Penelope's Web

by Christopher Rush

  But the palace people were used to the lacerated face and the flying hair fluttering from the battlements. Cassandra was the most ravishing of Priam’s daughters, but she was the skeleton at the feast. Nobody wants it, the skeleton, and she was fated never to be believed. She’d have done better to have kept quiet, and Troy could have made up its own mind. But she wailed her prophecy. And her words were thrown to the winds.

  ‘To hell with her,’ said the citadel-dwellers. ‘Death and destruction are well worth the risk, and it’s a slim risk to have such a creature as Helen in our city. Paris has done us proud. He’s brought us a real prize, the beauty of the world. Here she stays. And we’ll never give her up.’

  Another bad decision.

  Helen’s wide eyes widened even more when she was escorted into the palace and swept into her scented bedchamber, vaulted and spacious. Her surprisingly kind father-in-law came to greet her. Well, he wasn’t exactly her father-in-law – it was still illicit – but Priam was a nice old man and things suddenly felt good again.

  Of course Priam knew he’d be living on borrowed time. He knew the long arm of Menelaus could reach easily across the Aegean and overshadow his city. He knew the Spartan king’s rivals would see him as a weakened entity. He’d been humbled, gulled. And he would need to rescue his reputation. His brother would be number-crunching already, working out his share of the wealth, well beyond the dreams of even his ruthless avarice. Agamemnon’s reputation went well before him.

  There were few options. Sending her back was not one. Priam could have arranged for her to divorce Menelaus, allowing the elopement, or even the abduction, some semblance of legality. Then the brothers’ justification for invasion would have been slender, and Helen would have earned herself a better reputation in Troy and in Greece. Women had been executed for a lot less than she’d done. But Priam indulged her. As men always did. Bad decisions all round. And the Greeks crossed the Aegean.

  Priam may have clung to the possibility that in the end Menelaus simply wouldn’t bother. Or that he wouldn’t find the support. Crossing the sea for an adulteress is one thing: launching an entire navy to bring her back is another. Would wife-stealing justify the phenomenal effort, the expense, the terrible probable cost in lives?

  But if Priam reckoned as much, he reckoned without Agamemnon’s greed. Plunder was in the air. And the delectable scent of foreign women. Wherever there’s war, there’s always women. And these were dark women with the allure of the east in their eyes. Agamemnon’s was an easy argument. If Paris had carried Helen to some barren crag, no one would have lifted a finger to bring her back home, or to help Menelaus save his face. Not one breast would have been beaten, not one tooth gnashed. Not a solitary sail hoisted. Not a single oar picked up. Even the oath might not have held. But Troy was a treasure trove and the gateway to other treasure troves. So with trembling bowels and beating hearts and itching fingers the Greeks found themselves on the riptide of history, speeding to the beachhead.

  ELEVEN

  We didn’t have rams fitted to our ships, but we hit Troy at ramming speed. The speed was the thing – exciting, except that it was shit scary. Windy Troy – proverbial and accurate. You could feel the wind up your arse as well as in your ears. But the tide was roaring for us, a real ripper, bringing us through the surf and onto the beach at a terrific lick. Sand, grass, a plain cut by two rivers, a city and citadel high up in the air – all a blur.

  But the enemy was no blur. We couldn’t take our eyes off them; there were so many more of the bastards than we’d expected. The beach was packed with archers and spearmen, drawn up in long lines, ten, twelve, twenty deep, maybe even thirty at some points, we couldn’t count, we were coming in so fast, and they were massed so tight and the formation ran back so far. It was a terrifying defence. And they were waiting specially for us, all eyes on us, all ready to release their missiles in one devastating fucking burst. That’s when you saw that you could be seconds away from sudden death, you personally. And every other fucker under your command. What could you tell your men? What could you say to them?

  Absolutely nothing. An amphibious assault. Every cunt knows what that means. You’re not the arrow, you’re the target, you’re utterly vulnerable and you know it. It’s not the best of perspectives. We tore across the surf, blackening the beach with our hulls, and still waiting, waiting for what we knew was coming, waiting for it to fall, the terrible iron rain.

