The Memoirs of Helen of Troy

by Amanda Elyot

  Under a favorable west wind, we sailed past Samos, Chios, and the leeward side of Lesbos. But the closer we got to Ilios, the stronger the headwinds that tried to prevent us from safely reaching the port. Passing the isle of Tenedos off the Anatolian coast, I noticed many ships with colorful sails moored and bobbing on the white-tipped waves.

  “The north winds can blow for weeks,” Paris told me. “And until the winds change, the ships must bide their time in this sheltered strait, paying my father for the privilege to remain in Wilusan waters, rather than risk lives and precious cargo by challenging the wind.”

  Finally, with the northern tip of Tenedos safely at our stern, we approached the Hellespont. Off the starboard side was the bay of Ilios. My heart was drumming wildly within my chest as we rounded the beachhead. The rowers raised their pinewood oars, allowing the tide to pull us onto the sand. From the shore we could not even see the vessels waiting out the south winds off Tenedos.

  So this was the fabled Troy: the jewel of the East, glittering hub of trade from all corners of the world. Paris Alexandros carried me off the ship and onto dry land. The breezes off the bay immediately took hold of my cloak, whipping it about, and swirling the sands about my ankles. My lover’s horse was taken from the vessel, and Paris lifted me onto the stallion’s back and swung into the saddle behind me. Beyond the bluffs, we came upon a defensive ditch, perhaps as deep as a man’s waist and twice as broad. On horseback, it was impossible to cross without a running jump to breach it, which the terrain did not permit. A chariot never would have been successful. It would even have been difficult for a man to cross it on his own; he might have jumped into the ditch with relative ease, but climbing back out would have slowed his progress immensely, particularly if he was armored.

  Paris Alexandros led his mount to a cut in the ditch where planks might be laid and removed, permitting the Troyans ingress and egress to the city limits. “I wondered how you were going to bring a horse into Ilios,” I said as we crossed the cut and approached a high stone wall. Paris drew a horn from his belt and blew a long blast. The huge gates swung open for us, and we passed through them into the lower city. Now, finally, I had the first glimpse of the Troy I had imagined: the tree-lined winding lanes, some wide and sunny, others narrow and shaded; the well-spaced dwellings along the broader avenues, homes to wealthy merchants and traders; and the more closely configured homes on the smaller streets those of common laborers. Thrushes sang sweetly from the fruit trees in the private gardens; the air was redolent of sea brine and fragrant spices. Unlike the crowded and smelly Piraeus and Sidon, this port city gleamed. The citizens, recognizing a son of Priam riding through their midst, waved and bowed and called out his name. He was clearly a favorite among the ladies. Women tossing flowers from their upper windows at the handsome prince turned to one another when they spied me, their expressions conveying both curiosity and envy. “Do they know who I am?” I asked.

  “The most beautiful woman in the world needs no introduction. Even the slaves in Wilusa have heard the tales of Helen of Sparta.”

  The city was at least as vast as Athens; perhaps even more so. Excited, anxious, and somewhat fearful, I rode toward the citadel, the roads of the lower city sloping gently upward, their twisting configuration most often describing the shape of a thunderbolt hurled from the walled upper city. The ramparts were crenellated like saw teeth or like an undulating wave that wrapped protectively around the royal dwellings and temples. From one massive tower, one could look across the Hellespont north to the Black Sea and to the fingerlike Thracian peninsula; the other tower, its perfect twin, afforded a clear vista south to the Aegean. I had never seen anything like it. With such a triple fortification, it was little wonder to me that no one had ever successfully subdued the Troyans. Between the two unadorned towers lay a massive gate set within the walls: high but surprisingly narrow for its size. Two blasts of his horn opened what Paris Alexandros called the Scaean Gate. Before us lay Priam’s palace, by far the most impressive edifice within the citadel.

  Paris dismounted and lifted me down. “I can’t wait for my family to meet you,” he murmured, claiming my mouth. Hand in hand, we climbed the two grand tiers of steps and entered the palace.

