For the Immortal

by Emily Hauser

  Priam took me by the hand and led me towards the stone-carved thrones where he and the queen sat. At his direction I knelt at his feet as he took a two-handled golden goblet from the cupbearer and raised it to the heavens.

  ‘Lord Zayu,’ he said, into the silence that had fallen, ‘may the Amazons’ safe passage here be further proof of your favour to the Trojans. Gird their hearts and arms for battle on the plain, and grant them victory, Storm-bringer, as we grant you the fat of this sacrifice and the wine of this cup.’

  I felt the wine splash the tiles before me, tasted the richness on my lips as the drops spattered my robes.

  ‘And to you, Amazons,’ Priam said, reaching for my hand and drawing me to my feet, ‘I offer many gifts.’ He snapped his fingers, and a line of slaves moved from the shadows towards me, bowing to the floor and laying costly tapestries, robes iridescent as the stars, plates of gold and thick ropes of jewels over the tiles. ‘I pledge many more, if you bring us the victory over the Greeks that we desire.’

  He turned then, as talk subsumed the hall once more, to introduce me to his family, who surrounded him, naming them one by one: Deiphobus, the pale youth who had fetched us, and Aeneas his brother; Hecuba, his queen; Andromache, widow of Hector, clutching their son Astyanax, her complexion dulled by grief, her eyes red, crouched on her stool.

  ‘My son Paris,’ Priam said, as he swept his long tunic beneath him to sit, and gestured to me to do the same, ‘is not here. He seems to prefer the company of Helen of Sparta in his chambers, of whom, I do not doubt, you have heard much.’

  Helen of Sparta. ‘Helen.’ I stared at him, the image of the young girl with the golden ringlets from Theseus’ palace shimmering before me. ‘Helen of Sparta? She is here?’

  And then I realized: The wife of Menelaus of Mycenae.

  ‘Indeed.’ Priam inclined his head, his brow creasing. ‘She is a guest here in the palace.’

  His voice was composed, though Andromache’s hissed intake of breath and Hecuba’s swift reach for her hand, clutching at her robes, told me that not all of Priam’s family were so forgiving. Helen lived, then. She had reached Sparta. And now she was here, in Troy, prey to another man, another captor – or perhaps, this time, she had loved him. I felt myself fill with pity for her, for the frightened child whom I had once comforted by the hearth of Theseus’ palace. Perhaps, this time – I hoped it was so – she had left of her own accord.

  My mind wandered along the winding corridors of the palace to Paris’s perfumed chambers, the bed where, even now, perhaps, the two lovers lay together in tangled sheets, their eyes dark in the lamplight, Helen’s fingers tracing the hardness of his belly, his hands caressing her hair. Another pair of lovers, one Greek, one from the lands of the east. Another ship stealing into a foreign shore, heated glances, murmured words, the brief touch of a hand; another fumbled escape. Could I blame her? Would I have acted differently? Was I not Helen, too, by another name?

  My thoughts were interrupted by a slave who bowed before me, offering a platter of bread and meat, a goblet of wine. I took them and returned to the conversation around me. Andromache and Hecuba were talking in low voices, fussing over the child; Priam was speaking with his sons of the war.

  ‘… the ships,’ Priam was saying. ‘I have great hopes that, with the Amazon forces, we may break into the camp once more and torch the ships of the Greeks. If we take from them their means of escape …’

  His eyes alighted on me with a question, and I answered it. ‘My king, I swear to you, I will cast the brands on the ships and see them burn to the sky, if it will protect our people,’ I said, my voice rising as the visions appeared before me. Amazons riding out to battle, standards flying, roaring the war-cry and flattening the invading foreigners, like wild grass trampled beneath our hoofs. ‘This I promise: to lay low even the greatest of the Greeks, and to smite the wide host of the Argive men. I will bring back to you their stained battle-armour as your prize, and return to you your kingdom as reward for your loyalty and friendship to my mother and my people.’

  Priam’s eyes kindled bright with the flame of war, and now, as he sat on his throne, I saw again the warlord my mother had spoken of. Andromache, however, leant forwards to me across the body of her child. ‘You are not half the warrior my husband was.’ She spat the words at me like venom, and I recoiled at the look in her eyes – proud and broken and filled with horror.

  ‘I did not claim to be so.’

