The Women of Troy: A Novel

by Pat Barker

  From that moment on, Maire’s baby became a girl. The following day, I mentioned the birth casually in passing to Alcimus, who showed absolutely no interest. At dinner, one or two of the men commented on the singing. I said: “Yes, we were celebrating. Maire had a baby girl!” Once again, no interest. A slave giving birth to a slave is nobody’s idea of news.

  Except in the women’s hut. There, it changed the atmosphere completely. The girls had a new focus; Maire basked in being the centre of attention. After dark, when they gathered round the fire, the baby passed from one pair of arms to the next, like a good-luck charm. Maire looked on, smiling, though I noticed she was always relieved to get him back. Something fierce in that love. Mine, she seemed to be saying. Not yours. Mine.

  Would I feel like that when my time came? Oh, I’m sure many women would tell me: “Don’t be silly—of course you will!” “They bring the love with them.” I wish I had a gold coin for every time I’ve heard somebody say that.

  It’s not true—and I know it’s not true. The love doesn’t always come, not if the baby’s the result of a forced union—and especially not if it’s a male child who resembles his father. I’ve seen many such boys grow up, well cared for, well fed—or as well as their mothers can afford—but hardly ever touched, not cuddled, not loved. And believe me, they don’t thrive. So, every time I looked at Maire with her baby, I wondered how it would be for me. Oh, I laughed when the Myrmidons patted my stomach and talked about Achilles’s son, but I too thought it was a boy.

  The exception to this welter of baby worship was Andromache. Her detachment surprised me, a little—I’d expected her to adore the baby, but instead, she rarely looked at him. One evening, when we had a few minutes alone, I asked her why. She said: “After Hector died, Hecuba went a little bit mad. She used to call the baby ‘Hector’—and not just once or twice, she did it all the time. Oh, she always corrected herself, but then a minute or two later, she’d do it again. I think she was genuinely confused. And then one day I came into the nursery and I found her trying to shove her little wizened tit into his mouth. I grabbed him off her and shouted: ‘GET OUT!’ Top of my voice—the whole palace must have heard. Imagine that, telling Hecuba to get out! But he was my baby—he was all I had left. So, that’s why I don’t want to…” She shook her head and I saw she was trying not to cry. “He’s her baby, not mine. I’ve had my go.”

  As for me, I was astonished at how strongly I felt about that little boy. He was nothing to me, really—and yet I was fiercely determined to keep him alive. I thought he’d be safe while we were still in the camp. Maire rarely left the hut except to sit on the veranda, and none of the Greek fighters showed any interest in her child. The sea voyage would be more of a challenge, but he’d still be in swaddling bands and I thought the women would probably be kept in the hold. Anyway, I couldn’t worry about that now. I kept telling myself it was going to be all right. Given a reasonable amount of luck, I thought we could make it work.

  28

  Three or four days after the baby’s birth, I awoke to the sound of Alcimus moving around and got up at once to attend to him. As I set fresh bread and wine in front of him, he asked me how I was. We’d scarcely seen each other since Amina’s death, though that was mainly because he’d been so busy organizing the games. That’s what I liked to think anyway. Now, there were only two events left: boxing—a bloody sport guaranteed to produce serious casualties, but popular—and the grand finale of the games: the chariot race. That was to be held at the training grounds on the headland where much time and effort had gone into improving the track.

  “Why don’t you come to see it?” he asked.

  I was slightly taken aback—he’d never suggested anything like that before—but of course I said I would, I’d love to.

  “Look out for me though, won’t you? I don’t want you standing around on your own. There’s been a lot of heavy betting—I think it could get a bit rough.”

  “Who do you think’s going to win?” I had absolutely no interest in the chariot race, or any race, but we were talking again—that’s what mattered to me. I wanted him to feel I cared—and I did care—about him.

  “Diomedes, I expect.” He was pulling a face: Diomedes won every chariot race. “Pyrrhus is in with a chance though.”

  “Pyrrhus? Not Automedon?” Automedon had taken over as Achilles’s charioteer after Patroclus was killed, and he was generally regarded as the best rider in the compound.

