The Memoirs of Helen of Troy

by Amanda Elyot

  The Greeks fought with a renewed vigor that day, despite the fact that Philoctetes had not yet had the chance to employ Heracles’s massive bow. I watched the combat from the south tower of the citadel wall, where much farther along it, Paris Alexandros crouched, loosing his arrows in abundance.

  I sighted Philoctetes in a chariot below the wall, perhaps at the same moment that he and Paris Alexandros spied each other. I drew in my breath as each man drew his bow. It was difficult to follow the two trajectories simultaneously. Alexander’s arrow flew straight for Philoctetes, but the Achaean ducked, and the arrow stuck fast in the body of the cart.

  But Paris Alexandros had not taken cover in time. Philoctetes’s arrow pierced my husband’s armor, lodging in his breast. Paris Alexandros staggered backward and collapsed upon the stone; his cry of agony could have been heard on lofty Mount Olympus. Clutching my skirts, I descended the steps of the tower and raced toward him along the wall until I was out of breath. I elbowed past the Troyan warriors who warned me that I was now in an area of combat and who tried to prevent me from reaching my beloved lord. “Let them hit me!” I cried, referring to the enemy below. “Would that I could die today!”

  Someone had propped up Paris Alexandros so that he was seated with his back slumped against the wall, sheltered from the line of fire. His jerkin and tunic had been split open to avoid infecting the wound. Blood flowed like wine from his chest and his skin was deathly pale. I knelt beside him, ripping my gown to make a cloth to mop his brow. Shivering and trembling, he was covered in sweat. Sliding my arm behind his neck to cradle him, I whispered words of comfort. “Stay by me, my love,” I urged him. “You will live to save Ilios from the invaders. You will be king one day, and our son Idaeus after you. All Troy relies upon your valor.”

  I don’t know if he heard me. Paris Alexandros drifted in and out of consciousness, with one word on his lips: Oenone.

  Could my heart die twice in a single day? Oenone was the nymphlike girl of Alexander’s youth upon Mount Ida. In a moment of clarity, I recalled that he had once told me that she was exceptionally skilled in the arts of healing. Perhaps he only sought her as a nurse. Or was it more than that? I could not bear to think that might be true. But it was her name that he whispered, not Helen’s, in what might have been his final breaths.

  “Carry him home and send to Mount Ida for the woman Oenone,” I commanded the soldiers. When they did not move with enough alacrity, I became hysterical. “Heed me! I am Helen! And when Helen speaks, you obey.”

  The warriors transported Paris Alexandros to our sleeping chamber and laid him amid the fleecy coverlets and silken pillows. With utmost tenderness, I removed the offending arrow and undressed him, treating the wound as I had cared for the lesser injuries he had suffered in the past, with a poultice of figs soaked in milk to coagulate the blood.

  For hours my husband floated feverishly between darkness and light. I prayed to Aphrodite, who had brought us to this pass, to spare his life, and exhorted Zeus my father to be compassionate and merciful. I climbed up on our great bed beside Paris Alexandros and ever so gently slipped my arms around him. I would not let my flesh leave his, as though the constant touch of my hand or caress of my lips would bind him to this world. Softly, I sang to him and recounted the story of our mutual passion—from the moment we first laid eyes on each other to our first magical encounter in Sparta’s sacred grove—and all the nights and days we had spent since in each other’s embrace, holding out hope that the promise of countless passionate nights to come would seduce him into the light.

  Late that night a Troyan warrior pounded on our door. “Oenone will not come,” he said.

  The wound was becoming infected despite my best ministrations. I nestled closer and softly kissed my husband’s lips, then rested my hand on his sweat-drenched brow. “Oenone?” he murmured.

  “She will not come. It’s Helen. Helen, my love.” Without Oenone’s skill, I knew that it would soon be over. “Please . . . please, my beloved . . . my life . . . please don’t leave me. You are all I have in Ilios.” My sobs bathed the skin that once was golden bronze and now was white as chalk.

  “Helen?” whispered Paris Alexandros in great pain, tilting his head to gaze directly into my eyes for the first time since I had brought him home.

  I nodded. “Helen. Your Helen. Helen of Troy.”

