by Byrne Fone
In the square the Trojan horse watches through impassive eyes as soldiers rush toward the palace and mount the broad steps that lead to its great bronze doors. As they run they cut down the royal guards who stand, and die, vainly to protect them. The attackers are at the head of the stairs before the doors. Someone shouts, “Batter them down! Take the king!” But then to my horror the doors slowly open. The attacking soldiers stop, wait, to see if some larger force will issue out. “No! No!” I try to say, for I know what is to come.
The doors are open wide now. There, in the door, standing in the center, is a man, old and alone. It is Priam. The sacred Lord of Troy, High King of Ilium, son of a thousand kings. He waits, robed and crowned, with his sword in his hand and around him a corona of light seems to glow. Who could not be stunned and stirred by that? The ancient majesty of Troy, descended from the blood of Zeus, has come out to defend his realm. The soldiers stare in awe at what they see. They falter, they begin to fall back. Then their commander leaps in front of them and races up the steps to where Priam stands. He shouts “We did not come here to let him live,” and with a single stroke his sword like a whirling silver arc slashes through Priam’s neck and the body falls in a shower of blood. The commander stoops to retrieve the crown, fallen to the ground. He raises it and the soldiers, their faces mirroring at once horror and triumph, race up the palace steps. and soon the cries of the dying horribly resound from inside the ancient halls.
Dreadful sights flash by my eyes without respite. The city burns. Its people die. Hecabe is taken in fetters, cursing, to Odysseus’ ship. The palace is put to the torch. And from its heights I hear screams, terrible screams. A woman struggles, her face a mask of horror. It is Andromache. She shrieks a curse at the soldier who turns from the parapet over which he has just hurled her child, Astynax, heir of Troy. The child seems to float on air for a moment like a bird—then falls, falls, plunging toward the rocks, strikes them, and like a pomegranate that splits wide open when it plummets from its tree, stains the pavement upon which it falls a rich dark red. With a satisfied smile the soldier makes a sign. Guards bind her, and drag her screaming away.
And then as suddenly as it came, all is now calm and silent. The vision passes. I float above the world, my body wrapped in night and starlight. Carried upon moonbeams I drift across the sky. I see the heavens unfold in glory. I am free, though I am exhausted and my body aches. But I can move again. I realize that I am lying on the floor of my room, my knees drawn up to my chin, as if I were an unborn child about to spring out of my mother’s womb. My head is full of inchoate images, meaning nothing, with difficulty I raise. The silver moon, full and glittering sends a beam, like a path to heaven though my window. I look out. Below me the city, so full of revelry today lies deep asleep and silent. The moon picks out the great Trojan horse that my father will dedicate to Athena when the morning comes.
Was it just a dream or a signal of what will come? Suddenly, sickeningly, I know the answer. I also know that this time, no one will doubt the truth of what I see. Involuntarily I double up; my stomach burns with hideous pain as if a fiery sword had run me through, the way my mother told me the birth pangs feel when they at last begin. I cannot help it. I scream in terror and in pain. My scream echoes and rebounds from all the walls and towers of Troy and in it I hear the agony of all the ages and the prophecy of the end.
Epilogue: Chryseis
My father died a year after they brought me back to him. We had such a little time together and it was not happy. He came home in joy and in triumph; he died in sorrow and in pain. We had been spared the vengeance visited upon the rest of the Troad. Perhaps Agamemnon, in a moment of uncharacteristic generosity thought that we had given enough. Indeed we had, for my father had stripped Apollo of all his treasure to ransom me. Or perhaps Agamemnon feared that even in defeated old age Chryses the priest might have influence with Apollo still?
My father was desolate and so was our land. He gradually sank into darkness. Some days he did not seem to know where he was; he could not sacrifice, the words would not come. He did not recognize those about us that we had known for years. But, and it makes me weep to remember, he always smiled when he saw me. On the day he died it was if the god gave him strength. His eyes cleared; his voice was strong again. He half rose from his bed and held out his hand to me, bidding me come beside him.
“I love you, my daughter, sweet Chryseis,” he said
And then, he was gone.
There was no doubt in my mind what I would do. There never had been. I would honor him. With the help of the few villagers who were left, I performed the rites, burned the body, and by moonlight I scattered his ashes from the cliff side above the sea, as I knew he wanted me to do, letting the wind take them, falling to earth or riding on the breeze, floating out to sea to be washed to some distant shore.
I have never been back to Troy, even in all the years that have passed. And why go? People say it is a ruin and a dangerous and haunted place. The wind moans through the broken walls, the gates lie shattered, the palaces are razed, the temple stripped of its treasure, on the great streets of the city only a few columns remain, rising darkly against the leaden sky. It is said that Priam’s ghost wanders the empty streets weeping, for his body was never was found and so his soul never placated or released.
When it was done and the last Greek had looted the last golden cup and raped the last young girl and killed the last defender, the city walls were razed and the land was sown with salt. The Achaeans sailed away in their black ships, taking with them Trojan treasure, Trojan women and pretty boys, and leaving desolation behind. Troy smoldered on its high cliff, a ruin never to be rebuilt. The roads were unsafe, bandits—Achaeans who stayed behind, renegade Trojans, poor men from upcountry hoping to find remaining scraps of plunder, no one knew who they were-- lay in wait for any traveler. No one dared leave their homes, and hardly anyone came to the temple.
