The War At Troy

by Lindsay Clarke

  Helen saw at once that there was no point in denial. On the contrary, she felt an overwhelming surge of relief that here was someone with whom she could share the collisions of joy and fear in her heart -- though her breath was shaking as she spoke.

  ‘Paris loves me,’ she heard herself say. ‘Other men’s eyes are arrested by this curse. He sees through it to the person beyond. If there were not countless other reasons, I would love him for that alone. And I do love him, Aethra. With Paris, I feel that I know who I truly am. I feel free to be myself.’

  ‘As you do not with the husband who also loves you?’

  Helen felt all the pain of the question and was amazed to find it far from mortal. ‘I see now,’ she answered, ‘that I love Menelaus much as I would a friend. A good friend, the dearest friend I have, and, yes, as a good father to my child. And I know very well that is not how he loves me, and my heart grieves for it. But my love for Paris is of another order.’ Helen looked up into Aethra s searching gaze, and a wistful smile broke like light across her face. ‘For the first time I utterly understand why Penelope refused to give herself to anyone but Odysseus. She was always far braver than me. She was prepared to live alone if need be, rather than foreswear the honesty of her heart. And she was right. I’m only just beginning to realize how much of my own life I have mortgaged to fear. And I’m still afraid, but I believe that Paris’s love is stronger than my fear. He has brought me from hiding, out into the elements where I can feel the wind on my face, where I can feel the fire burning under the earth. Aethra, there can be no going back on this.’

  ‘So what will you do?’ Aethra asked. ‘Does he too mean to carry you away?’

  Helen studied the bond-servant’s regal face -- a face which, many years earlier, had been ignited into life by a single night in the myrtle-grove at Troizen; a face in which a lifetime of womanly suffering through all the long years since was written clearly along the care-lines gouged into her skin. And when Helen spoke, it was as if in answer to a different question.

  ‘But if I go,’ she said, ‘I go freely this time.’

  Aethra considered the needle in her hand. ‘Then you are decided?’

  ‘Yes ... No ... I don’t know.’ Helen rocked like a logan-stone on her uncertainty. ‘There are so many things that argue against it. Hermione is terrified of Paris. Can I abandon her in Aphrodite’s service as my own mother long ago abandoned me for Zeus? Yet if I force her to come with me it will break her father’s heart.’

  ‘You have done that already,’ Aethra said, ‘though he does not know it yet.’

  ‘I know it. Menelaus will go mad with grief when he learns of this.’ Helen averted her mind from the thought. ‘And I have my duties here ... I am queen and priestess in Sparta . . . Aethra, what should I do, what should I do?’

  ‘Why do you ask me,’ Aethra said quietly, ‘when you already know what you will do.’ She looked up from the embroidery- frame again. ‘Is it not so?’

  ‘It is -- may the gods help me,’ Helen gasped, ‘for they have given me this fate.’ And because she could scarcely bear the gently complicit smile of reproach and understanding in the other woman’s eyes, she turned her face away.

  Then had come the difficult encounter with Aeneas, who returned from the chase wanting only to brag of the huge bear he and his comrades had hunted down. He was showing Paris the shaggy yardage of its skin, to which skull and claws were still attached, with its great maw wrinkled in a snarl, when his distracted friend begged him to be still for a moment and listen.

  Secretly placed to overhear them, Helen waited, scarcely breathing throughout the long silence that followed Paris’s frank confession of his love for her. Then she was appalled to hear the incredulous, heated oaths and insults that Aeneas heaped on her lover’s head, and the merciless accuracy of the questions he shot at him, barb after barb, like arrows from his hunting-bow.

  Impassively, Paris withstood it all, answering each question with a grim candour that sought neither exculpation nor extenuation, merely a simple acceptance of the agonizing fact that his love for Helen was such that he was left with no choice but to betray their friend and host by stealing away with his wife.

  ‘Has that Spartan witch driven you out of your mind?’ Aeneas demanded. ‘Have you forgotten why we came here? Our purpose was to work for peace, not to start a needless war. Get hold of yourself! Think what your father will say to this.’

