Helen of Troy (88 page)

Our commanders were now confident that the danger had passed. Antimachus gave a stirring speech down by the city gates a few days later, to the effect that the Greeks had received such a telling blow they were mortally affected. Gelanor’s spies confirmed it—they reported that spirits were so low in the Greek camp, preparations were under way for withdrawal. The ships were being readied, and the soldiers were eager to depart.

Encouraged, Priam sent his son Helenus to speak with them, arrange terms for ending the war. In his expansive mood, he was even willing to draw up a treaty of peace between the Trojans and the Greeks. They responded by holding Helenus captive.

Everyone was stunned. The celebratory mood was shattered. Priam was reeling as if from a sword strike: another of his sons in the hands of the Greeks! He was shocked into collapse, and Hecuba tended him in the palace, speaking for him. “Get my son back!” she said. “Get my son back!” It had a dreadfully familiar ring.

Helenus did not return. Cassandra grieved for him, burning lumps of figwort and resin incense, sending her pleas to heaven and toward her brother.

“We are linked,” she said. For once her expressionless blue eyes showed life, as if Helenus had bestowed his on her when he was captured. “I feel his mind, I feel his thoughts. Oh, to fall into their hands! They will not release him, I know it.” She turned to Paris—she always ignored me—and flung herself on him, crying, “I see it all!”

Gently he took her hands. “And what do you see, dear sister?”

“I tremble to disclose it,” she murmured. She shook her head as if to clear it, and her lank red hair flew all about, finally settling like dead snakes on her shoulders and back. “He will betray us.”

“What?” Paris cried. “How?”

Her voice was dull and so soft I had to strain to hear her. “He knows all the prophecies—as do I—concerning the fall of Troy. The ones left to be fulfilled.”

Afterward, in the privacy of our upper chambers, we spoke further about them, these prophecies daring the Greeks to fulfill them.

“Two prophecies have been fulfilled, and there are three left,” he said. “It has been a long time since the second one, involving the Thracian horses, but there is no time limit on a prophecy. Of all things, it has the most patience. Now we must worry about the arrows of Heracles.”

“The arrows of Heracles—Philoctetes has them.”

“Yes, when Heracles was dying, he gave his bow and arrows to a lad who was willing—when no one else would step up to the task—to light his funeral pyre and end his misery. That was Philoctetes as a boy. Now the Greeks will bring him here, feel bound to retrieve him from the island, along with his bow and arrows.”

“What matter?” I asked quickly—too quickly. “You are the premier bowman of the war.”

“These arrows never miss, so it is said,” Paris corrected me. “And they are deadly, since Heracles dipped them in the slain Hydra’s blood. They cause a man’s blood to boil, and his flesh to melt, and there is no remedy. Oh, if Philoctetes comes here—”

“Perhaps he won’t,” I said. “Perhaps he is dead of his wound. He has resided alone on the island since the start of the war.”

“Even if he is, they will find the bow and arrows,” said Paris. “Someone else will wield them. And fulfill the prophecy.”

“Troy will fall because one man has a deadly bow and arrows? Troy is bigger than that!”

Paris looked at me almost pityingly. “The prophecy is not concerned with the size of Troy, nor who is slain,” he said. “It matters only that the bow and arrows of Heracles, given to Philoctetes, come to Troy. That is all the prophecy specified. Perhaps it would count if the arrows were fired into the wall!”

“Let them do so,” I hissed. Oh, enough of prophecies, of the war, of suspense.

It was night. Paris was standing with his back to me, looking out the window into the deep, star-filled night. The gentle curve of his white wool robe seemed to glow in the dim light of the chamber. I rushed to him and embraced him from behind. The wool, soft as a baby’s cheek, slid under my fingers. I held him tight, my arms enclosing him. Slowly he turned to me. He had that smile that was only a hint of a smile on his lips.

“You almost knock me over,” he said. “But it is a sweet assault. Dear Helen.” He reached out and took a lock of my hair in his fingers and smoothed it against his palm.

As we lay on our bed together, I traced his face more than I was wont. Visitations, god-induced encounters, visions—however fleeting, they are real when they occur. Children result from them—I myself, if Mother entertained the swan as she would have it, rather than Antenor in an ordinary, ugly way—O let me not think upon that! I must believe that it had all happened, that Troy was real, that Aphrodite as she appeared in the cave was real.

Tales were filled with women who consorted with ghost lovers and spirits and gods. So be it. The vision fled in the morning light. But in the night it was real enough: perhaps the only reality. A reality that followed them into their old age, that faded last of all. When their memories dimmed and their husbands and children were sucked up into the mist of oblivion, that one divine encounter lived on.

“Paris,” I whispered, “let us have one more divine encounter.”

“One more?”

“Yes, and perhaps this one will grant us the child we long for. I have never given up hope.”

“Nor I,” he said.

He slept, I kept from sleep. Dreams were cheap. I wanted to be able to reach out and stroke his cheek, to bend my head and listen to his breathing as he slept.

The chamber was still, unearthly still. I did not hear the call of birds outside, nor the stir of air puffing against our curtains. On the floor the late-rising waning moon traced its light and brought the shadows of the windows to dance across the floor.

I lay safe and happy and drowsy in the circle of Paris’s strong arms. I knew such things were not proof against danger, but deep down we feel that they are—that a warrior’s arms bestow immunity from harm.