  ‘Then why boast that you would achieve the deeds he did not?’ she cried. ‘You insult his memory, you insult his family and his people, when you suggest that he was slain because he did not … that he could not …’ Her voice faltered.

  ‘You are not in your right mind to speak such words to one who would be your friend.’ She leant back, her spine stiffening. ‘But you should know this: I do not seek to defame your husband’s reputation, only to finish the war he fought to defend his home – yours and mine both.’

  ‘You will die,’ she hissed. A frisson went around the circle of royal persons at the unlucky words, spoken like a prophecy, like a curse. Hecuba got to her feet, attempting to take Andromache’s hand and draw her from the hall. But I waved a hand, and the queen stalled.

  ‘You do not frighten me,’ I said, holding Andromache’s gaze, and her lip trembled. ‘You are grieving, and you loved your husband. Both are to your credit. But I am an Amazon, born to rule, taught from my very earliest days to ride the swift horses of the plain, to put my trust in the strength of my sword-arm. I am here to aid you as a warrior and to ally with you as a queen. In neither of those, I think, would Prince Hector have opposed me.’

  I pushed back my stool and stood, glad to have an excuse to leave Andromache’s forebodings and the stifling heat of the hall. ‘My lord Priam,’ I said, bowing to him, and I saw his eyes crinkle in return as he rose, buoyed by my self-assurance. ‘My Amazons and I would gladly bathe and rest after our journey in preparation for tomorrow’s battle.’

  Ἀδμήτη

  Admete

  Troy, Anatolia

  The Fourth Day of the Month of Ploughing, 1250 BC

  I was pushed into a chair in Agamemnon’s tent, nursing my hands, which were raw from pounding herbs, and glaring at Machaon, another healer of the Greeks, whose bloodshot eyes danced back at me in the lamplight.

  ‘I would prefer—’

  ‘Even the gods take rest,’ he said. ‘You have been of great service to us, daughter of Eurystheus, but now it is time for wine and good cheer. The sick and the wounded can wait until the morrow.’

  He reeled away in search of drink, pushing past the lords who were crowded into the tent, leaning back on the carved chairs or reclining on cushions, raising their goblets to victory and shouting about their exploits in that day’s battle, pulling up their tunics to display fresh wounds and taunting Thersites, a rat-faced man who stank of stale urine, for his cowardice.

  I tried to get to my feet, choking on the stench of old blood, unwashed bodies and putrid wine, blinking in the low light of the lamps and the embers of the fire where the carcass of what had once been a deer hung skeletal on a spit. This was not the battle I had thought it would be: heroes fighting hand to hand in glorious combat, bronze-shining warriors, tall and godlike, whose stories would be told down the ages. This was a mess of death, and there was no glory in the healers’ hut where the soldiers groaned as they clutched at their wounds and cried for their wives and mothers. Agamemnon might host a feast to celebrate that day’s battle. The men the Greeks now called heroes – Achilles, dousing himself in a pouch of wine till his hair dripped red, Diomedes and Ajax, laughing and duelling with their goblets over a half-naked slave girl, Odysseus, Nestor, Menelaus – might spend their strength there, wallowing in drink like pigs in a sty; but I would not be a part of it.

  ‘I like it as little as you do.’

  I turned. A young man had been standing in the shadows behind me, unnoticed, a lyre hanging from a strap at his side, his arms
crossed over his chest. He stepped forwards and leant towards me. ‘But you should hide your distaste. This is not a court that tolerates criticism of its ways.’

  ‘And you know this …?’ I began.

  He shrugged, his face slanted with shadows, and I noticed that his eyes were blind, filmed with white. ‘I am but an itinerant bard, and a young one at that,’ he said. ‘I heard your protest against Machaon,’ he explained, ‘though I’d wager your expression is as good as a poem.’

  ‘A bard? A singer of tales?’ I glanced at him. ‘But you do not sing tonight?’

  ‘Not tonight,’ he said. ‘No warrior wishes to hear a story when he is busy telling his own, and it is the first duty of a poet to know his audience.’

  I laughed for the first time in days.

  ‘And why are you here, a woman?’ he asked, shifting his weight on one leg. ‘You know the craft of song, too?’

