We’d been there half an hour, perhaps, when Priam arrived. Somebody placed a chair for him and he summoned Helen to sit beside him. He always treated her with the greatest courtesy, though he must have known that the people of Troy—and particularly the women of his own household—hated her.
“Who’s this?” he said, looking down at me.
I blushed miserably as Helen explained. But then, in the midst of all his worries, the war going badly, Hector publicly accusing his brother, Paris, of cowardice, the death toll mounting, his coffers emptying, Priam took out a silver coin and put it on the palm of his hand. He passed the other hand quickly across it, muttered some magic words, and the coin vanished. I stared, knowing it was a trick, but not being able to see how he’d done it. He pretended to search inside his robes, patting himself all over. “Where’s it gone? Oh, don’t tell me I’ve lost it. Have you got it?” I shook my head. Then he reached forward, felt behind my left ear and produced the coin. I was rather inclined to stand on my twelve-year-old dignity, I was too old for magic tricks, and yet at the same time I was fascinated because I still couldn’t see how it was done. He presented me with the coin and then turned to watch the battle, the lines of his face immediately settling into an expression of deep sadness.
Afterwards, we walked back to Helen’s house. She unpinned her veil and ordered wine and cake, a sweet lemony cake they make only in Troy. In public, Helen was forever beating her breast, blaming herself for the part she’d played in starting this ruinous war. Perhaps she thought if she used the word “whore” frequently enough, others would be less likely to use it. If so, she was wrong. In private, it was quite a different story. She ridiculed the Trojan women—“the ladies”—and, god knows, they gave her plenty of material. The stupid way they copied her hairstyles, her makeup, her clothes…It was astonishing the way really quite intelligent women seemed to believe that if they carried their eyeliner beyond the outer corner of the lid and gave it a little upward flick, they’d have Helen’s eyes. Or if they fastened their cinctures the same way she did hers, they’d have Helen’s breasts. All this mindless imitation of a woman they affected to despise…No wonder she laughed at them.
So we sat there gossiping and drinking wine—rather too much wine—and I felt very grown-up, very flattered. When my sister came to collect me, she was absolutely horrified, but then that only added to the fun.
After that, I often used to visit Helen on my own, though chaperoned of course by one of my sister’s maids. Almost always, Helen took me with her to the battlements and, while she hung over the parapet drinking in every detail of the fighting, Priam would discover sweets and coins behind my ears. Sometimes Hecuba, the queen, would be there too, always with her youngest child, Polyxena, clinging to her skirt and bristling with a little girl’s pride in her mother. Helen tried to make friends with her, but Polyxena wasn’t having it; she’d absorbed her mother’s hatred of Helen. I used to see her sometimes in the palace grounds, charging along behind her older sisters, shouting: “Wait for me! Wait for me!” The cry of youngest children everywhere.
Hecuba and Helen would exchange a few stilted words, but I noticed we never stayed long if she was there. Helen preferred to get Priam on his own. One final searching glance over the parapet and then it was back to her house for wine and lemon cakes. Every visit ended the same way—she’d suddenly stop smiling and say, “Ah, well, back to work.” And that was my signal to put on my mantle and wait for the maid to chaperone me home.
Sometimes, Helen would go into the inner room even before I left and then I’d hear the chattering of the loom, the rattle as the shuttle flew to and fro. There was a legend—it tells you everything, really—that whenever Helen cut a thread in her weaving, a man died on the battlefield. She was responsible for every death.
And then, one day, she showed me her work. I’ve known some great weavers in my life, including some of the women in the camp. The seven girls Achilles captured when he took Lesbos—they were brilliant, no other word for it, they were brilliant. But even they weren’t as good as Helen. I wandered round the room looking at the tapestries while Helen sat at the loom and sipped her wine. Half a dozen huge battle scenes covered the walls, a sequence that taken together told the whole story of the war so far. Hand-to-hand combat, men decapitated, gutted, skewered, filleted, disembowelled; and, riding high above the carnage in their glittering chariots, the kings: Menelaus, Agamemnon, Odysseus, Diomedes, Idomeneo, Ajax, Nestor. I knew Menelaus had been her husband, before she ran away with Paris, but her voice didn’t change when she said his name. Did she point to Achilles that day? I think she must’ve done, but I really don’t remember.