Then it came: the hateful vision. I had questioned whether my second sight, the one conferred on me by the sacred snakes, was still alive. Oh, this answered me, but I would have wished the vision never to have come.

Paris lay dead. He had been slain but I did not see by whom—only that it was by an arrow.

I screamed and bolted upright. Immediately Paris was awake as well. “What is it?” Muddled with sleep, he clutched at my shoulders. “A bad dream,” he muttered. “Turn on your other side. That way the dream will not continue.”

This was no dream, and it went on, stamping itself on my heart, and I saw it all: Paris lying white and unmoving. The fall of Troy—the high towers toppling. Slaughter and blood running in the streets. A great wooden . . . something. Disarming, misleading. The Greeks conquer.

In pain, I tumbled from the bed.

Paris slept on, and I crept back near him, trembling. I dared not touch him for fear of waking him; if he waked, he would surely see what I had seen. But I needed to be beside him, to protect him in the futile way a wife feels she can protect her husband from all evil.

LXIII

I
t was true. After many months, the Greeks were stirring again, rousing themselves like a bear from its den after a winter’s sleep. Our spies soon told us why: Philoctetes had indeed arrived from his island exile, and Odysseus and Diomedes had fetched the son of Achilles from his mother, the princess Deïdameia, in Scyros. She had been reluctant to let him go, but when they had come upon him he was practicing with spear and sword, driving a chariot, and was eager to come to Troy and leave the placid safety of his mother’s court. Perhaps she had wept and bewailed the loss of Achilles from her life too ardently and for too long. The young do not tolerate that. They want to be doing, not reminiscing. So the Greeks were busy trying to bring about the three prophecies which either Calchas or Helenus had revealed.

Philoctetes was far from well; his wound still festered and he was weak. He was being treated by Machaon but until he recovered he could not fight.

“But you wounded Machaon!” I said to Paris.

“Not mortally, obviously,” he said glumly. “My arrows are not the potent ones of Heracles.”

“I do not understand about the arrows of Heracles,” I said, more to distract myself from the horrid vision I had had of Paris wounded and dead than to ask a question. “If Philoctetes has had them since he was a boy, and he used them to hunt food for years on the island, how many can remain? A quiver does not hold many arrows!”

“Perhaps he has a little vial of Hydra poison to dip new arrowheads in,” said Paris. “That way he could keep replenishing the store of lethal arrows.”

“There is nothing in the story to say that Heracles collected the poison of the dying Hydra,” I said. “Only that he washed his arrow tips in her blood. He must have stuck them under her spouting neck—”

Paris smiled. “My dear Helen, you are too literal. You should know—being the subject of them—that stories twist what truly happened. We do not know what passed between Heracles and the Hydra in her cave. Any more than anyone knows what passed between us on Cranae.”

At that memory he made me smile, as he knew he could. “Only we know that,” I said. Oh, the precious memory!

“Nonetheless, your point is well taken,” he said. “There will be no flying arrows until Philoctetes recovers, and who knows when that will be?”

It was summer again. Truly time seemed bent and folded, for it had been autumn only—days?—before. But the trees and their broad, dark leaves, the continual winds from northeast, all shouted that it was summer. Let the gods do what they would. They wanted it to be summer: therefore it was summer.

We sweltered in Troy—proof enough that it was true summer. The sun beat down on the stones of the city with such intensity that the heat penetrated the soles of our sandals and came near to blistering our feet. To wear armor in such heat was deadly in itself, causing our soldiers to collapse and crumple as they practiced in the drilling field to the south of the city. But they were a ragtag band; so many able-bodied men had lost their lives, and now the ranks of the soldiers were swelled with the too-young and the too-old. Little boys who had been forbidden to fight, shriveled old men whose grandchildren sternly told them not to go, now could take up arms. In vain Priam ordered them only to man the walls and attend to the warriors. Let the wounded do that, they retorted, hobbling out to try to protect Troy.

Seeing the pitiful men trying to defend Troy, women wanted to join in as well. They did not aspire to fight like the Amazons, but they could do as well as the old men and little boys, they said. Theano tried to dissuade them, but they argued that no priestess of Athena could do that, as Athena herself was a goddess of warfare. So they served as lookouts on the walls, ready to lob insect bombs and heated sand down below if needed.

Troy itself had become as shabby as its army. Stones had been pried from the once-proud streets to mend damaged walls, and the fountains were dry. The sphinx down in the lower marketplace was awash in trash and dust around its base. Men came there to sell their belongings in order to get food, which was running low—the grains were moldy and the fine wines sour. Clothes were soiled and stained; no one could squander precious water within the city for laundry, and the springs outside were unreachable. Our brief respite of relief had passed, and the Greeks were besieging us again.

Sometime in all this, I consulted with Antenor, who was still trying to arrange some sort of honorable settlement to the war.

“But we have waited too late,” he said. “The Greeks sense that we are desperate, and now they need only to keep doing what they are doing—and wait.”

“Antenor—what do you think will happen? Truly?”

“I would like to think that we hang on in here until the Greeks give up. But that would take either a decisive defeat, a catastrophic incident, such as a massive plague, or bitter quarrels between their leaders. Thus far, the loss of Achilles has not stopped them, nor the plague that visited them earlier, and as for bitter quarrels—that is all they have done since before they left Greece.”

“And otherwise?”