  Protesilaus didn’t wait. The Trojan spearmen ran into the surf to meet us with their arms thrown back, poised for the first covering fire of their archers over their heads. But Protesilaus vaulted over the prow of his ship with a whoop and crashed into the swirling water, landing up to his waist. He was King of Thessaly and eager for action, with a dash of glory and a display of leadership. He had youth on his side. He was also still pissed from the night before. Stories had flown round the fleet that the first Greek whose feet hit Trojan soil would be the first killed. A Calchas prophecy for sure. Achilles had been expected to lead the charge with the Myrmidons. He was anything but a coward but he was also superstitious and held back. Protesilaus was untroubled by superstition. He’d placed a bet that his would be the first feet to hit the beach, the first man on Troy, and that he’d kick in the head of the first Trojan who got in his way.

  He’d shouted from the prow. ‘I piss on prophecy! Up Thessaly! Follow me, lads!’

  And then he’d jumped.

  He took the first hit from Hector, who led from the front. The next five spears came from all angles and struck him almost simultaneously, making him jerk like a puppet. The last spear went right through the throat and out the back of the neck. He went down like a porcupine, and the surf boiled white and red about him. He won his bet but never collected it. The undertow sucked him back among the ships. He was submerged and dead as a nit but you could follow the progress of the corpse by the bronze spears stuck like flags in his flesh, swinging above the sea’s white thunder.

  ‘Fucking arsehole!’

  Agamemnon’s epitaph for the King of Thessaly. He’d drawn the Trojan spearfire – their archers hadn’t gone yet – and we were a leader down before we’d even got our feet wet.

  ‘There goes the first glory boy!’

  The Trojans gave a huge cheer. But they thought more of Protesilaus than Agamemnon did. First blood to them. And Thessaly without a king. Now their archers fired.

  And the rain fell.

  You could hear the order for it, Hector’s order, bellowed out over the din, and then that cold moment of quiet when both sides suddenly stopped breathing and listened. Five thousand arrows left their bowstrings in the same split second and sang their song of death. The sky went black. It was like the longest, biggest strings of geese you’d ever seen crossing over, and the combined whistling sound was bloodcurdling. I’d never heard anything like it in any raid I’d ever been on. This was a beautifully disciplined assembly of men, and the message they were delivering was lethal.

  Screams. So many screams all at once.

  It’s inevitable when you think about it. With that number of bowmen, even if just one in every twenty-five arrows finds a soft target, you have two hundred men suddenly screaming out, telling you that they’re wounded and dying and in terrible pain, all in the exact same instant. It’s a sound you don’t want to hear. Not on your side, at least. It freezes you. Just for a second. But it’s enough for the other side.

  The spearmen cheered and hurled their javelins. Scores found their targets. Then the archers fired their second round, only seconds after the first. Our dead toppled from the ships, and as we beached and jumped out into the surf we found ourselves stumbling over floating corpses all the way to the shore. The sea around us seethed and ran red.

  ‘Archers, fire!’

  Hector again.

  We were near to closing with them, but we were out of the shelter of the ships and their third volley halted us. We crouched behind our shields, waiting for the spears to stop.

  I
f you were lucky, you heard the clang of bronze on bronze and you thanked the gods or your shield for your protection. If you weren’t so lucky, your protection didn’t work, or your god was somewhere else at the time, and the arrowhead pierced bronze and bone and reached softer places inside you, places you’d never even thought about till now, but you thought about them now, and it was the thought as much as the agony that made you add your own private scream to the others.

  Or you made a mistake. You lifted your shield just a fraction to check the opposition, but you lifted it too early and before you’d even registered it you had one in the eye and out the back of the skull. You were lucky. You didn’t even have time to take in the good news. No more hardship, no more fear, no more pain. For you, the war was over.

  It was over for hundreds of us and the Trojans not a man down. Not a single trooper. When we did raise our shields, we saw them turning and running back up the beach. We stood there dumbfounded, thinking it was a manoeuvre, a ruse to suck us into some trap. But they just kept on running. And it got through to us. The bastards were retreating. They’d achieved exactly what they wanted. They’d shown us that they weren’t going to be intimidated. We’d landed, but we’d lost heavily. They’d inflicted maximum damage at no cost to themselves. They’d also demonstrated the effectiveness of their archery. They’d be no pushover.