The Trojans were there too, of course, Priam looking down from the battlements, and below him, on the battlefield, his eldest son, Hector, defending the gates. No Paris, though. Paris seemed to be fighting the war from his bed. On the rare occasions I saw them together, it was obvious even to a child that Helen preferred Hector to Paris, whom I think she’d grown to despise. His reluctance to go anywhere near the battlefield was notorious, as was Hector’s contempt for his brother’s cowardice.
When I’d finished walking round the tapestries, I went round again because I wanted to check something I didn’t understand.
“She’s not there,” I said to my sister that night after dinner. “She’s not in the tapestries. Priam’s there—but she isn’t.”
“No, well, of course she isn’t. She won’t know where to put herself till she knows who’s won.”
There was so much bitterness in that remark, and it wasn’t the routine malice of the other Trojan women, but something altogether deeper. Looking back, I wonder whether my dumpy, plain sister wasn’t slightly in love with Helen. I was probably a little in love with her myself.
That night, I lay in bed wishing I’d said more to Helen, that I’d at least tried to express my admiration of her work. Why hadn’t I? Struck dumb, I suppose. Oh, but it was more than that…I think I was groping after something I wasn’t old enough to understand. What I came away with was a sense of Helen seizing control of her own story. She was so isolated in that city, so powerless—even at my age, I could see that—and those tapestries were a way of saying: I’m here. Me. A person, not just an object to be looked at and fought over.
There was a story that dates back to the first year of the war. Menelaus and Paris, the two rivals, had agreed to meet in single combat, the outcome to decide which of them would get Helen. Both armies gathered to watch, the battlements were crammed with spectators eager to see the fight, but Helen wasn’t there. Nobody had bothered to tell her what was happening. So her fate was decided without her knowledge. I think the tapestries were a way of fighting back from that moment. Oh, I know she wasn’t in them, I know she deliberately made herself invisible, but in another way, perhaps the only way that matters, she was present in every stitch.
I don’t know how much good it did me, dwelling on those memories of Troy. Really, what use is it to a slave, trying to get to sleep on a hard bed in a smelly hut, to remember that once the King of Troy did conjuring tricks to amuse her? Wouldn’t it be better, easier, to accept the joyless grind your life has become?
But then I think: No. Of course it isn’t better. That night, remembering the hostility I’d felt being directed at me in Agamemnon’s hut and tasting, as I always did, the slime-gob of his phlegm in my mouth, I wrapped King Priam’s kindness round me like a blanket and it helped me drift off to sleep.
19
One evening, after dinner, Achilles and Patroclus went to see the great fortifications Agamemnon had started building between the camp and the battlefield. From the stern of his ship, Achilles had greeted the success of the Trojan counter-attack with whoops of joy, apparently untroubled by the growing number of Greek casualties. Now, he was curious to see Agamemnon’s attempts to shore up his defences.
By the time they reached the building site,
it was beginning to get dark, but they could still just about see what was going on. A great trench had been dug in the scrubland that divided the sand dunes from the battlefield. Hundreds of men, so thickly caked in mud they seemed to be made of it, were pushing wheelbarrows full of soil away from the site, while others dug deeper into the waterlogged clay. It had never been more brutally apparent that this land was a floodplain bisected by two great rivers that regularly burst their banks during the autumn storms. The trench was filling with water as fast as the men could dig. A short distance away another group of men was piling up sandbags to try to keep the water out. Duckboards had been laid along the bottom of the trench, but even so, in places, the labourers were well above their knees in water. A vast parapet towered over their heads, sentry posts set at intervals along its length from which pale faces gazed down on the chaos below.
“Well,” Achilles said, “he obviously thinks they’re on the verge of breaking through.”