  You could have put at least two of Sparta’s Great Halls within the Troyan one. I was sure that it was even finer than Agamemnon’s in Mycenae. Paris Alexandros and I traversed the length of the room to the accompaniment of so many whispers and murmurs and buzzing that I felt like I was in a field of wildflowers hosting dozens of honeybees amid their fragrant petals. The court was an exotic one. Men and women alike wore robes of silk, brightly colored, embroidered and brocaded, smelled of musk and ambergris and hyacinth, and adorned themselves with extravagantly wrought golden jewelry.

  Suddenly, all went silent. An elaborately robed graybeard in a horned headdress shaped like the head of a bull—the Trojan Bull of Heaven—rose from the throne. Priam. Beside him, a majestic-looking woman wearing a golden wreath atop her silvery black tresses, glared malevolently at Paris Alexandros. “What have you done?” she breathed. She would have said more but was silenced by her husband.

  “I didn’t believe it was true,” he said to Paris.

  “It is,” the prince replied, feigning indifference to the hostile reaction he was receiving. “King Priam, Queen Hecuba—Father and Mother—this is Helen. Helen of . . . Troy.”

  Before Priam could respond, a young woman in priestly robes, her hair flying wildly about her shoulders, burst into the Great Hall. “Death!” she shrieked, pointing at us. The glaze in her eyes was no doubt induced by laurel leaves—chewed by prophetesses of the temples before issuing their oracular decrees. “Blood! I see blood and death! The blood of our fathers and brothers, husbands and sons, shed for the harlot of Sparta! Every house in Wilusa burning to ash for the sake of her perfect breasts and honeyed thighs.” She turned her invective on Paris Alexandros. “How dare you have the hubris to flout the words of the seers? You have no business being alive. Our parents should have slaughtered you ere you left Hecuba’s womb and not trusted your death to other hands.” My lover was visibly shaken. Priam ordered the girl removed from the Great Hall.

  “She is so pretty,” I whispered to Paris Alexandros. “It is a shame she is mad.”

  He quickly explained the situation. The hysterical woman was Cassandra, his younger sister, a priestess and prophetess at the temple of Apollo. It was believed that Apollo himself once fell in love with her and asked her to be his consort, to which she happily agreed. But when he kissed her, she reneged on her promise, and so he spat in her mouth; thereafter, any prophecy she uttered was doomed to be dismissed as folly. Her twin brother Helenus was also a seer and a priest, but his oracular predictions were uniformly accepted as truth and had invariably proved correct over the years. “Were he here to buttress Cassandra’s wild prognostications, I might have reason for concern. My little brother is nowhere to be seen, however, and so I see no cause for despair.” Still, Alexander’s eyes betrayed what his voice did not.

  “We had visitors while you were gone,” Priam informed his second son. “A delegation from Achaea: cunning Odysseus the Ithacan, old Nestor of Pylos, and King Menelaus of Sparta, who claimed that you had abducted his wife.” Priam looked directly at me, then returned his focus to Paris Alexandros. “They demanded her immediate return as well as the treasures you stole from the Spartan palace.”

  “Treasures?!” I blurted. “We took nothing but my own personal effects and some things belonging to my late mother.”

  “I told Menelaus that we were not harboring Helen,” continued Priam. “That she was not in Wilusa and had never arrived on our shores. But I was disbelieved. As the Spartan king had also entertained Aeneas, and Aeneas was standing beside me, Menelaus thus reasoned that you and Helen must have returned as well and that I was either feigning ignorance or was being obstinate. I am indeed obstinate. ‘Had Helen been here,’ I told the Achaeans, ‘I would still shelter her within Troy�
��s walls in retaliation for the abduction of my sister Hesione by your countrymen.’ Upon hearing my final words on the subject, the flowing-haired Achaeans fumed and threatened and promised to return with an armada that would reduce Wilusa to rubble and smoldering ash. ‘Then come!’ I told them. ‘And Troy will face you down and turn your great warriors into carrion for the crows!’ ”

  Hecuba’s eyes blazed with angry fire. I had heard that the Hittite queens were renowned for their formidability, and this Anatolian sovereign appeared to be no exception. “Listen to your mother’s words, Alexandros,” she said, her voice the low rumbling warning of impending storms. “You were ever destined to bring ruin to your homeland. It is not for men to question the gods or to circumvent their designs. You tried to cheat them once, but it only purchased you some time. That woman,” she added, rising and pointing imperiously to me, “will be your ruin and the downfall of Troy. It is not too late to send her back to Sparta. Let her husband do with her what he will; it is none of my concern. My cares are for the welfare of the men of Wilusa and the women who will be widowed by your lust.”