  “He . . . len . . .” he whispered once more, and closed his eyes.

  I was alone.

  I took a small knife from my cosmetics box and clipped a curl from Alexander’s honey-colored locks, setting my treasure inside an amulet through which I slipped a golden chain and fastened it around my throat.

  When Priam came to visit the following morning, he found me seated on a low, carved stool, ankle-deep in a mass of red-gold hair.

  The funeral honors for Paris Alexandros were nearly as lavish as those accorded Hector. Libations of wine and honey mixed with milk were poured, dirges chanted, and orations delivered. He was buried on Mount Ida, in a cave where in his shepherd youth he often liked to sleep and from where he loved to watch the stars. As voluble as I had been at Hector’s pyre, with Paris Alexandros I was mute. I was too filled with emotion and passion to articulate my thoughts. It was universally acknowledged that the love I bore him was undying and irreproachable; it did not need to be restated.

  I was as dead as Paris Alexandros, and yet I still breathed. I suffered as much as any mortal; how I wished I could die like one. I existed in a state of eikasia, seeing my own death in that of Paris Alexandros, wishing, hoping, imagining that I, too, would be taken by Ker or Thanatos—in a painful or a gentle death, it didn’t matter to me anymore; yet I did not literally die. Not being able to join my beloved in the underworld was the cruelest trick of immortality, for in memory I would forever relive every moment of his slow and painful death.

  To compound my grief, Hecuba refused to allow me to see my children, insisting that my hysteria might frighten them. In my disconsolate state, I was too weak to fight her will. Deprived of my babies, I had nothing left of my precious Paris Alexandros but my memories and a lock of his golden hair.

  Over the following days, the most fascinating intrigue came to light. It began this way: Ilios, being situated in Anatolia, where inland of us the Hittite Kingdom held powerful sway, had co-opted many of the Hittite laws. One of them affected me most directly: If a man dies, his widow shall be married to his brother. Deiphobus strenuously asserted his right. He was now the eldest son of Troy and Priam’s heir presumptive. He was also not above taking what he wanted, even where a human being was concerned. But Deiphobus had a rival, I learned to great surprise, for his much younger brother Helenus—the priest and seer—had scarcely glanced in my direction since I’d arrived in Ilios.

  I would never have wed again, had that decision been mine to make. Despite the youthful bloom upon my demimortal face and figure, I was nearing the age of forty, and suddenly I felt like the sixteen-year-old Helen at the whim of the avaricious Tyndareus. Had the choice of husbands been mine as well, I would have opted for the unknown, far preferring the quiet Helenus to his savage older brother who still referred to me with leers and whispers, outside his father’s presence, naturally, as the Spartan harlot.

  But King Priam deferred to Deiphobus’s seniority, and we were married in a ceremony that could not have been performed with greater haste.

  Scarcely had the white bones of Paris Alexandros been buried on Mount Ida than Deiphobus appropriated our high house as his own, filling it with slovenly serving women who freely helped themselves to my perfumes and cosmetics and lived to do his pleasure at peril of their limbs. When it came to attending to my directives, they suddenly grew indolent.

  But the apathy of my servants was insignificant compared to my treatment at the brutal hands of Deiphobus. “Open your whoring legs for me the way you did for my brother,” he would demand, roughly parting my thighs and forcing himself upon me. When I did not do his bidding quickly enough, or when
out of disgust or fear my lips and tongue or any other part of me went dry or became otherwise unresponsive to his touch and his commands, he beat me.

  It was my curse that I was unbelieved when I threw myself at Priam’s feet and disclosed with bitter weeping what went on inside this mockery of a marriage, for in my half-mortal state, no marks of roughness remained upon my person within a few hours of their infliction. Deiphobus had slapped me until my face resembled raw pork. He had bruised and pinched my limbs and raised welts on my sore buttocks. My every orifice had been violated repeatedly, not so much in a manifestation of his lust, but in a sick desire to destroy me. Straddling my body one night he even threatened to introduce the elaborately wrought hilt of his dagger between my splayed legs. In his presence, my fear and sorrow, and my suffering, knew no bounds. And the following night, when he determined I had displeased him in some way, he threw himself upon me, clasping my throat until I could scarcely breathe, and vowed, “I’m going to kill you, you filthy whore!”

