Helen of Troy (75 page)

“This young man duplicated the scars of Hyllus. Where is Hyllus? Murdered, perhaps. In any case, this person is not Hyllus, but a clever impersonator sent by the Greeks. He was sent here to play upon our desires, upon our wishes that both the father and the son had not betrayed Troy. But where is Hyllus’s mother? She has been strangely silent. She would have known this imposter was not her son. But”—Gelanor walked directly over to him—“you avoided your ‘mother,’ did you not? You said you did not spend time at home. Small wonder!”

Hyllus now began to blabber. “Ask my mother! Ask her! You shall see! My mother knows!”

“Fetch the wife of Calchas, the mother of Hyllus.” Priam’s command was quiet but sharp.

“While we wait, let us continue the questioning,” said Gelanor. “We would like to know how you conveyed your findings back to your friends in the Greek camp. Going openly yourself would have been too obvious. Either you sent someone else or you devised signals in advance. You don’t seem clever enough to have created a code yourself, if I may say so. Perhaps you will tell us who it was? And what it was?” His polite tone was as insulting as a slap.

Hyllus closed his eyes and shook his head, to indicate ignorance and sorrow at the misunderstanding.

“No, I did not think so,” said Gelanor. “You will continue the playacting until the end. Very well, for the end is near.”

Hyllus’s mother was brought forward. Hyllus made a great show of embracing her. I could not see whether the embrace was warmly returned or merely endured. “Mother! Tell them, Mother! They are making a dreadful accusation, saying that I am an imposter.”

She looked at him searchingly. She reached out and touched his cheek, running the back of her hand lightly along it. “My son . . .”

The room came alive with murmurs.

“Yes, Mother!” he said, tears trickling down his face, his mouth starting to quiver. “Thank you, Mother!”

“. . . I do not know,” she said, twisting her hands together, her face contorted as well. “I do not know . . .” She turned to Priam, her eyes desperate. “There are days when I think, yes, it is he, Hyllus—days when he turns and makes a gesture and it could only be him. But when I first beheld him, I did not know him for Hyllus.” Turning this way and that, between Priam and Hyllus, she was distraught. “It was not my son. It was someone else. It frightened me—as if he had died and this was a shade, a pale visitor. As the days went on, the paleness disappeared and color came into him and he took on the life of Hyllus.”

“How could you have done this?” Priam was shocked. “How could you have received him—this ghost?”

“Because . . . because I could not know, for certain.”

“A mother not know her own child?” Hecuba spoke for the first time, from her place near Priam. Yes, Hecuba, the mother who had cast out her own son!

“It had been some time since I had seen him . . . people change . . .” She looked miserable. “And you know the longing of a mother for a lost child. There is a part of you that will accept back any morsel you can get, even if it is not complete. Part of you that will settle for a copy, if the copy is a good one.”

“Even if it is false through and through?” Gelanor sounded outraged. “This boy was not a piece of Hyllus, he had not a shred of Hyllus in him. He was no more Hyllus than I am! Would you have called me ‘son’?”

“No. Because there is no way I could have convinced myself that you are Hyllus, no matter how I longed to. This boy made it easy.” She took his hands, then dropped them in farewell. “Now it is doubly hard. I lose Hyllus twice.”

“Mother!” the boy cried out, extending his arms.

“If you truly knew me for your mother, you would not be so cruel as to torture me any further,” she said, stepping back, her arms still at her side. “This proves what I wish were not so.”

“Take him away!” said Priam. “Hold him in chains, and mind that he does not escape. Before he is executed, we must know what he knows.”

The two soldiers grabbed him and, locking his arms behind his back, pushed him through the crowd, which had grown nasty.

“Let us kill him!” yelled one man. “Think of the deaths he has caused!”

“All in good time,” said Gelanor. “There may still be some deaths we can prevent, if we know what this spy and his friends have planned.”

“Mother!” the boy wailed from the back of the room, then we heard the soldiers strike him and silence him. Calchas’s wife, weeping, stumbled from her questioners and disappeared into the crowd.

Suddenly the room erupted into wails and cries of mourning for all the death caused by this war. Priam’s attempt at solace and reconciliation had only gathered large numbers of war victims together in one room, where their grief and anguish could multiply tenfold. Women screamed and raised their hands, children sent pitiful shrieks like dagger stabs through the night. They overturned the tables and shattered the wine containers, scattered the food, turning the chamber into a slippery deck.

“My friends—” Priam held up his hands, imploring them. But his voice was lost in the melee.

“I will end this!” One voice rose above the others, cutting through them like the sweet high notes of a flute rise above the throb of drums. “I began it, and by all the gods, I shall end it!”

Paris! But how could he end it? There was no turning back.

He had taken his place beside Priam and in the flickering light I had never seen him look so glorious—but was that only because he had withdrawn himself from me? He was no longer mine, therefore his beauty increased?

He held his arms up, his fine hands reaching for the sky. He held his head high, his chin lifted, but I could see his eyes searching the crowd. When he saw me, he looked away. “I brought us to this,” he said. “I plunged headlong into the realm of the unknown, and now I have dashed us all upon the rocks. But the ship—the ship of Troy has not foundered. And my good fellows, you know what we do when a ship seems to be endangered or cursed—we lighten the load, we throw the cursed object overboard. So I shall. I am that cursed object.”

I could not believe what I was hearing. Was he to kill himself? No, rather than let that happen, I would fasten my arms around him and entwine him for the rest of his life, I would be his hated chain.