  ‘I have my father’s authority,’ Paris answered, though with less certainty.

  ‘To do what? Certainly he once spoke of making off with an Argive woman as hostage to exchange for Hesione if all else failed. But give my body to the dogs if he was thinking of Helen!’

  Aeneas was shaking with frustrated rage. ‘And all has not yet failed. Our mission is scarcely even begun. Menelaus means to help our negotiations with his brother. He must be preparing the ground right now in Crete.’ Aeneas glared at his friend, wide- eyed. ‘Or do you mean to betray your city as well as your friend? Would you set all the hosts of Argos against the walls of Troy for the sake of playing at love with a faithless woman?’

  Then the two men were arguing so violently that Helen was terrified that someone else -- Eteoneus in particular -- must also overhear them. She stood trembling in her secret place as the friends all but came to blows.

  ‘We should stop now,’ Paris said at last, ‘before something is said that cannot be forgiven or forgotten between us. Aeneas, you are my friend and I love you, but in this matter, believe me, my choice is made. I am no longer free to act as though it were not the case. The only question is, are you with me or against me? Whether you like it or not, you too must choose.’

  Out of the tense silence of the private chamber, Helen heard the hoarse whisper of Aeneas’s voice. ‘Menelaus saved my life.’

  ‘I know,’ Paris answered, ‘I know he did.’

  ‘And this is how you would have me repay him?’

  ‘I would have you do only what you must -- even though my life is in your hands.’

  ‘Come away with me now,’ Aeneas urged. ‘Leave the woman here. Get clear of her for a time. There is a gorge I know in the mountains where you can stand under a fall of melt-water and clear your senses. We will hunt together, and I swear not to speak a word unless it has to do with game or shelter or our life on the crags. Take time to think, and if, after a night or two in mountain air, your feelings remain the same, then I promise to do everything I can to help you.’

  But when he looked up he saw his friend smiling so sadly at him that there was scarcely any need for Paris to utter the single, imperative syllable, ‘Choose.’

  The flight from the palace that night was covert and hasty, though it proved, in the event, less perilous than they feared. One of the attendants who had accompanied the Trojan princes to Sparta left the city openly on horseback in the early evening with secret instructions for the sailing-masters to ready the ships. As soon as the palace was asleep, others were sent to yoke the horses to the chariots and load them with the small amount of baggage that Paris allowed. Most of his own possessions were left behind to make room for Helen’s needs, along with those of Aethra and a trusted handmaid, Phylo, both of whom were to flee Sparta with her.

  Having made the choice and committed herself, Helen astonished Paris by her cool practicality. Though he assured her that Troy would provide all the wealth she could ever want, she insisted that much of the gold in the treasury was her rightful legacy from her father Tyndareus. The Queen of Sparta was not about to venture out among the hazards of the world without taking the means to provide for her comfort and security. As he watched her filling caskets with gold coins and precious stones, Paris was thinking wryly that, on his return from Crete, Menelaus would find himself lacking more than a wife -- a considerable portion of his treasure would have vanished with her too.

  It was Helen also who prepared the sleeping draught and mixed it with the jug of wine that Phylo took to the two men guarding the gatehouse that n
ight. But when Paris went to check on the sentries later, he found one of them blearily stirring still. With a prayer to Aphrodite he slit the man’s throat, and then, having killed one, he decided -- with a ruthlessness that surprised him -- that it might be as well to murder the other man too. But on his return to where Aeneas gathered weapons from the armoury, he told him only that the guards were asleep.

  An hour had passed since midnight and everything was now in place, yet when Paris went to fetch Helen he found her collapsed in tears, having looked for the last time on her sleeping daughter. Worrying that all his plans must founder on her grief, he pulled her to her feet, whispering, ‘Bring the child with you. We will fight our way out if she causes a stir.’

  Still contending with her tears, Helen looked up into his gaze as though trying to ascertain whether this man who had overthrown every stable thing in her life, was a demon or a god.

