Those were the romantic stories of girlhood. They weren’t the truth of marriage. So, I could not tell my daughter of love, exactly. I could hope that when she looked at Achilles, she would see enough of a kinship in his eyes to know that they might lead a peaceable, contented life together. I could tell her that the joy of true love would come when she held her first baby in her arms – before then, even, when she felt it roll and squirm within her, when she sang to her growing belly and placed her hands on the warm, taut skin and marvelled at the unimaginable miracle that was to be hers. But I could remember the panic I had felt myself at contemplating such a thing: the fear that walked hand in hand with the happiness, the shadow that hung across that joyful prospect. When I looked at my slim, lithe daughter, I could not help but feel the worry stir within me. We would lay down our lives for our children, and every time we faced birth, we stood on the banks of that great river that separated the living from the dead. A massed army of women, facing that perilous passage with no armour to protect us, only our own strength and hope that we would prevail.
It didn’t feel like the right conversation to have on the way to her wedding.
Fortunately, she spoke first. ‘I’m glad we get to see Father again before he sails to war,’ she said.
‘I am, too,’ I replied. ‘We didn’t part on the happiest of terms; I’m glad of the chance to make peace before he goes.’
‘Why not?’ She was intrigued, and something about the intimacy of the chariot ride made it easy to talk, to say the things that had been turning over in my mind.
‘Helen is my sister,’ I said. ‘The way the men speak of her . . .’
The chariot jolted harshly beneath us, and the sun was climbing higher in the sky, beginning to beat down on the thin canopy that shaded us. Dust flew from the wheels, and I wondered what state our fine dresses would be in by the time we arrived. Iphigenia shifted a little on her cushions. ‘I have heard some things,’ she said, cautiously.
No doubt she had. Hardly anything else had been talked of since we found it out. ‘Menelaus is angry,’ I said, ‘and I don’t blame him. But your father should have enough affection for me to think of protecting my sister. He did not, and so I was angry when he left. I didn’t bid him a very kind farewell.’
‘He says the war will be won within days. Even if we were not to see him now, you would have had your chance to reconcile soon.’
My kind girl, always seeing the best in everyone. I wasn’t so sure. My tongue had been sharp in my last conversation with Agamemnon, and I regretted some of it, though I still felt the injustice of his words.
‘Menelaus should have made a wiser choice of bride,’ he had scoffed. We were in our chamber; his ships were ready in the harbour and already I looked forward to the quiet that would fall once he had sailed. I felt restless and agitated, my mind on fire with questions for my errant sister. How I wished I could talk to her, that I had been there in Sparta, that I could have seen this Paris for myself, that I had more than wild speculation to fuel my imaginings.
‘All the men of Greece wanted Helen,’ I said. ‘You should remember that, surely.’
He cast me an irritated glance. ‘If they wanted her that much, why have they all been so reluctant to bring her home?’
Again, this familiar grumble. It had been a constant refrain as he and Menelaus tried to summon the armies.
‘War is not an easy thing to contemplate,’ I said. ‘They have wives of their own, children to think of . . .’
He scoffed. ‘Troy is ours for the taking. They will sail home with riches they have never dreamed of, which they can lavish upon those wives and children.’ He strode to the window and stared through it intently. ‘But that they dared to shrink back from their duty when I called them to arms, the king of them all. Odysseus, feigning madness. Achilles, disguised as a woman. They should have been eager to fight this war when I summoned them.’
‘You have Odysseus, and Achilles, too.’ I thought of Penelope with a pang of grief. I knew that she and Odysseus must have plotted it together: that he pretended to be mad as he ploughed their fields with salt and ranted and raved nonsense. It had taken the shrewd Palamedes, whom Agamemnon had sent, to pluck their newborn baby Telemachus from Penelope’s arms and lay the infant down before the plough. When Odysseus swerved away to save the child, the pretence was exposed as a lie. My heart had leapt into my throat when I heard that particular story, and my arms had circled my swollen stomach instinctively. The thought of her baby, exposed and vulnerable on the earth, the sharp metal teeth only inches away – I felt a shiver of Penelope’s fear. And a strange sensation of jealousy lurking beneath it. She had wanted her husband to stay at home, wanted it enough to risk his dishonour and make him break the oath he himself had suggested years before. I could not quite bring myself to feel the same about my husband’s impending absence. His complaining had been driving me to madness myself as the armies were assembled.