The Memoirs of Helen of Troy

by Amanda Elyot

  But where the tents had been erected and the vessels had been beached stood something truly astonishing: a giant horse, nearly as big as a ship and twice as high as my home. Set upon cart wheels, it was a glorious monstrosity indeed, constructed out of planks of polished wood and adorned with gemstones. Its flashing eyes were made of amethyst ringed in deep green beryl. The hooves were shod in bronze. Its mane was painted purple, tipped with gold, the open mouth—as if the beast were caught in the act of a defiant whinny—was set with teeth of ivory. The ears pricked up as if the creature was ever alert. Its great tail flowed all the way down to the rear wheels. The bridle had been fashioned of leather adorned with spangles of bronze and ivory; and the straps, bedecked with violet-colored flowers, all but invited the Troyans to grasp them and tug the magnificent creation inside the city walls.

  “Wait, there’s someone there!” said Deiphobus, drawing his ever-present dagger.

  “Please spare my life,” we heard, and from behind the horse an aging man clad in little more than rags, crept cautiously toward us, raising his hands in surrender. His body was covered in welts and sores, as though he had been beaten.

  Priam’s guards immediately placed his hands in restraints. “Who are you and why are you here?” the king demanded of his squirming prisoner.

  “My name is Sinon,” sniffled the man. “The Achaeans accused me of being a traitor and were going to kill me. They would make of me a human sacrifice to suit their will. But I escaped their wrath and hid here before they sailed away.” He went on to explain that the wily Odysseus had contrived to tar an innocent man, Palamedes, with the brush of treachery.

  I wondered if Odysseus had waited all this time to take revenge upon Palamedes for tricking him out of his feigned madness so many years ago, forcing him to honor the Oath of Tyndareus and come to Troy.

  “Believing the Ithacan’s crafty tale, Agamemnon put his own kinsman to death,” the trembling Sinon told Priam. “I had been the good Palamedes’s lieutenant, and when I spoke out about his blamelessness, Odysseus began to slander me as well.” Sinon feared a similar fate to Palamedes’s. “If you think all Achaeans are as ruthless as Odysseus, then kill me now,” he urged. “And the sons of Atreus will thank you for ridding their kind of another traitor.”

  Priam considered the captive’s words. In silence, we waited for his verdict. “We are not barbarians in Wilusa. You are welcome here,” Priam told him, “if you speak the truth.”

  Sinon’s words tumbled out of him like a waterfall. “It was no secret that for many years the Achaeans had wanted to give up and sail for home. Once Achilles and the High King quarreled, Agamemnon was quite prepared to quit these shores. After nearly ten years’ decimation of their ranks, they finally decided to go home. But the winds were unfavorable and Agamemnon looked to Kalchas the seer for guidance. Having spilled human blood in exchange for fair winds before he sailed for Troy, the High King believed the same remedy might be necessary for them to leave these shores. Because I had already been tarred a traitor, I was to be their convenient victim. I throw myself now on your mercy!”

  Priam ordered the removal of Sinon’s restraints, and the Greek threw himself before the Troyan king and kissed his hem. Then Priam asked why the great horse had been left behind.

  Sinon explained that after stealing the Palladium from the Temple of Athena, the Achaeans feared her wrath; to appease the goddess, they had built the horse, rendering it as grand as possible under such short notice. It was Kalchas, he said—reminding Priam that the seer was a Troyan turncoat—who had advised the Greeks to make it so tremendous that it could not be brought inside the city and thus gain the citizens of Ilios the renewed protection of Pallas. “If you allow the great horse to remain here on the beach, it is decreed that the Achaeans shall come back and capture Troy; but if you bring it inside the city walls before the Temple of Athena and present it to the goddess as a holy offering, then the enemy’s task shall remain unaccomplished.”

  “It is a deadly fraud! He plays us false!” cried Laocoön, a seer himself and one of the priests at the Temple of Apollo. He and his two sons had hastened to the beach as soon as word spread about the great wooden horse. “Why should we believe the Greeks would bear us gifts? I say we fear this horse as we should still fear the Greeks. This is no tribute from the Achaeans; it is an elaborate siege machine,” he insisted. To demonstrate his point, he threw his spear at the horse’s belly, hoping to penetrate the wood and impale one of the men he was certain were hidden inside.

