The Memoirs of Helen of Troy

by Amanda Elyot

  The pergamos was silent, save for the cry of a bird winging past the sun. I slipped my arms about Alexander’s waist and we held each other and wept.

  Then Priam spoke and eulogized his son, declaring afterward that a twelve-day ceasefire would be observed by the opposing armies so that Hector could be properly mourned. He called for the men to bring timber for the funeral pyre. It was considered a great honor to help build it.

  Nine days of mourning followed, during which noble Hector’s corpse lay in state, wrapped in a purple-bordered robe and crowned with a wreath of myrtle. Day and night, singers, ringed around the altar, chanted the funeral dirges and sang lamentations. On the tenth day, the pyre was lit and Hector’s body was burned until nothing but his white bones remained. The flames were then doused with wine and the bones of the great warrior were dipped in oil and wrapped in the finely woven linen tunic that had been worn by Hector on the day he wed Andromache. Hecuba brought forth a golden casket into which Priam gently placed his son’s bones, bestowing a kiss upon the cloth before closing the box. The entire city was then invited to a lavish feast, old Priam having sent emissaries to our allies, charging them to scavenge and scrounge, to empty their larders, fields, and farms in noble Hector’s honor.

  On the morning of the eleventh day, Andromache draped the elaborately wrought red funeral shroud over the coffer; alongside Hector’s parents, she set the casket in a hollow grave, which they piled over with enormous stones laid close together. Each of Priam’s surviving children and their wives laid down a stone until the great grave barrow was complete. Priam set up watchmen all around it in case the Achaeans broke the truce and tried to defile the newly raised tomb.

  Then, on the following day, when Hector’s name and legacy had entered the realm of legend, the fighting resumed.

  Paris Alexandros, now the eldest prince of Troy, felt it his duty to assume Hector’s mantle. How far my husband had come from insisting that he was a hunter and not a soldier! “I want Achilles,” he said as he lay in my arms the night after the ceasefire was lifted. “I want to be the one to make him pay for Hector’s life. For Penthesilea’s. I have become a man obsessed. It’s said he is not fully mortal, and I believe it. How else could he have remained untouched even in the thick of battle? He appears invulnerable to arrow, spear, and sword.”

  I traced his jawline with the tip of my finger, then brought my lips to his. “The Troyan warriors are aiming for the wrong place.”

  “We have aimed everywhere!”

  “Not quite,” I whispered.

  I recalled how Achilles, having unwittingly lowered his guard in my presence, handled the kouros. “Remember the story you once told me about the marriage of Peleus and Thetis?”

  “Of course.”

  I nestled into his arms. “I have one, too.” I could not tell him how I learned it; Paris Alexandros was surprised that no Troyan seemed to ever have heard it or surely they would have taken better aim. I told him the tale of Achilles’s near immortality: how Thetis had held her newborn son by the left ankle and dipped his tiny form into the cauldron to boil away his mortal parts, thus leaving the rest of his body completely invulnerable to death or injury; how Peleus, coming upon her and thinking, mistakenly, that she was trying to kill their baby, had pulled her away from the cauldron; how Thetis, still holding Achilles by his left ankle, had never dipped that part of his body into the boiling waters of immortality; therefore, his left foot up to the ankle was as mortal as any man’s.

  “His sandal covers his foot, but his greave ends just above his ankle. The tiny patch of flesh would not be easy to reach with a sword, and a spear would strike the dust before it struck Achilles, but it is supremely vulnerable to an arrow’s tip.” I straddled Paris Alexandros and kissed him passionately, feeling him grow hard between my legs. “For an archer as skilled as you, no target is too small.”

  He slipped inside me. “Are you sure that what you told me of Achilles is true?”

  I shook my head. “But you have everything to gain by taking aim.” My hair tumbled over my breasts and down my back as I rode him. Our lovemaking was fierce and feral, an even greater passion gripping us that night: the raging mutual desire to extinguish the Achaeans’ brightest light.

