A Thousand Ships

by Natalie Haynes

  But like all the other suitors, and the maids who Odysseus believed had conspired with them, he is now dead. And I will never know if that was your design, or all Odysseus’ choosing. What I do know is that I welcomed a stranger into my halls, and he was abused. And he paid back his abusers with arrows and a sword.

  The arrows were probably my fault. I could not shake the idea that something needed to come to a conclusion. The self-styled Cretan was in my halls, and there was something familiar about him. The suitors were behaving like a pack of wild dogs. I knew I needed to make a decision, so I offered them a trial of strength and skill: to string Odysseus’ bow and shoot an arrow through twelve axe-heads. It takes real strength to string this particular bow. It has an individual design which most men would not recognize. And it takes skill to shoot an arrow from such a weapon, let alone fire one with the accuracy and force required to traverse twelve axes. Honestly, I doubted any of them could do it. I just thought it might keep them quiet for a while so I could rest. The noise of all those young men could be deafening.

  Was I testing the Cretan to see if he was really my husband? Telemachus believes that I suspected it was Odysseus all along. Certainly, I knew that my husband would be able to string the bow and fire the arrow: I had watched him do it countless times in our youth. I don’t believe that was my motivation, but perhaps you – or one of the other gods – put the idea into my mind. It had certainly never occurred to me before, to test my suitors like this. Of course they all failed, and of course Odysseus prevailed. Not only did he prevail, but now he was armed with a weapon and the suitors were not. And he was armed with precisely the sort of weapon that might even the odds between one man and many.

  It was not quite one man fighting alone though, was it? My son fought alongside him, and they paved our floors with blood. My husband had revealed himself to Telemachus, to Eumaeus and even (I later discovered) to his old nurse, Eurycleia, before he revealed himself to me. And when he finally did so, he was drenched in the blood of the men who have made my life miserable, and the blood of one man who did not. He had killed Amphinomus with an arrow to the throat, leaving his lovely face unharmed. The boy’s eyes stared at me blankly from beside Odysseus’ left foot.

  My husband, meanwhile, stood knee-deep in the suitors’ blood and before the twitching bodies of my maids – each one hanged from the same length of rope – and that was when he told me he was mine. In all my dreams of his homecoming, I never imagined it would be so violent or so cruel. I never thought it would take so long to clean up. And I don’t suppose he gave a moment’s thought to how we are to apologize to the families of these obnoxious young boors. Or indeed, how I am supposed to find a new set of maids, given what happened to the last lot. And so, Athene, the prayer I offer is this: thank you for bringing my husband home, if that is what you have done. If the man who sleeps upstairs in the bed he once carved from an old olive tree is an impostor, I suppose I will find out soon enough. He knows the old stories of our marriage, of that I am certain. And Telemachus is devoted to him, which is fortunate. So perhaps it does not matter if he is the man who left, or a changed man, or even another man altogether. He fits in the space that Odysseus left.

  Your devoted Penelope

  41

  The Moirai

  It was the same scene every day: Clotho held the spindle, Lachesis watched her with hungry appraisal in her eyes, and Atropos sat in the darkest corner, her stubby blade almost invisible in the gloom. Clotho fed the thread through her right hand and flicked the spindle with her left. She could not remember doing anything else for as long as she had ever known. She would take a clump of fleece in one hand and twist it into a thick rough string. Once, she might have plucked thorns or burrs from the soft fuzz, but she had long since given that up; they only scratched her hands. The thread was so fragile at this point, almost still fleece, scarcely thread at all. The fibres would pull apart with the slightest pressure, so she had to be careful. Lachesis would not forgive her if she shortened the lifespan of a single mortal through her clumsiness. It was her task to spin the thread of life but it was for Lachesis to decide how long the thread would be. Clotho had once suggested that they swap jobs for a while, so she could rest her cramping fingers. But neither of the others would consider it, which just proved what she had always known: that she had the hardest task of the three of them and it would never change. No wonder she felt so little sympathy for the mortal lives which flitted between her fingers.

  The grease in the fibres kept her fingertips soft as she rubbed them across the puffy strand. Once it became a little firmer, she would hook it around the spindle and the weight pulled it longer and thinner still. Only then would Lachesis focus her attention on the thread. She used no measuring stick, only her sharp eyes. At the crucial moment, she would nod and Atropos would slash her short blade into the space between Clotho’s hands. Another life measured and complete. Sometimes they misjudged: Lachesis did not always nod with the vigour required, and in the gloomy light, Atropos missed it. Who had that man been, Clotho tried to remember, who had lived so long after the Fates botched his mortal span? She could not recall his name, only that he had been so ancient when he died that he had looked like a pile of autumn leaves. Occasionally Atropos sliced too low or too high and cut the thread at the wrong point. And sometimes Clotho could not get the thread to form properly: her hands were dry, the fleece was not greasy enough, and the fibres simply fell apart before Lachesis could find anything to measure. She felt no sorrow for these souls, because if she thought at all about the consequences of her actions, she would become paralysed and never spin again. But she did prefer it if one of the others made a mistake, because that led – as often as not – to a longer life rather than a shorter one. When the thread would not form, it could only mean a grieving mother, standing over a cradle, howling at the unhearing sky.