  But then the most remarkable thing occurred. A wave swept in with the encroaching tide, its extraordinarily powerful undertow gripping Laocoön about the ankles like a monster from the deep, pulling him into the sea. In vain, his two young sons grabbed hold of his limbs, struggling to tug him back onshore, but the undertow snaked about the small boys’ bodies as well and all three were dragged into the sea and drowned.

  “You see, Poseidon is angry at such blasphemy of his sacred symbol,” snapped Deiphobus angrily. “I say we spit in the Achaeans’ face and bring the horse all the way through the Scaean Gate.”

  “Fools! You’re all fools!” spat Cassandra, distraught at seeing Apollo’s priest so violently slain. “White-haired Laocoön spoke the truth and for that he was destroyed. This horse is not a gift; it is a trick!” She grabbed her aged father by the arms and shook him. “Why do you heed the words of this foreigner, Sinon, instead of those of your own child? And if you will not believe me, believe poor Laocoön, a priest who always commanded your respect and who never uttered falsehood in his life.”

  At this Sinon increased the fervor of his entreaties, swearing oath upon oath to Priam that his story was no fabrication. “You see me on your shores, scared and bleeding. Where else am I to go? Either way, I am at someone’s mercy. Would you return me to the tyrants who framed Palamedes, who stole Briseis from the great Achilles, who abandoned Philoctetes for a decade until he suited their purpose—to the High King who sacrificed his daughter for his own ambitions?”

  My throat seized at Sinon’s inference to Iphigenia. The man knew which notes to play so that his music would achieve the desired effect. His words were crafted in the manner of an orator, though not delivered as such. To me, it sounded almost as though he’d memorized a text. And I was now fairly sure of its author. The great horse was no doubt Odysseus’s plan as well, or at the very least a collaboration with Helenus. Helenus had come down to the beach but was careful to offer no opinion on the matter. Hecuba, too, remained silent, though I doubted she had any real idea of the magnitude of her treacherous son’s involvement in this conspiracy. The lone dissenter was Helenus’s twin, Cassandra.

  But Sinon’s plea had worked its magic on Priam.

  The king ordered the horse to be drawn into the city, and the men went to fetch ropes and pulleys. They built a sturdy bridge across the trench with planks of wood, then drew the monstrous horse through the lower gate, up through the winding lanes of the lower city, and across the dusty plaza where Hector’s light had been so brutally extinguished. Finally the enormous Scaean Gate was opened amid triumphant fanfare, and the horse was wheeled inside the citadel.

  The Troyan women, inspired by the floral adornments on the horse’s reins, ran to the fields outside the city, going as far as Mount Ida to pluck wildflowers, with which they fashioned fragrant wreaths, climbing on ladders to fling them over the beast’s neck. They wound garlands about its polished fetlocks and danced around it, chanting songs of celebration over the retreat of the Achaeans.

  The events of recent weeks had changed me far more than everything that had transpired over the previous thirteen years. The death of Paris Alexandros, my repeated defilement at the hands of Deiphobus, and the slaughter of my precious children by Diomedes, had benumbed me. Like one who sleepwalks, I roamed through the rooms of the high house that Paris Alexandros had built for us. My passions that had once burned white-hot in the name of Eros were dead. Now I lived entirely for revenge.

&nb
sp; I welcomed what the citizens were calling the Trojan Horse, not because I thought, as they did, that it was the Achaeans’ guilty tribute to Athena, but because I believed the alarmist words of Laocoön. And if Odysseus and Diomedes were inside its polished carcass, that only brought them closer to the point of the dagger I now carried with me everywhere, cunningly concealed within my silken robes.

  That night, the entire city, from Priam to the lowliest washerwoman, danced and drank as if there were no tomorrow. Never in my recollection had any festival’s revelry been so grand or so joyous. No one heeded Cassandra’s dire prognostications of holocaust. The woman might as well have been spitting into the Great Sea. Suspicions from any quarter were roundly dismissed as folly and the speaker as disloyal to Ilios.

