‘That one,’ Agamemnon said, his eyes a void as dark as the painted Athena’s had been. ‘I’ll take her.’
We weren’t given time for goodbyes. My mother reached out for me, but she was too far down the line, and already there were Greek hands on her shoulders, forcing her back in place. I caught her eyes for the space of one agonising heartbeat and I saw the same moment flash before us both. Her rising in horror from her bed, transfixed by the swell of her belly, shuddering from the nightmare that told what the baby would be. The same thought hovered between us. If she could have brought herself to hurl him from the highest tower of Troy, it wouldn’t be rubble among ashes now. Paris would be as dead as he was today, but the rest of Troy would have lived.
I dug my heels into the sand, but the Greeks who led me off didn’t even notice my resistance. I could only turn my head back towards the women for as long as I could bear the sight of my mother’s face, the grief that had split her soul apart, the wordless anguish that united all of us in that moment. Whoever we were in Troy, however these women might have turned their heads away from me once, all of us were the same now. They pitied me; I could feel the ragged pulses of their sympathy for me, the first to be borne away after Polyxena, even though all of them would suffer the same. Troy was in ruins, but in these hideous few minutes, I felt more a part of it than ever before. Our city would only exist in our memories; a strange, shared bond that flickered into existence between us all, just as we were torn apart from each other, just as we were about to be scattered across the ocean and separated forever.
And, even in the grip of cold dread that twisted inside me for what was still to come, I felt a spasm of despair for them, too. Every one of them that I would never see again.
It was only Helen who moved, Helen who wasn’t held back like Hecabe was, Helen who darted forward and wrapped her arms around me. For all Menelaus’ empty threats of justice in Sparta, everyone knew she was going back home, back to a life that still existed. As she embraced me, she whispered into my ear, ‘My sister, Clytemnestra, she is queen of Mycenae. She will be kind.’
I shivered. Helen’s words, the last fervent comfort she could give me, rang hollow. I knew already there was no sanctuary for me in Mycenae. As Helen stepped away from me, a desperation engulfed me; if only I was boarding her ship; if only I could go to Sparta with her. The urge to beg flared within me, a howl rising up, but I clamped my lips together. I wouldn’t give these men the satisfaction of refusing the pleas of a Trojan princess.
In Agamemnon’s tent, he drank wine and boasted. I stared at a gleaming gold plate, watching how the light slid across its shining surface. I wondered if it came from Troy – if it had been in the palace yesterday, if I had seen it a hundred times in my life and never noticed it.
‘She’s a priestess of Apollo, you know.’ It didn’t feel like Agamemnon could be talking about me, but I knew that he was. ‘Apollo, Troy’s protector.’ He laughed harshly. ‘He isn’t sending a plague for this one, though.’
At this, the men stirred uneasily. They were so close to going home, I thought, their victory scraped after ten long years, the dragging war made longer by the foolish pride of Agamemnon and men like him. At the very end of it all, on the eve of their homecoming, he dared to talk like this. I felt their eyes flicker nervously to the opening of the tent entrance, to the blank sky beyond, as though the god himself might be roused to anger, might strike them down where they stood.
I knew better, though. The gods had left Troy. They might have stridden across the battlefield once, when the war raged at its most ferocious. Even Aphrodite had sullied her pristine feet on the blood-streaked mud of the Trojan plains for her beloved Paris. Ares had rampaged beside Trojan fighters, his bloodcurdling yell bringing terror to Greek hearts. The great, black, leathery wings of Eris had rasped in the air just above their heads, carnage unfolding in her wake. And Apollo, sleek and sinuous, along with his wild sister, Artemis, they had stood with us, too. It wasn’t enough. And, in our defeat, they had deserted us.
All that was left to me of Apollo was the ache in my head, the dull throb of the tender split in my mind. The unpredictable streaking flash, like lightning searing across the sky, leaving its imprint against the back of my eyelids. It flickered when Agamemnon put his clammy hands on me, when I felt the heat of his rancid breath on my face. A strange comfort from the curse that had so blighted my existence, the power that had been my pride and my ruin, as the conviction settled over me like the fine mist of morning, as I thought of Helen’s final words to me before I was torn away.