  42

  Andromache

  When Andromache looked up at the mountains that towered above Epirus, she wished they reminded her of Mount Ida, but they did not. Mount Ida rose to a perfect point, so high that often in the mornings it was shrouded in mist and she and Hector had been unable to see the top of it. She had watched the sun chase the mists away and each time the highest point was visible again, she felt calmness flood through her, like a child who can finally make out her father coming home in the distance. She missed the mountain, but when she thought of that instead of everything else she had lost, she found she could keep herself from weeping.

  But Epirus was no Troy. The peaks lacked the kindly parental nature of Ida. Here, there were mountains on all sides, so that Andromache felt as though she were trapped at the bottom of a well. She had been taken from her beautiful city, with its thick walls and high citadel, for what was scarcely more than a village. Well, a collection of villages. Epirus nestled in the northernmost part of Greece, so its mountains were always covered in snow and Andromache was often cold. She had never worn a woollen tunic in Troy, or in Thebe where she had grown up. But in Epirus it was a necessity.

  When they landed here – she blurred the details of that period of her life as much as she could, but this part she did remember – she had woven a cloak for herself in a matter of days. She had little choice if she was not to die from the vicious north wind that whistled down from the mountains. Neoptolemus had ordered her to spin the wool (a gift from his none-too-loyal subjects) and weave. And she had obeyed him. But although she began the task resentfully (a princess of Troy reduced to slavery) she had completed it eagerly, keen to have the thick fabric to wrap around herself in the cold evenings. It had been the realization of this – her desire not to be cold – that made her accept she might not wish to die after all.

  She had spent the voyage from Troy like a dead woman. She could not rise from her pallet, she could not eat, she could barely drink wine unless it was diluted almost down to water. She watched with mild interest as the bones in her wrist grew more pronounced, and once or twice she traced her fingers along
her clavicle and felt the hollows on each side of her neck growing deeper. Only on the fifth day, when he shouted, screamed really, a hand’s breadth away from her face – his stale-wine breath making her queasy in a way the choppy sea never had – demanding that she ate and stop damaging his property, did she manage to swallow a small quantity of thin soup. The sailor who brought it to her looked sorry for her, when he watched her retching as she raised the too-large spoon to her lips. But he was afraid of Neoptolemus, too. Rumour had it that he had hurled one of his own men over the side of the ship on the voyage to Troy, because of some slight misdemeanour. The sailors would not run the risk of being set adrift, of watching their comrades sail off into the distance while they tried desperately to keep afloat for just a moment longer. Neoptolemus was not known to have expressed regret for any cruelty he had perpetuated against anyone – man, woman or child.

  Andromache felt her mind begin to travel down the road she could not allow it to take. She focused on the spoon in front of her mouth, and tried to keep it level, so the soup did not spill on her filthy dress. The sailor nodded slowly in encouragement, as though she were an invalid. He waited for her to finish eating and quietly took the bowl away.

  But eating alone did not bring her back to life. Her eyes could not focus on anything but the horizon, she did not hear anyone speak unless he screamed in her ear, and she could not bear any touch or taste. The material world repelled her because (she was sure) she should not be in it any longer. The Fates had made a mistake when they let her be taken aboard Neoptolemus’ ship. She should have died on the shores of Troy, instead of her son.

  She wove the cloak poorly, although she had once been a fine craftswoman. The last cloak she had woven had been for Hector – dark and bright for him to wear into battle – and it had been exquisite. It was slashed in two by Achilles when he drove his fierce blade into her husband’s body, and then she had watched it stretch out on the ground behind him like a pool of blood as Achilles dragged his corpse three times around the walls of the city.

  In Epirus, she was careless with cleaning the wool, so the finished fabric scratched her skin. She did not spin a fine thread, so the cloak was covered in lumps where the wool was too bulky to sit flat. And she did not keep the threads taut, so the garment had an ugly puckered edge. But sometime during the process of weaving it, she found herself wanting to finish it so she would not be cold. And although she did not understand it immediately, this was the first sign of her life after death.

  But when Andromache had finished the cloak and wrapped it around herself, she still felt cold. She remembered one day near the beginning of the war, when a young Trojan fighter had been carried back to the city by his comrades. He had been shot in the back – a lucky hit from a distant archer – and his suffering was terrible to behold. It was not the pain which was distressing: he was in less pain than virtually any other Trojan or Greek she saw injured. It was the gap between what had happened to him and what he could perceive. He lay on his side unable to feel the arrow, or his spine, or his legs or feet. All sensation had deserted him below the chest. When asked by the healers to describe his symptoms, he said simply that his body felt cold. This was his only complaint for the next three days, at the end of which he died. And that had been what filled Andromache’s mind as she submitted to Neoptolemus.