  No one questioned why the Achaeans had so suddenly weighed anchor. And by the time our warriors were in their cups, no one cared. The ships were gone; thus the story ended as far as it concerned them.

  If Queen Hecuba regarded the horse as a trick rather than a tribute, her acquiescence to bringing it inside the Scaean Gate was an act of calculated suicide. Nearly all her sons were dead, including her unparalleled favorite. She bore little love for the vicious Deiphobus and the duplicitous Helenus. Priam was old and feeble, and the strain of the long siege had been killing him by degrees for years. Better to end it swiftly.

  In the midst of all the carousing, Helenus cornered me and whispered instructions to leave a torchlight burning in my bedchamber once the citizens slumbered, overcome with wine. I agreed, but wondered if, when the time came, I would have the courage to go through with it. And could I keep from trembling in the presence of Deiphobus as he insisted that I spend the evening by his side? He was the most vociferous advocate of the Trojan Horse and I had to appear to support him.

  Deiphobus believed that his rule of Ilios was now so close at hand that he could taste its extravagant sweetness. Old Priam would soon die, or better still, abdicate in favor of his wise, strong son. Control of the Hellespont would be his alone. And if the craven Greeks came crawling back, Troy would never again abide by the rules of formal military engagement that had wasted ten long years.

  “To think the Achaeans are hidden inside the horse!” I teased, as arm in arm Deiphobus and I strolled around the massive tribute. “Your sister Cassandra is most certainly a misguided fool.” My words were coated in honey. I behaved as though I could not wait to be Deiphobus’s queen, and in his tremendous hubris the monster in man’s flesh did not even notice how differently I was behaving in his presence.

  “Oh, Menelaus, it is Helen,” I taunted, looking directly at the horse’s belly. “You thought that I would never be Troy’s queen once Paris Alexandros was dispatched to Tartarus. How you underestimated the strength of his brother Deiphobus, whose bed I warm as his new bride. For Deiphobus is not softhearted as was Alexandros. He is a fierce man whose brutality is unforgiving.”

  Deiphobus laughed, accepting as a compliment what I offered as a veiled warning to others.

  “And Agamemnon,” I continued, mimicking the voice of my sister Clytemnestra, “your hubris will become your downfall. For Deiphobus does not quake at the merest mention of your name.”

  Deiphobus was delighted. At last his wife understood what a great man he truly was! Perhaps tonight he would not strike her after all.

  “My sweet Odysseus,” I teased in the voice of my cousin Penelope, “I fear you will not return to my white arms as quickly as you’d hoped. For Deiphobus the Fearsome may yet prove more cunning than yourself.”

  Deiphobus wallowed in my words the way swine frolic in mud and filth. He could not wait to return home to demonstrate the full measure of his appreciation. But Aphrodite, if no one else, was on my side that night, and no sooner had Deiphobus reclined on the fleecy coverlets than all the wine he had consumed delivered him directly into the arms of Hypnos.

  At the sound of his strangled snores, I tiptoed to the chamber window, still fully dressed, my dagger within easy reach; after several deadly quiet moments of reflection tinged with fear and tremendous ambivalence, I lit the beacon.

  Helenus had told me that Sinon would light one, too, as would he, and this would alert the Achaeans—who could see his window from the Trojan Horse’s gaping mouth—that all was ready.

  In the flickering light I waited for the Greeks to come. But my heart was not as cold as I had believed it to be. I knew the invaders would spare no one in their wake of destruction, and while my rage against Odysseus had been fully heartfelt, I never truly countenanced the death of women and children—especially children—for I had now lost at least five of my own to senseless slaughter.

  Then the cries of panic began. Shouts of “Fire!” rang across the pergamos and echoed up from the lower city. Through my window I saw the last of the armored warriors descending a rope ladder suspended from a trapdoor in the belly of the Trojan Horse. Troyans, peering out of doors to wonder at the clamor, found themselves beheaded or run through with an Achaean sword or spear. The Scaean Gate had been thrown open and throughout the night, wave upon wave of soldiers marched through the lower city, torching the homes and massacring the residents who had been brave enough to remain there even in the final year of the long siege.