  “No, Pyrrhus. He’s far and away the best—and Automedon would be the first to tell you too.” He drained his cup. “Of course, he’s got next to no experience…but, I don’t know. He’s probably got the best team.”

  I knew the team, everybody did—Ebony and Phoenix, the black stallion and the bay. I’d watched him drive them back from Troy, Priam’s bloodied corpse bumping along behind. Bastard, I thought, smiling, as I followed Alcimus to the door and waved him goodbye.

  I would go to watch the race, I decided, and try to persuade Andromache to come with me. As Pyrrhus’s prize of honour, she ought to be there, ready to garland him if he won—and to mop his brow, or anything else that needed mopping, if he didn’t. Either way, there’d be really heavy drinking in the hall that night—and I’d have to be there, because Andromache hated it so much, walking up and down the tables rigid with distaste, a king’s daughter forced to play the part of a common serving woman. Poor Andromache, I thought—and then, rebelliously: Poor me. I’d had to do it.

  Andromache was up and dressed. The girls were in the yard at the back, watching Maire bathe the baby. It was always rather touching to see how that little scrap of humanity with his dreamy, black-bubble eyes had the power to draw everybody in. I wished I could take them all to see the chariot race—the outing would have done them good: a brisk walk to the training grounds, something to distract them from their grief—but nobody had given them permission to leave the hut, whereas it was self-evidently right that Andromache should be there.

  We walked up the steep track without talking much. She was still reserved with me—with everybody—but I thought she had slightly more colour this morning and had taken some care with her dress. The higher up we went the more fiercely the wind blew, but it didn’t seem to be bullying us along, as it so often did—even though we kept breaking into little involuntary runs whenever a sharper gust caught us. I felt as I used to do, as a very young girl, that the wind was the breath of a god filling me with life. How full of hope and possibility the future had seemed then. It didn’t seem so now—and yet the wind and the brightness of the day somehow still suggested the possibility of a larger, freer life beyond the confines of the camp.

  Crowds of Greek fighters passed us on the road and we pulled to one side to give them room. The main influx would come after the boxing ended, but there was already a sizeable crowd, men who’d preferred to turn up early and secure a good vantage point. Alcimus had said there’d been heavy betting—and you felt the tension of that. The added excitement. The Greeks gambled on everything—I’d once heard a group of fighters placing bets on two raindrops running down a shield. Admittedly, they were laughing, but it hadn’t been entirely a joke.

  The competitors were already gathering. The whole scene was bathed in lemony-yellow light that became richer in tone, less acidic, as the sun rose higher. The chariots glittered; the horses’ backs gleamed. The grooms would have been up well before dawn making sure everything was as perfect as it could be. At the end of the race, ash-grey men driving dirty horses would emerge from the clouds of dust, but they set off each of them looking like Phoebus Apollo driving the chariot of the sun. Among the crowd at the starting line, I spotted Pyrrhus’s red hair and Diomedes’s glossy black curls. Menelaus was there too, evidently intending to compete—which surprised me a little: in recent months, he’d become red-faced and fat, looking suddenly much older than his years.

  Agamemnon was there, richly dressed
, sitting on his throne-like chair, talking to Odysseus. Behind him, the red-and-gold standards of Mycenae snapped in the wind. Agamemnon had agreed to donate the prizes: a racing horse for the winner; a huge bronze cauldron for the runner-up. I looked carefully, and was relieved to see there was no slave girl dragged out of Agamemnon’s weaving sheds and forced to stand shivering by the finish line. I was remembering the chariot race at Patroclus’s funeral games when Achilles had given my friend Iphis as first prize. She’d disappeared into Diomedes’s compound and, since his women were rarely, if ever, allowed out of their huts, I hadn’t seen her since. But I did my best to shake off the memory, because this event, the chariot race, with its richly dressed spectators and waving flags, was as close to a splendid occasion as the camp could manage.

