“Just for tonight,” Aethra soothed her.
The baby blinked, and when she opened her eyes again, they had turned emerald green like her mother’s. Theseus shook his head. Surely it was only his fatigue, for they had spent a long night and an even longer day.
At the sound of the door opening, Aethra took the baby back from Helen’s arms, and passed the child off to the woman who entered, shooing her out again.
Too weak to protest, Helen sighed. Her body trembled beneath his hand where it rested at her waist, and then she shuddered harder.
“Help me move her back to the bed, and then you must leave us for a moment, Theseus,” Aethra said. “The last of this should not be seen by men’s eyes.”
He did as his mother asked, settling Helen comfortably within a nest of cushions and furs, even as Aethra slipped a rag of sailcloth beneath her hips to protect the bedding. And then he squeezed Helen’s hand, leaning down to kiss her forehead. “Wait for me,” he said.
Helen’s lips twitched in what might have been a smile if she had not been so weak. “I haven’t the strength to move without your help, but I’ll be fine, now. Go.”
Allowing himself to be persuaded, Theseus left the room, glancing back only once as he closed the door behind him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Theseus was shouting.
The realization brought me out of sleep, but the words—
The words burned through me like fire, and my eyes flashed open.
“Was Hippolytus not enough!” he roared. A crash of the sea quenched the flames in my stomach, but my breath still caught. “Now they would take Helen’s child, too?”
Aethra stood unflinching before him, though the knuckles of her hands were white behind her back. Theseus held a silver cup, all but forgotten.
“If you do not obey them, you know what will come. The bargain she struck with Poseidon will be kept if you agree to it, but the price is terrible. He cannot protect Athens, too, or stop your people from turning you out. Nor will he defend Helen against Zeus, and that god is most displeased.”
“Has Helen not suffered enough by her father’s will?” The cup crumpled in his hands, wine spilling over his fingers and leaving trails like blood. “Even now she lies bleeding, on the edge of death! Taking the child now will kill her!”
“No!” The word burst from my throat before I could think, and Aethra moved as if to come to my side.
Theseus caught her by the arm, jerking her back.
“Go,” he told her as he opened the door to the hall. “Go to the temples and find another way.”
He shut the door behind her, but he did not turn to me. The lump of metal he held was no longer recognizable as a cup. He set it down on the table and wiped his hands.
“Theseus.” My voice was rough, my throat thick with fear. “Theseus, what’s happened?”
His jaw tightened, his hands closing around the edges of the table.
And then he threw it.
The table and all its contents flew across the room. The wine jug shattered against the hearth, and the cups chimed as they bounced on the tile floor long before the table hit the plaster wall. It cracked like thunder, and if it had not been the external wall, lined with brick and stone, I did not know that it would have stopped there.
My heart pounded in my ears, and I struggled to sit up. Every muscle in my body felt stretched to breaking, and my breasts ached, too full of milk for the child Aethra had torn from my arms.
“Theseus,” I gasped through the pain of being upright. It could not be. Poseidon had promised me. “Please. Tell me.”
I did not see him move, but he was beside me, tucking cushions and furs behind my back and easing me against them.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, his voice flat.
“My baby—”
“Our daughter is warm and fed, sleeping in the queen’s room even now. I have seen it so myself.”
“Then why?”
Theseus sighed, searching my face. What he saw there, I do not know, but the lines around his eyes fanned into deeper creases. He took my hand, his grip too tight.
“There has been a sign.”
“You saw it?”
He shook his head. “Menestheus had a dream while you gave birth that Athens would be turned to rubble, the world laid to waste. He told the priests, and the auguries confirm it. They say we must leave the baby exposed to die.”
“No!” I tried to sit up again, but he pressed me back down.
“I have forbidden them from touching our daughter, as yet. That is why Aethra came, to persuade me.”
“Promise me.” His face blurred, and my nails dug into his hand. “Promise you will not do this. We need only wait. Poseidon swore to protect us. That is why I went to him, Theseus! To stop this!”
“Shh,” he said, stroking my hair, my cheek. “You are so weak, still. Rest now.”
“I can’t,” I murmured, my eyes closing without my permission. “I won’t.”
“I know,” he said.
And then I slept.
I woke again with the dawn, my hand going to my empty stomach. I had dreamed of my baby, and Apollo, with an arrow drawn, his face a mask of fire. My legs trembled when I stood, and my belly ached, but I was strong enough for this.
The door to the bathing room had been left open, and I picked my way through shards of pottery on the floor. Theseus must not have allowed the slaves to clean while I slept. The baths were empty, and the door to the queen’s room stood ajar. I smiled to think Theseus might have been listening for our daughter’s cries, and I pushed it open.
Hippolytus’s cradle had been brought out of the storerooms and polished to gleaming a month before, the olive wood inlaid with gold and silver horses. It had sat by my bed, waiting for the child that might come. I went to it now, desperate to hold my daughter and know her safe and well, to feed her from my own breast and feel the weight of her in my arms.
But it was empty.
“No.”