  The Achaean ships must have taken shelter behind the isle of Tenedos, off our coast, in the very place I had remarked upon when I first sailed here from Sparta. As the nearby cove could not be seen from our beaches, or even from the towers atop the citadel, it was the perfect spot from which to launch a surprise attack.

  Groggy and disoriented, Deiphobus leapt out of bed. “There has been some trickery after all,” I told him in a panicked voice. “You must don your armor and save the city!”

  My heart raced frantically when I heard shouts from my own courtyard and the heavy footsteps of the encroaching warriors.

  Deiphobus had not dressed; his first thought was to punish me. “False whore!” he cried, throwing me to the floor. He straddled me and grabbed my shoulders, repeatedly slamming my body onto the cold hard tile. Seized with madness, he grabbed me by my cropped hair and throttled me, cursing my name and dashing my head against the floor. I screamed and clawed at him, unable to reach my dagger, but in his white-hot rage, Deiphobus was a man possessed by the Furies. All reason had deserted him, all thoughts of defending his city and his parents. He saw me as the treacherous architect of his demise, and for that I would pay with everything I had, including my dignity, before he threw himself amid the clamor to save Troy.

  So dazed and battered was I from this brutal beating that I was barely aware of Deiphobus entering me, delivering each painful thrust with every dram of hatred in his body. His eyes did not see Helen; they saw everyone he had ever wanted to destroy.

  In a blinding flash of inspiration, I realized that I might gain the upper hand if I timed my own movement to the rapist’s rhythm rather than inertly succumbing to his punishment. Each time Deiphobus raised his body, I was better able to maneuver my right hand toward my dagger.

  Not much longer than a minute had passed since I’d first heard the commotion below us; now everything seemed to happen in a matter of moments.

  With Deiphobus’s next downstroke, I thrust home as well, sinking the dagger into the center of his back.

  Deiphobus released a startled cry. I dislodged the knife and stabbed again between his shoulder blades. He tried to raise himself just as the Achaeans burst into the room, but someone drove a spear into his back, and I felt his full weight as he collapsed on top of me.

  “Get off my wife, you filth!”

  Deiphobus’s dying carcass was roughly removed from my body with a swift kick to his midsection.

  From where I lay, bruised and trembling, I looked into the eyes of Menelaus. As ever, I could not tell what truly lurked behind their inscrutable storm-cloud gray. Behind him stood Agamemnon, who impatiently tried to elbow Menelaus from the doorway.

  “No, brother. He is mine,” said Menelaus. He glowered at the crumpled,
bleeding body. “This is what Achaeans do to adulterers,” he told Deiphobus. With one swipe of his sword, he cut off Deiphobus’s nose. Followed by each ear. And then his genitals. In Greek culture, this was the ultimate dishonor to someone found guilty of adultery or incest. If I was the wife of Menelaus, Deiphobus had most certainly committed the former; and under Achaean law, a man could not marry his brother’s widow, which, if I was the wife of Paris Alexandros, rendered Deiphobus guilty of incest.

  In his methodical way, Menelaus then hacked off Deiphobus’s arms, followed by his legs, and finally, beheaded him. Everything in the room, including the two of us, was spattered with the vicious Troyan’s crimson blood.

  “Now we kill the adulteress,” said Agamemnon, and strode into the room, his sword unsheathed. I scrambled for cover behind my bed.

  “No!” Menelaus cried, knocking his elder brother off balance. “That’s never why we came to Ilios,” he growled. “The mission was to rescue Helen, not to kill her. For ten long years, thousands of men have given their lives for this cause—the cause that you yourself devised to incite them to arms. You will not touch her, nor harm a hair on her head. The quarrel is not yours to resolve or mitigate. Not only that, if you injure her, you hurt your own wife’s sister. Helen is my wife, and I will deal with her as I see fit.”

  I rose to my feet and took a few tentative steps toward him. “Then I hope you will see fit to kill me after all,” I said, unclasping the brooches that closed my chiton at the shoulders. The silk tumbled down my body, baring my breasts. “I have made it easy for you. I will die as Iphigenia did, my bosom exposed and vulnerable to the fatal thrust. Come, husband. I beg you to end the torture I have lately suffered.” I truly wished to die, for I could not endure any more pain. Dying would have been easy then. And preferable. It was living that was a far more painful fate.