  I wished he had been able to do so, for I no longer desired to live. After Alexander’s death, my life had become increasingly miserable. In a moment of desperation and weakness, I considered hanging myself as my mother had done to escape her marital torment; but I decided not to emulate the action Leda had taken in her shame. I’d heard Oenone had hanged herself after Paris Alexandros died. Perhaps that was another reason why I changed my mind.

  So I prayed to Zeus my father to take me in some other way, for my demise had to be his decision, but he was deaf to my entreaties, as was Priam to my repeated confessions of his son’s brutality.

  After I was legally married to Deiphobus, Hecuba had relented to my pleas to be reunited with my children, but their homecoming was horrifyingly short-lived, for Deiphobus could not bear the sight of my offspring by Paris Alexandros and sent them to the temple of Athena to be raised as priests and priestess.

  With nothing left for me in Ilios, I was ready for the Greeks to inflict their worst. No matter what Menelaus chose to do with me once the war was over, it would be preferable to this death-in-life of my present existence.

  I soon discovered the source of all the recent prophecies by which the Achaeans had reconfigured their military strategy. It was the jealous Helenus. Unknown to Priam, he had been briefly captured by the enemy and had revealed the importance of regaining Heracles’s great bow and lethal arrows. Helenus foresaw that with those weapons Philoctetes would kill Paris Alexandros, thereby clearing a path for this younger son of Priam to marry his rival’s wife. But having lost his bid for me to Deiphobus, Helenus, believing that he lacked his father’s love and respect, had turned willing traitor. Of all the perils they considered, the Troyans had never taken into account the dangerous vengeance of a jilted youth—a youth with the ability to see the future.

  Helenus was a serpent: silent and deadly. It terrified me that he had bided his time all these years waiting for his chance to strike. I had been his secret passion, his fantasy. In his desire for me he lost perspective, even though as a seer, he had to know that as his wife or lover, I was not his destiny. And so he told the Achaeans how to destroy Paris Alexandros—and therefore, me. Hate is only love turned inside out. It is envy; it is wounded pride, both of which ultimately gained the better of Helenus. But all of us over the years, Achaean and Troyan, had become so caught up in a tide of events that was far greater than we were, that its momentum eventually engulfed us. We lost all clarity, all reason. Ruled by our passions alone, we were riding out situations over which we now, or perhaps ever, had little or no control.

  Willingly, I contrived with Helenus to aid the Achaeans. I knew that I conspired with a demon, but every night I fell victim to a far greater monster in his elder brother.

  Helenus reminded the Achaeans that if his younger brother Troilus survived his twentieth birthday, the city would never be taken. Within a few days of this “prediction,” the prince’s body was spitted upon an enemy sword. A city could also not be sacked as long as the statue of its patron god or goddess remained safely within its temple. For Troy, this icon was the Palladium, the statue of Pallas Athena.

  Under cover of darkness, Helenus planned to unbolt a secret gate within the citadel wall and lead Odysseus and Diomedes through a clandestine tunnel that opened into the Temple of Athena. Diomedes would steal the Palladium, murdering its priestly guards, if necessary, and then Helenus would spirit the two Achaeans back out of the city.

  A few nights later, Hecuba came calling. Deiphobus was out carousing as he did almost every night before staggering home to rape me. “There is a beggar outside who would speak with you,” she told me. “He is probably one of the starving citizens who once dwelt in the lower town.”

  “I have no cause to converse with a beggar man,” I replied. “Send him away.”

  “I have already tried that. He came first to the palace, demanding to speak with Helen. He says he must tell Helen something that no one else may hear.”

  After a few more minutes of talking in circles, I reluctantly agreed to see the beggar. Hecuba accompanied him to my chamber. “He insists you bathe him,” the queen told me, standing back from the man’s foul stench. “If I had told you that at the outset, you never would have admitted him to your home.”

  In thirteen years Queen Hecuba had never left the palace walls to escort someone to my home, least of all a flea-bitten, sore-encrusted vagrant. Something was amiss—but what? It seemed as though the queen was urging me in no uncertain terms to grant the beggar’s boon and do his bidding.