And what triumph did the war bring to the victors? What triumph was there for Achilles, his friend slaughtered, and his own death inevitable? Or for Agamemnon dead, his blood seeping out even as Clytemnestra danced in vengeance over his corpse? Or what for Helen, returned as chattel to her dark Spartan court, where grown old and fat and shrewish, despised by Menelaus, she waited for nothing but to die? What triumph for Hellas and all its lands: for Pylos with its silver beaches, for Corinth of the golden temples, for Boeotia, Phocis, for Holy Thebes, for Athens of the splendid citadel and the rich temple of Athene, for little Thisbe, for rocky Ithaca, for Arne where the grapes hang thick, for Argos and Tiryns that had come with eighty ships? What victory was there even for the cohorts of Lacedaemon and all the armies of Menelaus, or for Rhodes, or for Idomeneos, Lord of Crete of the hundred cities, all of whom came to Troy? A thousand ships and a thousand peoples came to Troy and left on its shores only the smoking funeral pyres of their sons.
Now the singers try to explain the inexplicable and justify the death and carnage around Troy’s walls by inventing stories of the intervention of the gods. Was Paris a coward when he ran and hid from Menelaus? No, it was Aphrodite who wrapped him in a cloud and whisked him back to Troy and Helen’s arms. Did Agamemnon despair, and deciding that the war could not be won, tell the Achaeans to sail for home? No, it was a false dream sent from Zeus to deceive him. Did Pandarus break the truce between the armies because he was a malicious and headstrong fool? No, it was because Athene prompted him to do so. Did Agamemnon slay his daughter because he was determined to do anything to prosecute his war of conquest? No, he cut that innocent throat because the priests said that if he did so Artemis would be pleased. For surely no god or goddess sends false dreams to kings. No goddess deceives weak men with visions; no god demands that we kill our children. These stories are the inventions of men. The gods speak in the silence; they speak in the private recesses of the heart and speak when the air is clear and the wind pure. Then a soft voice calms the turmoil of the mind and all becomes clear. The gods may stir the spirit, but
they leave the decision and the action up to us. And thus, when we act, on our shoulders rests the consequence.
Sing of glory how they will, and of the intervention of the gods and the piety and bravery of men, of the quest to recompense broken honor, no metered line or honeyed tongue can disguise that it was not about Helen. The reality was gold and grain and ox hides, bronze and emeralds and trading ships, villages and counting houses, and the vanity, ignorance, and greed of kings. The war was about the lies they told to secure their ends, and the contempt of nations one for another. These terrible things always lie at the heart of war. And now, here at what must seem to many to be the very end of times, they have brought ruin to us all. It is the victors, they say, who decide the truth. The truth is that the victors left a land drenched in the blood of brave young men, an ancient city destroyed, an ancient nation ruined beyond repair. What honor was this? What victory?
One by one they all have gone, those heroes, those names that shook the world and whose deeds astounded all mankind and gave the poets brave new songs to sing. Some died in shipwrecks sailing home from Troy. Others came home to find that the loving arms they had left were entwined about another. Few died happily in their beds. Others awakened, like Agamemnon, to the searing pain of a knife in the night. Some went mad. Some faded into obscurity, forgetting, even as others forget, why they had once been the children of fame.
I too fade into obscurity, though once I stood at the center of the affairs of the world. But now I live alone amidst the fallen stones. I have chosen to do so because I have chosen to serve the god. I know that Apollo has not deserted me, perhaps because he knows that I can survive even though all the world is weeping, though often I think his gaze is distracted, or that sometimes he even looks away. If Apollo has bent his gaze elsewhere, it is because there is much in the world now for him to see. Even here, far away from cities and from the concerns of nations, I hear of it. Though from time to time a wandering singer comes, it is not from those brave songs that I learn the real stories. Not poets but simple people tell me of the misery and fear that stalks the world, even now so long after great Troy fell.
Once in a while merchants make their way here as they go from village to village, hoping to trade some cloth or a tin utensil for a bit of old bronze or sometimes just for a meal and a glass of sour wine. They complain that there is little left to barter. If there once was gold it has gone. Sometimes they tell stories of lands beyond the sea, of the doings of the peoples of the isles, once even of distant Ithaca, and thus I learned that Odysseus wandered twenty years before he came back to his rocky isle. This seemed right to me. Only Nestor, of all the great lords who fought at Troy, returned safe to his home. That too, seemed right to me.
It was also thus that I heard, a few years ago, that Helen had died. The news came from a Spartan woman who came to me because she could have no children. After the ceremony and after my prophecy for her we shared some wine and bread and she talked of Helen. All the world knew that Menelaus stormed into her chambers as Troy burned around them, intent upon killing her for her infidelity, and all the world knew that seeing her, even though she had aged a decade and was no longer young, that he could not do so and collapsed in tears in her triumphant arms. What I did not know was the aftermath. It was years before Helen came back to Sparta, five or six at least after the war was done, and when they returned she and Menelaus retired to the palace high above the city and were never seen. Some claim she hanged herself in remorse, others that she was taken living into Elysuim. Perhaps this so, but if that were the case, she went as an ancient crone. For when I heard the tale, thirty summers had passed since Troy fell, and by then, sad mistress of her dreary Spartan court, her face would have launched no ships.
