The pounding of the blood inside my head muffled any other sound. Pinned beneath his body, his weight crushing the breath from my lungs, my eyes flickered to Athena’s face. I could not speak, but mutely, I implored the goddess to make it stop, to halt him with her divine fury, for she could not let this happen in her temple.
The painted black irises stared back into my own, cold and fathomless as the ocean. I felt her chill contempt, her iron glare, pierce my soul.
Then, as I looked up at her helplessly, her glass eyes rolled to the sky, so she did not have to watch.
Down at the shoreline, the women were gathered, huddled together in weeping clusters. Just yesterday morning, they had flocked to this beach, full of wonderment and giddy disbelief.
From one knot of women, I heard a hiccupping gasp and my own name croaked out. ‘Cassandra?’
The men that had led me here shoved me towards her and I stumbled, just managing to catch myself before I fell. It was my mother. Crouched on the sand, hunched in upon herself, looking so much older, as though the years of war had passed again in one night. Around her were my sisters. I looked away, blinking back the burn of tears. Andromache. I had seen her widowed, forced to watch Hector’s corpse dragged through the dirt, and I had thought those were the depths of despair any woman could plumb. But there was so much worse than I had known to imagine. The shock pierced me with every detail I noticed.
The moment I saw that the cradle of her arms was empty.
My sister Polyxena, trembling like a reed, heartbreakingly young.
And Helen, there among us. Her dress was ripped, the fabric frayed and fluttering across her. When I looked unwillingly towards the Greeks, I couldn’t ignore the way their eyes lingered on her exposed skin, the gleam of covetousness mingling with something darker, yet to be unleashed. The waiting was agony, a drawn-out torment whilst the soldiers decided our fate.
I realised what it was they were waiting for when I saw the contingent striding towards us from the smoking ruins of the city. Four of them, purposeful and intent upon us. I glanced back at Helen. The colour drained from her face, and although she drew herself up as tall as she could, I saw how she trembled. I felt Andromache give way behind me, her sobs echoing across the eerie silence of the dawn. Where was Astyanax? I so desperately didn’t want to know the answer.
Other Greek soldiers followed these four, fanning out around the beach. The ocean had spread so vast and empty when we had spilled out of the city the day before. Now, the long ships filled the shallows, and the men went back and forth, loading up what they had stolen from Troy. I wondered how many of them had wives waiting for them, mothers and daughters perhaps. What would those women think if they could see their menfolk, as they stood guard over us, the weeping, grieving survivors of Troy? As they waited to discover which among us they could take as their prizes, just the same as the gold and jewels they piled up? Would the women of Greece recognise the little boys they had once cuddled, the tender husbands they had kissed goodbye, the kind fathers who had cradled them proudly?
I knew that I would never see most of these reunions, would never know whether the monsters that were ransacking my home and murdering the men and boys of my city would walk back into their lives as though this didn’t matter. But the Spartan king who had sailed here for his wife stood before us, and this was the moment of Helen’s reckoning. A circle widened around her; she stood alone as he advanced.
We were all there because of her. But I remembered the insistent press of her hand on my shoulder when I had thought of running away, how she had tried to save my life. Looking at her, so alone amid the carnage wrought in her name, I wished that I could do the same for her.
Menelaus spoke at last. ‘I’ll take her back. She can face justice in Sparta.’
Somebody snorted. The men whipped around, their accusing stares fastening firmly on Hecabe. My mother hauled herself to stand, leaning heavily on the arms of Polyxena on one side and Andromache on the other. ‘She’s going home,’ my mother spat. ‘After all of this, she’s going home.’
Menelaus drew himself up. ‘Helen will face justice in Sparta,’ he repeated.
Hecabe laughed, a gritty cackle that made me flinch. ‘No, she won’t.’
On the Trojan shore, where we women waited to be divided up among the Greeks in front of the smoking embers of our city, we thought the worst was done. We could see our lives stretch out ahead of us, captives of those we hated the most, forced to look each day upon the faces of the men who had slaughtered our fathers, brothers, husbands, sons. Our dignity gone, our freedom a long-forgotten dream. But we thought the carnage was over. We didn’t think that we would have to watch those we loved be murdered in front of us again.