  “I go to kill one man today,” said Paris Alexandros the following morning as I helped him don his armor. “I have no urge to see any other Achaean fall.”

  Never before had I encouraged Paris Alexandros to set foot on the battlefield. Although I’d been in Ilios for years, my life was still completely tied to his alone. Without him, neither I nor our children were entirely safe from harm. Every time he shouldered his great curved bow, I felt like I was holding my breath for hours until his return. And when he returned home safe and unscarred, I was even happier to see him than I had been the day before. I regretted that Andromache had always rebuffed my repeated overtures of friendship, for we were truly sisters under the skin for the overwhelming love we bore our husbands.

  Paris Alexandros checked his store of arrows one last time before leaving. I kissed him good-bye, holding him so close that I could feel his heartbeat through his leather armor, and wished him good fortune on the field.

  Then I dressed as if for a festival in cloth of gold and crowned my head with a glittering diadem that resembled a wreath, studded with rubies to mimic wild berries. I climbed the steps to the ramparts and stood on the wall to watch the day’s carnage. For the first time in my life I felt something akin to the way my sister Clytemnestra viewed the world, and it both thrilled and horrified me.

  Below me, the fighting raged as fiercely as it did on any other morning. What a dreadful life a soldier had! I still saw no honor in dying on the field for a cause in which one had no personal stake, as had numberless Achaeans. By now, their warriors were half a generation younger than those who had sailed under Agamemnon. Most likely they hardly had a clue who Helen was and why so many of them were dying in order to recapture her. To them I was no more than the stuff of legend, though I lived among them.

  I spied Achilles in the thick of the conflict. Hacking and slashing with his sword, he cut a deforesting swath through our army. Troyans staggered and fell on either side of his blade. He appeared invincible.

  Crouched behind a crenellation, Paris Alexandros waited for open space before he drew his bowstring. The other warriors were too close to the mighty Achaean; the target was obscured.

  Achilles did not lack for hubris, though, and I will always believe that his ego, as much as Alexander’s arrow, contributed to his downfall. For a few moments, the great Greek warrior stood alone amid a sea of corpses, his leather sandals soaking up the lifeblood of the morning’s victims. But, from where I stood, it appeared that one of the Troyan warriors was not expiring quickly enough to suit Achilles’s temper. He raised his left foot to deliver a swift kick to the mutilated body.

  With the instincts of an eagle, Paris Alexandros released an arrow from his bow just as Achilles made the slightest movement to raise his foot. My beloved’s aim was perfect and deadly; the tip of the shaft penetrated the back of Achilles’s leg, just above the heel.

  Like a wounded boar, Achilles roared in pain. Perhaps it was my imagination, but it seemed to me that in that moment, every movement, every noise on the vast and bloody plain, ceased, leaving nothing but the echo of Achilles’s final cry. The great warrior reeled and staggered, tearing off his helmet and raising his arms to the sky as if to rail at the Olympians who had failed to protect him. Blood poured from the sensitive mortal flesh.

  With the massive momentum of a felled cypress, Achilles toppled to the earth, striking his bare head on a stone, becoming motionless in an instant as the dust around him billowed into a sepia-colored cloud. Troyan and Achaean alike were shocked to see the hero dead. Odysseus and Diomedes faced down the Troyan army, keeping them at bay, lest they try to despoil Achilles’s corpse the way the fallen man had done to Hector’s. Despite their collective hatred for Achilles, the Troyans had a certain
reverence for him as a warrior and let the Achaeans bear him from the field undefiled.