I threw open the door to the hall, searching for a servant, the nurse who must have fed my baby, waiting outside for her cry, but there was no one on the stool. No one in sight.
“No!”
“Helen?”
Theseus! Theseus had done this. Allowed our child to be taken. Perhaps he had even taken her himself! My legs shook, but I refused to fall. I knew where they would take her—to the stone from which Aegeus had leapt, when he believed Theseus would never return home from Crete.
I ran.
“Helen!”
Theseus’s call did not slow my feet, and I sprinted through the corridors faster than I had ever run in my life. Shadow and torchlight should have tripped me, but they didn’t, nor did the cold stone on my bare feet make me so much as blink. I heard Theseus behind me, shouting, begging me to wait.
I leapt down the stairs from the porch and sprinted across the outer yard of the palace, around the slaves’ wing, and the kitchens, through the practice field and past the stables. I could see it now, rising above the massive stones of the wall. And I could see the bundle atop, still as death.
“Stop!”
Theseus’s hand closed on my arm, and we both tumbled to the ground. I clawed myself free, biting at his fingers, and struggled toward the rocks. Up the steps, carved in the stone and worn smooth with age, on my hands and knees, even, as my legs grew weak.
“Wait!”
There. The small bundle of our daughter, swaddled in blue cloth. I reached for her, everything inside me shattering at the stillness of her body. She ought to have twitched and squirmed. She ought to have cried, wailed at the cold. A sob tangled on the back of my tongue, turning to a keen, long and raw, my throat torn by the sound. I hugged her to my breast—my daughter, still and silent and lost. Lost to me, forever.
“I had no choice,�
�� Theseus said, behind me. “She would have destroyed everything if she’d lived. The gods saw it. Wasted lands, Athens in ruin, and you dead, Helen.”
I whirled, still cradling our daughter to my chest. “She is my daughter! An innocent baby!”
“She is a princess of Athens.”
He reached for her, to take her back, and I tried to strike him, to bite, to scratch, while I held her tight, but Theseus was stronger. His hand turned to iron on my flailing arm, my worthless, strengthless body, and with a deft twist, he defeated me altogether, our child’s body tucked in the crook of his arm as he turned away. I hugged myself, shivering, tears streaming down my cheeks, though everything inside me felt numb and broken and so twisted.
Theseus set her down again upon the rock, so carefully, so reverently, and when he turned back to me, I could see every line of his age so clearly. My gaze slid away, back to the small, cold bundle of our daughter. I did not want to see his pain when I held so much of my own, already. Too much, filling me up with bitterness and rage.
“Listen to me, Helen,” he said, shaking me until I met his eyes. “In this, she serves her people, if nothing else. Would you have let her live, if it meant death to all who look to you? This was Zeus’s price. Her life, or the lives of every man, woman, and child; a thousand times worse than the war you dreamed of, and no glory, no honor, nothing but death! This is why they did not want me to have you!”
I shook my head, my eyes blinded by tears. “We were supposed to be free, Theseus. You and I. We were going to be free! Poseidon promised me peace. We could have saved her from it. We could have stopped this, too.”
His hands gentled, and he pulled me against his chest, tucking my head beneath his chin. For the first time, I realized he was naked, and his skin burned against mine, blazing even in the chill of dawn.
“Not this time,” he murmured. “Don’t you see, Helen? The bargain you struck was for your life in exchange, and Apollo had the arrow strung. I could not bear to lose another wife in such a way, not even for our daughter. I could not let them take you.”
“Better if they had.” I shoved him away, and he stumbled back. “I would rather have been dead than give my daughter up to Zeus.”
I left him there, atop the rocks, and I didn’t look back.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
In the queen’s rooms, the sight of the cradle brought the image of the bundle above the wall, and the room blurred, my eyes burning. I fell to the floor beside it and pressed my face against the wood, the metal inlays cold against my burning cheeks.
My daughter. My girl. We had not even named her, yet.
I did not hear Theseus over my own weeping, but I felt his hand on my shoulder and the warmth of his body beside mine. He tore my fingers from the wood and drew me away from the cradle, pulling me into his arms instead.
“I am so sorry, Helen,” he murmured. “I am so sorry I could not stop this.”
“You left her,” I sobbed. “You left her in the cold. Left her to Zeus.”
“Not Zeus,” he said, smoothing my hair beneath his chin. “The dead belong to Hades, and that is where her shade flies. Zeus will never touch her. Never know her. Never look into her eyes. She is safe from him, more free now in death than she could ever be alive.”
I clung to him as my thoughts clung to his words.
“It’s over,” he said, his voice hoarse with his own pain. “The price is paid, and the world is safe. Mycenae does not know you as anything but a princess of Egypt, and Sparta has given up the search for its missing daughter. We need fear nothing now.”
“Nothing but the gods,” I said.
He pulled back and caught my chin, forcing me to meet his eyes.
“Nothing, Helen.”
Waves against stone, and the cliff face crashed into the sea. Theseus was the ocean, and in his face, the gods were only rocks, to be worn away and drowned in time. Looking at him, I almost believed it.
But it did not bring back my daughter.