Patroclus turned to look back at the beach with its long row of ships pulled up onto the sand. Black, beaked, predatory ships, designed to produce terror wherever they sailed—but now, in this changed situation, just so many heaps of dry wood. A few blazing arrows shot onto the decks, enough of a wind to carry sparks and the entire fleet would be on fire—in minutes.
It was intolerable to him to stand there doing nothing. “You know we could help with this. You only said you wouldn’t fight, you didn’t say you wouldn’t do anything.”
“I mightn’t have said it, but I certainly meant it. Whose fault is it he’s in this mess? His.”
“But everybody else is in it as well.” Patroclus jabbed his finger at the struggling men. “It’s not their fault.”
“No, and it’s not mine either.”
A tense silence. Looking down, Patroclus remembered a colony of ants he’d watched when he was a child, the kind that carry snipped-off triangles of green leaves and look like tiny ships in sail. He tried to place the memory but he couldn’t. Slowly, in this wordless pause, he and Achilles were working their way together again. When he sensed it was safe to speak, he said, “Do you think it’ll keep them out?”
Achilles shook his head. “No, if anything it’ll slow down his retreat.” He pointed to the area of scrubland on the other side of the trench. “That is a killing field.”
Patroclus took a deep breath. “So this is it, then?”
“Depends what you mean by ‘it.’ I don’t expect to hear from him just yet.”
This isn’t about you.
They knew each other so well that the unspoken words hung in the air between them. Then Patroclus said, “You know, if they break through you’re going to have to fight anyway. They won’t spare your ships just because you’re not fighting.”
Achilles shrugged. “If I’m attacked, I’ll fight.” He turned to go. “C’mon, I’ve seen enough.”
20
We knew the war was going badly for the Greeks. The battle was no longer a distant rumble you could just about manage to ignore, but a deafening roar clearly audible above the clacking of the looms. We knew from the noise that the Trojans were getting close, though even if we’d been deaf the grim faces of our captors would have told the same story. They were, to a man, vile-tempered, inclined to kick anything or anybody that got in their way. We were careful to pretend indifference to the outcome, not that they gave a damn what we thought, anyway. Some of the girls, mainly those who’d been slaves in their previous lives, were genuinely indifferent. No likely end would bring them loss or leave them happier than before. But those of us who’d once been free, who’d had security and status, were torn between hope and fear. Some managed to convince themselves that if—if—the Trojans broke through they’d greet us as their long-lost sisters. But would they? Or would they see us as the enemy’s slave girls, theirs to do what they liked with? I knew which outcome I thought more probable. And even that was assuming we survived the battle. They were likely to attack at night and shoot blazing arrows into the camp to create the maximum amount of chaos and confusion. Within minutes, the huts would be on fire, and at night the women were locked in.
So we waited in a tide race of hope and fear as day by day the Trojans advanced. Every morning, the camp emptied of men—everybody who could stand up and walk had to fight—so at least we were free of the constant supervision that had been one of the most irksome features of life in Agamemnon’s compound. We still worked all day, but we took regular breaks, sitting in the sunshine to eat our bread and olives, listening to the battle, trying to decide if it was closer now or a little further away.
One morning, we were sitting on the steps when I saw Ritsa approaching. I hadn’t seen her for several days because she was working so hard she had to sleep in the hospital. She looked haggard, I thought, and I felt a stab of fear. I couldn’t afford to lose Ritsa.
“I’m all right,” she said. “Last couple of days have been hard…Fact, that’s why I’m here; I asked Machaon if I could have you to help—and he said yes.”
I was overjoyed, but immediately thought: No, it won’t happen. “He’ll never let me go.”
“He will, Machaon’s already asked.”
The main hospital was close to the arena, a twenty-minute walk from Agamemnon’s compound. I didn’t dare look back or relax till I was outside the gate, but then I slowed down, gazing around me as if I were seeing everything for the first time: the heat shimmer over a cooking fire, the iridescent sheen on the neck of a cockerel pecking for grain, the sharp tang of urine from the laundry hut as we walked past. It was all new and miraculous and for no reason other than that I’d left the weaving huts behind.