  It was too much for Achilles, who had nothing but contempt for archers and archery. That was playing at war, he said. It was theatre but not the theatre of war. You weren’t a real soldier if you weren’t in the thick of battle, fighting with sword and spear at close quarters. Not swanning about with a fucking bow in your hand like some lyrist and keeping a safe distance.

  ‘Gutless cunts!’ he yelled after them. ‘You might as well stand there with your finger up your arse!’

  An arrow sang past his ear, and instead of getting his shield up he looked to see where it had come from. His eyes blazed. A big tall bastard called Cycnus had held his troops on the beach, covering the Trojan retreat. I knew him. He was one of their allies from Colonae on the west coast, opposite Tenedos. A crack archer, he was bringing men down at will, loosing off arrows like lightning. Even after he’d ordered his troops to join the retreat he stayed on to let off a few more. He made it look like target practice.

  That’s when I saw Achilles’ famous speed for the first time. He simply ran at this bitch, taking arrows all over his shield. When Cycnus saw he’d no time for his last arrow, he turned and ran. But it was like a lion after a kid. Achilles was up to him in seconds. He grabbed him from behind by the helmet straps. Cycnus struggled and tried to turn round, but Achilles jammed his knee in the small of the man’s back and just kept on twisting and wrenching at the straps until he’d throttled the bastard. Then he let go and Cycnus crashed on his back with his tongue out. Achilles picked up the bow, cracked it apart and flung it contemptuously into the water. Anybody else would have kept it. I would have. It was a stunner of a bow. But for Achilles a bow was no trophy. The riptide ran right up the beach and took Cycnus out to sea to join our dead.

  Later, a story did the rounds that Cycnus was an old-time hero, invulnerable to ordinary weapons, and that this was why Achilles had to strangle him with his bare hands. Achilles smiled slightly when he heard that one. The plain truth was that he enjoyed the physicality of killing. Even weapons kept you at a distance from your enemy, he said. Nothing could beat the feel of a neck cracking in your hands, flesh and bone giving way, giving up, submitting to your strength.

  There was another story, and Penelope used it to great poetic effect. Poseidon had taken pity on Cycnus and turned him into a snow-white swan, after his name. You can see him on the web, wafted gracefully away on the waves, a swan destined for a star. Or you can watch him as I did, on his back, wallowing in the water swollen-cheeked with his tongue stuck out purple and his dead bloodshot eyes bulging out of a blue bloated face.

  Afterwards, somebody told Achilles about the swan story.

  ‘Really?’ he laughed. ‘Well, that swan stuck his long neck out too far.’

  And that was all he said.

  His death hardly mattered. We’d been humped and we knew it. We’d landed but at a price. Already there were hundreds of wives and mothers who’d be paying that price. They didn’t know it yet, but it would be for the rest of their lives, and till the day they died they’d be saying it was a price that was too high and that should never have been paid at all. Still, Achilles had downed us a king for a king. A grain of honour had been satisfied. And we’d taken the beachhead.

  Our foot was in the door.

  PART TWO

  THE WAR IN TROY

  TWELVE

  Most men are driven mad in Aphrodite’s bed. Even at the moment of bliss, when the sperm releases and the soul is sucked sweetly from the supine self, melting from every pore – even then men feel sadness and pain, and lose their reason.

  Why? Why must Aphrodite lead to this?

  It’s what she was born for. It’s how she was born. Go back to the beginnings, if you will, if you wish to find out, go with Penelope, go back and see.

  Chaos, Tartarus, Gaia, Ouranos, the earth below, the starry skies above, sprung from her, partnerless, spontaneous. The stars long to shoot their spears, to penetrate the earth, and the earth yearns for it, the infiltration, the stab of satisfaction. The rain pierces her, and in time she conceives under the dew of the hymen – flowers, herbs, cattle, men. For now, however, she sleeps incestuously with her own son, producing hills and seas, monsters and Titans. Cronos.