  So I summoned my serving women and had them fill the enormous silver bathing tub with warm water. They were more than happy to be dismissed after that single, simple task. I scented the water, and with extreme disgust undressed the man, dropping his reeking garments in a pile outside the door. I would give him one of Deiphobus’s tunics after I had cleansed him. I did not expect my new husband to return shortly.

  It suddenly occurred to me that perhaps it had been Hecuba’s intention for her son to catch me performing such intimate ablutions for another man, knowing the consequences would be dire, retribution swift. But it seemed I had no choice. I must take the walk the Fates had planned for me.

  The vagrant had not yet spoken to me, although he had communicated his errand to the queen outside my presence. As I scrubbed the filth from his matted hair, I attempted to engage him in light banter. On noticing that his Phrygian accent was inauthentic, I asked, “When did you come to Troy?” He told a clever tale, but I did not believe him. And when I bathed his body, which was not that of a spindly, half-starved beggar, but that of a strong and seasoned warrior, I was sure of his identity. His face, once shaved, bore a scar that dimpled his chin, and my suspicions were confirmed. That small disfigurement had often sent his adoring wife into raptures.

  “So, you found a way to feel the caress of my soft hands on your bare flesh after all, you swine. What do you want from me, Odysseus? We bear no love for each other and never have. Were it not for you, I never would have been married to Menelaus and you and I would not be here.”

  “Complicity,” he replied. “A blind eye. It will cost you little or nothing; I know you are unhappy now. You do not have to display your scars for me to see them.” His words were well chosen and he knew it.

  “So, you have Helenus, and now his mother, believing that it would be an act of mercy on the Troyans to end this bloody conflict now. What bargain did you strike with Hecuba for her to bring you to me?”

  “Achilles wanted her youngest daughter, Polyxena, to be sacrificed upon his pyre. He knew she had once fancied him. In death, she will become his bride. From the Temple of Athena I went straight to the palace with that news. Hecuba entreated me to see that Polyxena was spared that fate.”

  “And you agreed?”

  “I did.”

  “And in exchange for my . . . complicity . . . what do I gain?”

  “We’re both aware you have no friends within the walls of Ilios. You will see your e
nemies pay.”

  “My enemies lie on both sides of the citadel walls.”

  Odysseus demurred.

  “Promise me my Troyan children will be safe. Deiphobus sent them to the Temple of Athena to be acolytes.”

  A silence so enormous that it could have swallowed me whole, filled the room. Odysseus rose and stepped out of the bathing tub, reaching for Deiphobus’s tunic.

  I knew the worst had taken place. “What have you done?!” I railed, clawing at his chest. My nails raised welts before he could clothe himself.

  “Your children tried to prevent Diomedes from taking the Palla-dium. I am sorry, Helen.”

  “My babies?! All four of them?” The horror of his words penetrated my heart like an arrow. “Diomedes was to kill grown men if necessary, not to slaughter children!” My cries filled the night. I didn’t care who heard me now. I had nothing left to protect. “I want you dead!” I screamed at Odysseus. “I want ALL of you dead! I will not weep for you or any of the Achaeans, nor will I shed a tear for a single Troyan. Sack the city. Raze it to the ground. Leave no man alive. And may every Achaean perish in the flames as well.”

  Odysseus collected his filthy beggar’s disguise and, to my horror, donned it over his fresh clothes. “With your help, Helen,” he said, before he turned to leave my home, “the gods may yet grant half your wish.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  One morning, some days later, I was awakened by a cacophony of shouts and cries. Deiphobus sprang from the bed and ran down to our courtyard. Below us a crowd had gathered, shrieking gleefully that the Achaeans had gone. “Go down to the harbor,” someone shouted. “There isn’t a ship left!”

  With Priam in the lead, the members of the royal family processed through the Scaean Gate and down the winding avenues of the lower city. When we reached the defensive ditch, it was evident that there was nothing left of the Achaean encampment—the tents and pots and cauldrons, the horses and mules; except for Achilles’s funeral pyre, nothing remained. Even their refuse had been removed.