A few pilgrims come from across the sea and they apologize for the meagerness of their gifts and tell hard tales of a diminished and darkening world. Though it has been years since the great war ended, still, they say, even in the great cities people are hungry. Crops fail, no plea or sacrifice makes the land fertile. And they tell fearful stories of strangers coming into the mainland from the north.
“They come, my lady, sometimes a few at time, sometimes in groups. More each time. Wherever they come there is conflict. They take what they will for they are armed and though our lords send soldiers to fight them, the strangers have weapons that cut through bronze as easily as through flesh.”
Another story did not come from merchant, poet, or pilgrim. Instead it was broadcast as if by magic across the entire world. One heard it on the wind, in the sighing of trees, in the waves rolling urgently upon the sandy shore, in gossip at every market; one saw it in the eyes of men looking fearfully at their wives. Agamemnon, great king, mighty above all men, Lord of all the Isles, Lion of Mycenae, slayer of men and despoiler of Troy was dead. He who lived through battles died at home, hacked to death by his wife and her lover, Aegisthus. It is said that as she swung the axe that severed his head, as he stumbled to his knees and fell like a bull at sacrifice, as the axe bit through his neck and his head rolled away, eyes staring in horror and unbelief, blood spurting into the tepid waters of his bath into which he was about to step when the blow fell, Clytemnestra danced in manic rage and joy shouting “Iphigenia, Iphigenia, rest now. You are avenged.”
Did I take satisfaction at this death? Oh yes, for even now, late at night just as I am about to descend from waking into sleep, I sometimes start and feel his hands on me. Even now the dream still comes: I smell his sour breath; I feel his moist body bearing down on me, his hands around my throat, his harsh rasping breath, his guttural and unspeakable demands as he tells me what he intends to do. I feel him enter me, take his quick and brutal satisfaction; then he rolls away, stinking, drunk, unconscious, and I lie weeping and in pain. Do I rejoice that he is dead? I do. For this is the war that I remember. I do not remember trumpets or charging men or battle cries. I remember tears and rough hands, and grimy sheets and pain. This war brought ruin to me and destruction to the vanquished.
Let the bards make great men out of monsters. Let them sing the bravery of heroes and lament the loss of fallen lords. In my heart I will lament the women, for they always remain unsung, though their hurt is often the most grievous. I will weep for Andromache, wife of Hector and mother of the heir of Troy. Princess and priestess, she ended her days a chattel, taken among the spoils of war to serve as breeding stock for a petty king. Chattel too was Kassandra, raped by his men and taken by Agamemnon as his prize. Men called her mad. But her madness was only that she saw the truth more clearly than us all. What she prophesied indeed came to pass. But did she know all? Did she know that she would become Agamemnon’s prize, and when he fell to Clytaemnestra’s axe, did she know that she would then be Clytaemnestra’s victim? If she did, perhaps she did not care. Perhaps she welcomed it.
I weep for Hecabe, mother of Princes, Queen of Troy, who saw her son Paris die, who saw her son Hector dead, who saw her Priam, her king, her lord, her love, slain before her eyes. In the last bloody days of war, in an act of malice, mockery, and contempt, Odysseus took her as a prize. But who would want her save to mock her? She was an old woman and beyond beauty or the bearing of sons. They say that when Odysseus got her as far as Thrace she had gone quite mad and become foul and shrill and full of curses. And thus, unable to bear her rant no longer, he had her stoned to death.
Will I weep for Helen? No. She deserves no tears.
There has been so much weeping now, and for so long. As the years go by, I lose count of them. How many summers have passed since it all was ended I can barely tell. How long has it been since Troy fell and the dark ships sailed away, leaving us bereft, bereft of King and kin, bereft of food and sustenance, bereft of hope. I was a girl then; I am old now. Sometimes late at night when I cannot sleep, I wander out of the house and sit upon the broken wall by the temple gate, or go into the Apollo’s grove and rest amidst the trees, silvered in the moonlight. Sometimes then, in the darkness at the edge of the grove or further a
way, near the cliff’s edge, I think I see my father. He beckons me; when he smiles I am reassured. I know that soon I will join him.
Now I only wait to die. When my time comes will I go into Hades, cross the river with the boatman, and there on that misty shore, in the Asphodel Fields will I see all those who have gone before? Will I come upon Achilles there, his Patroclus in his arms and lounging and laughing with Antilochus, the three of them at peace? Will I see brave old Nestor, the only one among the Achaeans who deserves honor, for he did not sully his own? What of Odysseus, who some called wily and others wise? Will Agamemnon walk there, eyes downcast, his hands red with a holocaust of innocent blood? Will Priam ever find rest? Will I find my Briseis there, of whom I never heard again?