Our mother – who had borne six strong sons and four skilful daughters since she was fifteen years old and was also extremely busy with many other tasks – put us in the care of Adosha with instructions to keep us as calm as possible and out of the way for much of the time. Her instincts were probably as good as usual. She knew the result might be madness or prophecy – there is not always such a gulf between the two – and she made the best choice of nurse when she found Adosha. At that time Adosha was only twelve. Her father was a relation of our father’s. She was the oldest girl in a large family and instantly accepted the burden of the king and queen’s two mad children, which was probably rather lighter than the burdens borne by the oldest girl of a big family on a poor farm. She took us for granted and doled out a mixture of indifference, concern and slappings which turned us, especially as we grew older and more in command of what was happening to us, from children generally seen as mad and going madder, to children accepted as sane. For my mother, I think, we were the night side of the bright day she wanted to live in. She had allied herself to the sun and given birth to the moon. Helenus and I, with our quick glances at nothing and our sudden, long, awestruck starings into empty space, were not what she wanted, even if the glances and stares were part of something holy. Our births seemed to indicate a strange, even malign, fate coming upon the family, although now it seems to me that we were a prophecy in ourselves, a hint of coming darkness.
Meanwhile, as they brought in the torches, I knew I must break Helenus’ mood. We would both suffer if any more of the visions came in on us. I said, ‘Let’s go and make sure the horse has enough to eat.’
By this season the barns were emptying and the slaves who fed the horses were inclined to be economical with straw and fodder. Okarno was an old, rough pony, one of the local breed, not one of the fast horses we bred from southern stock. We had him only because his foot had cracked and mended badly and he commanded little attention in the stables. But we looked after him, groomed him, tended his bad foot because we loved him and because the ownership of any horse, even if it was only Okarno, gave us prestige. The palace stables were part of the palace itself, opposite the great hall, a four-sided block, built round a small courtyard. You could also reach the stable by leaving the palace and walking along the road which led up from the town below.
Behind us lay the warmth of the fire, on which they were piling more logs; the dice were rattling, wine going round and the women beginning to bandy words with the men.
We took the long way, walking the path round the palace walls, looking down at the lights winking from the houses on the levels below. At the bottom, torches were being carried into the temple beside the great gates of Troy. The whole of the lower area of the city – temple, granaries and tanneries, metal-working shops and potteries, stables, shops, storehouses and smithy – covered less than an acre. Inside the city a cobbled road rose, with houses, gardens and workshops, to the palace, armoury and stables at the top.
Helenus and I, clutching our arms around our thin chests, hurried in the wind, scurrying along the wide, paved path, broad enough for a chariot with a pair of horses, round the palace wall and through the stable gates.
Advenor, the man who looked after the horses, was a slave captured somewhere in the wild mountains and as broad as he was high. In spite of his youth and savage appearance he was respected by everyone – was he not in charge of our fortune, the horses? He was out of his hut beside the gates in a flash, torch on high, peering through the dark, calling, ‘Ah – it’s you, my prince, come to see your charger.’ We had only managed to secure stabling for Okarno in the royal stables because we were the king and queen’s children. Advenor had the power not only to evict Okarno from the stables but to send him to the pit outside the city where the dead horses were thrown. We looked at Advenor nervously as he stood there with his torch. No point in arguing with him, he was too powerful. He could, as they said, bring a dead horse to life. He knew at a glance what a horse was like, body and mind, and it was by our horses and our wool and cloth that we lived. The farm produce kept us alive, but without our trade we would have had a thin time of it.
‘We’ve come to see to Okarno,’ I said. ‘I brought him an apple – and you also.’ I took the apples out and gave them to him – they were rare at this time of year – and he said, ‘All right,’ and didn’t prevent Helenus from fetching more straw for Okarno, who had gone short in the distribution of litter.
We sat down behind him, with our backs against the stable wall. It was warm and soothing there, with the straw bunched round us and Okarno snorting and breathing in front. ‘Were they camped all across the plain when you saw them in your vision?’ I asked Helenus.