  She was not quite sure how long she had been living in Epirus before she realized she was pregnant. She said nothing to Neoptolemus for a while, because she could not find the words. She felt too many things at once and it took her many careful hours at the loom (now weaving finer garments once more, though nothing in comparison to what she had made for Hector) before she could isolate some of them and give them names. She felt fear, firstly. Neoptolemus rarely spoke to her other than to bark orders. She had no idea if he wanted his slave to bear him a child. He had no son, as far as she knew, and he had not yet a wife. What if she told him, or he noticed her body changing shape, and he punished her? Would he kick her in the stomach until the baby was dead? Andromache felt a wave of sickness that did not come from her child. Or rather, it came from her first child, from Astyanax. It had been Neoptolemus who killed her boy, hurling him from the walls of Troy before snarling back to his ship to bring her here to Epirus. How could she trust that a man who would murder her first child would not murder her second? She could not.

  She moved her shuttle up and down through the warp-threads, pulling the weft gently so she did not stretch the edges, pushing each completed row up so she did not leave any gaps. The steadiness of the work, the feel of the threads beneath her fingers, the enforced calm of feeding the shuttle through: these things made her able to keep breathing, and naming. So fear, that was the first feeling: both for the baby and for herself. Then came revulsion. Her blood would be mixed with the blood of the man who had killed her son. And Neoptolemus was son of Achilles, who had killed her husband. To be enslaved by this vicious clan of murderers was terrible enough, but to produce a new scion was worse. She felt tainted by the infant inside her and had no confidence that the feeling would pass when the child was born. Anger, that was the third. For everything she had once told Hector had now come to pass: don’t keep going out to fight on your own, she had said. Don’t take so many risks. Fight among the Trojans, not ahead of them. Your honour is already assured. Catch the eye of Achilles and he will cut you down and then what will become of your wife and son? We will be enslaved with no one to care for us.

  There was no pleasure in being proved right, of course, only a slowly unfolding dread. Why had Hector not listened to his wife’s wise words? How could he have abandoned her, abandoned their son? Everything had come to pass as she had predicted, but worse. And if only . . . She broke her thoughts. She could not begin to consider if only, or the sun and the moon would come crashing down upon her.

  So fear, revulsion, anger. Guilt, that was next. She felt a terrible pressing burden of guilt. Because in spite of all this, she felt a small flame of inexpressible joy. Her body, so long not her own, was providing her with comfort at last. She had nothing to love but her memories and those were too painful to think about. And now she had something. And in spite of the fear, the revulsion, the anger and the guilt, the flame kept burning inside her.

  *

  Andromache never came to love Neoptolemus, because that was asking too much even of a woman like her. His actions could not be forgotten, nor did he ever show the slightest contrition for the terrible toll he had exacted upon her and the women she had once called her family. But nor could she maintain the visceral loathing she had felt when he first took her from her home. It was not possible to keep hating a man with whom she lived in such close proximity: the aversion had to die, or she would die. And although his temper was fierce, and she sometimes found herself shrinking back from his anger, he was not as cruel as she had feared he would be. When he saw his son for the first time, she could not breathe. The wet-nurse held the child for him and she saw a soft smile transform his petulant face. He was not a good man, but Andromache suddenly saw that he might nonetheless be a good father. He named their son Molossus.

  She did not resent his wife, when Neoptolemus married Hermione, the young daughter of Menelaus and Helen. Anyone could see there was no affection between them. And although he visited her bed for the first month or two, her youthful attractions quickly paled and he returned to Andromache for comfort. She lay in the darkness beside him, no longer sickened by the faint sourness of his breath. She heard his breathing slow but she knew he was not yet asleep. And still she was surprised when he spoke.

  ‘I killed her as painlessly as I could.’

  She felt her limbs stiffen. ‘Who do you mean?’

  ‘Your sister,’ he said. Polyxena. Neoptolemus had killed her sister-in-law (she did not correct him) on the shore, to appease his father’s ravening ghost.

  ‘Did you?’ she asked. She kept her tone as neutral as she could. Tears of gratitude would antagonize him as much as tears of anger.


  ‘The Greeks had decided,’ he said. ‘They would not sail without the sacrifice. They sacrificed the general’s daughter at Aulis, they needed to sacrifice your king’s daughter to sail home again.’ It was a peculiar quirk of his, to refer to men by their role rather than by name. Always the general, never Agamemnon. Your king, rather than Priam. And then in a rush, ‘She was no coward. She died nobly.’

  In the dark, Andromache nodded. She knew he felt the movement of her head. ‘She was always brave,’ she replied. ‘Always.’

  ‘She is the one who torments my sleep,’ he said. Andromache drove her nails into her hands. Not Astyanax, a baby. Not Priam, a helpless old man. Only Polyxena had wakened the conscience of the man she had once thought a monster. Would still think a monster, if circumstances had not forced her to find something else in his character that she could tolerate.

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  She heard a muffled sound and he moved his hand swiftly across his face. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘She was so—’ This time he felt her go rigid. ‘You should not hear this,’ he said. But she found that although she could not think of these events on her own, for fear that the grief would split her asunder, even now, she was comforted to hear the words from him. The shock came first, but she could feel the consolation travelling just behind it.