Theseus did not leave my side for days, refusing all requests for his presence to see to my needs. For the most part, his people mourned with us, respecting their king’s choice. The bright hope of a princess of Athens had left the city in shadow with its loss, and Theseus and I grieved in peace.
Mostly, I slept, not wanting even to look at Theseus but needing him all the same. Even rising from the bed to relieve myself took more fortitude than I had. My run to the wall had sapped me of what strength I had gained, and I still cried in my sleep for the baby I had struggled so hard to birth.
And I still feared the gods. But more than that, I hated them. So much for Poseidon’s kindness. He was no better than Zeus, slippery and deceitful, offering hollow promises we could not have risked letting him keep.
“Can you mix me a potion?” I asked Aethra while she helped me bathe. I did not have the strength to do it alone, and I did not want Theseus’s help. I was too sore and too bitter to make love and did not want to tempt him. “One to stop me from conceiving?”
She paused in the motion of scrubbing my back, and I turned my head to look at her.
“I will not survive this a second time, Aethra. Even now, I wish he had let me die more often than not. And he will always do as the gods ask. He is sworn to it, and no matter what he says, I know he will not break the vow.”
She sighed, dunking the sponge in the water and taking up where she had left off. “I will speak to Ariston. Perhaps he knows of something that will be better than what I can make, for the potion I know of does not always work.”
“I do not know what else to do.” My throat tightened, and I splashed my face with water to hide the tears that pressed behind my eyes. “I want nothing more than to forgive him, to put this behind us and never think of it again. But sometimes I look at him, and it is all I can see. I have to close my hands into fists to keep from scratching his eyes out. I know I should not blame him, that it is the gods who made this happen, but it was his hands that carried her to the wall. If I had told him when I dreamed of it, perhaps we could have stopped it. Perhaps if I had not gone to Poseidon . . .”
She hushed me, stroking my hair. “You must cleave to each other, and in time, it will be easier to go on.”
I shook my head. “He warned me, before we married. But when he told me the story of Hippolytus, I never dreamed it could happen again. I saw the pain in his eyes, Aethra, and it has never left him. You say to give it time, but he has spent more than ten years mourning. I should have listened, then.”
“Did you love him?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“And do you still?”
I swallowed against the lump in my throat. “Yes.”
“Then you will heal together.” She squeezed the water from the sponge over my shoulders. “And I will find you any potions you require.”
Theseus watched me recover, occasionally chiding me to let my body mend as it must. The worry I had felt from him during my pregnancy had been replaced with a calm certainty I could not share, no matter how much I wished to. But I remembered what Aethra had said, and so I had begun to let him help me when I hurt, and in the night when I cried, I turned into his arms for comfort. I think we both felt the stronger for it.
But I was still not strong enough.
“You are more patient than I am.” I leaned heavily on Theseus’s arm while I walked about the room. No matter how I lay in the bed, my body ached from it.
“After seeing you struggle for every breath, this is a marked improvement.” But he smiled as though he knew my thoughts. “A wound on my thigh kept me in my bed for near a month, once. Every time I rose, a fever would grow. Aethra almost killed me herself to keep me off it in the first days, but then I became too miserable to argue.”
“What was it from?” Theseus was so filled with life and vitality; I could not picture him crippled by anything.
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“A bull gored me at Marathon. A furious beast rampaging on the shore.”
“Pirithous said you charmed bulls not to gore.”
Theseus smiled again, looking down at me. “And if you believe everything Pirithous tells you, you will think I can breathe water and ride dolphins across the sea with no need of a ship.”
“Can’t you?” I had missed his teasing, though part of me hated missing anything from him. I understood what he had done, even why, but how could I forgive it? How could he have forgiven me? I hated myself as much as I hated him.
He twitched a shoulder. “I have never been shipwrecked, no matter how terrible the storm, and often enough I have sailed distances in half the time it might take other men on a similar ship, but I hardly ride dolphins even if I swim like a fish. How I escaped serious injury in the Cretan bull ring, I can only attribute to my father’s protection.”
Poseidon’s protection. I fell silent for several heartbeats. I should have known better than to trust any god, no matter how Theseus and Aethra spoke of them. And I had thought myself so wise, but I had not believed the gods would give Theseus so great a reason to object. A kingdom of people for the life of one child, and my death as well. I should have known. “I cannot do this again, Theseus. To myself. To you. To the child who might die for it.”
He squeezed my hand. “I would not ask it of you, though I am sorry for it. I wish I had known to warn you before we married. I wish I had known not to give you a child at all.”
I tried to smile. “It would not have stopped me from trying to thwart them.”
“Perhaps not,” he said. “But we both would have been more prepared for the loss. We could have guarded our hearts against it, even if we hoped for something different.”
“Was this what it felt like, before?” I asked, unable to stop myself.
Theseus sighed. “Hippolytus, you mean?”
“Yes.”
He shook his head. “I was alone in that grief. For a long time. It made it easier to dwell on my sorrow when I had no one to share it with. I picked at it like a scab, never letting it heal. Until I loved you.”
Helen of Sparta Page 29