‘Tents, huts, fires,’ he said. ‘Rows of horses, pickets on the outskirts. They looked settled in. Many ships were anchored in the harbour and along the beach beside the harbour. I could hear the horses and the scraping of armour being cleaned, and talking and singing. Not in our tongue.’
‘Is it true?’ I asked.
‘You know it is,’ he said calmly. ‘It’s worse for me – I shall be a man soon and expected to fight. What good shall I be when someone runs at me, blade raised?’
Mercifully for us at that time, although we saw the visions we could not interpret what the real consequences would be, if they were true. We could not imagine the future for the land, the city, the people, and our own family.
Here, perhaps, I should speak briefly of my land and family, not as the Greek ballads do, but as they truly were. My father, King Priam, ruled the city of Troy, its prosperous harbour and the surrounding area, the Troiad, or, as our Hittite neighbours call this, the Seha River lands. This is a fertile area some hundred miles square bounded to the west by the Aegean Sea and to the north by the Sea of Marmark. Further down the Aegean coast lay our friendly neighbours, the Mycians, Lycians, Carians and the rest. To the east were enemy tribes, such as the ferocious Black Sea Gasga. Beyond them, from where the mountains begin, lie the territories of our ally, the great and powerful Hittite kings.
My father, King Priam, had married twice, divorcing his first wife, with whom he could not agree, in favour of a happier and more practical alliance with my mother Hecuba, daughter of the King of Phrygia, from the mountainous country to the east of the lands of the Troiad. They had many children. Oh, my brothers and sisters, now dead! As I write, all those sharp memories, deliberately put aside in order to continue my life, assist my husband, rear my own children, return. I weep for them now, and for Priam and Hecuba, my parents.
I weep for my brothers and sisters, for brave Troilus, stalwart Hector, Paris, the beautiful, and for merry, cynical Deiphobus. And for Polites and young Pammon, my half-brothers who both died so early on in the fighting. For Polydorus – little brother – whom we thought saved. I remember my sisters, Creusa, Aeneas’ wife, and Laodice, and Polyxena, the youngest.
My poor mother’s sister was queen of neighbouring Lycia, through our grandmother. In Lycia women rule, make the laws and own almost everything. The Lycian men are famous warriors. I think now my mother had always been afraid of her powerful mother and even felt at a disadvantage with her sister for she was not a queen as Borea was, just queen to a king. Here my tall mother was less influential than she might have been, for although in Troy women could inherit property and leave it as they wished, and had much independence, they did not rule as they did in Lycia.
Some thirty years separate me from the child sitting in straw in a stable with her brother. My mother and father have been dead for twenty years. She must still be sad, Hecuba, even in Paradise with the Great Mother. The Greeks call her bitch and Dog Queen. The winners give such titles to the defeated. Virtually none of her fine children lived out their lives to a natural end, as people should. Probably only Helenus and I, her strangest fruit, are still living. It’s a terrible thing for a woman to carry children, then bear and rear them, then have them thrust, too young, into the insatiable mouth of death.
*
In the stable Helenus said, ‘Shall we tell? What we’ve seen? Who are they?’
‘I believe it’s the Greeks,’ I told him. ‘I believe I saw Agamemnon. I think I saw his blue eyes staring from under a gilded helmet.’
I call these men ‘Greeks’ for reasons of convenience. They would not have found the word friendly. Agamemnon was King of Mycenae, his brother King of Sparta. When the nations eventually coalesced they saw themselves as an alliance of separate states – from Mycenae, from Sparta, from Boetia. King Nestor came from Pylos, the Thessalians were led by Achilles, there were men of Crete and Rhodes; the Ithacans were led by the intelligent Ulysses. Any of these warriors would have scorned to have been called by one name – Greek.
I knew Agamemnon for he had come on a visit with some lords less than a year ago. Even then he had claimed he was leader of all the kings of Greece. My father doubted this; my mother said he would be leader so long as he could band together with the stronger lords to kill the weaker ones and take their lands and property. If he were the Greek leader – and she doubted it – it was only as the biggest and most powerful wolf in a pack is leader until a stronger wolf comes along and kills him. Agamemnon, a great, fair man in a red robe hung about with necklaces and bracelets, shining with gold, had frightened me. Suddenly, there in the stable, I saw what Helenus’ vision had shown him – the great warrier in full armour, his gold armbands pushed up his thick arms and glinting in sunshine, and his huge sword raised over the head of Helenus as he was now, just a boy.