“Two men call themselves the husband of Helen, daughter of Tyndareus of Sparta.” Slowly he turned his head to look over the entire gathering, and his eyes darted across all the faces. I was thankful he had not said
daughter of
Zeus.
“Menelaus of the House of Atreus in Greece, and I, Prince Paris of Troy. This is a private quarrel, which the brother of Menelaus has chosen to make an occasion of war. This man, Agamemnon, was a warlord without a war until I appeared in his vision. But I say, it is still a matter between two men—between the man Helen chose as husband in a contest her father arranged many years ago, and the man she chose for herself. It is Agamemnon’s doing that anyone else should suffer for it. Let us thrash it out for ourselves. I challenge Menelaus to a duel. Let him meet me on the plain before the walls of Troy.” He lowered his arms at last. “The fight will be to the death. And may the gods anoint the best man.”

I expected Priam to object, Hecuba to cry out. Instead they stood silent. For the longest time the great crowd in the room did nothing, then they began to chant and sway, and praise Paris for his bravery. They surged forward and enveloped him, then hoisted him on their shoulders.

“Paris! Paris! Paris!” they cried.

They buoyed him along; he bounced and gestured, but he did not look at me.

LIII

D
eep night. I sat alone in my inmost chamber, barring it to all. I heard Gelanor asking to be admitted and my attendant sending him away. I heard Evadne beg to come in, and being turned away. I was utterly alone, and so must it be.

The stillness of the winter night stalked the chamber, letting Paris’s words echo in the cold. At dawn they would fight. And this time tomorrow, who would lie quiet and breathless?

I knew it would be Paris. Menelaus was stronger and more skilled in fighting. Furthermore, he was driven by anger and desire, fueled with the need for revenge, whereas Paris had lost his spirit some time ago; it had fled with Troilus. Menelaus would be fighting a man already dead. This time tomorrow night, Paris and Troilus would be walking together through the gray fields of asphodel. And I would be standing a widow on the banks of the deep black Styx, seeing their shades but unable to cross. Menelaus would proclaim victory and I would have to return to him as his wife, the mother of his child.

Dark. Dark. The sky was still dark as a squid’s ink. There was no dawn. Not yet.

Dawn finally came, the rooks and crows cawing deeply to welcome it, their rasps sounding like funeral drums. The sun rose triumphant in the eastern sky. Down on the plain there was movement. The Greeks were on their way; dust from the chariot wheels rose in pale puffs. Below my window I could hear and see the rustlings of the Trojans as they readied for the spectacle. Someone was preparing Paris for his contest. It should have been me, but I knew he would have turned away, despising the sight of me, knowing he was probably going to die for a woman he no longer loved.

I longed to see him as he set out, but I could not trust myself not to fling myself into his arms, dismaying him and harming his ability to fight. No, I must remain here. Only after he had departed would I be able to see him, far below on the plain, only when it was too late.

I changed my clothes, putting on a warm mantle, and went up to the rooftop to watch. I saw the great line of the Greek soldiers drawn up, and a contingent of Trojans marching forward to meet them in the rosy half-light of dawn, and then heard, faintly, cheers as the Scaean Gate of Troy swung open and Priam and Hector emerged in their chariot, then, behind them, Paris in his. Yet a third followed, bearing a herald and sacrificial offerings. In this formal challenge, a ceremonial treaty had to be proclaimed and terms stated.

They milled about as they met, and I longed to be able to see and hear all that was happening. A whisper close behind me, and I turned to see Evadne standing there. How had she come up here, into these most private quarters?

“Helen, you called me,” she said softly. Then I saw the curve of her neck and the flash of her eyes, and I knew her for who she was: not Evadne. Thus Aphrodite likes to mock us, thinking us blind and stupid.

“Indeed I did,” I said, pretending to believe her disguise. “Today I feel as blind as you,” I said sadly. “I wish I could see what was happening on that dreadful plain below. And hear the words being spoken.”

“Because my eyesight has faded, I have learned to see far in a different way,” she said. I could not have told her voice from Evadne’s true one. “Shut your eyelids tightly until you see wheeling colors and spots, then open them again. Focus on what you want to see far away, and it will show itself to you.”

Dutifully I followed the instructions, still pretending, humoring the goddess. When I opened my eyes again, it was as if I stood on the plain beside the men. I could even see puffs of smoke from the horses’ nostrils rising in the chill dawn air.

Priam stepped from his chariot and approached Agamemnon. The two men stopped a length apart—the long shadows of early morning showed them nearly the same in height, but Agamemnon’s shadow was twice as thick as Priam’s. The heralds brought out the sacrificial lambs, mixed wine in a gleaming bowl, and poured water over the kings’ hands. They nodded to one another, then Agamemnon cut hair from the lambs’ heads; the heralds distributed it to the captains on both sides. Then he raised his hands and prayed in that braying voice I had always hated. He called upon Zeus, and the sun, and the rivers and the earth, and the powers of the underworld to witness their oaths and to see that they were kept. “If Paris kills Menelaus,” he cried, “allow him to keep Helen and all the wealth she took with her, and we will depart from the shores of Troy. But if Menelaus slays Paris, the Trojans must surrender Helen and her treasure. Furthermore—they must compensate all of us for our expense in coming here! Yes, pay us back, on such a scale that all future generations shall remember it. And if they do not, I will keep my army here and destroy Troy.”