  Nestor appeared in a chariot driven by his eldest son; he was the last of the kings to arrive and there was a great burst of cheering as he greeted Agamemnon. Meanwhile, I was scanning the group behind them for Calchas, who I felt sure would be there. Eventually, I spotted him, right at the back of the crowd, a tall, white-faced figure, carrying his gold staff of office. To my surprise, I saw that he was being jostled by some of the young men from Skyros, who were openly jeering at his dress. This lack of respect was something I’d never seen before, and it disturbed me. Calchas was a proud man and, quite possibly, underneath all the paint and the posturing, sensitive. He was surrounded—and nobody was helping—but just then a braying of trumpets announced that the race was about to begin, and the lads from Skyros surged forward to support their hero.

  At a signal from Alcimus, the drivers climbed into their chariots. When they were settled, he went along the line holding up a helmet, and they cast lots into it. After giving the helmet a good shake, he presented it to Agamemnon, who drew the lots and called them out. His voice was considerably weaker than I remembered; I noticed that one or two of the men around me looked surprised. Diomedes was well placed, which was a shame, since it made the outcome of the race even more of a foregone conclusion. How many of the men here would’ve had the confidence to bet against him? The few who had must be feeling rather depressed now. Though I remember Alcimus saying Diomedes didn’t have the best team—Ebony was probably the single best horse in the field—but, on the other hand, Diomedes was infinitely more experienced.

  The charioteers raised their whips and at a signal from Alcimus set off, their horses’ manes streaming in the wind, their wheels churning up clouds of dust. In places, the chariots bumped wildly over ruts in the ground, but somehow the riders clung on, racing away from us across the plain. In the far distance, you could just see the turning point, a dead tree flanked by granite boulders. Here, the track narrowed, forcing the chariots to bunch together, a potentially dangerous situation: if they clipped each other’s wheels, there was a real chance they’d overturn, inflicting serious, possibly even fatal, injuries on men and horses alike. All the skill was there, at the turning point, where it was possible to overtake, but only by taking an enormous—though calculated—risk.

  Menelaus was in first place as they went into the bend, but Diomedes, only a few yards behind, looked poised to overtake. In third place, Pyrrhus was driving like a madman, as if he thought he and his horses were immortal. And then, infuriatingly, the clouds of dust rising from the trampling hoofs hid them all from view. A groan from the crowd, followed by a tense silence as everybody strained to see who would be in the lead as they came off the bend. Shadows of chariots and drivers wielding whips appeared in a roiling cloud of red dust. Directly in front of me, a man shouted: “Diomedes!” “Course it’s not,” the man standing next to him said. “It’s Menelaus. Are you blind?” And then, in true Greek fashion, they started quarrelling about it, each insisting he was right, though neither of them could see anything. They might have come to blows if the men around them hadn’t sworn at them to shut up.

  The murmurs died down, as everybody waited, dry-mouthed, for the riders to appear. I expected Diomedes; I think everybody expected Diomedes—even those who were cheering for somebody else—and when the first shadowy shape finally emerged from the cloud, Diomedes’s contingent raised a ragged cheer. But the charioteer’s face was caked in dust, unrecognizable. People peered instead at the horses: one black, one bay…Or were they? Both were so covered in red dust nobody could be sure what colour they were. But then, as the chariots hurtled towards us, the lead driver pulled off his helmet to reveal a mane of flaming red hair.

  Alcimus, who was supposed to be neutral, just about managed not to cheer, but from the mouths of all the Myrmidons around me came a full-throated roar. Could anybody catch him? That was the next question. Less than a minute behind him was not Diomedes, as everybody had expected, but Menelaus. Pyrrhus was whipping his team, shouting—pulling ahead, if anything—and then he was over the finish line. The Myrmidons erupted and ran to congratulate him, swarming over his chariot like bees in a hive. But instead of letting himself fall into their outstretched arms, Pyrrhus climbed over the rim of his chariot onto Ebony’s back and from there jumped to the ground, where he threw his arms round Ebony’s neck. “My boy,” he kept saying. “My boy.” He pressed his face against the horse’s head—and closed his eyes; in all that tumult, a moment of peace. Everybody felt it, and envied it too, I think: the perfect union of man and horse. Then Pyrrhus reached across and patted Phoenix, perhaps wanting to make sure he didn’t feel left out; but you could tell his real passion was for Ebony.