‘You wouldn’t have to fight him,’ I said. Suddenly everything seemed vague, hopeless, incredible. Were we saying this? What were we saying? Were we, Helenus and I, really here or dreaming?
‘Perhaps it’s just bad dreams, waking dreams,’ I said to Helenus and added, ‘I can hear Advenor coming. He wants to lock the gates.’
So we got to our feet. ‘Come on,’ said Advenor from the doorway. ‘It’s dark and I want to lock up – thieves could sneak in. Are you talking to the horse? Nothing you two do could surprise me.’
He walked behind us as we went out of the high wooden gates.
‘What shall we do?’ Helenus muttered to me.
‘I’ll tell you – you won’t like it,’ I said.
Advenor drew the bolts of the gates behind us. ‘This way,’ I told Helenus. He followed me across the paved road to the high city wall which overlooked the plain on one side and the sea on the other. In a corner between the wall and the high tower, from which we could hear only the wind and the faint sounds of celebration from the palace, I said to my brother, ‘We must go to the oracle.’
‘Oh,’ groaned Helenus, who, I think, had known in advance what I was going to say, but did not wish to hear the words. ‘No – I can’t go. I don’t want to. You go. Take Adosha.’
‘They won’t let her inside the cave,’ I told him despondently. I knew the priestess would only let the two of us in. Even our mother, who had first taken us there when we were four years old, had been obliged on that occasion to wait at the cave mouth while we went in alone. At that time the oracle had frightened both of us, but not nearly as much as the journey to the cave, or the inside of it. She, it was easy to see, in spite of the robes and chalky face, was only a woman.
‘You’ll have to come,’ I told Helenus. ‘You said we had to tell. She’s the person we must tell.’
‘You don’t tell her things,’ Helenus said. ‘She tells you.’
It was a weak argument and he knew it. In the end he agreed to go, as he had to. ‘We’d better go back,’ he said. ‘It’s freezing.’
At the corner he looked down at the winking lights of Troy and said, ‘It’s Helen.’
‘Helen?’ I asked. ‘Who’s that?’
He just said again, ‘Helen.’ I didn’t ask again what he meant. I felt as if my head was in a thick fog and I couldn’t see. A huge noise filled my head, as if I were standing close to a waterfall. All I wanted to do was sleep, but Helenus and I had been concentrating on fear and disruption for hours now, trying to piece together images of war. I dreaded to sleep, being afraid of dreaming and waking my sisters and the other women in the room where I was supposed to sleep. It had happened often before and they were annoyed when I disturbed them with my cries.
‘Let’s ask Adosha if she’ll let us sleep on the rug by the brazier, under the sheepskins, like we used to,’ said Helenus. One of the prices paid for increasing age and sanity was that we had been separated six months before, Helenus to go to the men’s room, I to the women’s. Our brother Hector was undertaking the job of training Helenus to use arms as a man ought – he was nimble and competent but a little cowardly, said Hector – and so night after night he had to go to the big room, containing thirty men. He hated it, complaining that the men were noisy and often drunk, quarrelled and talked about women half the night and threw smelly sandals and clothing all over the room. If he had a bad dream, they swore or laughed at him. I was not much happier among the women, who also quarrelled, talked about prospective husbands half the night and made the room smell of stale scents and old incense. They complained when I used their combs and pins. Still, I was lucky not to be in the room where my father’s other wives, their babies and small children all slept.
Nevertheless, because it was tacitly admitted that Helenus and I were quite young to be in the big rooms with the others, we were often able to persuade Adosha to take us into the little stone room we had once shared. So that night we rolled up like puppies under our sheepskins by the brazier and managed, without saying anything to each other, to will ourselves to sleep without thoughts of an army between our city and the sea.
Half-way through the night I heard scratching and whispering at the door. I heard Adosha get up from her palette bed and say, terrifyingly, ‘Die – go away and die! Stay unburied until your bones show on the earth!’ But I fell asleep again, partly because I was used to Adosha’s ungentle tongue, partly because I knew the midnight visitor was my brother Hector, who was beginning to pursue Adosha, who did not very much like him.
