The War At Troy

by Lindsay Clarke

  Paris had his eyes fixed on the muscular figure of Deiphobus where he stood laughing with the young women as he towelled himself. ‘That is King Priam’s son?’ he asked, looking for something familiar in the youth’s face and bearing.

  ‘Deiphobus, yes.’ Aeneas smiled. ‘Is this your first time down from the hills?’

  When Paris nodded one of the girls called out, ‘Be gentle with the bull-boy, Deiphobus. It would be a shame to break that pretty nose.’ A smaller, darker girl stood beside her, frowning at Paris with an air of puzzled hostility that he found slightly unnerving. But Deiphobus was ready to fight again. He stepped into the ring to loud applause from the crowd, measuring this fresh opponent with confident eyes. Then Paris was stripped to his breech-clout and standing across from him at the scratch-mark in the sand.

  For a time Deiphobus sparred around him, flashing his fists in such swift jabs and feints that only Paris’s agile movements prevented him from taking more than glancing blows. Growing impatient with the way this novice ducked and swerved, Deiphobus engaged him with concentrated aggression. More by luck than skill, Paris contrived to stay on his feet, and though his own blows hit only air, he was fresher than the other man and kept his wits about him. He had observed in the earlier fights how Deiphobus had a trick of pretending to drop his guard, then feinting to the left as he drove his right fist to the midriff, only to cut upwards with a rapid left to the head. He was waiting for that moment when it came. Deiphobus found his right thrust to the body parried by such a firm block that his own weight unbalanced him. Then his ears were ringing as Paris threw a stiff jab at his head. Paris closed quickly, pummelling at his opponent’s body, and when he broke free of the clinch, he used his longer reach to crash a fist into his nose. Blood splashed. Deiphobus reeled, blinking for a few seconds. When Paris slammed him with another body-blow, his legs sagged under him and he was on his knees in the sand.

  Amid the startled silence of the crowd, Paris leaned forward, offering a hand to pull him up. ‘You fight well, brother,’ he panted.

  Scowling at what he took for a presumptuous insult, Deiphobus wiped the blood from his face, then brushed the proffered hand aside and staggered into the crowd. All the young women followed him except for the dark-eyed girl who stood for a moment, frowning at Paris as though she had seen him elsewhere and was still trying to place his face. But when he smiled at her she turned on her heel, darkening her frown, and hurried after the others.

  ‘You fought well yourself,’ said Aeneas. ‘My cousin won’t thank you for robbing him of this wreath.’ Then he studied Paris more carefully. ‘Weren’t you at the fair in Lyrnessus last year? Didn’t a bull of yours take first prize?’ And when Paris nodded, his smile broadened. ‘I thought so. It must have been the bulls who taught you to move as nimbly as that.’

  ‘Deiphobus has more skill with his hands,’ Paris said.

  Aeneas warmed to the kind of openness that was commoner among the Dardanians than here in Troy. ‘But you were a lot faster on your feet. Why not enter the footraces, friend? You might win yourself another crown.’

  Three hours later Paris was summoned before the king where he sat among his courtiers in his gorgeously painted throne-room.

  The rest of that afternoon had been a bright blur of heat and pace and building excitement. During the course of it, he had fallen foul of two more of Priam’s sons by beating Antiphus in the dash and outstripping the people’s favourite, Hector, in the cross-country race around the city walls. Now, with his blood running fast and high, he stood holding his three wreaths, tired and proud, and looking for the first time at the man who was his father.

  ‘My nephew Aeneas tells me that you keep watch over my bulls in our Dardanian lands.’ Priam stroked his perfumed beard as he gave Paris the distracted smile of a man who had carried the burdens of kingship for more than twenty years. Though he was in his middle-forties, Priam looked older. His thinning hair glistened towards silver and his gaunt face was creased with many lines. Yet he sat on his gilded throne with the air of one long familiar with its power as well as its cares, and when his eyes settled on Paris they left him more in awe at the king than eager to know more about his father. Only minutes earlier Priam had been given the news that a coastal town belonging to one of his allies had been pillaged and burned by yet another Argive raid. So as he fondled the ears of the boar-hound lying at his feet, the mind of the High King of Troy was still preoccupied with other things than a bull-boy come down from the hills to take the prizes at the games.