  A swarthy-complected man, tall and well muscled, supported the queen’s position. “Should we be compelled to defend our homes because my elder brother can’t control his passions?” he scowled, a hand upon his silver-hilted sword. “Since our parents were too craven to kill you at birth, they should have let me do it with my spear.” I guessed that the speaker was Deiphobus, who appeared also to be ruled by his passions, although his were fueled with anger. He was the one who had tried to kill Paris Alexandros during the athletic games. Alexander’s return had displaced the third-born Deiphobus as heir apparent to Hector’s glory, and it was evident that Deiphobus bore him no fraternal affection. I took an immediate dislike to him. His manner was rough and his demeanor coarse. In some ways he reminded me of Agamemnon, but without the undeniably imposing regality of the Mycenaean High King or Agamemnon’s striking looks.

  Then spoke a darker version of Paris Alexandros, bearded, handsome, and noble. “I have no burning hunger for war, brother, being newly a father. But I will not hesitate to take up the spear for my family and for Troy if called upon to do so. I am more of our father’s mind. It is no secret that the Achaeans have long sought to possess Priam’s domain and plunder its riches. Mycenae is a city rich in trade and Wilusa is enriched beyond all measure by taxing it. The presence of the Spartan queen within our walls is a political subterfuge no doubt designed by the crafty Ithacan and endorsed by the High King of Mycenae in order to convince the Greek chieftains to rally in defense of the sullied honor of Menelaus. If the Greeks come to take our city and seek to control the Hellespont, it will not be because of Helen.”

  I remember not knowing what to make of all this discourse. Was the Troyan royal family friend or foe to Helen?

  With the situation remaining unresolved, we left the Great Hall, and Paris Alexandros brought me to his palatial rooms, arranging for a Thracian girl, Xanthippe, to be my maidservant. She spoke no Greek.

  My first evening in Ilios was awful. Although the food was plentiful and well prepared, and the wine and water were consumed from golden goblets, as Paris and Aeneas had asserted when we hosted them in Sparta, the Troyan women did not dine with the men; consequently, I was entirely friendless among those who took no pains to welcome me, flashing looks of resentment when they bothered to make eye contact at all. They spoke the Phrygian dialect, which I barely understood, catching an odd word here and there that sounded similar to a cognate in my own tongue. When I tried to speak with them, they did not understand me, or at least pretended not to. Priam, Hecuba, Hector, Aeneas, and Paris Alexandros all spoke good Greek. Surely some of the twelve daughters of Priam or the wives of whichever of his fifty sons had wed, spoke decent Greek as well. In this cosmopolitan metropolis, I had heard many dialects when Paris Alexandros and I rode through the streets; thus, I was hard pressed to believe that everyone in the royal women’s dining hall spoke only Phrygian. I was horribly lonely and could not wait to be reunited with Paris in our bed, where no jealousies could touch us and where it was clear that I was desired.

  “I fear I have made a dreadful mistake,” I told Paris Alexandros as I lay in his arms. “I am not wanted here.”

  He brushed the hair from my brow with a gentle caress, then kissed me full on the lips. “I want you. I want you here. Here. Beside me forever.”

  “Except for you, I am all alone here in Ilios. The women hate me. Even your mother hates me.”

  “Her opinion is inconsequential to me. She still believes I should be dead. When I cheated the omens, my father embraced me like the long-lost son I was and called for a festival in honor of my homecoming. My mother did not rejoice. My father accepts you; and my brother Hector, the noblest man on earth, welcomes you as well.”

  “His wife, Andromache, was one of the rudest of all. She is determined to detest me. I went to embrace her as a sister and she cursed me with almost as great a furor as your sister Cassandra. I had heard that Andromache was a woman of great dignity. But not when it comes to welcoming Helen, I fear. I am a daughter of Zeus, and I have been a queen. If they refuse to respect my birthright, can they not at least welcome me as their brother’s beloved?”