As we turned the corner into Nestor’s compound, I was surprised to see that several large tents had been erected in front of the hospital huts. Their canvas was stained and foul-smelling from long storage in the holds of the ships. These must be some of the tents the Greeks had lived in during the first winter of the war when they were still arrogant enough to believe it would be over in months or weeks. Now, nine years later, the tents were being pressed into service again to shelter the wounded. Ducking my head, I followed Ritsa through a flap into the nearest tent. Despite the din of battle and the gloomy conversations I’d overheard every night at dinner, I don’t think I’d realized till then how badly the war was going. The place reeked of blood.
I followed Ritsa down the narrow space between two rows of beds to where Machaon was sitting on a bale of straw, stitching a wound. He glanced up. “You took your time,” he said, curtly, to Ritsa. And then, to me, “Welcome on board.”
I liked Machaon, whom I’d got to know, slightly, when he came to Achilles’s compound to advise us on the treatment of plague. I’ve forgotten a lot of the men I met in that camp, but I remember Machaon clearly. He was a portly man in late middle age—though I’ve a feeling he may have been younger than he looked. White hair receding from a high forehead, grape-green eyes meshed in a net of wrinkles, a sardonic sense of humour—and a profound scepticism about the power of medicine to alter the course of nature; a scepticism which, in my experience, all the best physicians share. Standing there, watching the movement of his fingers as he pulled the thread, I felt safe for the first time since I’d arrived in the camp. I don’t know why. He finished tying the knot, congratulated the sweating man on his courage and set off down the aisle to attend to his next patient. Ritsa gave the man a drink of water—he wasn’t allowed wine—and settled him to sleep. He turned cautiously over on to his uninjured side, closed his eyes and was asleep in minutes. I wondered how anybody could sleep there. There was a constant buzzing of bluebottles in the green gloom and shouts and screams from some of the patients: men who were trying to claw their bandages off—as, in delirium, many did—and had to be forcibly restrained.
Ritsa took me to the back of the tent and sat me down at a long table. It felt good to be sitting beside her on the bench with a
pestle and mortar in front of me and several jars of dried herbs close at hand. Above our heads, swaying slightly in the draught, hung a laundry rack with bunches of dried herbs suspended from it. Fresh herbs, those that could be gathered locally, lay in swathes across the table, giving off their sharp, sweet, penetrating scents and attracting bees that flew in through the open tent flap. Many of the herbs—those I could identify—were for pain relief, but others were used to clean wounds. More men died of infection, Ritsa said, than from loss of blood. “Watch Machaon when he’s examining a patient, you’ll see he doesn’t just look at the wound, he listens to it.”
Later that day, I watched Machaon bending over a man who’d been brought in that morning. At first, he just looked long and carefully at the wound but then his fingertips began to probe, pressing down gently, again, and again, and, yes, Ritsa was right, I could tell from his face he was listening. And then—faint, but unmistakable—I heard it too: a crackling underneath the skin. Machaon smiled and said something reassuring, but less than an hour later the patient was transferred to a hut on the promontory where the dead were burned. It was known as “the stink hut” because the stench grabbed you by the throat whenever the door opened or closed. Nobody who went into the stink hut ever returned.
“It’s the soil,” Ritsa said. “It gets into the wound—and as soon as you hear that crackle…” She shook her head.
I have to confess that something about that pleased me, that it was the rich earth of Troy that was killing the invaders. But I was torn too, as I had been during the plague, because so many of these men were very young, some of them hardly more than boys—and for every one who was gung-ho and desperate to fight there was another who didn’t want to be there at all. But though I sympathized, almost involuntarily, with men having their wounds stitched up or clawing at their bandages in the intolerable heat, I still hated and despised them all. I said as much to Ritsa, who just shrugged—“Yes, yes”—and continued spreading paste onto a poultice.