  ‘You have been brave thus far,’ he encouraged her. ‘Be braver still. Our life is waiting for you.’

  ‘But it can be won only at terrible cost,’ she gasped.

  ‘Yes,’ he whispered, and the air between them strummed with that simple acknowledgement of an inescapable truth.

  Helen glanced once more at the door of her child’s chamber. Then she reached out to grip his arms so tightly that he might have winced at the pain. ‘I know I cannot take Hermione with me. It is not her fate. But swear to me you will never forget that I made this sacrifice.’

  In the vivid gleam of her eyes he saw the absolute gravity of the demand.

  ‘On my life I swear it,’ he whispered.

  ‘Then come,’ she said, ‘it is time.’

  The moon was big still, but its light across the Laconian plain was fitful under the passage of black clouds scudding inland from the sea. Yet only when they were some distance down the hill and out of hearing of the citadel did they climb into the chariots and make speed along the river road.

  With the wind smarting at her face, and her cloak billowing behind her, Helen stood beside Paris, gripping the chariot rail with white hands while the landscape she had known since birth retreated swiftly around her into the relinquished past. Sparta was gone, Hermione gone, Menelaus gone, and only an uncertain future lay in wait beyond the mountain pass. The wheels jolted at speed along the rough road. Moonlight flashed like molten silver off the horses’ backs. As she gulped on air that came at her mouth fast as the torrent of a spring, a surge of exhilaration thrilled through Helen’s heart. She was already far gone beyond forgiveness or reprieve, and every fugitive cell of her being felt utterly alive.

  There came another death in the mountains. The sentinel on watch at the fastness in the pass was about to call down in challenge when an arrow from Paris’s bow took him in the throat. He crumpled at the parapet without a cry.

  ‘That was the first death,’ Aeneas muttered grimly within Paris’s hearing. ‘How many more will have to pay for this?’

  But no one else stirred in that small, lax garrison, and minutes later, some four hours after they had crossed the Eurotas river and fled from Sparta, the chariots were through the pass and heading for the port without pursuit.

  The ships were already afloat, the crews having been recalled, grumbling, from their various billets in the taverns and stews of the town. Two men who defeated all efforts to find them were left behind to meet whatever fate lay in store for them after the ships weighed anchor and dipped their prows into the swell. As the crew strained at the oar-benches, rain was already falling, cold and sharp, on the deck where Paris watched the greying headland slip away.

  It had been agreed that, for safety’s sake, the two ships would sail in close company, but as the storm got up and visibility worsened, that proved easier said than done. The whole world was in motion round them, the masthead tilting and plunging, the decks awash, the bow-wave clashing white crests of surf over inky green hollows, the sky a turbid race of blackening cloud. The Aphrodite had been toiling among the billows for less than an hour when Helen fell desperately sick.

  She lay below decks, groaning in the salt-smell of the bilge, her face white as quicklime, crumpling again and again in drawn grimaces of pain. Out of nervous anxiety, she had eaten almost nothing for hours, and now she was retching on an empty stomach so that only malodorous green bile gushed vilely from her mouth. While Aethra wiped her soiled lips, and Phylo muttered to the sea gods at her side, Paris gathered Helen in his arms, where she panted like a dying dog.

  Hours passed without the storm breaking and Helen’s condition got no better. Afraid that he had stolen her away from land only to watch her perish at sea, Paris balanced the risk of being overtaken by pursuers against his lover’s need to find haven from the turmoil of the storm. When he saw that she had lost even the strength to whisper, he ordered Skopas, his sailing-master, to put in at the first shore he could find.

  They fetched up on a small island rising steeply from waters deep enough to risk running their keel into a cove. All around them, a stunned aftermath of fallen rocks lay in gloomy stacks where some casual heave of Poseidon’s shoulders had long since scattered them. But the bald hill from which those stones had tumbled huddled its broad back to the storm. There was refuge in its lee.

  Paris ordered the awning rigged across the mouth of a cave. A fire was lit from dried-out driftwood and chivvied to a blaze. With his own hand, he made a bed of cloaks and sail-cloth on a slab of rock above a standing pool. Then he carried his lady ashore into the stillness of a place that had, he promised her, never been known to move in a thousand years or more. Filled with love and anxiety, he watched her while she slept.