  I wept in Alexander’s arms, bedewing his chest with my hot tears. I had not anticipated such antipathy. But in those strong arms I found a solace and a satiation I had never known until we’d met. Paris Alexandros gave me a reason to exist, and wherever we dwelled, as long as we were together, I could endeavor to endure the taunts and insults of the envious.

  Days turned to weeks and weeks became months. Time and distance continued to diminish any homesickness I still might have harbored. Three of my boys by Menelaus were in the agogi, and I would not have seen them for many more years, even if I had remained in Sparta. You, Hermione, had always reserved your affections for your father. I did miss little Nico, but soon he, too, would be taken by the Spartan elders to become a hoplite. There were moments when I longed for the wild beauty of my Laconian countryside, but I did not pine for the Spartan lifestyle or for my abandoned husband. I resolved anyhow to look forward to what might lie ahead rather than dwell too much in what I had chosen to leave behind. I was reminded of the future every day. A new life now throbbed within my womb.

  Apart from meals, Paris Alexandros and I spent every moment in each other’s company. And no Achaeans stormed the port with their black-hulled ships. One day we rode out to Mount Ida. As I had brought Paris Alexandros to Mount Taygetos where I roamed as a girl, he yearned to show me the countryside where he was raised as a shepherd lad by Agelaus. We crossed the river Scamander and wended our way up the mountainside, where the air was cool and sweet. By that time, I should point out, the Troyan prince was referring to me as his wife, for I was in every way; indeed, it was how I had come to see myself, although Priam and Hecuba had refused to host a formal wedding feast. Hecuba, particularly, had tried her best to ignore my pregnancy.

  At the sound of hoofbeats, the mountain villagers came out of their humble abodes. Agelaus welcomed us, insisting that we join him for a meal of roasted lamb. He seemed pleased to meet me; and his love for Paris Alexandros was undeniable, a far warmer affection than Priam had conferred upon his prodigal. Yet most interested in our visit was a dark-haired nymphlike girl, whom Paris, with some trepidation, introduced to me as Oenone, his favorite childhood playmate, exceptionally skilled in the arts of healing. Oenone looked me in the eye, then turned her gaze on my obviously swollen belly. She bit her lip and blinked back tears.

  “Are you still such a genius with that bow of yours?” Agelaus said hastily in an attempt to alter the dampened mood of their reunion. “Or has your new life on silken cushions softened the boy I raised?”

  Paris Alexandros slung his bow across his shoulder and wordlessly pointed to a circling hawk. Drawing an arrow from his quiver and laying it across the bowstring, he squinted, took aim, and let his missile fly, bringing down the predator in
a single shot. “Now show me a hare or deer, bear or boar, and their first taste of my arrow will catch them on their final breath.”

  Agelaus laughed and embraced his foster son. “Finest marksman on Mount Ida! In all of Troy and Dardania, too! But don’t think his skill is limited to the creatures of the woods and sky. He could bring down a man the same way, if he had a mind to.”

  “If I had a mind to,” Paris Alexandros echoed. “I have no love for killing, except to put food on the table. I am a hunter, not a soldier like my brother Hector.”

  My anxiety was reawakened; I could not hold my tongue as we rode back toward Ilios. “You loved her,” I said to Paris of the dark-haired girl Oenone. “And she still loves you. Tell me why you left her.”

  He had followed the men who took his prize white bull to the city and became swept up in the athletic games at the festival. Suddenly, his birthright was revealed, and he was welcomed back into the bosom of the royal family. There was no turning back; he was no longer a carefree man of the hills, free to consort with and marry a simple mountain girl. Paris Alexandros assumed the regal mantle; with some regret for leaving Oenone among her people on Mount Ida, he moved on, embracing his new life as a prince of Troy. “Are you jealous?” he asked me. The sensation was new and terrifying; that I, the most desirable woman in the world, should fear losing her lover—her new husband—to anyone else, least of all to a lowly shepherdess. I despised myself for my vanity, but I could not deny its existence. “You are the only woman for me,” Paris Alexandros soothed. “I want to live every day of my life in your love and to die in your arms.”

  “Pretty words.”

  “You disbelieve me?”

  I touched my belly. “It must be my condition,” I replied, trying to embrace his assurances. “We are starting a family of our own now.”

  It was the first time I truly felt like Helen of Troy.