  ‘It’s not often a man wins a triple crown.’ He gave a faint smile. ‘Perhaps my sons would do well to pass more time in the mountain air?’

  Holding his gaze, Paris answered, ‘Perhaps they were lucky to have a father who did not expose them to the mountain air when they were born.’

  ‘Was that your fate, boy?’ Priam arched his brows. ‘Well, I pity you for it. But it doesn’t seem to have done you much harm. The gods must favour you. They have spared your life, given you a handsome enough face and the strength to make you winner of the games.’ Priam glanced away, smiling at his counsellor Antenor. ‘What more can a child of the mountain ask?’

  ‘Nothing more,’ Paris answered quietly, ‘except his rightful heritage.’

  Surprised how firm the voice, Priam looked sharply back at him. ‘Which is?’

  ‘To be acknowledged as your son.’

  The King, his sons and the assembled courtiers were too astonished by the demand even to gasp. Before anyone could move or speak, Paris pressed on. ‘I understand that these games are held in honour of the child you lost. Well, the child you lost has just won them. Those I have beaten are my brothers. I have come here to stake my life on the truth of this claim.’

  At that moment the dark-haired girl who had been among the young women watching the boxing-match pushed her way forward between Hector and Antiphus. She had been staring at Paris ever since he had come into the hall and as soon as he had spoken, a familiar, tense pressure that was building inside her head broke like the release of lightning in a storm. ‘Now I see you,’ she said. ‘You are the sacrifice that was not accepted.’ She stood swaying on the balls of her feet. ‘You are the brand that burns while my mother sleeps. There is the smell of smoke about you. I cannot breathe for it.’ She turned to look at her father, white-faced. ‘He will bring destruction on this city.’

  ‘Be silent, Cassandra.’ Impatiently, Priam signalled for some of the women of the palace to take the girl away, but Cassandra sought to resist them. ‘He belongs to death,’ she cried. ‘He must be given back.’

  Making the sign against the evil eye, Paris watched in dismay as the girl was hurried away out of the hall, but when he looked back at the people round him, they seemed less alarmed than embarrassed. Hector quickly stepped forward to cover that embarrassment. ‘It looks as though the winner’s wreath has gone to this bull-boy’s head,’ he laughed. ‘He seems to have mistaken it for a royal crown.’

  Some of the courtiers joined in the laughter, but Deiphobus, whose nose had been broken in the fight, was not amused. ‘He has the air of a troublemaker. No one comes before the king and speaks as he has done. Who knows who he is, or what he has in mind?’

  Antiphus said, ‘Perhaps Cassandra is right for once? It might be as well to kill him anyway.’

  Paris stiffened as a hostile murmur of assent gathered around him, but Aeneas stepped forward at his side. ‘I think your sons are still nursing their bruises, Lord,’ he suggested calmly. ‘This youth beat them fairly in the games. I will attest to that. As to his other claims, only an honest man or a fool would stand before the High King and speak as he did. Might it not be as well to hear what he has to say?’

  Priam considered a moment. Then he leaned forward to look more closely at the young man who stood before him, wary-eyed but unflinching. ‘It’s common knowledge that the gods once demanded a son of me. But that child was not given to the mountain.’

  ‘Nevertheless your herdsm
an Agelaus left me there.’

  ‘Yet you stand before me now.’

  ‘A she-bear might have killed me but she suckled me instead.’ Paris heard the sound of scoffing from where the king’s sons stood, but his eyes were fixed on his father’s eyes, where he discerned a glint of conflict between doubt and hope. He pressed on. ‘When Agelaus found me unharmed, he lacked the heart to kill me -- as did the horseman who had brought me from this city.’

  Priam narrowed his eyes, unwilling to believe what he heard yet troubled by the pride and dignity with which this bull-boy withstood his gaze. He looked uncertainly to his counsellor, Antenor.