  When he woke she was already bathing in a fall of fresh water deeper inside the cave. At first he thought it dawn, but there was a drenched, lemon glare to the light through the awning and the sky was singed with amber from a westerly sun.

  Paris realized that this was still the first day of their flight. They must have slept throughout the afternoon from sheer exhaustion, having travelled all night and been worn out by the turbulence of the sea. But though the swell was still high, the storm had passed, and the woman who walked towards him, drying her slender limbs on a cape, was glistening like a nymph newly minted from the sea. He was famished with hunger and the sharp tang glancing off the briny light made him hungrier still. But his lady was smiling, however wanly. Her spirit was back inside her skin again. And there were other, more urgent appetites to sate.

  Kranae -- the rocky place -- that was the name they gave to the nameless island where, for the first time in freedom, they consecrated themselves to the passion that was Aphrodite’s fatal blessing on their lives.

  For days, till the seas were calm again, they lived like the survivors of some rich wreck, banishing the others from their sight, feasting on fish and the squid they caught, and diving for sea-urchins, which they stripped back to the orange flesh with knives before swallowing down that vivid taste of sea. Gulls gleamed bright about their heads. The rocks which had once seemed gloomy through the drizzle of the rain were burnished to an ochreous red by sunlight now. They found figs and watermelons on the south-facing terraces of the hill, gasped at the chilly water from its springs, and squeezed the juice of lemons in their hair. They laughed and made love often, both by night and day, and during the drowsy afternoons they shared hot dreams of sleep.

  When Skopas complained one morning that his crew grew restless, Paris gave them leave to visit the mainland shore that lay as a grey blur visible across the strait. Taking such store of food and wine as he and Helen might need, he gave orders that the ship return within the week, then the lovers stood together to watch the ship dissolve into the haze.

  ‘And if they should not come back?’ Helen said.

  ‘Then we will live here forever,’ Paris laughed. ‘Here is our kingdom. The island kingdom of Kranae, which has no subjects, no slaves, no history, no worldly ambitions other than to remain itself, and only one law, which is love.’

  ‘Yet we have enemies,’
she said.

  ‘Forget them. They will think us far away by now. Come, we will make of this whole island a shrine to the goddess. She is all the protection that we need.’

  So under the hot sun, on the bare crown of the hill, they gave themselves once more to Aphrodite. And as an excess of wine dissolves the mind into oblivion, it was as if, through a glut of sensuality, they sought to erase from their bodies all memory of a world that must one day make them answer for this dream of liberty.

  A Perfect Case for War

  Outside the House of the Axe, in the sweltering heat of the bull-arena more than two hundred miles across the Cretan Sea from Sparta, Menelaus was bestowing prizes at his grandfather’s funeral games when the news came.

  The runner who had arrived sweating from the port was troubled by more than the heat. He waited anxiously while the chamberlain whispered in the ear of the Cretan king. Frowning at the interruption, Deucalion nodded and turned to Menelaus who was warmly congratulating the lissom bull-dancer into whose hands he had just thrown an opal ring. ‘A ship has put in from Sparta,’ he said. ‘It seems someone has come with news. He wishes to speak privately with you’

  Deucalion had been king in Knossos for more than thirty years now. It was he who had rebuilt the ancient palace of Minos after the labyrinth had been left in ruins by earthquake and the war with Theseus. But the power of Crete was a shade of what it had been for a thousand years before that evil time, and Deucalion felt far from easy that the death of one of his vassals should have brought the sons of Atreus to the island. It had once been among his ambitions to wed his son Idomeneus to Helen of Sparta, and thereby forge an alliance that would strengthen Crete against the growing might of Mycenae. But that hope had failed, so he had been forced to sit with Menelaus beaming at his side, while that crass bully Agamemnon cut a swathe through the palace-women, dreaming of a day when the whole of Crete might lie beneath his sway.