  It was not long before word spread throughout the enemy army that it was Paris Alexandros—fabled as a lover and not a fighter—who had dispatched the mighty Achilles to the Elysian Fields. They considered it an insult to the hero’s glory that Achilles was felled by one who in their view could scarcely bear a candle to his brother Hector’s light. In our culture, excellence on the battlefield was determined by one’s skill with spear and sword (and in the Troyans’ case, with chariots as well), but never with a bow and arrow. A man who needed distance from his target in order to be effective and who took cover behind the presumed safety of a wall rather than stand in the thick of an ugly skirmish, was seen as less than a true soldier. Bows and arrows were considered fine for hunting, but not for warfare. In the Achaeans’ view, Paris Alexandros had killed the greatest warrior since the mighty Heracles with no more than a craven sportsman’s toys.

  I welcomed him home that day with a steaming bath strewn with rose petals. I lovingly bathed every inch of my adored husband and washed and oiled his hair until it shone like Apollo’s, the Olympians’ greatest archer. I smoothed fragrant lotions along every limb and plane of his beautiful golden body and decked him in his finest robes.

  “Do you think that my mother might finally appreciate my return to Wilusa?” he quipped, but I could tell from the look in his eyes that he did not speak entirely in jest. Not only had Hector been his mother’s favorite by far, but Hecuba still remained certain that the prophecy she dreamt of when she carried Paris Alexandros in her womb would still prove true and that her second son would live to bring ruin on Ilios.

  To my view, the city—and the royal family—had already suffered the devastation predicted in her dream. Perhaps the worst of it had passed, that it had culminated in the death of Hector and that with Alexander’s triumph over Achilles, the tide had finally turned in our favor.

  That night we feasted well, amid much revelry. I thought, mistakenly, that some of my sisters-in-law would have congratulated me on Alexander’s feat, or even sought to ingratiate themselves with me as the wife of Troy’s new hero. But I was as lonely as ever until the meal itself was over and the women adjourned to the Great Hall to join the men.

  I was so proud to languish at Alexander’s feet; I never thought it an abasement to show my adoration for the man I loved, but Paris Alexandros called for a chair so that I could sit beside him. While he insisted on propitiating Apollo for his aegis that afternoon, my beloved alone knew how great a contribution I had made that day. The arrow that struck the seemingly invincible Achilles in the vulnerable mortal flesh above his left heel was not a lucky shot by any means, but the achievement of a master marksman . . . guided by the equally lethal tip I’d given to him during our lovemaking.

  Priam stood and raised his elaborate golden wine cup. “I’ve always believed that Paris Alexandros was a fine warrior,” he began, lest any snickers contradict the king. I could see that Deiphobus barely concealed a smirk behind the lip of his kylix. “And his lovely Helen has ever been a charming, gracious asset to Wilusa. We have not lost so many sons because Helen saw in Paris Alexandros what others were so late to acknowledge.” I noticed that he glanced first at Hecuba and then at his daughter Cassandra. “To believe that men have died for Helen and the love she bears my second son, and now my heir, is to tarnish the name of glorious Hector—who understood what was truly at stake in this bloody conflict—as well as to discredit Alexandros. Let us drink to Paris Alexandros, hero to all of Wilusa and heir to the throne of Troy!”

  My eyes misted over with joyous tears. Everyone drank to my husband’s valor and continued health, and libations were mixed and poured to thank the gods for favoring us that day. And what a grand show it was of Priam’s faith in and love for his son, to proclaim him heir before the great royal family! I think that was what stung Deiphobus most of all. Even though he was younger than Paris Alexandros, Deiphobus had convinced himself, I’m certain, that their father did not regard the man best known in Ilios for being the city’s most scandalous lover, as fitting material for a king. Now the outraged Deiphobus had to swallow his anger as well as his pride and embrace his elder brother in a public show of affection and support.

  Although Paris Alexandros had returned from Mount Ida many years ago, that night he felt as if he had finally come home; and when Queen Hecuba enfolded him in her arms, kissing first his right cheek, then his left, and then his right again, the tears that trickled down his face bedewed her lips. The plaudits of his peers and his father’s approbation were thrilling, but his mother’s acceptance was all the world to him.