  ‘Anyone might come before the king with such a story,’ Antenor said. ‘What proof do you have?’ But before Paris could answer, a woman’s voice rang from the open door of the throne-room. ‘Let me see this youth. ‘Worn from much childbearing, and older than her years, Queen Hecuba walked through the parted crowd of courtiers with her hands clasped at her chest. She stopped a yard away from Paris and studied the young man with a gaze of such penetrating gravity that it would have shaken his soul had he not been given the goddesses’ warranty for the truth of his claim. ‘You have the long bones and the tilted eyes of a royal Trojan, but so do many of my husband’s by-blows. What proof do you have that you are the child of my loins?’

  ‘Surely a mother should know her own son,’ Paris answered quietly.

  ‘Twenty years have passed since that child was torn from my arms. But its image is branded on my mind. There was a mark from the birth. It lay across my baby’s neck. I remember thinking that it was as though he had been bitten by passion there.’ The Queen’s eyes gazed fiercely up at Paris. ‘Do you have such a mark? Be sure you will die if you do not.’ She beckoned Paris closer and reached up to lift the locks of wheat-coloured hair that fell across his left ear to his jaw-line. Paris tilted his head at his mother’s touch. He heard the sharp catch of breath as she saw the mark’s faint blush still blemishing his skin. Quickly she caught a hand to her mouth. A moment later her soft brow was pressed to his chest and he could feel her body shaking.

  Priam rose from his throne. His queen glanced towards him, tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘He carries the mark,’ she said. ‘This is our son.’

  Over the long years of his reign, King Priam had coped with many shocks and surprises but none had shaken him like this. He stood, staring the impossible in the face, wanting to believe, yet not trusting that the same fate that had robbed him of a son could now so capriciously return him. ‘You are sure?’ he demanded hoarsely. ‘It is not just your wish that speaks?’

  ‘He has the mark, I tell you,’ Hecuba cried. ‘Come, embrace your son.’

  But it was hard for Priam to look at the child whose life he had condemned. He closed his eyes and reached out a hand to support his weight against the throne. Then he was whispering to himself, ‘The ways of the gods are not the ways of men, and what comes to pass is not always what was expected.’

  With the dazed air of a man waking from a dream, King Priam opened his eyes and looked at the young champion holding his wreaths across from him. Then he raised himself to his full height, and opened his hands as though to catch invisible blessings falling from the sky. ‘Let the ways of the gods be praised,’ he said, and advanced to fold Paris in his arms.

  With the astonished court looking on, King Priam held his lost son for a long time before he turned and said, ‘My sons and daughters, come and embrace your lost brother. You must learn to love him as your mother and I already do.’ Hector and the others stared uncertainly. The hall was loud with murmuring around them as, one by one, in obedience to their father’s urging, the many brothers and sisters of Paris came to greet him.

  Confident of his father’s love, Hector, the oldest and noblest, stepped forward first to welcome his new-found brother warmly enough, but the feelings of the others were mixed and not always well concealed. Deiphobus replied with no more than a curt nod when Paris asked forgiveness for breaking his nose. Antiphus merely stared at him in scornful disbelief, and when Cassandra was brought back into the hall, she recoiled from Paris’s anxious embrace as though her skin was scorching under his touch.

  Only with his open-hearted cousin Aeneas did Paris feel completely at ease. It was he who guided the awe-struck youth through the labyrinth of painted apartments to a spacious bathhouse, where slaves were summoned to bathe and massage him with perfumed oils, and dress his unruly hair. King Priam had commanded that the whole city should feast that night and Aeneas had undertaken to make sure that Paris would appear at the banquet garbed like a prince of Troy. But Paris had been troubled by the ungracious way in which most of his brothers and sisters had received him, and as he soaked in the bath, he shared his anxieties with Aeneas.

  ‘It must be hard for them,’ Aeneas answered. ‘After all, only Hector is senior to you in birth, and it’s obvious that you have a special place in the hearts of your parents. How could it be otherwise? It’s bound to take time for the others to come round. But they have no real choice. Sooner or later they will.’

  ‘You think that’s true of Cassandra?’

  ‘Ah! Cassandra is different. Cassandra is . . .’ Aeneas hesitated.

  ‘There’s something wrong with her?’

  ‘It’s a strange story. She says that Apollo came to her one night while she slept in his temple at Thymbra. She says that he promised to give her the gift of prophecy if she would let him make love to her, and that when she withheld herself, the god grabbed her by the head and spat into her mouth so that no one would believe her prophecies.’ Aeneas looked at his friend and shrugged.