  At that moment, I happened to glance round and see Calchas, his face paint cracking in the heat, watching Pyrrhus. He must have been five or six yards away from me, but even at that distance, I could feel the hatred coming off him.

  At the finish line, the usual post-race wrangling had begun. Diomedes came in third, furious because Pyrrhus had driven him off the track. “Stupid young idiot,” he said, loud enough for everybody to hear. He wasn’t hurt, but his pride certainly was. “Don’t rise to him,” Alcimus told Pyrrhus. “It’s just sour grapes.” With his hand on Pyrrhus’s shoulder, he was steering him firmly towards Agamemnon, who was waiting to bestow the prizes. Meanwhile, Automedon leapt into the chariot and knotted the reins round his waist, ready to drive it back to the camp. Pyrrhus embraced Agamemnon, then turned to the crowd, both arms raised, fists punching the air. With a great cheer, the Myrmidons surged forward, lifted him shoulder high and carried him down the path in the wake of his chariot, like a colony of ants, I thought, carrying a particularly juicy larva back to their nest.

  I turned to Andromache. She pulled a face and I read her thoughts. “Oh, don’t worry,” I said, wearily. “The way they’ll be drinking tonight, he’ll have passed out long before that.”

  29

  Pyrrhus gave a great feast to celebrate his victory. Goats and sheep roasted on spits, wine flowing like water…Menelaus was guest of honour, though the other kings took their cue from Agamemnon and stayed away. Pyrrhus made a speech praising Menelaus to the skies: his courage, his wisdom, his horsemanship—and apologized, or very nearly apologized, for attempting to drive him off the track. When Menelaus stood up to reply, he was cheered to the rafters—everybody likes a good loser—and though he couldn’t resist one or two barbed remarks about hot-headed young men getting away with murder, it was on the whole a gracious speech. He concluded by saying that he hoped in future the two kingdoms would be even more closely allied since Pyrrhus had accepted Menelaus’s offer of his daughter’s hand in marriage.

  Well, the hall erupted. You’d have thought they were all getting married too. I stood at the back and watched, thinking how secure Pyrrhus was, how lauded, how glorified—and a little blind worm of anger deep inside my brain reared its head and swayed from side to side.

  Once the speeches were over, the serious drinking began. Everybody sang, everybody clapped, everybody danced—and somewhere in the middle of all this Automedon indicated to Andromache and me that we should withdraw. I walked Andromache back to the w
omen’s hut; rather to my surprise she stopped at the foot of the steps and hugged me. She wasn’t sent for that evening and neither was Helle—though I suspect the women round the campfires had a rough night. I just hope they got a share of the wine.

  When I woke next morning, the compound looked abandoned. Gradually, over the next few hours, first one man and then another surfaced, gathering round the fires, shouting for breakfast, though few of them managed to eat very much. Some just groaned at the sight of food and went straight back to bed.

  Hour by hour, the sky darkened until, by noon, it was almost black. Everything looked jaundiced, including people’s skin—as if the only colours in the world were yellow and black. Warning colours they are, in nature—and indeed there was an increasingly threatening feel to the day. Several men pointed to the anvil-shaped cloud that hung over the bay, but others said that was a good thing. A storm was just what they needed. Thunder—a good heavy downpour—and then, at last, the wind would change.

  Dinner that night was a subdued affair. Nobody felt like eating much and, although some of the younger men were going for the hair of the dog, the majority drank very little. The wind keened round the hall; the absence of the usual shouting and singing made it sound louder than before. Everybody felt like an early night. Some of the men were already on their feet, getting ready to depart, when there was a noise at the door. We all turned to look, as Agamemnon’s heralds entered and processed down the central aisle. Pyrrhus seemed surprised, but immediately stood up to greet them. They bowed low, then indicated they had something to say to him in private. Summoning Alcimus and Automedon to follow him, he left the hall, and although people lingered for a while, curious to know what was going on, he didn’t return.