Well, we had waited and the tenth year had come, and we waited still. The days had settled into a terrible kind of routine, one that had become so familiar that often I forgot the horror of it all, until it would sweep through my body and I would go rigid with the shock of it all over again. It seemed impossible, but this was normal life to us. So it was that in that tenth year, I woke early one morning to a sky thick with clouds and a metallic taste in the air. The remnants of a dissolved dream clung to me; its fragments tantalisingly out of reach.
Something had changed. I dressed hurriedly and did not linger to drag a comb through my hair or to twist it up, but let it hang loose and tangled as I slipped through the sleeping palace into the city.
He was here. I could feel the raw edge of his menace: the fury of Apollo, as sure and steady as I had long ago felt it in the temple beneath the bruising pressure of his lips. My heart was hammering, at odds with the soft peace of the morning. I wanted to run, but it was as though quicksand sucked me down and I was held fast where I was, helpless and vulnerable. I clutched my arms about my head, felt the scrape of stones tear at my knees as I flung myself to the ground. Panting, I waited for his strike.
The moments passed. I dared to raise my head an inch from the floor as I felt him recede. Crawling to the wall, I heaved myself up against it and looked out across the battle plain, towards the Greek camp.
The pain shattered my head like a bolt of lightning. I pressed my hands hard to my temples, desperate to hold my skull in one piece. My breath left my body as his light sliced through my mind and I reeled against the clammy, fog-drenched stone.
My sight came back, piece by piece. I watched, open-mouthed, as it descended on the Greeks, invisible to anyone but me: the acrid reek of disease, the choking stench of plague, breathed from Apollo’s perfect lips, a cloud bulging and distended with every sickness he knew how to heal. A curse of open, rotting sores that would burst their flesh; burning fevers that would ravage their bodies; rattling, wheezing gasps and prayers that would go unanswered. They would beg for his mercy, for his healing powers. He would watch them die.
For ten days, we all watched them. Frantically, the Greek soldiers tried to burn the bodies, but they piled up faster than they could light the pyres. The infection swept the camp, invisible and deadly. I could feel their despair and their terror from the cushioned couches the slaves dragged to the edge of the palace courtyard so that my parents could watch along with me. Andromache, too, cradling her son, her body tensed with hope.
Hector, of course, galloped ahead of the Trojans. Our men were buoyed, giddy with their advantage. There was no one to drive them back. The Greek forces were depleted; so many of their men sickened and dying, or dead already from Apollo’s plague. They clung on, but only barely, and it seemed impossible that they could hold out against us any longer. The end of the war rose before us; a beautiful vision that seemed so close within our grasp. Only I, alone in my family, alone in the city, did not believe it.
Whether it was the burning altars the Greeks lit in honour of Apollo or some other appeasement, the eleventh day dawned fresh and clear. The vile miasma that had hung across the Greek camp burned away with the sunrise. Undaunted, my brother led his troops once more into battle with their exhausted enemy.
That evening, Hector returned at sunset exultantly, reporting that although sickness no longer ravaged the Greek armies, Achilles refused to fight alongside them. He and his Myrmidons had stayed away from the battle. And true enough, we did not see the unmistakable sight of his chariot flying across the plains after that: the chariot that, every day before, had left our sons and brothers and husbands hacked and mutilated in his wake.
If Achilles had withdrawn from the war, then victory was ours – and everyone in Troy knew it. Weeks passed, but our confidence continued to grow. The Greeks may have survived a plague, but they could never win without Achilles. It was only a matter of time. I saw Andromache’s tired eyes aglow, a nervous smile daring to lift her lips. My mother, drinking wine, the tension loosened from her shoulders. And Helen, her face as calm and beautiful as it had ever been.
I chewed on my lip anxiously, the dry skin splitting under my teeth. I did not see our salvation ahead; only the sour dread of disaster unforeseen.
In the ghostly dawn, we ranged again at the city walls, useless spectators gathered atop the ramparts, waiting for our fate to be decided. The monotony of it, day after day for ten years, the helpless despair that pinned us there to watch – could it break at last?
The fog rolled in from the shore with the waves; a drifting tide of white exhaled by the surging sea. It cloaked the enemy encampment, stretched its tendrils out to the Trojan campfires dotted at the base of the walls. We were poised, all of us, a silent city gathered in this endless moment. I think every soul among us held their breath as the warriors massed in their ranks, ready.