Next day we woke up frowsy in our rugs to Adosha’s excitable shrieks. An embassy from Mycenae had docked in the harbour at dawn. The palace expected a royal visit. We managed to evade her – a swig of goat’s milk and we were off, bits of bread in our hands, wrapped in sheepskin cloaks against the early chill and the mist from the sea. We ran out through the main gate with the others, and took the road down to the harbour.
Half the city had urgent business down at the port that day; half the nearby countryside had got its cart on the road, with bread, casks of wine, what was left of the apples, dried figs and raisins, tubs of olives and sausages. Others were rushing across the meadows with a cheese, a couple of hens tied together, wings flapping. A small man with bandy legs carried a whole slaughtered sheep on his shoulders, with some of the blood still dripping down his neck; three boys were trying to keep a herd of goats together. The Greeks might only have been at sea for three or four days, but people reasoned they would still be needing supplies.
Half a mile out of the town, jumping aside for carts, pushed and shoved by women with baskets and men with loads of planks, we felt the sun on our heads and saw the mist disappearing from the fields. There were cries behind us, and rattling, and, looking round, we saw Paris, our brother, standing up in his chariot behind two matched black horses, charging up at a fantastic pace, with people dropping away from the road on to the fields, as fast as they could, to keep out of his way. No one minded; everyone smiled; I think he could have knocked a child or an old woman flying and still received everyone’s blessing.
Paris, now twenty-five but still unmarried, was as handsome as a god, very dark, curly-headed but with huge, dark blue eyes, which shone out from his dark skin like pieces of lapis luzuli. And Paris was brave, kind as a mother and calm as a meadow. He was Dionysos at the festival at the solstice, when Dionysos made love to the priestess to bring back the sun and rekindle the earth. Children were not supposed
to be present at the festival but, as children do, we spied and I don’t think very great efforts were made to stop us. I once sat in a tree beside the sacred grove and watched as the great surge of men and women, some masked, some not, raced over hills and fields to the sound of pipes and drums, torches flaring, people shouting and crying out. Was the priestess my mother on those occasions? I could not tell if it was my mother under the bird mask she wore, although I knew Paris was the lover because he wore no mask. I don’t think that to this day I have seen a man as beautiful or as good as my brother. Of course, it was that beauty and generosity which helped us to our doom. Had it not been for Paris my family might have lived. I might have been a happy woman. He destroyed us but no doubt was fated to do so. In any case, with his strong arms holding the reins, his hair flying back in the wind of his chariot as it sped and his brilliant, open smile, he was a joyful sight on that spring morning. Spotting us, he pulled up short, the horses snorting. ‘I’ll let you ride,’ he said, ‘but before we arrive you’ll have to drop off and disappear into the crowd. You’re too young and too unwashed to meet the guests. You’d bring shame on us.’
‘How many ships?’ I asked.
‘Two,’ he answered, as we jumped in. He urged the horses on through the crowds. ‘No warning,’ he said, partly to himself. ‘They should have sent a messenger by an earlier ship. Perhaps they came on impulse – but why?’
Our relationship with our violent neighbours across the sea was never happy. We were a major port on that coast. Suppiluliumas, the Hittite king, from his capital Hattusas, six hundred miles away, relied on us to protect the coast, part of his sphere of influence, from pirates – chief among whom were the Greeks. Consequently, our ships were forever in battle with theirs – while our own ships raided their coasts when possible. I think we took it that these Mycenaeans were mad. Their ancestry was short, but the records said that ever since their arrival in Greece they had been leaving their poor land to ravage their neighbours, looting, burning and enslaving. Mighty Crete had fallen to them, and Rhodes and many other places. Now they had gold, weapons and land. They lived in well-defended fortresses, for when they were not conspiring to attack foreigners they would be turning on each other. They seemed always violently angry, as unpredictable as poorly-trained dogs and as furiously deprived as week-old babies left to cry in the dark. Happily for us we had the support of Suppiluliumas, but even so the sudden arrival of our deadly neighbours made us uneasy.
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