  ‘Not song, no,’ I said, reaching forwards to strum at the strings of the lyre at his side. They sounded with a sweet ring, barely audible over the shouts and laughs of the drunken lords. ‘I am a healer, here to remedy the warriors’ wounds as I can. I learnt the ways of plants in the court of my father Eurystheus, king of –’

  ‘– Tiryns,’ he finished for me. ‘The names of the kings of Greece and their forebears have been my study since the Greeks came to Troy. You would marvel at how it enchants them to hear stories of their own people – as if they are transported in their minds and thoughts to Greece, though here they are so far from home.’

  My gaze flicked to Menelaus, red-faced and sweating, his hair tied back. He was attempting to toss his goblet across the tent to Odysseus, and Diomedes launched himself over the table to catch it, knocking aside chairs and breaking a stool, roaring with laughter as he landed in a heap on the rugs. The smile faded from my lips.

  ‘It is strange, do you not think,’ I mused, my thoughts returning to those many years ago at the court of Lycus, when the bard had sung of Alcides’ deeds, ‘that warriors all want immortality – they long for it more than anything, saying it drives them to glorious deeds and death-dealing battle – yet when they have summoned the bard to sing their praises they ignore the poetry that would grant it to them, that hands their names down the ages and allows them to live beyond the grave?’

  A moment passed before he replied. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, it is strange. But perhaps,’ he leant closer to me, ‘they fear it too. I think they fear they might hear their own deaths told in song. It is a great gift, immortal glory,’ he sighed, his expression distant as if he were seeing something I could not, ‘but they know the cost of it, better than any other. There is no glory on the battlefield, when the edge of a sword is singing through the air and you hear the sigh of the river Styx in your ears. It is a poet’s task to make it seem as if there is.’

  And with that he walked away, leaving me looking after him, my mind filled with thoughts and my fingers playing with the stylus hanging at my girdle.

  Hippolyta

  Troy, Anatolia

  The Thirty-fifth Day after the Day of Fire in the Season of Tabiti, 1250 BC

  I awoke the next day as rose light tinged the sky outside the window of the chamber in which the handmaids had laid my couch. Cayster, Melanippe and my warriors were placed in other rooms. I preferred to sleep alone, as I had always done; and that morning, of all mornings, I was glad to awake to my own thoughts.

  For I had dreamt of my mother.

  I had not dreamt of her in years. Yet last night, as the stars rolled in the heavens above me, she had appeared to me as clearly as if she had been standing there, as if I could have reached out and touched her. I tugged the covers to my chin as I sat up, the fleeces and blankets shifting beneath me, and gazed outside, such joy blazing through me that I could not help but smile.

  She had urged me to defend my people. She had told me to fight fearlessly face to face with the Greeks. I had done her bidding, by coming here. I had done right by her and my people.

  I threw off the rug and leapt to my feet, feeling the polished wood cool beneath me, the chamber bathed in pale pink light. I moved to the chest on which I had placed my weapons and armour, gifts of Priam, eager to fit myself for battle. I slid the rich-patterned tunic over my arms, then bent on one knee to fit my boots and the greaves of hammered gold. I slipped on the breastplate and tied the buckles at my sides, then fastened my sword-belt beneath it with my trusted sagaris and dagger. The sword – another gift, set in a scabbard of ivory and silver, shining like the moon – I slung over my shoulder, and the helmet, with its shuddering crest of horsehair, I slotted onto my head, the metal enveloping my face soft as a caress. Last of all I caught up my shield, sickle-shaped, and two javelins, and in my right hand I took my bow. I turned towards the rising sun, now a glowing golden orb, and knelt, my head bowed, spears planted.

  ‘Goddess,’ I said, my voice low, speaking to the sun, ‘grant me victory in battle today. Strengthen my sword-arm if it grows weak, and let me lay the Greeks low in defence of my people. Mother, watch over me with the ancestors, and give me your favour.’

  I raised my bow to my lips and kissed it, eyes closed, tasting the beeswax polish sweet on my mouth.

  A tap on the door caused me to start to my feet.

  ‘Yes?’

  The door was pushed ajar. A herald stood there, younger than Idaeus, his hair burnished auburn in the sunrise, his tunic ill-fitting and hanging loose on his sloping shoulders.

  ‘My queen.’ He knelt to the floor, his eyes downcast as if he could not look at me, shining gold in the sunlight. ‘You are the very image of the war-goddess, no mortal woman, clad in such armour.’

