‘It’s beautiful,’ she said. I wasn’t sure if she was talking about the temple as a whole or the statue of Apollo, which she was looking up towards. I thought for a second of his eyes turning towards us, his ivory feet flexing and lifting from his plinth, his carved robe billowing around his shoulders. I wondered if she would still stand there with the same unshakeable confidence if he did.
‘Are there temples like this in Sparta?’ I was startled by the question I hadn’t known I was going to ask.
She considered it thoughtfully. ‘Some things are similar,’ she said. ‘But Troy is such a different kind of place.’ She sighed. ‘I hadn’t left Sparta since I was a child. This is another world.’
I wanted to ask where else it was that she had gone, but I hesitated. There was an echo of sadness in her tone when she said it, something I wasn’t sure that I could or should probe.
‘Did Paris tell you much about it?’ I said at last, and then flinched at the image of the two of them on board his ship, sailing away from her home. Was that something she would want to revisit, or was it a painful memory for her? I truly couldn’t guess. She didn’t seem like the woman I’d pictured, smug and serene in the face of the disaster they had brought with them. Instead, she was quiet and contemplative, quite different to Paris. She wasn’t so easy to hate when she was standing right in front of me.
‘How do you describe something that someone has never imagined?’ She smiled wryly. ‘Anyway, Paris barely knows Troy himself. He is almost as much a stranger here as I am.’
He didn’t behave like a stranger, though. He seemed so easy, so familiar in the palace, as though he’d grown up there, sprawling in ornately carved chairs all his life, sipping from jewelled goblets, swathing himself in fine linen, always smiling, always fluent.
‘Everyone in Sparta knew me,’ Helen continued. ‘Me and my sister, Clytemnestra.’ A chill draught of air snaked in around the curved columns, prickled the skin of my arms. ‘And I knew them. Here, everyone knows my name, but I don’t know theirs, or anything about them.’ She looked over her shoulder at me and now our eyes met properly. ‘Though I know a little about you – that you see things.’
‘If you’ve heard that, you know that no one believes it. That they think I’m mad.’
She shrugged. ‘As I said, it’s hard to describe something that someone hasn’t imagined. For people who haven’t been visited by a god, it’s easy to disbelieve. My mother – people thought she was lying at first, when she said that Zeus came to her.’
‘Why did they change their minds?’
‘I was born.’
Helen’s inhuman beauty was the proof; everyone was convinced that she had divine parentage as soon as they saw her. I looked down. Where was my evidence? Even when my warnings came to pass, people seemed to forget what I had told them. My words were insubstantial, lost on the air the moment they were spoken.
‘When Paris saw the goddesses, Aphrodite promised him that I would be his wife. And here I am.’ She smiled and I remembered my irritation with him when he had told us that story – or part of it, at least. He had left out that Helen was to be the prize. ‘But if Apollo has given you a gift that people can’t see, maybe it’s easier for them to think it’s madness instead.’
‘A gift,’ I repeated. The gilded face of the statue stayed impassive. I bit the inside of my cheek, stopped myself from saying any more. Beauty and love were gifts, perhaps – even if I knew that Helen’s beauty was a terrible thing, an incitement to war and chaos. But if I told her it was so, for all the kindness she had just spoken, she’d dismiss it like anyone else. I made myself still, my arms locked across my chest. She might seem as though she understood, but I knew that if I told her, if I let her glimpse even a fraction of the insight that shattered my mind, she would find a way to skate over it, to ignore the truth of it, to hear something else in its place. ‘You have come to make an offering,’ I said. ‘Very wise of you, to come to Apollo, new to our city as you are. If you are to be a princess of Troy, you do well to honour him.’
‘Of course.’ She tossed her head slightly, her face smooth and friendly as before, but something had closed between us. I was a priestess again, busying myself in the rituals I’d learned, the ones I could repeat and hold on to every day when everything else around me seemed to lurch and twist and change. That was the gift: stability. The solid stone floor that I could press my forehead to, the walls that stood around me, that gave me shelter – at least for now, until the storm I knew was coming swept in.