  Ouranos fears the monsters and keeps on copulating with his mother to trap the awful offspring within her womb. She lies flat and receptive. Her knees in the air are Assyria and Spain, her feet are in Africa – Libya, Egypt. The Great Sea is her huge opening. Ouranos pumps and plunges, and his mother’s capacity for intercourse appears to be endless. But secretly Gaia wants to free her brood and, with the help of Cronos and a golden sickle, dismembers her son during the act of copulation, slicing off his erect penis and testicles.

  The swinging balls and the stiff, foaming prick, spouting blood and semen at either end, are hurled into the ocean, and out of the bloody spume arises Aphrodite, beauty and bitterness born of the sea’s vast vagina, salt silt in her pubic hair, still tasting of tangle the pert pudenda, the impudent tits . . .

  There’s her heredity, her parentage, displayed: her father the erect cock and balls of an incestuous shagger, her mother the bloodstained sea.

  The sea clears. She stands for a moment in the bland campus, the crashing waves, squeezes the last drops of brine from her hair and steps ashore on Cyprus.

  And so love is born, out of incest, treachery, violence, pain, sperm, gore. She walks naked through the world. Or provocatively, scantily clad, dragging behind her destiny, death, strife and sleep. Sweeping the earth, she leaves her scent on the air, filling men’s nostrils with corruption and decay, like the sweet-sour musky stench left in the wake of whores.

  War has its own stench. The first thing a soldier does when he occupies a piece of ground and knows that he’ll be there for the next three days at least, and possibly even the next three years or more, is dig.

  Digs the fucking crappers, as he says, and digs them with one nostril to the wind and half an eye to how long he reckons he’ll be invited to stay on this alien scrap of earth.

  ‘Hey, don’t go so fucking deep! A month of turds and we’re off.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure of that, bum-chum! Our crapper’s a six-weeker. And we’re digging four of the bastards. We’re here for half a year, depend on it. And don’t come crapping all over us when your thunderbox is shut!’

  ‘Six months! You funny old cunt, how do you work that one out?’

  How. How did they work it out, the latriners? Maybe it was something to do with the walls. The more you looked at them, the deeper you dug the crappers. They were fucking formidable. No one had seen walls like them. They said the gods had built them, principally Poseid
on, whom the Trojans then neglected to pay for his labours, and so he became their sworn enemy.

  That was just a story. But it said something to the men about the treacherous Trojans and about the scale of their fortifications. The Scaean Gate flashed its bronze at us, a glint of contempt. Even its hinges, the first scouts reported, were taller than Ajax. And the walls sent a clear message to all rams and catapults.

  They had no toeholds either, and even if they had, you would have to be insane to attempt a climb with reliance on night and negligence and fuck-all else. The famous frown furrowed Agamemnon’s stupid face as he stood and gaped at the town he’d boasted he was going to walk into at will and walk out of with all its treasures – without the loss of a single man. Vain crazy bastard. He’d remembered nothing from his embassy visit. Now you could see the idea starting to penetrate, even into that solid fastness of a skull. He swore at his latriners to dig deeper and put their backs into it. He was finally embracing the suck, getting a hold on it. GOFO – grasp of the fucking obvious. At last. And it took the walls of Troy to do it.

  But walls at least stand still, unlike the Trojan allies – more than we could ever have imagined: soldiers from Abydos and Arisbe and Zelein, from Mysia and Phrygia and Paphlagonia and Maeonia, and from Caria and Lycia, plus the inevitable fucking Hittites. And still they kept on arriving. It was an awesome alliance, a multi-ethnic force. Priam had greased scores of royal palms with lapis lazuli and gold. And arses with whatever it took, brownjobs all round. He’d filled up their stables with prize horses, their cellars with fine wines, their beds with young girls. Beautiful horses and beautiful women speak the same language to leaders, no matter what the tongue. When the tongue’s out, as they say, it’s not what you say with it that counts. Agamemnon simply hadn’t counted on Priam forming such a huge coalition. Together with the sheer strength of the city, it was a bummer beyond his worst nightmares, and Agamemnon wasn’t good at hiding his feelings. When a big jaw sags, it’s all too obvious. It was bad for the men’s morale to see their Chief Mother Fucker standing there stroking that big stupid chin of his and asking himself the ultimate too-late question: what the fuck have I done?