  ‘What news do you bring?’ I asked him, gesturing to him to rise, and he stood, though still he spoke to his feet.

  ‘No news, my lady,’ he said, ‘only a gift. A further token from King Priam of his gratitude that you fight with us, for Troy, and that we can count your sword-arm among our own.’

  He fumbled in his tunic and then, from the folds, drew something that flashed golden, so bright I could barely look at it. I took it from him and moved towards the shade. At once its form materialized: an apple, pure gold, the skin stretched taut, and fine gold filaments for a stem – a work of such craftsmanship, such detail that I held my breath, wondering that such a thing could have been made by the hands of man. And then, as I turned it over in my fingers, I saw writing curling across its surface. Three words.

  For the Immortal.

  I laughed aloud, my spirits rising at this further portent of glory. The herald glanced up, and for a moment I thought I saw a laugh gleam across his face too.

  ‘It is most beautiful,’ I said to him, tossing the apple into my other hand, drawing open the thong of the leather pouch at my sword-belt and slipping it in. ‘A lavish gift, and an oracle of the battle that is to come. Give my thanks to your lord, and my oath,’ I raised my head, the crest on my helmet shaking as I smiled, ‘that I shall not fail him this day.’

  I left the palace with Cayster, Melanippe and my war-band as the sun’s rays poured through the lower colonnades of the palace and the sky burnt blue. Deiphobus and his Trojan forces were gathered at the Scaean Gate to meet us, and the Amazon troops would join us on the plain. We left as a small guard, mounted on our horses, with Priam’s prayers for our victory ringing in our ears. As I trotted forwards from the stables, my horse’s hoofs sliding on the paving stones on the road towards the lower city, I felt a hand grip my reins and looked down.

  Andromache was standing there, her feet bare, her arms empty of her son. She wore only her under-tunic, and her hair was dishevelled, as if she had run from her chambers, but in her hand she carried a dagger, unsheathed and sharp-tipped.

  ‘Take me with you.’

  Her voice was low, urgent. I glanced over at Melanippe, nodded, and signalled to the rest to go on. The sound of their hoofs clattered away as I slid from my mount.

  ‘Andromache …’

  ‘Take m
e with you,’ she sobbed, her voice dry, cracked. ‘I wish to come. I wish to fight. I need to do something.’

  I bent forwards and rested my javelins and spear against a bush of boxwood growing in the palace gardens, then took her by the shoulders. ‘Andromache, look at me.’

  ‘No, you look at me!’ she cried, and she raised her face to mine. I took in the red-rimmed eyes, aching with lack of sleep, the sagging mouth, the tears gathering on her lips and dripping from her chin. ‘What have I left? I have borne every sorrow known to woman, my father killed, my brothers killed, and now my husband.’ She took a great gasp of breath. ‘I have lost my husband, who was father and mother and brother to me at once.’ Her voice shook, and the tears quivered on her face. ‘You are a woman, and you fight – why not I? Better by far to die in battle now than to watch my city and my husband’s grave burn, and be taken as a slave to Greece.’

  ‘I shall tell you why not,’ I said. ‘I have been taught to wield a weapon since before I could walk, and you have never once raised a blade against another in your life. And,’ I said, gripping harder, my eyes boring into hers, ‘you have an infant son who is helpless, who cannot defend himself, for whom you care more than anyone in this world, and you will not leave him behind.’

  She wavered. Then she dropped to her knees, the blade clattering from her hand, her face in her palms, weeping and gasping, spit pouring from her mouth.

  I moved to retrieve my weapons, and she flung her arms around my knees, her head tilted upwards.

  ‘Avenge him, then,’ she gasped. ‘Avenge my husband for me, as I cannot.’

  I bent forwards, took her head in my hands and kissed her forehead, overwhelmed with emotion. ‘I will,’ I said, clenching my jaw. ‘I will protect all the people of the Trojan plain and beyond, if I can. I will do you justice on the battlefield.’

  I joined the Amazon guard at the gates, cantering down the street towards the mass of Trojan troops gathered by the walls, bronze breastplates gleaming, their voices and stamping feet a low hum of noise against the chattering of the birds. I nodded to Melanippe that all was well and brought up my steed beside Cayster. He was bent forwards, checking the quiver that was slung over his horse’s withers.