  ‘Do you believe her?’ Paris asked.

  ‘Do you believe what she said about you?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Aeneas smiled. ‘Neither does anyone else. It’s all very sad. Cassandra is the most beautiful of your parents’ daughters and she drives them to despair. But you mustn’t let her gloomy nonsense bother you. Now come on. You’re smelling more like a prince than a bull-boy now. It’s time we found you some clothes to match.’

  Aeneas helped Paris to choose among the selection of finely woven tunics and mantles that the butlers brought for his approval, and he advised him on a discreet choice from the jewellery casket, so that it was a true figure of a prince whose arrival was applauded when he joined the banquet that night. Paris was brought to a seat of honour between his parents. His father poured a grateful libation to the gods, and then asked the whole company to join him in drinking to the long life and good fortune of his handsome son.

  Flattered, worried by his lack of social graces, and frankly bewildered by this abrupt alteration in his circumstances, Paris was soon aware that, wherever his own eyes turned, he was the object of curious attention. His heart was already dizzy with wave after wave of unfamiliar emotion. Soon his head was swimming like the dolphins and sea-horses painted on the walls around him.

  During a pause in the feasting, Hector raised a drinking cup to toast him and called across the table, ‘Andromache tells me you’re already causing such a stir among the palace maidens that there’s some risk they may come to blows if we don’t quickly find a wife for you.’

  Smiling with embarrassment, Paris acknowledged the jest. ‘I thank your good lady, but tell her that I mean to sacrifice at the altar of Aphrodite every morning until the goddess brings me the one for whom my heart is fated.’

  He did not miss the amused exchange of glances round him, and they left him discomfited. He saw that he would have to learn to be less open among these clever, cultivated men and the painted women in their costly garments who left him feeling boyish and awkward. With a pang of regret, he thought about Oenone and the simple mountain life they had lived together. His heart quailed for a moment. But then his mother Hecuba was leaning towards him. ‘My son considers himself a servant of Aphrodite?’

  ‘I do, madam.’

  Priam looked up from where he had been lost in thought and smiled across at
Paris. ‘It seems that they made a Dardanian of you out there on the mountains. The Golden One is greatly revered by Anchises and his people.’

  Hector said, ‘Then it’s small wonder that you and Aeneas should be friends. I understand that in Lyrnessus they say that Aphrodite is his mother.’ He turned, smiling archly, to Aeneas. ‘Isn’t that so, son of Anchises?’

  Well used to the jibe, Aeneas raised his cup to him, and smiled at the astonishment on his friend’s face, for though Aphrodite had not been far from Paris’s mind in the past few hours, he had never for a moment thought of her as a mother. ‘I was sired in Aphrodite’s temple,’ Aeneas explained. ‘My mother was her priestess.’

  ‘But the story is more colourful,’ said Priam. ‘Have you not heard it, Paris -- how my cousin Anchises was blinded by the goddess for bragging of her love for him? Where is my bard? Let us have the song.’

  The bard, who had been chattering among the ladies of the court, reached for his lyre and began to play. As the chords thrilled across the air of the hall, the feasters fell silent. The bard lifted his voice and began to sing of how Zeus had once decided to humble Aphrodite by making her fall in love with a mere mortal. He made the heart of the goddess burn with such ardour for the young Anchises that she appeared before him in a stable disguised as a Phrygian princess and wearing a robe more brilliant than flames of fire. Aphrodite gave herself to him in a night of tremendous passion, but Anchises shook with terror when he woke in the dawn light to find that it wasn’t a naked woman he held in his arms but an immortal goddess. Aphrodite told him that he need fear nothing so long as he preserved the secret of their love, but his heart was so full with the knowledge that he was bursting to make it known. When he did so, he was blinded by a thunderbolt.

  Paris had heard neither the song nor the story before. It was more courtly and sophisticated than the country songs he used to sing with his friends in the mountains, and there was a wry edge to the words that left him wondering whether both Aphrodite and Anchises were being mocked by the bard. But Aeneas seemed to take it all in good part, so Paris relaxed and joined in the applause when the lay was ended.