of a familiar face.

  For a time he stood by the ring of sand, watching as one fighter after another got knocked down by a muscular, sandy-haired youth in a scarlet kilt who, for all the weight of brawn he carried, danced nimbly on his feet and dealt out blackened eyes and bloody noses with contemptuous skill. Paris had no such talent with his fists, but he had learned to dodge and weave among the bulls, and to trust his own lithe sinews. Also he reckoned he had a longer reach than the burly fellow who now calmly oiled his knuckles while his last opponent spat out a broken tooth. A party of girls were chanting out the winner’s name. Deiphobus favoured them with a haughty smile as the umpire shouted, ‘The King’s son wins again. Does anyone else want to chance his arm?’

  The tallest of the young women was already calling, ‘Give him the crown, Aeneas,’ when Paris stepped out of the crowd as if pushed by the unseen hand of a god. Somewhere he could hear the doleful bellow of his bull.

  Aeneas grinned at him. ‘Excellent, another challenger! And a Dardanian by the look of him. One of my own. But I shall strive to remain impartial.’