  Unfortunately, his euphoria was too short-lived. Late that night, after we had made love, I thought that Paris Alexandros had drifted off to sleep and was deep in the bosom of Morpheus dreaming of the day’s triumph. But his eyes were wide open, sparkling in the moonlight and gazing at the frescoed ceiling.

  “You realize, love,” he murmured in a voice that froze my soul, “that from now on, I am more than heir to Priam’s throne. My life is now the Achaeans’ greatest prize.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Although another ceasefire was not demanded, the Achaean chieftains decided that they needed to regroup. Achilles’s death had been as much of a loss to their army and a blow to morale as was Hector’s death to ours. Once more, though tragically, the opposing armies were evenly matched.

  We gleaned much intelligence from our trustworthy spies. The Achaeans claimed that a seer had proclaimed that they would not be able to take Troy without the arms of Heracles. The famed warrior’s great bow and arrows were bestowed upon his friend Philoctetes, who had been the only one brave enough to set the first torch to Heracles’s funeral pyre. But when the Achaeans stopped en route to Troy on the isle of Tenedos, just beyond our bay, Philoctetes, suffering a serpent bite that soon became gangrenous, was abandoned there by his trusted fellow warriors.

  Agamemnon thus dispatched a party to Tenedos for the purpose of bringing Philoctetes to Ilios and curing his wounded foot. It amazed me that they dared to imagine that the poor man might still be alive so many years later, particularly since their treatment of him a decade ago was almost as insidious as the gangrene.

  It was also prophesied that the Achaeans would never conquer Troy if one of Priam’s younger sons, Prince Troilus, lived past his twentieth birthday. The fact that the youth still lived was what Achilles had alluded to on the night that Priam came to ransom Hector’s corpse.

  In response to a third prognostication, Achilles’s young son Neoptolemus had been fetched from rocky Skyros where he dwelled with his mother Deidamia, one of the daughters of the island’s king, old Lycomedes. The boy was barely older than my son Idaeus; in my opinion, far too young to fight.

  By now my first three sons by Menelaus would have been grown men about the age of Troilus and were surely on our shores among the Spartan hoplites. I still had no word of them, despite the requests I’d made to our Troyan spies. Perhaps they had never even looked for my boys or had learned something but withheld it from me. With the possibility existing that my Spartan sons were on the battlefield trying to kill my Troyan husband and his kin and countrymen—and with all the ambivalence about allegiances that this situation might engender—I suppose I could understand how the scouts would have wished me to remain in the dark.

  The Troyans had fought well ever since Achilles’s death, particularly since another of the great Achaean warriors had died soon afterward. The Greeks had quarreled among themselves as to which of their number was the greatest surviving warrior and therefore most deserving to inherit Achilles’s armor. It had come down to Odysseus and Ajax the Greater: the first renowned for his cunning, the latter notorious for his tremendous strength. Agamemnon had been called upon to break the tie, and he awarded the armor to Odysseus, on whom he relied tremendously as a strategist. No one could have predicted that this act would completely devastate Ajax, but the battle-harden
ed warrior went mad over it and fell upon his sword. Ajax, too, had been one of my suitors all those years ago. I still remember how grateful I was that Tyndareus had not chosen him for my husband; but with his death, as with that of Patroclus, a piece of me, the girlish Helen of a gentler time, died as well.

  There was much anticipation in both camps on the day that Philoctetes was well enough to set his healed foot onto the battlefield, for everyone believed that Heracles’s arms bore a near-mythical power. Would they turn the hapless Philoctetes into a hero of his predecessor’s stature or would he dishonor great Heracles’s name by not distinguishing himself on the field? Naturally, we Troyans hoped for the latter.

  The irony of the bow and arrow being suddenly sacrosanct in a world where spear and sword were the revered weapons was not lost on Paris Alexandros. Before this intriguing shift of popular opinion, at least in the Achaean camp, Alexandros had said repeatedly that he could not understand why a sane man would put his life and his family at risk by being in the thick of things when he could dispatch at least as many of the enemy from behind a bow.