When Helen left, I didn’t watch her go. I knew she would be back, and despite myself, I felt a flicker of curiosity, a pull towards her: the other outsider in my city.
Although I knew it would come, still I couldn’t prepare myself for the moment that the Greek fleet was sighted on the horizon; a vast row of long ships with curved prows that spanned the edge of the world. Never before had anyone seen so many ships.
Even Helen was taken aback; Helen, who visited me at the temple, returning after that first conversation to talk to me as though I were anyone else in the family, a sister of her husband, like Andromache, who had married Hector.
‘They must have gathered every man of fighting age from every last island,’ Helen said, twisting an escaped coil of hair that hung loose by her lovely face.
The twilight air was still, stars glimmering to life in the sky above us. Beyond the city walls, far down on the distant beach, the Greeks were busy setting up their camp. So many of them, it defied belief. In Troy, panic mingled with a strange excitement, a surge of energy as we readied ourselves. The tension was broken at last, the waiting for retribution had come to an end. Priam had received a delegation ahead of the invasion; Troy had held its breath to see if he would give Helen up, but he had not. And so, the army came. Seeing its size, would he falter? Was that what Helen worried about? That he would hand her over to them, back to her husband? Even if he did, surely they wouldn’t be content to leave with just her. All those thousands of men who had sailed away from their homes: they must have been promised more than just one woman. I didn’t need to see the future to know it wouldn’t be enough.
‘Why would so many come?’ I asked.
She shook her head, her brow creasing faintly. ‘I don’t know.’
I wondered if she was scared. I wondered what would happen to her when the army broke down our walls. My fate, like the rest of the women of Troy, seemed clearer. And I found myself terrified by it. I’d suffered everyone’s disdain here, everyone’s irritation with my curse, but that was nothing compared to what awaited me if the city fell – or when the city fell, as I had seen the day that Paris came back to us.
The ring of bronze across the plains was all we heard, where once I had been able to step out of the broiling city and feel the sea breeze cool on my face, with the gulls shrieking and wheeling overhead. All of us were imprisoned within Troy’s walls, all of us except the men, who hauled on their armour at daybreak and coiled out on to the beach like a swarm of ants. At nightfall, they returned, bruised and bloody and broken. The dead lay scattered across the plains, skewered, glassy-eyed, staring whilst the blood congealed in their wounds and the flies buzzed in thick clouds about them. At intervals there were truces, and Greeks and Trojans alike would gather the corpses. The smoke from the pyres choked the sky, swelling from the sprawling Greek camps at the shore and belching from our besieged city. Only the dead could leave Troy now.
13
Clytemnestra
He said he was a traveller when he came. I barely gave him a moment’s notice. ‘Give him food, a bath, a bed,’ I said, waving my hand to the slave-girls, whose faces had become indistinguishable to me. At first, I saw the soft curve of Iphigenia’s arm or the gleam of her hair in every young woman I encountered, no matter how little they resembled her. Whether they were slaves or the noble daughters of the other wealthy houses of Mycenae, it pained me to see them living whilst she was dead. It was the hopefulness of youth, maybe, the sweetness of life on its very cusp that I recognised. Not just the girls, either; I saw the woman she could have been in every female figure I encountered: a nervous bride, a transformed mother, even a shuddering crone. All the things she would never be. I tried not to look at them at all.
A passing traveller seeking hospitality was nothing to me. The only visitors I cared about were those messengers who brought us news from Troy. Then I pricked up my ears, listened to what they had to say. I had no system ready at first; I had relied on those heralds who could travel faster than a fleet of ships to give me warning if my husband was to return victorious. Now, I had beacons and watchmen installed, stretching across the islands that stood between us and Troy, ready to send a chain of firelight to carry the news to me as soon as the city fell. So far, there was little to report. The Greek soldiers camped on the shores of Troy, but the walls stood strong around the city still.
I had taken to walking about the courtyard at night after spending the day immersed in the kingdom’s affairs. Unlike his sisters, the baby Orestes would sleep contentedly enough in his crib, but I found I could not tolerate the hours I spent awake listening to his soft breathing. I craved solitude more than I craved anything – almost anything, at least, not forgetting how my heart quickened at news of the war and of the countless ways my husband might die, either in it or, most precious to me, afterwards. But most days, what I wanted was to be left alone. The chattering of other people, be they my own children or anyone else, was like an unbearable itch. I longed to be lost in my own thoughts, my own plans and my one remaining dream. I lived for the quiet hours of the night, when all I could hear was the soft suck and hiss of the distant waves, when all that touched me was the cold caress of the dark breeze.